U.S. Soccer uses World Cup momentum to expand youth access in Chicago

With the World Cup beginning next week, U.S. Soccer is using Chicago to test whether tournament attention can do more than lift interest, it can widen access. The city sits in one of the country’s deepest youth-soccer markets, where the Northern Illinois Soccer League says it has more than 17,000 players on 1,300 teams across more than 120 Chicago-area communities. That scale makes Chicago a useful measure of whether the sport’s biggest stage can feed a broader pipeline, or simply intensify the fee-driven system that already shapes elite youth soccer.

CBS Saturday Morning visited the city as children from different backgrounds were introduced to the game through Soccer Forward, U.S. Soccer’s legacy initiative for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. U.S. Soccer says the program is designed to harness soccer for health, inclusion and unity, and says it has 119 member organizations across all 50 states and 27 national teams. It also says Soccer Forward has already supported soccer-for-good and community organizations in more than half the country, a footprint that shows the federation is treating the World Cup less as a one-time event than as a national expansion strategy.

The next layer is infrastructure. On March 23, U.S. Soccer and Bank of America announced Soccer at Schools, a 2030 campaign aimed at making soccer accessible to every school in the United States. That approach matters because schools can lower the entry cost that keeps many children out of club soccer, especially in communities that lack established elite programs. In that sense, Chicago is not just a showcase. It is a reminder that growth depends on where children can actually touch a ball, find a coach and get on a field.

The bottlenecks remain real. A 2026 analysis found that about 2 in 3 U.S. park-and-rec departments lack sufficient fields, courts and facilities, and about 4 in 5 lack enough volunteer coaches. The National Recreation and Park Association and GameChanger announced an effort on March 17 to confront the coaching shortage, underscoring how much of the participation problem sits outside the professional game itself. US Youth Soccer, which says it registers nearly 2.5 million players a year and calls itself the largest youth sports organization in the country, shows the scale of the market: demand is already there. The question now is whether the World Cup can help convert that demand into broader access, or whether the boom will mostly reward families already positioned to pay for it.