As a wealthy nation and a cultural melting pot, the United States of America is often thought of as a dominant force in the world of athletics. However, despite boasting the most Olympic gold medals of any nation with over 1,200 as of 2026, the U.S. is not considered a superpower of the same magnitude when it comes to soccer. After 22 attempts, they still have yet to win a World Cup trophy.

If the U.S. ever wants to top their best result — a third place finish at the tournament’s first installment in 1930 in which they were battered 6–1 by Argentina in the semifinals — evolution must come from the ground up. The youth academy system designed to develop young players into tomorrow’s superstars requires structural changes in order to match the feeder systems seen in Europe and South America. Salt Lake City’s Major League Soccer club Real Salt Lake is at the forefront of those efforts.

Soccer clubs worldwide traditionally feature youth academies that are essentially specialized “charter schools” designed to nurture young players and provide them with the optimal environment to train while receiving an education. While elementary in Europe, the system is still somewhat new in the United States.

At the 2014 World Cup, DeAndre Yedlin was the only player on the American roster to have graduated from a MLS academy, while every player on Germany’s championship-winning squad has come through the Bundesliga youth system. By 2022, 12 of the 26 American players at the World Cup were homegrown MLS products, a statistic that showcases forward progress.

The Salt Lake Academy High School is just that for RSL: Utah’s premier developmental MLS system, founded in 2010. It is distinguished by its live-in residency model and boasts the highest volume of professional graduates of any academy in the nation.

In the 2024-25 season, Real Salt Lake’s under-16 academy team swept the MLS NEXT and Adidas Generation cups with wins over Atlanta United and the Los Angeles Galaxy, respectively. RSL leads the league in all-time homegrown academy signings to the first team with 49 as of March 2026 and were matched only by the New York Red Bulls in minutes played by homegrown players last season.

On the surface then, it might seem that RSL, and indeed the United States as a whole, have optimized their youth soccer development system at long last. However, looking at how Inter Miami, the Seattle Sounders and the Los Angeles Football Club fared at the most recent FIFA Club World Cup in the summer of 2025, for which RSL did not qualify, shows that the MLS’ best are still incapable of successfully challenging Europe’s most elite clubs.

Furthermore, it is apparent that RSL and many other MLS academy graduates have a lower ceiling than those of Barcelona, Ajax and other elite clubs’ academies. Graduates have enjoyed professional careers, but RSL’s academy has not yet produced a top-level player who can lead a team on the international stage.

Midfielder Taylor Booth’s 2019 move to Bavarian powerhouse Bayern Munich directly from the Salt Lake Academy saw him make just one appearance for the first team, coming on as a second-half substitute and playing 22 of the 90 minutes in a 12–0 victory over fifth-tier Bremer SV during the first round of the German cup in 2021. Booth has since signed for Dutch side FC Twente in the Eredivisie.

While Booth and others such as his brother Zach Booth, Richard Ledezma and Gavin Beavers have managed to carve out respectable careers playing in Europe, none of them are headlining the starting lineups in the United European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League, the world’s top club competition.

Players like Alphonso Davies from the Vancouver Whitecaps and Weston McKennie of FC Dallas have made a splash in the Champions League, but Ledezma, who now plays for Guadalajara FC in Mexico, is the sole RSL academy graduate to ever reach that level and only played 11 UCL matches before leaving PSV Eindhoven.

Peyton Taylor, a former player for the Salt Lake Academy’s charter school who retired due to an anterior cruciate ligament injury before reaching the system’s professional pipeline track, believes the talent gap issue is multifaceted and that the expensive sign-up fees, which are not present in Europe, are hindering player development.

“I personally will always believe that the idea of pay-to-play is holding the whole country back,” Taylor said. “If you look at England or Germany, a lot of those kids don’t have to pay a bunch of money to play at a high level … I knew kids that went to the school who were very, very good, but they just couldn’t afford to play, so they’d have to sit out.”

Taylor also noted that athletic talent in other countries is often bottlenecked into soccer, which is not the case in the U.S. as other, more popular sports may be prioritized from an early age.

“If you look at just how high the quality of athletes are in football or basketball, those just have way more of a pool,” Taylor said. “If we could get kids of that quality playing soccer, I think the U.S. would be one of the best teams in the world.”

Salt Lake Academy director Sam Gibbs identified the age of player entry, U14, and the emphasis on non-soccer factors, such as the educational requirement of a 3.0 GPA, as other potential factors. Notably, England’s Phil Foden was just 4-years-old when Manchester City scouted him while Spain’s Lamine Yamal was an established starter for Barcelona’s first team at 16, an age when most American players are still navigating the high school graduation or college draft pathways.

“Real Madrid, Ajax and those teams, they have student academies at age 8 and age 10,” Gibbs said. “I think some of the efforts there to try and access students earlier also give them that opportunity. But, I love RSL’s emphasis. If you look at their three pillars, they talk about academics, citizenship and then athletics, and they tier it in that order.”

In light of these differences, Gibbs remains optimistic about the direction of the academy and is trusting in the process.

“I think it’s just a matter of time and consistency in the cultural aspects that they have in place right now, and that will yield things across generations,” Gibbs said. “RSL has done a great job to establish a culture and climate of excellence and leadership. Some of those things just take time to have root and develop.”

Soccer, or futbol, has long been the world’s most prominent sport with Topend Sports tallying over 3.5 billion fans around the globe, despite the United States being somewhat late to the party. For all its popularity, soccer has never found the favor of American fans the way basketball and football have.

The game is growing in that regard and has recently overtaken baseball as the country’s third most popular sport according to a 2026 report from The Economist that analyzed factors such as fan preference polling, TV viewership growth trends, live attendance and youth participation.