Fifteen minutes into the match, a lone North Carolina State attacker collects the ball at the halfway line and charges headlong into a retreating Clemson University back four. Despite his determination, the no. 9’s heavy touch ends his one-man counterattack as the ball is collected by a center-back who swings it wide to Clemson’s left-back. At this point the lead commentator exclaims: “And now the ball goes out to Charlie Asensio,” his southern drawl emphasizing the middle syllable, Ass-IN-see-o, “the 5’9’’ junior out of Roswell, Georgia.”
A seemingly unremarkable moment in a thoroughly unremarkable 2020 conference game, ending 1-0 to the then number-one ranked Clemson Tigers thanks to a late penalty. And yet the “ah-shucks” Ted Lasso-esque naiveté of the lead commentator, breakneck tempo and ramshackle attacking play, all set in a handsome and historic stadium replete with a school band in the middle of a bucolic campus is a neat distillation of the charm of men’s college soccer. Because of its growing insularity from the professional ranks and international football more broadly, it is one of the last places you can experience the men’s global game as a uniquely local phenomenon in the United States.
Once American soccer’s primary talent pipeline for the national team and the professional game, men’s college soccer has been waning in relevance for years as MLS-affiliated development academies and the international transfer market are starting to supply the dominant share of talent in the United States. Long gone are the days in which you could derisively though credibly accuse the US men’s side of being a “galumphing side of corn-fed college boys” as academy kids-cum-professionals like Brendon Aaronson have emerged as the model for player development.
To illustrate, 17 of the 22 in the 1994 US Men’s National Team (USMNT) World Cup squad played for their collegiate teams, while the other five were born outside the United States. That number is down to 7 of the 23 on the most recent USMNT roster. This is, no doubt, the outgrowth of the homegrown player rule, which was adopted by the MLS in 2007 to incentivize clubs to invest in their academies. As a result, the annual MLS SuperDraft has become a decaffeinated event that, at best, can be said to operate as a net that can catch the occasional late bloomer who didn’t have the necessary talent to break through to the professional ranks earlier.