Sometimes, it feels like there’s a distance between the U.S. men’s and women’s soccer teams, even though they wear the same crest.
Over the years, various people involved with both programs have tried to close that gap, including at U.S. Soccer headquarters. Sporting director Matt Crocker is definitely on that list, and high up on it.
That’s especially true when he talks about his vision of “the U.S. Way,” the creation of an on-field guidebook for the whole governing body. Many people will instinctively conclude that Crocker is sending a sermon from the mount, given how often the governing body has tried to do that over the years.
But it isn’t that simple, and it’s not just Crocker saying so. The last few months of on-field results at the senior levels have offered proof.
In some countries, every national team would be required to play the same way. Think of the Netherlands and Spain, for example, two programs with decades-long histories of putting philosophy over pragmatism.
Crocker is more pragmatic. Once he hired Mauricio Pochettino to coach the senior men and Emma Hayes to coach the senior women, he wanted to get out of their way. He does not stop Pochettino from playing a 3-4-2-1 formation, and Hayes from playing a 4-3-3.
“They are arguably two of the best coaches in the world,” Crocker told The Inquirer. “Who am I, in my experience, to dictate how they should be playing or not playing? I think the idea of that, for me, is not the way I work.”
His experience gives him power if he wants to exercise it. Before joining U.S. Soccer in 2023, previous stops for the native Welshman included seven years at English soccer’s governing body, the Football Association. He planted seeds that have now made the nation elite on both the men’s and women’s sides.
But no, what Crocker said is what he meant.
“Of course, there’s going to be a framework … of how we want them to work,” he continued. “But ultimately their job is to provide winning teams, and I think they’re doing a pretty good job at doing that. And my job is to make sure that they get what they need to be able to do that.”
If you only follow soccer casually, you might not think much of this. If you’re deep in the sport, especially the American game, you know it matters to hear that from someone so high-ranking.
“The way I see it is, my job is not to dictate every single detail of how everything needs to look or feel,” Crocker said. “I need to use their experiences, because they’ve got more than me in those areas of what winning looks like.”
Hayes vouched for this, and not by making light of the size of her trophy mantel. She knew Pochettino before taking the U.S. job because they overlapped at English club Chelsea, and she knew American soccer from many years of working here before returning to her native London in 2012.
“Mauricio’s ideas on how to win football matches might be different to mine, for example, but we both have ambition to win football matches,” Hayes said. “And we both have an appreciation that American players have their own unique set of qualities that we can lean into.”
How they execute from there is up to them.
“Yes, the U.S. Way is very clear and overarching — that sits above our WNT and MNT and all our other 27 teams,” Hayes said, using the abbreviations for the senior women’s and men’s teams. “But within that, some of those differences are in and around the game model.”
That might not sound like much, but it really does matter.
It all starts with youth soccer
If there’s distance between the men’s and women’s teams, it often feels like there’s a canyon between the senior squads on TV and the youth teams your kids play on. That, too, has seemed deliberate at times, with so many factions in the sport wanting to do what they want instead of working together for the game as a whole.
America’s youth soccer landscape, which better resembles an industrial complex — and really feels that big, in terms of scale — has a long history of rebelling against being told what to do by U.S. Soccer. Crocker quickly became well-versed in this when he took his job, and has spent a lot of time trying to change the tone.
“I think we have to recognize that what we do in state X can’t just be replicated and put into state Y,” he said. “Everyone’s unique and individual, and we have to listen to their individual needs. But we’ve also got to be clear on the framework of the things that are fundamental, and that we are going to do irrespective.”
He admitted that the scale of this country “scares you to death” for such a project, compared to how he built the England DNA program at the FA in 2013.
“You could bring every county FA to St. George’s Park, all of which were within a three-hour drive [from the national training center],” Crocker said. “You could mandate, you could then put people out into those environments to support it, and you could do it where you could really monitor something on a much smaller scale. Doing this is something I’ve never experienced before.”
That literal geography, not just youth soccer politics, influenced his journey to now.
“I don’t think there’s one silver bullet that you need to take, or you go, ‘It’s not going to work because of X,’” he said. “I just think we have to recognize the uniqueness of the country, build on that as a positive, but also remember not to make the same mistakes as others that have gone before us.”
Then came words that a lot of people — especially the youth coaches out there — have wanted to hear.
“I say this respectfully [because] I wasn’t here, but what I heard was U.S. Soccer was telling: We told, we told, we told,” Crocker said. “And now our job is to listen, to work, to problem solve, but to bring everyone together.”
Anecdotally, it’s been working. At various events this year where Crocker has spoken to youth and amateur teams, he has been warmly received. But the hardest part is yet to come, as a recent moment showed.
‘More worried about their bottom line’
Earlier this month, Crocker spoke to a crowd of the governing body’s sponsors and donors. Some of them wore track jackets of their youth clubs, but most were in business clothes. Crocker shared the stage with deputy sporting director and onetime Union centerback Oguchi Onyewu and U.S. men’s legend Landon Donovan.
“For those who are not familiar with the youth soccer landscape in this country, it’s a bit of a disaster, right?” Donovan said. “It really is. There’s so many competing interests.”
He spoke of a local club near his home in southern California, but knew it could have been countless others.
“People are very content with their little fiefdom and their little salary and their club and their control and their power,” Donovan said. “So what’s the incentive now for these clubs to change? … We do have national pride, but they’re more worried about their bottom line than they are [about] growing U.S. soccer.”
The words were as true as they were damning.
“I think the saying is, do what you’ve always done and you’ll get what you’ve always got,” Crocker said. “There’s been a lot of talk about, there’s a player that plays in this league over here that has to drive or fly thousands of miles because this league is falling out with this league, and they won’t play each other. And that’s not putting the child, that’s not putting the sport, at the heart of what we’re all about.”
It’s true for the boys and men, and it’s true for the girls and women. It’s an enormous task, but Crocker is willing to give from his side, and that is noticed.
“I think it’s being respectful to environments that have already been created,” he said. “Us as U.S. Soccer, being the national federation, the people that should be really saying, ‘Hey this is what player development and the game could look like in this country’ — it’s about time we spoke up and started to share some of that. But it’s not through a dictator approach, it’s through more of a collaborative way of doing things.”
Crocker’s plans are due to be published in January, the same month Philadelphia will host the 2026 United Soccer Coaches convention. It won’t be easy for him to get that crowd on his side, for the reasons Donovan made clear. If Crocker can, though, the benefits could last long past the World Cup.
