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Children wait to play football in the minor leagues of Newell’s Old Boys, where Argentine football star Lionel Messi used to play in Rosario, Argentina, 2018.
Eitan Abramovich/AFP via Getty Images
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Eitan Abramovich/AFP via Getty Images
ROSARIO — Newell’s Old Boys is one of the most popular soccer clubs in Rosario — Argentina’s third-largest city. It also runs one of the country’s most successful youth academies.
Every week, around 700 kids ages 4 to 12 train at its facilities in the center of the city, where black and red murals depict famous alumni such as Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi.
The most promising young players at Newell’s “baby football” academy receive scholarships to train for free. The rest pay around $25 a month to train twice a week with coaches who are mostly former professionals. On weekends competitive matches are held against other squads from around the city.
“Here you get good coaching,” says Carlos Gil a fencing contractor, who takes his eight year-old son to practice at Newell’s every week.
“You have the chance that your child can develop his skills,” Gil says. He shakes his head and chuckles after learning that in the United States, parents pay between $1,000 and $3,000 a year for the kind of instruction his son gets at Newell’s.
“If you did that here, almost nobody could play,” he said of the fees at U.S. youth soccer clubs. He also says that if Argentine clubs charged their young players thousands of dollars each year, the country’s status as a global soccer powerhouse might be at risk.
“Our best players tend to come from low income backgrounds,” Gil said. “Where would they train?”
With the World Cup still fresh in the minds of many Americans, a debate has resurfaced online and on television over how to make youth soccer more affordable in the United States and whether the pay-to-play model that prevails in U.S. soccer is preventing America from reaching its true potential — at least on the men’s side.
Argentina is one country that has managed to keep youth soccer affordable while churning out a steady stream of world-class players. And some coaches say its soccer structure could be an example for the United States to follow.
Newell’s — where Lionel Messi played from ages 6 to 13 — is one of dozens of clubs in Argentina that subsidize the training of their young players.
Its survival does not depend on tuition payments or donations from local companies.
The club’s professional team competes in Argentina’s top division and generates revenue from ticket sales and broadcasting rights.
A soccer field used by the Newell’s Old Boys youth team, in Rosario, Argentina.
Natacha Pisarenko/AP
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Natacha Pisarenko/AP
It also makes significant sums of money when its best young players are transferred to other clubs in Argentina or abroad.
“The kids that we are training today are what sustains this institution,” said Gustavo Tognarelli, the head of youth development at Newell’s.
In the United States, youth clubs have been largely excluded from transfer payments.
That’s because teams in Major League Soccer, the country’s top professional league, are not obliged by the U.S. soccer federation to give youth clubs a share of the transfer fees they get for elite players.
In Europe and South America, youth clubs regularly get a cut of a professional player’s transfer fee if they coached that player from ages 12 to 23, through systems known as training compensation and solidarity payments.
Major League Soccer (MLS) has been slow to adopt this way of doing business, fearing it might violate U.S. laws.
But many coaches say that the lack of training compensation puts U.S. youth clubs at a disadvantage.
“In the United States, if you train a player and they go to a better situation or a bigger club, you get nothing for that,” said Rory O’Neill, a coach for an under-13 team in Pennsylvania, who also runs a YouTube channel where he discusses coaching tactics and the state of U.S. soccer.
O’Neill said that youth clubs in the U.S. have very limited revenue streams, relying largely on payments from parents to cover their expenses. He believes they could improve their economic prospects if U.S. soccer transitions to what is known as an open ecosystem.
Currently, only 30 teams can play in MLS because it’s a closed league that charges teams hundreds of millions of dollars to join.
But in an open system, the worst teams are relegated to lower divisions, while teams that perform well are promoted to the top flight.
O’Neill says that kind of arrangement would give hundreds of teams around the country a greater incentive to improve and invest in youth academies because reaching the top division and benefiting from the financial rewards that come with it would be a real possibility.
“You would have almost any millionaire start investing in clubs,” O’Neill said.
Filippo Silva, a business owner and coach in Orlando agrees.
“If we do have an open system and it’s merit-based, I do think you’re going to open the doors for more small investors trying to get things done,” he said. “More people would be willing to put more money into soccer if there was something you could get out of it.”
In Argentina, where soccer has long operated with promotion and relegation, there are thousands of clubs around the country that have a shot at making it to the nation’s top division.
Though some will never make it, many clubs invest in youth development in hopes of climbing the nation’s football pyramid or making money from player transfers and solidarity payments.
Newell’s, one of the top clubs in Argentina, funds the training and education of about 400 players ages 12 to 18 who practice up to six times a week.
Some of the younger children, who practice twice a week, receive training scholarships, including Dastan Gil, Carlos Gil’s eight-year-old son.
Gil says driving his son to training every week is a challenge. He lives in a small town 120 miles away from Rosario, where he fixes fences for big farms and cattle ranches.
But even though being a soccer dad can be difficult, Newell’s, with its scholarships and low fees, is helping ease the burden.
“In Argentina, we might not have so much money,” Gil says. “But in some areas we have better quality of life.”
