When the state associations voted to integrate with U.S. Soccer, the chair of the USYS board said the step would make the game more affordable and accessible to kids and families across the country. That is the right promise. It is also the one part of the announcement with no mechanism attached to it yet.
This is a proposal for a mechanism. I am a Kansas City father of two young boys, and I published a blueprint for ending pay-to-play and then spent August measuring what youth soccer actually costs in one metro. It leads with the piece that could be adopted soonest and points to the wider plan behind it.
One published annual price, per club, per program
Every club carrying the designation publishes a single annual number covering everything a family cannot opt out of: club fees, required uniforms, league and player card fees, mandatory tournaments, and team level charges. If the expense is required in order to play, it belongs in the advertised price.
Compliance runs on designation rather than enforcement. Clubs that publish an all-in price hold it. Clubs that misstate it lose it, along with the benefits attached: in the blueprint, chartered clubs have their FIFA training compensation and solidarity claims administered on their behalf, money most American youth clubs never collect because nobody files for it, and they become eligible for development royalty payments when a player they developed signs a first professional contract.
That is enforcement by withdrawal, and it reaches only clubs that opt in. The model relies on the benefits being worth more than the opacity, and on a published price being much harder to misstate once a family can check it.
The designation can be whatever the federation builds. In the blueprint it belongs to a chartered metro network, but the rule does not depend on that structure. It attaches equally well to a tier in a national framework, to a state association's membership, or to a single league that decides its clubs will publish honestly. The mechanism is the same in every case: a club that wants the label publishes the number, and a club that misstates it does not keep the label.
What makes this workable inside the current landscape is what it does not require. It changes no competition structure. It moves no team between leagues. It favors neither ECNL nor MLS NEXT nor Girls Academy nor a local circuit, because it asks the same thing of all of them. A club can adopt it this season without leaving anything or joining anything.
The federation's own description of the realistic future is a tiered system with standards underneath each tier and designations that ease parental confusion. The hard part, correctly identified, is getting the leagues to agree on what those standards should be. A price disclosure standard sidesteps that problem entirely, because it does not touch what happens on the field. It is the rare standard that needs no negotiation.
Publishing prices does not lower them. It makes them comparable, which is what any real attempt to lower them needs in order to be tested.
The baseline is measurable, and here it is
The collection rule was to record only what a family can find. When a parent sits down to work out where their child can play and what it will cost, they land on club websites, so club websites are where every fee figure in the Index comes from.
In August I published the KC Youth Soccer Price Index: every published competitive club fee in the Kansas City metro, taken from the clubs' own pages, each figure carrying its source URL and collection date, re-verified in a live browser before publication and archived so the citation survives a site change. Thirteen organizations, roughly two hundred sourced rows.
- Published annual club fees for the same sport, ages U9 and up, run from $1,508 to $4,700.
- At three organizations, a family cannot learn the price of playing from the club's public pages at all.
- Across the entire dataset, a required uniform package appears inside the published price at one offering, where the word is printed on the page in white text a reader cannot see without highlighting it.
- Platform, not age, is the largest driver of what a family pays. Inside a single club, the same age band runs about $2,200 in one league and $3,512 in another.
The Index also records who already does this well, which matters more than the failures. Five clubs in the metro publish in a way that would satisfy the rule tomorrow. The standard is not hypothetical, and it is not a burden only well funded clubs can carry. Some clubs already meet it because they decided to.
Two corrections have been logged publicly since publication, one of them found by a reader who showed that the Index had missed eight published fee tiers at one club. Both are dated and explained on the page. An instrument that measures other people's transparency has to be willing to publish its own errors.
I built it in three weeks, at night, with no funding and no cooperation required from any club. The methodology is public so that any metro can be measured the same way, and someone has already asked about running it in Omaha.
One note on scope. Most of the clubs in the Index compete on platforms outside U.S. Youth Soccer: ECNL, MLS NEXT, Girls Academy, and regional leagues sanctioned elsewhere. That is deliberate, and it follows from measuring the largest competitive clubs in the metro rather than a selected sample. The costs that price families out sit at the competitive and pre-professional tiers, which is largely the layer the integration does not reach, so a disclosure standard has to extend past the USYS structure to touch the problem the affordability promise is about.
Which raises the fair question of why the federation would care about clubs it has not absorbed. The answer is that the Pathways Strategy was never scoped to USYS. U.S. Soccer has said it is in active conversation with every major amateur and professional organization about an aligned pathway, and the affordability commitment was made about the game rather than about one organization's membership. A disclosure standard is one of the few things that can cross those boundaries, because a club adopts it without anyone needing authority over that club.
Kansas City as a measured pilot
Whatever standard the federation adopts, someone will ask whether it changed what families pay. Answering that requires a before and an after in a real market, published by someone with no stake in the result.
Kansas City is positioned for it. The metro has just hosted a World Cup and is actively looking for a legacy. Its baseline is already measured and public. The state associations on both sides of the state line are entering a two year integration in which they have been told they are central to the work. And the metro contains the full range of the problem, from clubs that publish every component of their price to clubs that publish no price at all.
What that pilot would cost, and how that number was built, is published in full, including the lines that are still planning assumptions rather than measured figures.
The price rule is the first piece, not the whole of it
The all-in price rule leads this submission because it is the piece that can be adopted immediately and without negotiation. It is one component of seven in The American Pyramid, and two of the others speak directly to what the federation has already said it wants.
A travel limit below U15. No required league match or mandatory event more than ninety minutes away, with optional travel permitted but never affecting roster status. This is the single largest removable cost in the system, and it aligns with what the federation has described publicly: competitive soccer between eleven and fifteen organized more locally and regionally, with best-versus-best travel reserved for the top of the pyramid. In a dense metro that rule is straightforward. In rural markets the mechanism has to invert, funding travel to regional identification hubs rather than capping it, and that version is published as an open question with a direction identified and the detail still being worked through.
A free base tier. Mini-pitches, futsal, drop-in play, and school and municipal partnerships, so a child can play without a club and without a fee. The federation has already said it will invest in more forms of the game and scale programs that reach players outside the club system.
Both of those sit upstream of talent identification. The federation's Talent Reporters work widens who gets seen, which is real progress, and it operates on the children who are already on a field. A free base tier and a travel limit decide who gets onto the field to be seen in the first place.
The remaining components are a metro compact aligning clubs on formats and calendar, a coaching corps that makes grassroots education reachable, a development royalty that pays clubs after a player signs professionally rather than charging families up front, and a player registry that carries verified records. The full blueprint covers each in detail, along with what it would cost and what it does not yet answer.
The recommendation
Consider the all-in price rule as a disclosure standard in the Pathways vision. It costs the federation nothing structurally, it can be adopted by willing clubs in a single season, and it produces the measurement that every other affordability claim will eventually be judged against.
The travel limit below U15 and the free base tier deserve the same consideration. Both would change what a family pays, and the price rule is how anyone would know whether they did.
The remaining four components are built to work alongside these three.
In Kansas City the baseline is already measured. What is missing is a standard for clubs to publish against.
Everything referenced here is public and free to use: americanpyramid.org.
Jon Reed
Kansas City
jon@americanpyramid.org