For 30 years, American soccer has been the sport of the almost. Almost breaking through. Almost finding its footing. Almost fielding the team its passionate, fast-growing fan base deserves. The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, kicking off this summer across American stadiums, was supposed to be the moment of arrival—but the federation responsible for putting the best possible team on the field has been quietly grappling with a structural problem that no amount of cultural momentum could fix on its own.
It has never been able to reliably find its own best players.
Now, Dan Helfrich—who retired last year as CEO of Deloitte Consulting to take on what he calls a “passion project” running the U.S. Soccer Federation as its chief operating officer—says AI is about to change that in ways the sport has never seen. “My view is we can actually scout every single soccer match that a U.S.-eligible player is playing anywhere in the world,” Helmbridge said at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Think about that paradigm shift.”
The problem no scout could solve
The scale of the challenge is unlike anything in American sports. Because U.S. Soccer eligibility flows through citizenship and parentage—not birthplace—American-eligible players are scattered across every continent, suiting up in leagues from Lagos to Leipzig to Lima. Helfrich puts the number at between 50 million and 70 million teenagers, boys and girls, playing on any given day.
The federation’s human scouting network was never built for that. “How do you get your scouts—your humans—to all of those places?” Helmbridge said. “You can’t. And so automatically, you’re excluding 99.5% of people.”
That is not a rounding error. It is a structural ceiling that has persisted for as long as the American game has existed—and it compounds with every passing generation of players who were simply never seen. Add in the “pay-to-play” youth club system that has long screened out talented kids from lower-income families before any scout arrived, and the blind spot becomes a chasm. The American soccer machine has been operating, for decades, with most of its inputs switched off.
Two forces converging
Helfrich said two things are now “converging” simultaneously: the explosion of video availability for youth sports globally, and the rapid maturation of AI-powered video analysis tools. Together, they make something that was previously unthinkable suddenly achievable.
The system works by training AI models on positional profiles—defining the specific movement patterns, spatial awareness, and technical markers U.S. Soccer looks for at each position—and then deploying that analysis at scale across video feeds regardless of where in the world they originate. A right winger running channels for a youth club in Boise gets the same level of algorithmic attention as one playing for a powerhouse academy in New York or a semi-professional feeder side in Germany. For the first time, geography stops being a disqualifier.
“We have this extraordinary challenge operationally to find all the American-eligible teenagers around the world who are playing at any given day,” Helfrich said. “Video becoming much more widely available for youth sports, and AI—suddenly, we’re reimagining.”
Humans and machines
Helfrich was careful not to declare the human scout obsolete. The AI handles volume and geography—the things no person can do alone—but there are dimensions of elite evaluation it cannot yet replicate. “What’s the tone of voice of a player to a teammate when the teammate makes a mistake?” he said. “Really hard thing to detect. What’s the body language when the team goes up or goes down?”
The model that emerges is explicitly hybrid: AI surfaces candidates at a scale previously impossible, and human scouts assess the intangibles that cameras can’t decode. It is the same restructuring playing out across industries from finance to medicine—not replacement, but a force multiplier that expands what the human expert can actually see and act on. For a former Deloitte Consulting CEO who spent decades deploying that logic in professional services, the soccer application is, he admits, considerably more enjoyable. “In my old job, I had a lot of examples that weren’t as fun,” Helfrich said. “This one is a fun one to relate to.”
A sport that’s finally ready
The urgency is real. Soccer has spent three decades becoming something in America—slowly, organically, against the grain of every prediction that said it would happen faster. Roger Bennett, cofounder and CEO of Men in Blazers and one of the sport’s most astute observers, delivered the headline-making verdict earlier this year when he appeared on Alex Rodriguez’s podcast: Soccer has already overtaken baseball as America’s third-most popular sport, according to Q4 2024 research from Ampere Analysis cited by The Economist. Five billion people will watch the World Cup this summer. NBC Sports’ opening weekend of the 2025-26 Premier League season was the most-watched on record in the U.S.
The fan base, in other words, is enormous and growing. The commercial infrastructure is in place. What has lagged is the on-field product—and Bennett, who has watched the USMNT’s results with the particular anguish of a true believer, is unsparing about why. “When we play a big team, we still have an inferiority complex,” he told Fortune recently. “An imposter syndrome.” The U.S. has won exactly one knockout-round game in World Cup history. A so-called golden generation of players has been producing a diet of largely meaningless friendlies.
That gap—between America’s booming soccer culture and its underperforming national team—is exactly what makes the AI scouting bet so consequential. The talent may always have been there, dispersed across 70 million eligible teenagers on six continents. The federation simply lacked the tools to find it.
“Be realistic, do the impossible,” Helfrich said, borrowing the federation’s own mantra. For a sport that has spent 30 years being told its moment was coming, an AI-powered talent revolution—built quietly, in the background, while the World Cup spotlight blazes—may be the most structurally important thing American soccer has ever done.
Win or lose this summer, the search is on—this time, with robots.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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