A local soccer club practices regularly at Eric Casiano Park, a green space in Kensington, Philadelphia, that has been protected for over three decades. But a leading member of the club fears the field will soon be lost to developers. It’s an attractive plot of land to local officials intent on building new homes in the neighborhood, said Kurt Carlson, development associate of Kensington Soccer Club, a nonprofit that sponsors the club as well as competitive travel and recreational soccer programs. “We’re fighting an uphill battle just to give our kids space to run around,” Carlson said.  Philadelphia is in the middle of a historic housing boom, with major developments across the city set to construct thousands of new homes, according to the Pew Research Center. In Kensington, that means an already small number of green spaces will continue to disappear, said club parent Stephanie Santiago.  Although more than 1,800 new soccer fields have been created in the Philadelphia region since 2014, they aren’t distributed evenly among neighborhoods, and some kids must still scramble to find a place to play. Soccer is also still based on a pay-to-play model, although some nonprofits like Kensington are working to change that. var pymParent = new pym.Parent('map-over-time', 'https://visuals.otsops.com/projects/soccer-fields/map-over-time.html', {title: '', parenturlparam: 'parentDomain', parenturlvalue: window.location.hostname}); “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. Fields may also not have the right dimensions, local clubs like Inter Philly FC say. Inter Philly, comprising three teams across Philadelphia, often hosts seven-on-seven games for kids. But most soccer fields are designed for the standard 11-on-11 match, so none of the local fields are the right size, said Wendy Smith, one of the club’s executive directors. The club also bought and set up lights on fields in order to practice at night, Smith said. Now, they’re just hoping to find a piece of grass that isn’t too bumpy. 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. Santiago said she appreciates Kensington Soccer Club for keeping its travel program affordable at around $80, especially as living costs rise.  “Their clubhouse has gently used or close-to-new soccer cleats. They are always offering new shin guards, they’re always offering socks, they always have extra uniforms,” she said. “They do their best to make sure that the price of enrollment and maintaining your child in soccer is as affordable as possible to all.” For Cary Nieves, another parent, soccer programs are only accessible when they’re visible. Kensington Soccer Club is a good example of an affordable program, she said, but not many people know about it.  As schools contend with lowering budgets and cut sports like soccer from after-school programming, Nieves hopes more parents are notified about the affordable alternatives available to them, she said.  I do see that children have a hard time affording their own equipment, just paying dues or affording uniforms, because it is a challenging city.Cary Nieves, Kensington Soccer Club parent 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. “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.” Travel soccer programs can cost up to $4,000 to play on a team, a price that is unaffordable for many, Carlson said. To lessen transportation costs for his team, one Inter Philly coach began picking up his players and driving them to practice, Smith said. She added that teenage players in the program take public transportation. It’s the only way they can get to practice, she said, because their families don’t have cars. Low-income neighborhoods face barriers to access There are now roughly seven times more fields in the Greater Philadelphia region 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. var pymParent = new pym.Parent('map-choropleth', 'https://visuals.otsops.com/projects/soccer-fields/map-choropleth.html', {title: '', parenturlparam: 'parentDomain', parenturlvalue: window.location.hostname}); 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 2.5 times fewer soccer fields available to them. In mostly white neighborhoods, an average of 373 kids share a field. In ones where people of color make up the majority, the number rises to 927. var pymParent = new pym.Parent('slope-chart-wrapper', 'https://visuals.otsops.com/projects/soccer-fields/slope-chart.html', {title: '', parenturlparam: 'parentDomain', parenturlvalue: window.location.hostname}); Teams at Kensington Soccer Club reflect the racial demographics in the neighborhood, and across different points on the income scale, Carlson said. That means any given roster might include Black, Hispanic, and white kids, as well as growing participation among Asians.  “It’s a rather eclectic club, and we pride ourselves in that,” Santiago said.  Research by McKinsey 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. 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. In one zip code in Norristown, as many as 5,081 kids share two soccer fields. 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. var pymParent = new pym.Parent('neighborhoods', 'https://visuals.otsops.com/projects/soccer-fields/all_markets_html/neighborhoods/neighborhoods.html', {title: '', parenturlparam: 'parentDomain', parenturlvalue: window.location.hostname}); Source: OpenStreetMap, Census data “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 area used to be open land or fields built for other sports. The field at Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School in North Philadelphia, for example, was built as part of its new campus in 2019. var pymParent = new pym.Parent('fields_post_2014', 'https://visuals.otsops.com/projects/soccer-fields/all_markets_html/fields_post_2014/fields_post_2014.html', {title: '', parenturlparam: 'parentDomain', parenturlvalue: window.location.hostname}); 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 — Casiano field is often littered with trash and broken glass, Santiago said.  “Our coaches come an hour early with trash bags, with pooper scoopers,” she said. “They’re scouting the field to make sure that when the students get to the field, they have a safe and clean space to play.” Future of soccer: ‘Sustainable, community-centered, and accessible’ Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Philadelphia Soccer 2026 and the U.S. Soccer Foundation partnered to build 10 mini-pitches in the 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 NBC and Telemundo Philadelphia. 2026 FIFA World Cup My New Favorite Futbolista Jun 16 Why USMNT star Tyler Adams is building ‘mini-pitches' across the country My New Favorite Futbolista May 27 Meet the soccer stars to root for at the 2026 FIFA World Cup ...read more read less