The long list of soccer matches worth watching each weekend usually features a notable number of U.S. Men’s National Team players honing their skills in Europe’s top leagues. It is not a completely new development; since 2002, the USMNT has had at least eleven European-based players on their World Cup rosters. However, the collection of clubs they play for today looks very different than it used to.
Almost overnight, USMNT players have graduated from building strong legacies at mid-tier clubs to key players at some of Europe’s top teams. Look no further than this season’s edition of the UEFA Champions League, which saw twelve players set the record for the most Americans to play in a single campaign. A few of them also play for some of the sport’s most recognizable teams, with the likes of Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah securing starting spots at a resurgent Juventus.
Along with a handful of USMNT colleagues, the pair have spent almost their entire careers at the top echelons of European football and represent a sudden transformation of the national team’s player pool. But as fast as it seems, their experience in the upper echelons of the sport is emblematic of the decades-long journey to professionalize American soccer. While the sport’s growing relationship with the U.S. is seen primarily as a financial one, soccer’s power brokers have also reserved some of their attention 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.
Start them young
Getty Images
Although McKennie and Weah did not have the same path to Juventus, they had one thing in common: they came to Europe as teenagers. Both had stints in the MLS academies, with McKennie spending much of his youth career at FC Dallas and Weah spending some time in the youth setup of the New York Red Bulls. Weah crossed the Atlantic at a younger age, joining the Paris Saint-Germain academy before the age of 15 and making his professional debut there at the age of 17. McKennie, meanwhile, rejected a homegrown deal with Dallas and instead joined German side Schalke, where he spent about a year. in the academy before playing his first match for the senior team at the age of 18.
Their journeys are within the norms of the sport, with players generally ending up in Europe at a very young age and sometimes not playing in their domestic professional leagues at all. It is perhaps the most dramatic difference between McKennie and Weah’s generation and those who came before them.
“When I was young, there was no competition,” said Brian McBride, cohost of CBS Sports Golazo Network’s Call It What You Want and a USMNT veteran. “We didn’t really have the opportunities that the guys have now and it’s not because we deserved them. I think it was more because the football infrastructure in America was still very young and raw and there wasn’t really a way for a player to prepare to play at the highest level.”
McBride carved out such a legacy at Fulham that a bar at Craven Cottage is named after him, but he made his professional debut for the A-League’s now defunct Milwaukee Rampage in 1994, two years before the first season of the MLS. Years before moving to Fulham in 2004, McBride got his first taste of Europe with German side Wolfsburg during the 1994-95 season. However, the emerging soccer scene in the U.S. wasn’t the only difference he remembers between then and now.
“There was a German scout,” he said. “It’s not at all like today where the clubs actually have scouts and they roam around the world and they have specialists in different countries, but there were two guys who actually scouted for German clubs and they sent players to me, and so my first year at university [at Saint Louis University]my coach had mentioned that a scout had said he would like to give you a tryout when you finished school and that was my main focus at the time. I really wanted to go to Germany to play and then I was ready, I got a trial period at Wolfsburg.”
The creation of better pathways such as MLS academies coincided with a pivot from European clubs as they began to focus on finding the sport’s next stars. Instead of playing for a county soccer team as 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 providing scouts with easy access to up-and-comers talent. . Developing young talent has also become a lucrative activity, providing clubs with an added incentive to continue investing in that pipeline. Take FC Dallas as an example – although McKennie never played professionally for the MLS side, the club funded solidarity payments for his transfer to Juventus in 2020.
The benefits are also clear from a player’s perspective. Weah’s spell at PSG, a team his Ballon d’Or-winning father George also played for, gave him the opportunity to hone his skills alongside some of the best players in the world.
“It was easy for me,” Weah said of his experiences in the French capital in an episode of Juventus podcast last year. “I started playing professionally when I was 17, at PSG. There was Neymar, [Kylian] Mbappe, [Edinson] Cavani. I knew that at some point I would have to have my experience. I was at Celtic for four years and then at Lille 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.”
Make the chances count
Getty Images
For players like Weah and McKennie, the fact that they have spent their entire careers to date in Europe’s top leagues means that they have fulfilled the promise they showed in their teenage years as youth products. Experiences as youth players are ultimately formative, McBride argued, laying the foundation for what comes next as professionals.
‘It was like that then [the Olympic Development Program] but they are very short,” McBride said. ‘They weren’t consistent. You didn’t have professional coaches coaching you and I think that all matters. That doesn’t detract from the talent the players have now. I think they understand at a younger age what it is to be a professional and what it takes, which makes them better prepared.”
In the case of Weah and McKennie, it helped hone the necessary skills to remain in Europe’s top leagues throughout their careers to date. While Weah bounced around Europe, winning three league titles in France and one in Scotland. McKennie in particular has forced his way onto teams a few times now. Not every attempt was successful; 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 been racking up more wins than losses lately. He was deemed surplus to requirements by then Juventus manager Massimiliano Allegri in 2023, but he won him over and made 38 appearances last season. The same happened last summer under new manager Thiago Motta, but McKennie has already made thirteen appearances this season.
“Honestly, I think it’s the experience,” McKennie said of 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, and you’ve known the story since I was young, [on the] The U-17 national team, I got fired and I had to kind of come back from that and my thing was obviously when I came back here it was more like, ‘Look, I don’t really train with the team. I don’t really know how to prove myself,’ but my mentality was mainly, ‘Come in every day. Be happy as you normally are. Don’t let things get you down, put your head down and work, get back to what I’m used to and what I’m known for’, that is, as I said, putting my head down, no noise create and just work.”
Their consistency in top competitions, along with the work put in by players before them, has helped reverse the long-term setback the Americans once suffered in Europe.
“I think there was a stigma until the 2002 World Cup. It was more about, ‘Can this player play?’ and less about where the player comes from,” said McBride, a member of that team. “The game was starting to go global. … When I went in ’94 there was definitely a stigma and I think part of that was that no one really stuck around, that really made a difference.”
Three decades after McBride’s first stint in Europe, staying around isn’t as much of a problem for the USMNT player as it used to be. The conversation is now shifting from surviving in Europe to thriving on the continent, something players are actually starting to do.