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When the organization behind youth soccer in Massachusetts teamed up with the city of Boston to create an intra-neighborhood soccer league, community members sat down to find ways to expand access to the game.
The data showed an especially dire problem in North Dorchester, Mattapan and East Boston. There they found soccer deserts, said Rob Holliday, executive director of Massachusetts Youth Soccer, a nonprofit offering programs and tournaments to kids.
The league has since partnered with U.S. Soccer Foundation and local community members to open the first of six public mini soccer pitches across Massachusetts. The pitch, located on a former basketball court at Mulberry Park in Brockton, was built by construction crews in just two days, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Soccer Foundation. A second pitch will formally open in Brockton on Thursday.
These initiatives have directly impacted the opportunities to play soccer for youth athletes in their vicinity, Holliday said.
Although more than 1,018 new soccer fields have been created in the Greater Boston region since 2014, they aren’t distributed evenly among neighborhoods, according to an NBC analysis. American soccer is still based on a pay-to-play model, and some kids must scramble to find a place to play.
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“Roughly 28 million children in the U.S. don’t have a place to play within walking distance of them,” said Lex Chalat, the executive director at U.S. Soccer’s Soccer Forward Foundation.
Why most budding soccer players quit by age 14
Soccer in the United States, unlike in many other countries, operates largely on a pay-to-play model. According to the 2025 State of Play report from the Aspen Institute, the average U.S. family spends $1,016 on their child’s primary sport, up nearly 50% in five years.
While soccer’s basic costs add up to around $250 a year per person, with things like uniforms, cleats and league fees, prices jump drastically when families add on the cost of privately owned fields, travel, paid referees and coaches, Holliday said. Almost all these costs are borne by the parent, he added.
A lack of affordability also holds kids back from developing as players, one of Holliday’s biggest frustrations with soccer in the U.S. People assume kids can no longer develop their skills after second grade unless they’re on a private club team, which costs thousands, he said.
“If I could change anything, it would be providing pathways … so that a kid wouldn’t have to pay $5,000 if they’re talented, if they have a love for the game and want to just get better,” he added.
Outdoor soccer participation for all ages in the United States was at an all-time high in 2025 at nearly 16 million, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Kids have been participating in fewer sports over the past few years, but children ages 6 to 12 remain the country’s largest group of outdoor soccer players, with 5.5 million participating.
By the time they reach age 14, however, 70% of them quit, especially those from underserved communities, U.S. Soccer found.
“If I had to guess, it would be because at 14 it probably gets really, really expensive,” said Tyler Adams, the captain of the U.S. soccer team at the 2022 FIFA World Cup and a starter in this year’s tournament. “You’re spending a lot of time in the car, you’re spending a lot of money on flights, going to tournaments. Other sports are expensive as well, but soccer is especially expensive at a certain level.”
Low-income neighborhoods face barriers to access
There are now roughly three times more fields in the Greater Boston area for each elementary-aged child than in 2014. But whether that means easier access to the soccer fields is determined by where a child lives.
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We analyzed zip codes in the region and found that the soccer fields are concentrated in areas where the majority of the population is white. Elementary school-aged children in non-white areas, where residents of color make up more than 50% of the population, have four times fewer soccer fields available to them.
In mostly white neighborhoods, an average of 537 kids share a field. In ones where people of color make up the majority, the number rises to 2,254.
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Research by McKinsey & Company and the U.S. Soccer Federation found that Latino and Black children are three times more likely than white children to stop playing soccer because they feel unwelcome.
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Source: OpenStreetMap, Census data
Holliday credited the robust immigrant communities in Massachusetts for creating one of the highest market penetrations for soccer anywhere in the country. Irish, Portuguese, and Italians immigrants innovated their own ways to play, while teams in other areas might have been organized through YMCAs, he said.
The ‘ideal’ soccer field
In the 100 largest U.S. cities, park acreage in neighborhoods of color is on average only about half that in predominantly white neighborhoods, according to the Trust for Public Land.
A tiny percentage of the country’s 90,000 public schools — less than 1% — have schoolyards that are green and open to the public outside of school hours.
“I wouldn’t say that anywhere in America really has direct access to soccer pitches unless you live in a major city,” said Adams, who spent his childhood in New York’s Hudson Valley. “For me, it was always walking down to a park and making the baseball field and the outfield the ‘ideal’ soccer field, or we’d play on the concrete of a basketball court.”
Many of the now-soccer fields in the Boston area used to be open land or fields built for other sports. The field at Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville, for example, was renovated from an asphalt court to a synthetic-turf field to “respond to the needs of the school’s Phys Ed program” in 2020.
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Source: OpenStreetMap, Census data
The existence of a field doesn’t mean that it’s usable. It may not be in a setting that makes some would-be players feel that they belong, Chalat said, or the space may not be maintained.
Although Holliday’s club doesn’t always have the resources to clean up each and every field, they’ve started building mini-pitches where parents think it’s safe, Holliday said. Recently, they put one up behind the Harwich police station on Cape Cod.
“Nobody had an issue with having their kid play street soccer down there,” he said.
Future of soccer: ‘Sustainable, community-centered and accessible’
Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the U.S. Soccer Foundation partnered with Boston 26, the host city’s organizing committee, to build 20 mini-pitches in the New England region so children could play in their own neighborhoods.
Chalat said Soccer Forward’s next phase is to make soccer truly accessible to everyone everywhere.
“It’s not only public policy, it’s not only lack of investment, it’s not only a representation issue or a socioeconomic issue, it’s everything,” she said. “The key piece there is making sure it’s sustainable, that it’s community centered and that it’s accessible. And that’s not an easy thing to do.”
Other groups focused on making soccer more accessible include the nonprofit Street Soccer USA, which aims to provide an alternative to the pay-to-play model, especially in neighborhoods where over a third of residents live below the poverty line.
Another organization, 703 Warriors, a youth soccer development club based in Arlington, Virginia, identified five key ways to meet marginalized communities, including connecting with them in more languages.
“In those inner-city communities, they go through a lot of obstacles that not every kid in the suburbs or other kids have to go through,” Adams said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to do more wrong sometimes than there is good. It’s about inspiring them and remembering to find their reason why.”
Methodology
We analyzed OpenStreetMap data from 2014 and 2026 to get the number of fields across the U.S. and mapped it against American Community Survey 5-year estimates for ZIP code tabulation areas from 2014 and 2024 (the latest data available). We calculated the change in fields over time and across geographical boundaries.
We mean ‘elementary school-aged kids’ to be the population group that is 5-14 years of age. ‘White’ represents the population that is white, non-Hispanic — all other races are grouped as non-white.
For income calculations, we used median household income for families with children under 18 years of age. We split it into deciles to ensure we had the same number of geographical blocks in each category, with ‘lowest income’ being the first decile and ‘highest income’ being the last. If an area did not have an estimation of median household income, we dropped that area.
We did the same for the percentage of white population in a given geographical area, with ‘least white’ being the first decile and ‘most white’ being the last.
Lastly, for our graphics, we limited our analysis to the ZIP codes served by NBC10 Boston and Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra.
NBC10 Boston’s Asher Klein contributed to this report.
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