US Soccer announced Thursday it will dismantle the pay-to-play youth development system, calling the World Cup exit “the wake-up call we needed,” a phrase that has appeared in federation strategic plans dated 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022, each time after a different elimination.

The plan, titled “Project 2030: A New Horizon,” proposes eliminating registration fees by 2028, subsidising travel by 2029, and “realigning incentive structures” by 2030, a phrase the document does not define because, a development director admitted, “we're not sure what it means either, but it tested well in the focus group.”

When asked why the plan takes four years to implement, the director said: “You can't just stop charging people overnight. There are contracts. There are tournaments in Orlando. There are hotels that have already been booked. The Hampton Inn in Kissimmee has us through 2027.”

The federation confirmed that under the current system, a child in Belgium costs a professional club nothing to develop from age eight, while a child in Florida costs their parents $2,800 a year to play for a team called “Kissimmee United Elite Academy,” which finished 3rd in its own tournament. When asked how many Kissimmee United Elite Academy graduates had reached the national team, the director said: “That's not really the model's goal.”

“The World Cup fundamentally changed how we look at this,” the spokesperson said, using the exact sentence from the 2010 plan, the 2014 plan, and a napkin found in the federation kitchen in 2019. When asked what changed, the spokesperson said “the scoreline,” and then asked if we could move on.

The federation noted that Clint Dempsey, who grew up in a trailer park and became one of the greatest American players, would not have been able to participate in the current system. When asked whether this represented a structural failure spanning decades, the spokesperson said: “It represents a structural learning opportunity spanning decades, which we have now learned from, following the Belgium game, which we lost 4–1, in Seattle, on our own soil, in front of everyone.”

At time of writing, the federation has not cancelled the 2027 Kissimmee tournament. Registration is open. The fee is $1,850.