Soccer’s Democratic Promise Depends on Who Gets to Play

Sport is treated here as infrastructure, not decoration. Tom Farrey’s premise was that if the 20th century was the American century, sport was one of the tools that helped make it so. The United States embedded games in civic life: parks, schools, clubs, playgrounds, and youth institutions.

Farrey traced that role to the 1890s, when the playground movement created thousands of parks in cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago; when interscholastic sports entered high schools; when YMCAs proliferated; when Boys & Girls Clubs emerged; and when basketball and volleyball were invented and spread through what he called the “muscular Christians.” Europe, in his telling, did not place organized school sport at the center of youth development in the same way. The United States did, and that choice made games part of nation-building.

The claim was not that sport simply reflected the American idea. Farrey argued that organized play helped produce generations of soldiers, corporate chiefs, and citizens with a sense of identity, belonging, and competitiveness modeled on American capitalism. “Sports matters,” he said, because the games people play become part of how they learn competition, community, and social order.

That premise is also the tension in soccer’s American story. Soccer can preserve immigrant identity, model trust across difference, give a country a way to present itself to the world, expand girls’ opportunities, and force workplace debates about equal pay. But none of those social benefits appear automatically. They depend on institutions: schools, fields, transport, legal rights, affordable programs, and team cultures broad enough to reach beyond families already able to buy their way in.

The “Why We Play” project, a partnership between the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is built around the larger proposition that sport has shaped institutions from schools and politics to urban design and fashion since the 1890s. LACMA plans to mount a “Why We Play” museum exhibition during the Olympics, with a companion book. Soccer became the immediate focus because the World Cup was underway, and because Farrey described it as one of the world’s great cultural institutions: a vehicle for community formation, a platform for social change, a tool of diplomacy, a driver of economic growth, and a source of identity and belonging.

The question is not whether soccer matters. It is what kind of social machinery sits underneath the game — and who gets access to it.

For Carolyn Blodgett, soccer’s American story begins with the fact that it is not only a stadium product. It is a backyard game, a park game, and, especially in New York and New Jersey, an immigrant game. She connected that to her own family’s history in sports: her grandfather Bob Tisch became co-owner of the New York Giants in 1991, paying $75 million for 50 percent of the team at a time when people still viewed sports ownership as more hobby than business. What she believes he saw was that sports bring together people who may otherwise have little in common: rich and poor, people with different backgrounds, and people with different beliefs.

Soccer, Blodgett argued, has a distinct version of that power because it often bridges the place someone came from and the place where they are building a new identity. In New York and New Jersey, she said, the game has helped immigrant communities preserve identity while also forming a shared regional one. Farrey described the period from the 1890s to 1940 in those terms: factory teams, European immigration, and ethnic communities that used soccer both to hold onto origins and adapt to life in America.

Glenn Kaino complicated the language of assimilation. The older notion, he said, often meant folding immigrant stories into an American ideal. He suggested that soccer offers a better platform for talking about how difference can become strength rather than disappear. The game’s global history, in his view, parallels colonial history: it spread through missionaries and colonial expansion, but then changed in streets, clubs, and local communities around the world, eventually becoming a symbol of national independence in many places.

Kaino drew from his film Hoops, Hopes, and Dreams, in which Michael Strautmanis, an adviser to President Obama, described family, neighborhood, and country as linked teams. Kaino paraphrased the idea this way: teammates argue, but their futures are tied together. Soccer, with a larger roster and a global reach, becomes a broad canvas for that kind of civic imagination.

The contemporary U.S. men’s national team became a test case for that argument. Farrey described the team as roughly one-third Black, one-third White, and one-third Latino and other ethnicities, with players from small-town Pennsylvania, El Paso, Harvard, and other very different American routes. The team, in that framing, is not just diverse as a matter of optics. It is a product of opportunity structures.

? betsey-stevenson placed the sports story inside a broader American commitment to mass education. The United States’ 20th-century success, she argued, came from including people and expanding opportunity, especially through the free high school movement. Europeans, she said, viewed universal high school as excessive and too expensive; the American bet was that everyone should have access. Sports entered those schools as part of that institutional package.

The diversity of the national team, in Stevenson’s account, is not accidental symbolism. It is the result of widening the pool. If opportunities are extended broadly, the country can discover who is strongest at a given thing. If they are not, talent remains invisible. “Mass opportunity” is what creates a team that looks like the country.

Farrey suggested that once such a team forms, identities partly melt away in service of winning and playing beautifully together. Stevenson accepted that as one element, but argued that the deeper value lies in the skills sports teach: leadership, cooperation, putting aside grievances, and especially losing and returning the next day to try again. She linked that last skill to entrepreneurship and to building things that do not yet exist.

For Stevenson, this helped answer a puzzle that drew her into studying sports: American students often perform poorly on international math, reading, and science exams, yet the United States produces highly productive workers. Her answer was that “we make our workers productive through sports teams.” Sports, in her view, teach many of the productive skills that do not show up on those exams.

Kaino added trust. Teams require people to depend on one another across differences, and those relationships can expose players to realities they would otherwise never encounter. In his film, he said, Jerry West described learning about the civil rights movement by being on teams with Black teammates and hearing what they experienced. Kaino called the team a “petri dish of the country”: a small social world whose lessons move outward through families, conversation, and, if the team wins, a public platform.

Blodgett supplied a professional example from Gotham FC. The championship team she described included two players who had gone to Harvard and three players who did not speak English. They started together, went through adversity together, and won together. Her point was not that differences vanished, but that the demands of winning forced the group to find a way through them.

A deep World Cup run by the U.S. men, Farrey suggested, could create a temporary form of national togetherness amid polarization. One unnamed speaker described being in New York during a Knicks victory and seeing people who would not normally be together on the street hugging one another. Victory can create collective feeling across ordinary social boundaries, even if no one claimed it would resolve the underlying divisions.

After World War II, and as decolonization reshaped Africa, Asia, and Latin America, soccer became one of the truly global cultural institutions. In that postwar frame, the game became a platform for globalism, national presentation, and soft power.

? betsey-stevenson treated soft power as a step toward influence, not influence itself. A country’s sporting performance, fan culture, and civic presentation can display what she called civic capital. The world can see how people participate, organize, and identify together. That can make others curious about a country. But soft power becomes economic power only when it changes decisions: when admiration leads someone to travel, invest, study, trade, or otherwise act.

Her example was blunt: people can like Cape Verde, but unless they book a vacation there, the soft power has not become economic power. The same applies to any country. If a nation presents itself well through sport but lacks the institutions and economic framework that make people want to invest or engage, the soft power may not translate.

Glenn Kaino offered a story about nationalism’s emotional function. During a World Cup in Germany, he was in Berlin with his daughters and German friends. They were in an enormous public bar or street setting when the German game came on and a crowd of roughly 100,000 people gathered. Kaino, not yet a serious soccer fan, was struck by the public joy. A German friend explained the intensity by saying that every day except that day, Germans could not say they were proud to be German without being read through the history of Nazism. On match day, the team gave them an excuse to feel German pride.

Kaino took from that moment the idea that sports can allow a “productive and healthy nationalism,” even when geopolitics makes national pride fraught. For 90 minutes, or for the longer ritual around a match, people could inhabit nationality as joy rather than menace.

He also pointed to the way teams consciously present a country to the world. The Japanese team cleaning up after itself reads globally as a highly composed national self-presentation. By contrast, he said, the treatment of the Iranian team suggested a less healthy mode. His broader point was that every choice around a team’s conduct, staging, and treatment produces a societal reading.

The World Cup also makes viewers curious about countries they might otherwise know only by name. Farrey described looking up populations and asking questions about national histories. On a bus to watch Lionel Messi, he asked an Argentinean colleague why Argentina’s roster did not include players of African descent in the way Brazil’s often does, and received what he described as a history of Argentina and why its racial composition differed. For Farrey, the World Cup was a prompt to ask how countries became what they are.

Carolyn Blodgett described the same phenomenon from stadium experience. At MetLife Stadium, she watched fans wrap themselves in Senegalese flags and cry during the national anthem; she saw Norwegian supporters rowing together. “There is nothing like the nationalism of the World Cup,” she said. Even teams that lose can carry enormous pride simply by being part of the tournament and placing the country on the global stage.

Her comparison with American sports came through an anecdote from the New York Giants coach. After attending a World Cup match, he called her to say he had never seen fandom like it and asked why the NFL could not have that kind of fandom. Blodgett’s answer was that no domestic fan experience can fully replicate rooting for one’s country on a global stage.

The United States’ role as host added another layer to the soft-power question. An audience member argued that America had already won a soft-power victory through hospitality: Scots being welcomed in Boston, Lawrence, Kansas embracing the Algerian national team, and a foreign-policy colleague texting that Lawrence had done more for the U.S.-Algeria relationship than 10 years of State Department diplomacy. He also referred to a Bosnian song about going to America as part of a broader people-to-people perception shift.

Stevenson agreed that travel and interaction build relationships, and that seeing visitors welcomed in the United States can create a counter-narrative to some of what people abroad hear about the country. She maintained her earlier constraint, however: soft power has limits without the institutions and frameworks behind it. Hosting matters precisely because countries see global events as opportunities to shape how the world sees them through thousands of interactions carried across television, newspapers, and personal experience.

The strongest empirical thread concerned girls’ sports and life outcomes. The 1970s through the 1990s were described as the period when soccer transformed suburbs and the lives of girls and women: more fields, the enforcement of Title IX, and rapidly expanding youth participation.

? betsey-stevenson clarified the legal history. Title IX passed in 1972, but schools had until 1978 to comply. She emphasized that Title IX is not a sports law in form; it is an equal-opportunity-in-education law. Its application to sports happened because sports were embedded in schools. She described congressional history in which women legislators understood that the law would apply to sports while some male colleagues apparently did not. According to Stevenson, after passage, male legislators tried to exclude sports from Title IX; that effort was defeated in 1975, and the compliance deadline came in 1978. She said she fundamentally believes that if some men in Congress had realized in 1972 that Title IX would include sports, it would not have passed with sports included.

The change that followed was not marginal. In the early 1970s, Stevenson said, about 2 percent of girls participated in high school sports, compared with about 50 percent of boys. By the end of the 1970s, about one-third of girls participated.

Stevenson described that shift as a natural experiment. Economists look for treatment and control groups; in her telling, Title IX generated variation because girls’ sports opportunities expanded differently depending on how large local boys’ sports programs had been. Schools were trying to match girls’ opportunities to boys’ opportunities. In places where only about 10 percent of boys played sports, roughly 6 or 7 percent of girls ended up playing. In places where about 70 percent of boys played, girls’ participation rose to about 50 percent.

Stevenson said that variation allowed her to examine outcomes. In the data she described, where girls had more high school sports opportunities, women later had higher college-going rates, entered more previously male-dominated occupations, and earned higher adult wages. Many familiar claims about athletes — including the oft-repeated correlation between high school sports and later leadership — could be tested against the expansion of opportunity. Stevenson said her research showed those correlations were causal: sports build important skills.

Her conclusion was direct: denying sports access is not just denying a fun extracurricular activity. It is denying access to skill formation.

Soccer’s role in this story was especially important because it expanded for boys and girls together. Stevenson said that around 1971, official data showed roughly 75,000 boys playing high school soccer in the United States; she then described the sport’s later scale as something like 8 million, emphasizing the huge increase. During the 1970s, for every boy added, a girl was added, often on separate teams and sometimes on coed teams. In her telling, the common complaint that Title IX displaced boys’ wrestling through girls’ sports gets the mechanism wrong: it was boys wanting to play soccer that displaced boys’ wrestling, not girls’ participation.

Carolyn Blodgett connected Title IX directly to the U.S. women’s national team. The “99ers” — the team associated with Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Julie Foudy, and the 1999 World Cup victory — did not appear by chance. In her view, Title IX opened the aperture for girls to play, creating the broad base from which elite talent could emerge. The United States became the best women’s soccer nation because other countries had not created the same opportunity structure. Others are now catching up, she said, but Title IX was “100%” the reason that 1999 team existed.

The 1999 World Cup also changed the market imagination. Blodgett grew up playing sports, but the professional sports available to watch on television or in stadiums were men’s sports: Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Michael Jordan, and their peers. In 1999, the whole country knew Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain. Women’s sports were no longer presented as a niche “girl sports” category. The Rose Bowl final drew a 90,000-person sellout, proving that fans of women’s sports existed.

Blodgett noted that the National Women’s Soccer League did not yet exist then, so the infrastructure was not in place to capitalize fully on that moment. The 1999 World Cup helped lead to earlier iterations of women’s professional soccer, some of which failed, before the current NWSL. But the core lesson remained: people will show up to women’s sporting events if the product is accessible.

The contemporary era is defined by commercialization and the reshaping of childhood. Cable television, streaming, and social media brought the global game into American living rooms. Parents began to imagine downstream returns: college scholarships, preferential admission to selective colleges, and professional opportunities. Youth travel teams proliferated, encouraging early specialization and fueling what Farrey called the youth sports arms race.

That economy changes who can play. Carolyn Blodgett described the findings of the State of Soccer report for the New York-New Jersey region, produced with support from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, Gotham FC, and Aspen’s team. The region, she said, is a microcosm of the country. The report’s broad conclusion was not that children lack passion for soccer. They lack access.

The barriers fall into multiple categories. First is infrastructure. Blodgett described “soccer deserts” in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Newark — places with little or no field access. Second is the pay-to-play structure. The game may still carry a global reputation as egalitarian, but in many American youth settings it has become highly specialized and expensive. Third is transportation. Blodgett called this one of the report’s most interesting findings: about 80 percent of high-income families drive their children to practice, while among low-income families that drops to about 20 percent. Families still have to get to practices and tournaments, but many do not have the time, vehicles, or flexibility to do so.

The access problem is worse for girls. At the high school level, Blodgett said, participation should be closer to 50-50 under the spirit of Title IX, yet in the New York area only about one-third of high school soccer players are girls. The same structural problems — field access, costs, transportation, program design — become more severe when layered onto gender.

Farrey stated the contradiction plainly: soccer has historically been the world’s poor-kid game. If access is captured by wealthier families, the sport can become a contributor to economic inequality rather than a counterweight to it, because children excluded from soccer also lose the adult benefits that Stevenson described earlier.

He noted that Laurie Tisch and her family had dedicated $10 million to addressing these issues in New York City after the report. Blodgett then described the practical response in three buckets. One is building fields: a mini-pitch in Queens was announced as part of the World Cup legacy, intended to give more people access to play. Another is programming through Gotham FC, particularly for girls. Gotham and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund created “Keeper in the Game,” a program aimed at the age around puberty when girls commonly drop out of sports. The point is not only to support the girls themselves but also coaches and teams, addressing the reasons girls leave and creating conditions that help them stay.

For Blodgett, this is not peripheral philanthropy. It is central to owning a women’s soccer team in New York: making sure every girl has an opportunity to play.

The commercialization of women’s soccer produced another public consequence: the U.S. women’s national team became popular enough to press an equal-pay argument that reverberated beyond sports. The dispute became a way to argue about fairness in the workplace.

? betsey-stevenson said the equal-pay fight mattered because it asked the public to examine why lower pay for women is accepted when women are doing the same thing. She referred to equal-pay law dating back to the 1960s, while noting that many people do not know that history and that violations of equal pay still occur frequently.

The familiar defenses of unequal pay, in Stevenson’s summary, include claims that women are distracted by families, leave the workplace, or attract less demand from consumers — in sports, that fewer people want to watch girls and women play than boys and men. She argued that many of those explanations are partly artificial. The women’s soccer equal-pay debate forced a broader national conversation about what society values and what fairness requires.

Title IX helped create the U.S. women’s national team’s talent base. The 1999 World Cup proved mass interest could exist. Professional and national-team success created visibility. Visibility made the pay gap publicly legible. Soccer did not invent the workplace equality debate, but it gave the country a vivid case through which to argue about it.

For Glenn Kaino, soccer’s future social value is connected to art, but not in the narrow sense of objects in museums. He described art as the performance of culture. A great soccer game, in that sense, is artful and can be understood as an artwork. As American audiences become more fluent in the game — learning offsides, tactics, and the rhythms of play — he hopes they will also see soccer model behaviors that point toward a more equitable future.

Art, Kaino said, is a place to imagine the future one wants. That imagination happens in museums, but it also happens through the Olympics, the World Cup, and soccer. Farrey joked that the modeled behavior should not include players faking injuries and rolling on the ground. Kaino answered, “It’s how you interpret that.”

The Americanization of soccer raised a practical question: what should the United States add to the game, and what should it leave alone? Carolyn Blodgett said Gotham thinks constantly about the fan experience and the boundary between preserving “pure soccer” and adding new elements. Music during corner kicks, for example, has been discussed, though she noted that most European soccer fans would reject it.

Her more serious answer concerned women’s sports audiences. The fans are not necessarily the same as traditional men’s soccer fans. Gotham does not see much crossover with New York men’s soccer fans, and Blodgett said women’s sports audiences tend to be more female, more diverse, and more inclusive. She contrasted taking her children to a Chelsea match in London, where she felt they were the only women and children in the stand, with a Gotham game, where families, young and old fans, men and women all appear together.

That, she suggested, may be the Americanization of soccer worth keeping: not a gimmick added to the match, but a more inclusive environment around it.