The script is becoming repetitive by now: American soccer is broken. The men’s national team won’t be in next summer’s World Cup in Russia and the women’s team looks less dominant than ever, all while everyone is pointing fingers at who’s to blame.
But in February, the tired narrative could all change. The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) is about to pivot in a new direction for the first time in 12 years after President Sunil Gulati announced that he would not be running for a fourth consecutive term, a decision that in itself was a slight shock if not totally unsurprising.
Gulati’s exit presents soccer in the US with a brand new opportunity to fix itself. It just depends on who gets the unpaid job of doing so.
In total, nine candidates are likely to be gunning for the presidential title. All have talked about a broken system, but not to a degree that really offers much change from the status quo.
Kyle Martino wants to flip the equation — in fact, he wants to give American soccer a bottom-to-top makeover.
A former MLS player with a few caps internationally for the US, Martino didn’t initially bite at the chance to challenge Gulati because the presidential post comes with no salary. Martino has his “dream job” with NBC Sports on their weekly Premier League broadcast, where he is the lone American voice covering England’s top soccer league on American TV.
Still, the urge to tackle the problems ingrained in the system tugged at him. Martino, 36, thinks Americans have focused too long on the search for the next coach and the World Cup failure.
“[It’s] the symptom of a problem that we’re not growing a soccer culture because we’re not focusing on the right things,” Martino recently told The Post over the phone. “We’re trying to build a soccer culture from the top-down and everyone knows you have to do it the opposite. You have to flip the pyramid and begin to grow the experience.”
Martino recently held a two-day summit where he met with former players, youth and adult associations, as well as fans and business people to help hammer out his vision for US soccer, which will be pillared by three core principles: Transparency, Equality, and Progress.
Those conversations revealed just what many have feared — how distant the USSF has become from the youth level. In a way, Martino came away impressed by how grassroots organizations adapted and strengthened without proper guidance from its overlying body.
The USSF, as a whole, has detached itself from its membership, according to Martino. He feels that US Soccer has become too focused on success at the top of the pyramid, those at the senior levels for both men and women, when in reality, the USSF has been neglecting what matters most in all sports — youth development.
“We are not doing a good enough job of plugging into the grassroots movement and finding ways to grow the game in inner cities and making it available to demographics who are being sliced out or forgotten,” he said.
Changing the narrative in youth development will indeed take time, Martino warns, but a more immediate boost could come fairly quickly within American cities. It’s happening already in New York City, with Mayor de Blasio’s New York City Soccer Initiative (NYCSI) working together with New York City FC to build mini-fields, 50 in total, throughout the city’s five boroughs over the next five years.
Then there is USSF’s “It’s Everyone’s Game” initiative that plans to create 1,000 fields throughout the country by 2026. It’s an idea Martino applauds, but even good ideas come with poor optics.
“Building fields in the inner cities is an expensive initiative,” he said. “If you build a field down in the East Village, it’s going to be tough for kids up in Harlem to get there… the difficult part about inner-city initiatives is it’s typically high-cost, low-impact.”
Martino envisions adding soccer posts below the hundreds of basketball hoops New York City already has, which would replicate a similar scene around the globe that gives children different options to stay involved. In his view, that’ll create access around the corner for kids, not “a few subway stops or trains away.”
“We need to build a pickup culture. Because winner stays on is the best competitive model you can create,” Martino said. “That’s why our basketball is so amazing and why at Rucker Park you can develop top talent because when you lose and you have to wait and play again, there’s nothing in life that’s made me more angry than waiting to get on the next game.
“It’s a blue-collar sport in every country but ours. … We’re under-serving that community.”
That’s not to say that youth development in the US is a complete wash. The professional leagues, like MLS, NASL and USL, have produced talented players who’ve thrived at the senior level and flirted with playing abroad, a most recent example being Schalke midfielder Weston McKennie, who is a product of FC Dallas’ youth academy. But one glaring issue continues to hang over the domestic leagues — kids aren’t being given enough minutes.
Borussia Dortmund starlet Christian Pulisic recently let out his frustration of MLS and the lack of opportunities it provides for its young players, saying it’s hard to watch America’s best youth getting “rostered” instead of earning minutes on the field.
“I watch that, and I just think about how I was given a chance … a real chance … and it changed my life,” he wrote for the Players Tribune. Why then are we seemingly hesitant to allow these other talents to blossom?”
17-year-old Josh Sargent, who will ship off to Germany in 2018 to play for Werder Bremen, sees similar shortcomings in MLS.
“When you look at MLS, you don’t see many young players getting minutes,” Sargent told American Soccer Now. “But Weston and Christian are getting minutes. I don’t know how you can refuse that.”
How is it possible that American teenagers are getting first-team minutes in Germany’s Bundesliga but not in MLS? Martino says “short-termism” plagues coaches, both here and abroad, which stymies development. Writing rules for MLS teams to follow isn’t going to fix it either, but Martino agrees with Pulisic.
“Are we closing the gap? Is there less disparity? Absolutely, we deserve credit for that, but there are better options abroad,” said Martino, who thinks minutes should be earned, not rewarded. “Our focus should not be on forcing kids to stay here and forcing MLS clubs to play through them. The focus should be on improving our academies, improving the quality of coaching and increasing the opportunities these kids have to play. Abroad is always going to be an option, but when we have a commensurate option here, kids are going to stay and we’ll improve.”
That sentiment also applies to the once-invincible women’s national team, as leagues abroad have begun to attract America’s top talent due to better resources and professionalism as a whole.
“We use their success to paper over cracks,” he said, referring to three-time women’s World Cup champions. “We use their success to try to demonstrate that we’re getting it right.”
If it hasn’t been evident by the women’s senior team’s underwhelming performances of late, Martino echoes that the rest of the world has caught up with the women’s team’s success because they have started dedicating more resources to the women’s game. Due to the national team’s long-term success in the States, US Soccer hasn’t committed to revitalizing the program, Martino argues.
“[Women] need to see the pathway and someone who looks like them to inspire to do that and the ratio is not good enough if you look across the board. It starts by paying our women what we pay our men at the top level, treating our women national team players like national team players and not creating a gender-specific qualification for how they fly, what field they play on or what salary they get,” he said.
Of course, Martino’s visions will only happen if he is elected president in February. He said he received the necessary backing to make the run and is expected to be one of the nine candidates named sometime next week by the USSF. He’s publicly received support from international stars and former MLS players David Beckham and Thierry Henry.
He’s a glossy candidate, one who’s viewed as anti-establishment with a clear soccer background, qualities many think are needed in a president after Gulati’s reign. His professional career might not boast the credentials of Eric Wynalda’s nor does he have insider experience like USSF VP Carlos Corderio, Gulati’s right-hand man, or Kathy Carter, the president of Soccer United Marketing, MLS’ marketing arm and the first female challenger in the race.
Whether or not he’s the most popular candidate, Martino thinks he can become one of the best presidents US Soccer has yet seen.
“What we need is a president with a soccer vision,” he said. “We need someone who is actually qualified to be a technical director but not wanting to operate like one, not wanting to make unilateral decisions, not wanting to pick head coaches, wanting to work democratically to solve our soccer problem.”