How Title IX Holds Back US Soccer

In case you missed it, last Sunday was the Super Bowl Sunday for the world. Playing a game the entire rest of the world, outside the United States, calls “football” more than 1.6 billion viewers tuned in to watch Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in what we call “soccer.” Compare that to the 2026 NFL Super Bowl, where total world viewership of Seattle beating the Patriots was 0.1 billion.

The primary thing holding soccer up in the United States is the fact that soccer is a fall sport for our schools. Boys face a terrible dilemma: letter in the most popular sport in the world or letter in the most popular sport in this country.

Despite that dilemma, we have plenty of remaining potential to do better in developing a pipeline of soccer athletes. However, as a matter of policy choice, we force schools to cut men’s soccer opportunities at the secondary and college levels.

That policy choice is called Title IX. The way that Title IX is implemented to ban discrimination on the basis of sex in high school and college sports creates a perverse incentive to forego what otherwise would be lucrative opportunities to invest in men’s soccer teams. Due to the high return on investment of expenditures on American football, Title IX forces high schools and universities to balance things out by padding the rosters of their women’s teams in other sports—and cutting men’s teams in other sports. Were these schools to spend more on men’s soccer, the amount of balancing spending on women’s sports would be even higher.

There’s a natural problem with balancing spending on sports by sex. Women are less interested in playing sports than men, and spectators are less interested in paying for tickets or televised viewing access to women’s sports. So, how do you spend equal amounts in sex segretaged teams? You have to throw more dollars chasing women athletes in a wide variety of sports while keeping a cap on expenditures for men’s teams.

This magnifies the football vs soccer dilemma. Even though we have a non-trivial number of boys who play soccer before high school, and there is a bigger market for spectators to watch men’s soccer than women’s soccer, Title IX makes men’s soccer too expensive for schools to fully develop.

What is the solution? To the original authors of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the answer is obvious. The law did not require creating a separate special olympics for women in sports. Schools could meet the legal requirements by funding one varsity team that allowed women equal access to try out as men.

Like in the administration of civil rights legislation for race, the original intent of “equality” has been supplanted by “equity.” Testosterone being the ultimate performance-enhancing drug, opening up the varsity team to girls would not mean they make the team. So, to get equal outcomes, in terms of playing time, we ironically pursued segregation in a Plessy v Ferguson approach to school athletics. Were we to go back to the original Title IX intent, men’s soccer would get a game-changing boost at the high school and college level, and we’d be able to hang with the likes of Spain and Argentina.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.