The US Women’s National Team is a major player in FIFA’s Women’s World Cup, having won two of the last three and four since the women’s World Cup was established in 1991. The US men’s team has gone beyond the Round of 16 only once in the same time span.
Part of the reason for the US women’s dominance is that fewer countries emphasize women’s soccer. Male athletes also have more options in America, with 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.
But there is another factor behind the underperformance of US men’s soccer on the international stage: the perverse incentives of our reigning civil rights regime.
Title IX has 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.
Because of this 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 fifty female basketball players in 2025-2026. Alabama’s female rowing team has more than 110.
But in order to fulfill Title IX, schools have not only expanded women’s sports; they have cut men’s. 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.
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 two to one in Division 1. In 2023, there were 10,239 women playing soccer at the highest collegiate level, compared to 6,441 men
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, 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 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. Until then, men’s soccer 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 areas, a men’s soccer club team at Texas or Florida could file suit against their schools for their failure to provide equal opportunities to male club soccer players. Females at Austin or Gainesville are, after all, getting scholarships to play soccer while men must pay full freight.