Landon Donovan on Soccer's Unfinished Business in

Landon Donovan was 12 years old when the 1994 World Cup landed in his backyard, and the first soccer game he ever attended — Argentina vs. Romania at the Rose Bowl — reoriented something inside him. He recounts the moment in a recent Portfolio Players conversation with Front Office Sports: "I was like, whoa, what is this? I had no idea that that existed."

He's spent most of his adult life trying to produce that same collision of ignorance and wonder in other Americans. Thirty years later, with another World Cup arriving on home soil, he offers a framework for how the sport gets from where it is to where its believers think it can be. The framework is worth examining — not because Donovan's position is without tension, but because those tensions reveal something true about American soccer's structural condition.

The World Cup as catalyst — with a caveat

The standard talking point from the soccer community is that hosting the World Cup will mint a new generation of fans. Donovan accepts the premise but hedges the mechanism. 1994 produced a quantifiable institutional outcome — MLS launched in 1996 as a direct consequence. This summer, there is no equivalent blank-canvas infrastructure waiting to be built. The league already exists. The streaming apps already exist. The fan clubs for Bayern Munich and Liverpool already exist in New York.

What the World Cup can deliver, in his reading, is an exponential amplification of attention tied directly to how far the U.S. men's team advances. "Every step you go further in the tournament, the attention is exponentially greater," he says, sketching out a viewership cascade that runs from a few million early-group viewers to something in the tens of millions by the knockout rounds — if the team stays alive. His structural point: the U.S. is positioned favorably in its group and could realistically reach the round of sixteen or beyond before facing top-ranked opposition. That path matters because casual viewers need time to develop the habit before they have a reason to keep it.

What Donovan doesn't fully address — and what a skeptic would press — is that the 2026 growth will accrue partly to international leagues and clubs, not just domestic ones. An American fan minted by a Lamine Yamal moment may end up subscribing to a Barcelona package, not an MLS season ticket. The sport and the league are not synonymous, a distinction that shapes every financial calculation downstream.

The NWSL thesis

The most direct investment claim Donovan makes is the one with the clearest structural logic: "The best investment you can make in probably anywhere in sports right now is the NWSL because it's still relatively inexpensive and the trajectory is incredible — it reminds me a lot of where MLS was probably a decade ago."

The comparison to the NBA and NFL in the 1970s and '80s is the kind of historical framing that sounds compelling and is hard to verify in real time. Every undervalued league looks, in retrospect, like an obvious buy. What makes the NWSL case more than nostalgia is the specific combination of factors that currently apply: entry costs are still modest relative to the MLS expansion fee curve, broadcast interest is growing, and the Washington Spirit — under Michelle Kang's ownership group — provides a proof of concept for serious institutional investment producing serious outcomes.

The question the NWSL bull case has to answer is how quickly the cost basis rises to the point where the early-adopter thesis evaporates. NWSL expansion fees have already climbed steeply. The window Donovan describes as wide open may already be narrowing.

MLS, perception, and the ownership intelligence gap

On MLS specifically, Donovan is both charitable and diagnostic. He credits commissioner Don Garber with navigating the league's global positioning problem — competing for eyeballs not just against the NFL and NBA but against La Liga and the Bundesliga — as skillfully as the situation allowed. But the core friction he identifies isn't about talent pipelines or salary caps. It's about what he calls a knowledge deficit at the ownership level.

"A lot of ownership groups get into sports and they don't really understand the sport," he says. "They have technical directors and coaches, but owners aren't generally very knowledgeable about the sport." His proposed correction: embed former players, agents, or deep practitioners in ownership structures — not to change strategy, but to close the comprehension gap between what clubs are doing and what owners actually understand about why.

The Raiders' decision to bring Tom Brady into ownership gets a favorable mention, though Donovan acknowledges the early returns are inconclusive. The broader principle is real regardless of that example's outcome: sports organizations run better when decision-makers understand the product. That this even needs to be said tells you something about how the celebrity-ownership boom has reshaped front offices across American sports.

This knowledge gap question has a geographic dimension worth noting. San Diego FC, the newest MLS franchise, is built around the Right to Dream model — a youth development pipeline designed to generate transfer revenue and feed the first team with players whose formation the club actually shaped. That's a structural answer to the ownership intelligence problem: build institutional knowledge into the asset base rather than hoping to hire it in.

The Apple TV diagnosis

Donovan's take on the MLS-Apple TV deal is candid about its limitations while defending the logic of a correction. He relays a conversation with Garber directly: "Putting it behind a second paywall proved to be the wrong idea." The adjustment — making MLS content available to existing Apple TV subscribers without an additional fee — represents the league listening to a market signal.

His underlying concern is more structural than contractual. MLS is not the NFL. It cannot afford to retreat from linear television and still expect the promotional machinery of NBC, Fox, and ABC to amplify its brand. "We still need that exposure," he says, pointing to the NFL's continued investment in broadcast relationships even though a full streaming pivot is financially viable. The NFL's decision to move slowly toward streaming is not timidity — it's the product of understanding what the linear ecosystem actually provides beyond distribution: marketing surface area, casual viewer access, and legitimacy signaling.

For MLS, those things are still load-bearing. What the Apple deal tested — and what the adjustment clarifies — is that distribution exclusivity without a commensurate audience size is a losing trade.

The youth pipeline, and what an eight-year-old's rejection reveals

The part of the conversation that probably matters most to the long-term financial architecture of American soccer is also the least financial on its surface. Donovan describes his eight-year-old son being cut from his team in San Diego — moved down to a B-squad because the club wanted "bigger, faster, stronger" players. His son's response: "I just want to play with my friends."

Donovan cites a German study finding zero correlation between being among the best 12-year-olds and becoming a professional. The correlation tightens at 14, tightens further at 16, and becomes meaningful at 18. The implication for how American youth clubs are structured — applying professional selection pressure to children who are not at a developmental stage where that pressure generates anything useful — is that they are optimizing for the wrong variable at the wrong time, and the cost is attrition.

"For the Tigers and Serenas, there are millions of kids that are falling out of love with the sport, quitting at 13, 14 because they don't want to deal with their parents yelling or the coaches or the pressure," he says. "That's not good for the sport."

This is the structural gap that no media deal or expansion fee can paper over. MLS valuations, NWSL investment theses, and World Cup tailwinds all ultimately depend on a fan base that grew up playing the sport and retained an emotional relationship with it. If the youth development system is churning through children and returning a fraction of them as lifelong participants, the demand-side math for every other investment gets harder.

Donovan's stated intention is to dedicate a significant portion of his remaining career to changing this. Whether an individual advocate — however prominent — can shift institutional incentives embedded in club revenue models and parent expectations is an open question. But he's right about the stakes. The pipeline problem isn't downstream from the investment opportunity. It is the investment opportunity.

Marcus Tate is the Sports Desk Editor at Buzzrag.