SWITCHING FIELDS

An examination of how American men’s soccer has improved as a result of opening its doors to a broader field of players.

As Dohrmann, the senior managing editor for the Athletic, writes, youth soccer, which took hold in the 1970s, had a problem from the start: It was played by kids whose parents had no idea of what the game entailed, and it was largely a phenomenon of the White suburbs. The consequences were driven home when a supposedly competitive U.S. team suffered unexpected, ignominious defeat in an international competition in 2017, which led to the team failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. The soul-searching that followed centered on a big question: How could a team from tiny Trinidad and Tobago beat the U.S., with its population of 330 million? The answer, it turns out, had been revealed in a detailed report filed years before, in which the authors concluded that the game had to be more accessible to minority players. It took that defeat to drive the point home again, and finally the various soccer organizations around the country heeded the advice. Dohrmann’s explorations take him into cities and suburbs as well as onto the pitches of storied teams such as the University of North Carolina’s women’s team, whose ethos has become that of women’s and girls’ soccer nationwide, courtesy of longtime coach Anson Dorrance: “What he baked into the culture of women’s soccer in America was that it was more than all right to be a killer; it was a prerequisite for being great.” If you go to any girls’ or women’s game today, “you’ll see team after team playing the high-pressing 4-3-3 formation that Dorrance championed. And you’ll see young girls throwing elbows and flying into tackles.” The male side of the game has similarly improved with greater diversity, so much so that European and Latin American coaches are now scouting the U.S. for professional players.

A well-reported study of how a hidebound sport was saved from itself.