The World Cup has arrived in the United States, providing another inflection point for American soccer.
Professor Darin White, founder of Samford University’s Sports Industry Program and the Center for Sports Analytics, is a former collegiate player and coach who offers perspective as the U.S. attempts to finally become a soccer power:
This year’s question—How will the World Cup impact soccer in the U.S.?—is the same question that arose when the United States hosted in 1994. So, 32 years later, what tangible impact did that previous event have?
White: In ’94, the majority of the players on the U.S. team came through your traditional American sport development pathway—which is growing up in America, playing club, playing high school and playing college. Back then we had a few random guys who would end up in Europe, but that pathway didn’t really exist. It just wasn't there. We also didn't have a professional league back then either, because the NASL had gone under in the early 80s, and we went about 15 years with no professional soccer in our country. That all changed with the ’94 World Cup, because FIFA secured a promise from U.S. soccer to start a professional league in America if they would bring them the World Cup. That was the negotiating point, and U.S. Soccer agreed to do that. It took a couple years—they launched MLS in ’96 and of course it was a really small league, 10 teams. Very much in an infant stage there.
Now there are 30 teams in the MLS, so we've had tremendous expansion, and around 2007 they added all the academies, and that was a big, big deal. Because now with MLS Academy, you've got kids as young as 11 or 12 years old who are playing year-round, playing with professional level coaches, and they're playing against other academy teams. So they’re playing a lot more soccer and training at a higher level. They give up high school and club soccer, so that a pathway to professional soccer has now been created in our country, which is the pathway that the rest of the world had.
What would make this event a long-term success for U.S. Soccer, whether it's player development or MLS franchise growth?
White: I think we define long-term success as the U.S. being able to genuinely compete for a World Cup title. Progressing to a point where we are among the six or seven teams that has a legitimate chance to win the tournament. That should be the goal, right? I mean, we are America, we should be better at soccer. We dominate the Olympics, we are the best at virtually every professional sport out there, and yet we’re a middle-of-the-pack nation when it comes to soccer. We've come a long way from where we were in ’94, but there's still another huge jump to get to where we're a legitimate World Cup contender.
First, we've got to continue to export our best young talent to Europe. We’ve got that pathway now that exists through MLS Academy, and the best example of that is right here in Birmingham, with Chris Richards. Chris grew up here in Birmingham, and at 16 years old, he was showing a lot of promise, so he had the opportunity to go play for MLS Academy in Dallas. That accelerated his growth and gave him the visibility and exposure to European clubs. He was then sold by FC Dallas to Bayern Munich, where he’s playing for one of the top brands in Europe, and that launched his career to where he eventually goes to Crystal Palace and starts in the Premier League. He's going to be the anchor of the U.S. defense in the World Cup.
Second, we need to grow the game here in America. We need the quality of the MLS to improve and become more of an upper-echelon league globally, so that we’re developing better talent. Then you’ll see more and more exchange of talent between us and the “Big Five” leagues in Europe. For that to happen, I think that's where the World Cup can really help us. What we're witnessing at the World Cup is what we saw happen in Auburn in early June, where 88,000 people watched Argentina win a friendly against Iceland. Many of the people in those stands had never been to a big-time global football match. Global football is unique in the world of sports, and there are millions and millions of Americans out there that love sports and they know about soccer, and they may be viewing an MLS game here or there, but they've never really been exposed to the energy and the pageantry that is global football. So it’s going to be incumbent upon MLS in the next three to four years to capture a larger portion of that audience and actually pull them in.
To drive sustainable revenue, right?
White: If they pull millions of people into the MLS, that drives more revenue for the MLS, which drives more ability to increase player salaries and start buying elite players. The MLS is all about revenue, and there is a hope that the World Cup is going to open the eyes of the corporate America to see the potential particularly of Gen Z. More than 30% of Gen Zers say soccer is their favorite sport. Gen Z loves this game, and America loves marketing to Gen Z. If corporate America would wake up to the opportunity to build relationships with Gen Z through global football, that’s going to be a huge cash infusion into MLS.
About the USMNT, you and your son Daniel published a timely study capturing data behind the improving depth of U.S. players.
White: The U.S. has 30 players who are currently playing for one of the “Big Five” leagues in Europe—the English Premier League, La Liga in Spain, Bundesliga in Germany, Serie A in Italy and Ligue 1 in France. Our research spanned the last seven World Cups and showed that the No. 1 best predictor of where a nation's team will finish in the World Cup is the number of minutes your squad logged in the Big Five the year prior. The Big Five are heads and tails better than any other leagues out there.
You want your national team’s guys playing, practicing, training day after day after day, year after year after year in one of those leagues, So we had 30 guys—which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's by far the most we've ever had—and those 30 guys logged 35,000 minutes of playing time in the Big Five this past season. By comparison, a team that is expected to contend for the World Cup, like Spain, has over 500 players in the Big Five who logged more than 500,000 minutes. You’ve got France with 400 players and 400,000-plus minutes and England had 267 players last year, including 170 in the Premier League alone. So there’s a huge gap between our best team ever and those elite teams that ultimately are going to win the World Cup.
You’re an Alabama-raised lifelong soccer player/coach/fan who closely follows Leeds United. How can MLS better appeal to serious fans?
White: When you talk to hardcore U.S. soccer fans, stats I saw recently show that 68% of them prefer European football over domestic football. That's a problem. I’m a great example. The MLS has got to figure out a way to reach the people like us and make us feel like this league is authentic, while also not alienating the new people who are coming in.
By focusing on new fans most of the time, they’ve kind of Americanized the sport. For hardcore soccer fans, that just makes us bristle. We don't want an American version of soccer. We want a league that’s in America, just like we want relegation and promotion. We want the season to run August to May. I want MLS to fit within the global football landscape, and that's what all true soccer fans want. MLS is starting to get that with tournaments like Leagues Cup and the US Open Cup.
In terms of World Cup impact across the next decade, what might failure look like?
White: If 10 years from now, we’ve still got only 25 or 30 guys playing in Europe, and the MLS has plateaued in terms of viewership and the values of its franchises, then that would be a huge missed opportunity.
There are encouraging indicators: If you go back just seven or eight years ago, you could get an MLS franchise for about $10 million. Now, the most recent ones have been selling for hundreds of millions of dollars, so the evaluation for MLS has gone up, which is all a function of future expected return.
MLS has the Apple TV deal, which is unique. They were the first ones to go all streaming, and it’s globally available. Two years ago their average streaming was like 2 million people per weekend across all the games. Last year it was around four million, and so far this season, it’s more than seven million.
What aspects of the World Cup have Samford students most excited?
White: One of the things our students really love is studying and understanding the analytics of the global football talent market. It's not like the NFL or MLB, because it is a global labor market. And what's different about it is that the club owns the player. So if I'm FC Dallas and I’ve got Chris Richards—he is my player and I’ve developed him—I can either let him play on my squad, or I could sell him to a team in Europe for a huge transfer fee.
Our students, we work with the properties on maximizing revenue generation around revenue streams like sponsorship and ticketing and media right and licensing. We also work a lot with brands like Coca Cola and Phillips 66 and making those relationships as healthy as possible for all parties. We're on the business strategy side, and analytics plays into all of that.
Then there is looking at the financial evaluations of the sport property in terms of an asset and then selling that asset. We have a lot of finance majors in our program that specifically want to do that type of work.
