Is Title IX The Reason US Men's Soccer Is Average?

    As I am writing this (Friday, July 18), the FIFA Men’s World Cup finals are this coming Sunday; Spain vs. Argentina. Now, this may come as a shock to some of my older friends, but I will be watching. Never having been much of a soccer fan in my youth, the sport has grown on me these last few years. This will be my third World Cup in a row! Thank you...Thank you very much. Trust me, no one is more surprised than I am. One of the reasons I say that is because the United States men’s team is quadrennially...boring. Unlike the women, who have also succeeded in becoming boring, because they win so often; the men are boring because they do not. They cannot even sniff the finals, let alone the semi-finals! 

    Now, I read a piece not long ago in some newspaper by someone who was describing what it takes for a country to be elite in soccer. This guy typed things like “large population,” “lots of money,” “large infrastructure,” etc. Well, we have lots of all those things! More than most nations, if not all. So why do we suck! Well, I can think of one reason right off the bat. There are many more sports options for young men here in the States. But the more I thought about it, the more I remembered something else I read a while ago, which took me back in time to a piece of legislation, while needed at the time, caused more than a few arguments between the sexes. If I may...

    The United States Women’s National Team is a major player in FIFA’s Women’s World Cup, having won two of the last three, and four total since the women’s World Cup was established in 1991. The U.S. men’s team has gone beyond the Round of 16 only once in the same time span. Part of the reason for the women’s dominance is that fewer countries emphasize women’s soccer. Another part of the reason is that they are very, very good. Male athletes also have more options in America, including football and baseball capturing much of the attention. Europe’s more popular and lucrative professional leagues also help to make soccer stardom an aspirational ideal across the pond.  

    But there is another factor behind the underperformance of our men’s soccer teams on the international stage. That would be the perverse incentives of our reigning civil rights regime. Now, before everyone goes batshit over that last sentence, please continue reading. 

    Title IX, which was necessary at the time due to a vast inequity in sports participation between young women and men has, as the years have passed, actively suppressed the growth of men’s sports since the early 1990s, when enforcement of the 1972 law underwent sweeping changes. Since that time, Title IX has been interpreted as a requirement that the proportion of athletes who are female must be equivalent to the number of undergraduates who are female at every school receiving federal funds. Let me just say that is the dumbest logic ever. And that’s saying something when discussing bureaucratic thought processes. 

    Because of this moronic requirement, schools with football teams—which tend to have large rosters—try to balance out their many male athletes by creating niche female sports such as bowling, flag football, and beach volleyball. They also pad the rosters of their women’s teams. The University of Nebraska had 50 female basketball players in 2025-2026, which is absurd. Alabama’s female rowing team has more than 110, which borders on stupid.  

    But in order to fulfill Title IX, schools have not only expanded women’s sports; they have cut men’s. And this is where I have a little problem. Nowhere is this choking out of male demand more evident than in soccer. NCAA Division I had roughly 200 male soccer teams and fewer than 100 female soccer teams in 1990. The number of male teams has remained steady since. The number of female teams exceeded the number of male teams in 1996-1997 and then kept on growing. I think that is awesome, because I am a full supporter of women having every opportunity to play sports. The caveat to that support is, as long as it doesn’t harm, stunt the growth of, interfere with…whatever…men’s sports. Let me try to explain before the pitchforks show up at my door. 

    In 2022-2023, male teams numbered 203 while the number of female teams was 337. Today, many schools with large athletics programs—including Florida, Georgia, Texas, LSU, Iowa, and Missouri—have women’s varsity soccer teams but only club soccer for men. This reduces the number of men playing at a high level. According to NCAA numbers, in the early 1990s, male soccer players outnumbered females by more than 2 to 1 in Division I. In 2023, there were 10,239 women playing soccer at the highest collegiate level, compared to 6,441 men. I’m not the brightest guy in the world, but that’s a huge difference. 

    The NCAA long allowed men’s varsity soccer teams to have only 9.9 scholarships to spread out over their rosters. Women’s teams, by contrast, had fourteen. This double standard against male soccer players was necessary to comply with prevailing Title IX regulations, which hold that only proportional parity provides schools a “safe harbor” against Title IX suits. (Roster limits are now equalized at twenty-eight.) 

    For basketball and baseball, Division I sports are pipelines for developing America’s world-class team sports programs. In the World Baseball Classic, other countries pillage American players, just as they do in international basketball competitions. In soccer, however, America’s World Cup team must look for talent elsewhere. By contrast, every member of the last three American female World Cup teams was homegrown. 

    America’s women’s soccer has a world-class pipeline (as it should), but Title IX prevents men’s soccer from building one. Only when America drops its sports sex-quota system will the American men stop being humiliated by the likes of Belgium. (Really? Belgium?) And America will drop its sports sex-quota system only when it stops using sports as a lever to break down stereotypes and engineer parity and instead allows regulations to acknowledge that the sexes differ in their interest in sports. Yes, I typed that. The sexes differ mightily in their interest in playing sports. But the correct response to that I, “So what?!” Millions more young women are playing sports now than when Title IX was given full throttle. And until the NCAA acknowledges that very obvious fact, men’s soccer (and other niche college men’s sports) will continue to be hobbled by a legal regime that not only limits its talent pipeline but requires it to split its World Cup winnings with female athletes.

    Change is possible. Just as interpretations of civil-rights law have shifted in other walks of life, a men’s soccer club team at Texas or Florida could file suit against their schools for their failure to provide equal opportunities for male club soccer players. Females at Austin or Gainesville are, after all, getting scholarships to play soccer (again, a great thing), while men must pay full freight (again, a not so great thing). Now, do we really want to get the lawyers involved? Or can someone, or even a group of someones ask, “Is Title IX still a necessity?” Feel free to talk amongst yourselves…in a civil tone.  

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com