On any given weekend, the long list of soccer games worth watching usually includes a notable number of U.S. men’s national team players sharpening their skills in Europe’s top leagues. It is not an entirely new development – since 2002, the USMNT have had at least 11 Europe-based players on their World Cup rosters. The collection of clubs they play for these days, though, looks a lot different than it once did.
Almost overnight, USMNT players have graduated from building strong legacies at middling clubs to becoming key players at some of Europe’s top teams. Look no further than this season’s edition of the UEFA Champions League, in which 12 players have set the record for the highest number of Americans to play in a single campaign. A few of them play for some of the sport’s most recognizable teams, too, with the likes of Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah carving out starting spots at a resurgent Juventus.
Alongside a handful of their USMNT colleagues, the pair have spent almost the entirety of their careers in the top ranks of European soccer and represent a sudden transformation of the national team’s player pool. As quick as it may seem, though, their experience in the upper echelons of the sport is emblematic of the decades-long journey to professionalize American soccer. Though the sport’s growing relationship with the U.S. is primarily viewed as a financial one, soccer’s powerbrokers have also reserved some of their focus for the on-field product. Not only has it normalized the presence of USMNT players in European soccer, but that effort also represents the increasingly comfortable relationship between the sport’s decision-makers in both the U.S. and Europe.
Starting them young
Though McKennie and Weah did not have matching paths to Juventus, one thing they had in common is that they made their way to Europe when they were teenagers. Both had stints in MLS academies, with McKennie spending much of his youth career at FC Dallas and Weah spending some time in the New York Red Bulls’ youth set-up. Weah crossed the Atlantic at a younger age, joining the Paris Saint-Germain academy before his 15th birthday and made his professional debut there at 17. McKennie, meanwhile, rejected a homegrown deal with Dallas and instead went to Germany’s Schalke, spending about a year in the academy before playing his first game for the senior team at age 18.
Their journeys fall within the norms of the sport, with players generally landing in Europe at a very young age and sometimes forgo playing in their domestic professional leagues altogether. It is arguably the most dramatic difference between McKennie and Weah’s generation and the ones that came before them.
“When I was young, there wasn’t a league,” Brian McBride, a cohost of CBS Sports Golazo Network’s Call It What You Want and a USMNT veteran, said. “We didn’t really have the opportunities that the guys are having right now and it’s not because we deserved them. I think it was more because the infrastructure of soccer in America was still very young and very raw and there wasn’t really a pathway for a player to be prepared to go and play at the highest level.”
McBride carved out such a legacy at Fulham that there’s a bar in Craven Cottage named after him, but he made his professional debut for the now-defunct Milwaukee Rampage of the A-League in 1994, two years before MLS’ inaugural season. Years before his 2004 move to Fulham, McBride got his first taste of Europe with Germany’s Wolfsburg during the 1994-95 season. The nascent soccer scene in the U.S., though, was not the only difference between then and now that he recalls.
“There was a German scout,” he said. “It’s nothing like nowadays where the clubs actually have scouts and they scour the world and they have specialists in different countries, but there were two guys that really scouted for German clubs and they would send players over and so my junior year in college [at Saint Louis University], my coach had mentioned that a scout had said he’d like to give you a trial when you’re done with school and that was then my main focus. I really wanted to go to Germany and play and so that’s when I finished, I got a trial with Wolfsburg.”
The creation of better pathways like MLS academies coincided with a pivot from European clubs as they began to focus on finding the sport’s next stars. Rather than playing for a district soccer team like McBride did as a teenager, high school age soccer players in the U.S. play organized competition against each other and around the world, mirroring the way the European game works, and offering scouts easy access to rising talent. Developing young talent has become lucrative business, too, offering additional incentive for clubs to keep investing in that pipeline. Take FC Dallas as an example – though McKennie never played professionally for the MLS side, the club banked solidarity payments from his transfer to Juventus in 2020.
The perks are also obvious from a player perspective. Weah’s stint at PSG, a team his Ballon d’Or-winning father George also played for, afforded him the chance to hone his skills alongside some of the best players in the world.
“It was easy for me,” Weah said about his experiences in the French capital on an episode of Juventus Podcast last year. “I started playing professionally at 17, at PSG. There were Neymar, [Kylian] Mbappe, [Edinson] Cavani. I knew that at some point I would have to have my experience. I was at Celtic, then Lille for four years and now I’m here. The experiences were important, they helped me grow, in football and as a man. I am very proud of my experiences. Nothing was really complicated, but everyone has their own story, everyone has their own strength.”
Making the opportunities count
For players like Weah and McKennie, the ability to spend the entirety of their careers so far in Europe’s top leagues means they have made good on the promise they showed as academy products in their teen years. Experiences as youth players are ultimately formative ones, McBride argued, laying the groundwork for what comes next as professionals.
“Back then, it was [the Olympic Development Program] but they’re real short,” McBride said. “They weren’t constant. You didn’t have professional coaches coaching you and I think all that matters. That’s not to take away from the talent that the players have now. I think they understand what it is to be a professional and what’s needed at an earlier age, which prepares them better.”
In the case of Weah and McKennie, it helped to hone the necessary skills to stick around in Europe’s top leagues for the entirety of their careers so far. While Weah bounced around Europe and won three league titles in France and another in Scotland. McKennie, in particular has battled his way into teams a few times now. Not every attempt was a successful one – he described a 2023 loan spell at Leeds United as “probably one of my lower points, if not the lowest in my professional career” – but he’s picking up more wins than losses lately. He was deemed surplus to requirements in 2023 by then-Juventus manager Massimiliano Allegri only to win him over and play 38 games last season. The same thing happened last summer under new manager Thiago Motta, but McKennie already has 13 appearances to his name this season.
“Honestly, I think it’s the experience,” McKennie said about his ability to bounce back in an October interview with CBS Sports Golazo Network’s Morning Footy. “It’s not the first time I’ve been doubted, it won’t be the last time, and you know the story since I was young, [on the] U-17 national team, I got cut and I had to kind of come back from that and obviously my thing was, when I came back here, it was more so, ‘Look, I’m not really training with the team. I don’t really know how I can prove myself,’ but my mentality was mainly just saying, ‘Come in every day. Be happy like you normally are. Don’t let things get you down and put your head down and work, revert back to what I’m used to and what I’m known for,’ which is, like I said, putting my head down, not making noise and just working.”
Their consistency in top leagues, alongside the work players that came before them have put in, has helped to undo the longstanding pushback Americans had once received in Europe.
“I think there was a stigma until the 2002 World Cup. … it became more about, ‘Can this player play?’ and less about where the player is from,” McBride, a member of that team, said. “The game started going global. … When I went in ’94, there was definitely a stigma and I think part of that was there wasn’t anybody that really stuck, that really made a difference.”
Three decades on from McBride’s first sojourn to Europe, sticking around is not as much of a problem for the USMNT player as it once was. The conversation is now shifting from surviving in Europe to thriving on the continent, something that players are actually genuinely starting to do.
