So you want to be a professional soccer player. Are you good? Are you great? Are you devoted? Are you invincible? That's right... are you invincible? Of course not. You're human.
Let's examine the process. You're a good player at 16. You get noticed, and recruited at 18 by a professional club as a developmental player... which means you get to work your butt off for chicken scratch, and have a real possibility of never even suiting up for a match. After two years of getting frustrated, you decide to play for a lesser club, in a lesser league, for chicken scratch.
You are good enough to get some playing time your first year, but don't get to play very much, and never start. You are getting a couple hundred dollars per game, and some per diem travel expense reimbursement. You are a professional. You love it.
The season is 24 games, and you play in all of them. The season lasts a total of 4 months, and you make about $1,200 a month, which isn't bad for a 21 year old, better than flipping burgers for 40 hours a week. That would work out to be $14,400 a year if you played all year... but you don't, you play four months, which gives you a grand total of $4,800 in one year.
So you pick up a job coaching on the side, during the off months to try to earn $800 a month by coaching two teams simultaneously. Working a couple of summer camps might bring in an additional $1,000, if you're lucky. Meanwhile, you run everyday, and practice to be a better player next season.
Two seasons come and go, and you finally earn a starting position because the top-scoring player you played behind recently retired at 37, to go back to college and earn a business degree. You are playing well. You are really on this year, making all the moves and scoring lots of goals for your team. You get a raise, and start bringing in $1,000 a game. You play in all the games, and rake in a whopping $24,000 for the season. Not bad for a 24 year old. You continue to coach for about $1,000 a month in the off season, and the year's end brings you a total of about $33,000. Life is good.
You continue to be a key player for your team, until this season, when the team folds, due to bankruptcy. You get put up on the dispersal draft, and you get picked up by a good club in the San Francisco area. You get the same pay. You have no friends or family near you, and the cost of living is now twice what you were used to paying. So even though, you got a $4,000 a year raise with your new team, the cost of living increase is almost $6,000 more per year than before. During the off season, you can only coach one team, due to the saturation of coaches, and it only pays $400 a month. Your new arrangement is the equivalent of making less than $30,000 a year now.
You learn to like the team, you like the coach, and the area is really cool. You are still playing well, and you sit back and play out another two years for the club. Now you're 26.
One day at practice, a teammate cracks you in the leg, causing your knee to buckle, tearing your meniscus and ACL. Your season has just ended. Months of rehabilitation pass, and your doctor says you will be 100% by next season's beginning. But when you start playing again, it isn't the same. You don't have the same knack of scoring. You seem to be a step slower than before, and you find that the coach is playing you less and less.
Mid season, your coach gets into an argument with the general manager about your team's losing streak. Your coach gets replaced by a new coach. The new coach happens to be an ex-player of one of the teams you used to play against. The new coach hates you, and sits you on the bench for three weeks, because he can. You have two options. Stay and be miserable, or ask to be traded. You opt for the second choice, but nobody wants a player that is slow coming off an injury. So you quit playing, and retire at 27.
Now what? You don't have a job. You don't have an education. Even if you get a job as a coach, it won't pay you more than $1,200 a month for 9 months. That works out to $10,800 a year. You are 27 years old.
I know what you are thinking, I'll be better. I'll make millions of dollars. Probably not. Even the very best players in our country are not bringing in a million dollars a year. Most aren't even bringing in $100,000 a year.
You have to look at the numbers. The A-League has 24 teams, the CISL has 11 teams, the NPSL has 15 teams, and the MLS has only 10 teams this year. If you assume that each team has about 20 players on the roster, that makes a total of 1,200 players being paid as professional players. Most are not paid very much at all. There are over 16.5 million soccer participants in the United States. That gives each player about a one in 13,750 chance of making it as a pro, and not much chance at all of being highly paid.
So what is the happy side of this. Soccer is the best sport on earth. It is great recreation. It is a great social event. It is even a great way to go to college. Many partial and full-ride scholarships are available to soccer players, especially women. Soccer is growing quickly, still, and will eventually become the most popular sport in the United States.
Just keep it in perspective. There are opportunities to play at the top level in this country, and a few of you have the stuff to make it big someday. In fact, some of you may go on to be international stars like Alexi Lalas, Eric Wynalda, John Harkes, Tab Ramos, Marcelo Balboa, and Kasey Keller. Just remember to have fun and love the sport.
I'm sorry if I burst anybody's bubble. Ciao for now.