Happy Wednesday,
Mark Franek started playing soccer at 13 after a string of concussions ended his other athletic pursuits, went on to play semi-pro in Iceland, and has spent the last three decades teaching English and coaching soccer in Philadelphia, where his students include professional teenagers at the Philadelphia Union's academy who are signing six-figure contracts before they're old enough to vote.
He also wrote the book on American soccer (literally). It's called American Soccer Nation, and it covers 150 years of a sport that never died, just kept getting knocked down.
This week, Jake and I sat down with Mark to talk about where American soccer came from, where it's going, and what the 2026 World Cup actually means for the sport's future here.
Soccer has always been here. It never died out. It may have gone dormant, but it never died out.
How They Got Here
Early 1980s: Started playing soccer at 13 after suffering multiple concussions in other sports, picked it up late compared to most serious players, but fell in love with it immediately
Mid-1980s: Got noticed at camps, became athletic enough to play at the Division I college level despite his late start
Early 1990s: Started making summer trips to Iceland to play semi-pro ball while teaching: paid flight, free flat, no papers to grade for three months
Today: English teacher and soccer coach in Philadelphia, his students at YSC Academy include Philadelphia Union academy players signing professional contracts at 16 and 17, and he teaches his own book as a unit in 10th grade
The Big Idea: This Time Is Different
Count me in the group of soccer casuals, but I’ve always considered soccer to be a relatively “new” sport in America. However, Mark's argument (and he makes it convincingly) is that it's actually one of the oldest:
Soccer has been played in this country since the 1860s
We had a functioning professional league as early as 1920
We finished third in the first-ever World Cup in 1930
We beat England in 1950.
And then it almost died, three separate times:
The Great Depression killed the first professional league (1922-1933)
The NASL (1968-1984) collapsed because it filled rosters with foreign stars and never built a single youth academy
Brazilian soccer legend, Pelé, debuting for the New York Cosmos (NASL, 1975)
However, what’s different now is structural. MLS launched in 1996 with a single-entity model that soccer purists hate (no promotion, no relegation, locked franchises), but that same model is exactly why the league survived when every previous attempt didn't. When MLS owners nearly folded the whole thing in 2002 after years of losses, the structure allowed them to make a collective decision to “quadruple down” rather than let individual owners bail. That decision is why we're here today with 30 teams, a deal with NBC Sports, and a 48-team World Cup landing on American soil this summer.
The boring answer is usually the right one: stability built the foundation, and now the interesting stuff can happen on top of it.
5 Tactical Takeaways
1. The single-entity structure was necessary, but it's still misunderstood. Every soccer purist hates that MLS teams can't get relegated. Mark's students come into class furious about it every year. But the math is simple: soccer has failed in America three times, three time zones make promotion logistically impossible without serious financial infrastructure, and no owner is putting up half a billion dollars for a franchise that could be playing minor league soccer the following year.
The structure that feels wrong is the one that actually worked.
2. FIFA doesn't care about American soccer; they care about American money. Mark is blunt about this. FIFA has never done the U.S. any favors. They awarded the 1994 World Cup to a country without a professional league because they saw 100,000 fans at the Rose Bowl during the 1984 Olympics and recognized an ATM. The 2026 tournament is the same calculation.
That's fine, the money flows both ways, and American soccer benefits regardless of FIFA's motives.
3. Winning the World Cup isn't the metric; simply getting out of the group is. Mark's realistic benchmark for 2026:
Get out of the group
Win the round of 32
If the US gets to the final 8, it's a massive success. If they don't get out of the group, there will be disappointment, but it won't kill the sport. The soccer fans are already in the tent; the World Cup's real job is to pull in the people standing outside it.
4. The league won't make American soccer great. Youth development will. This is the thing Mark kept coming back to. You can have the best league structure in the world, but if there isn't a pipeline of young American players who see a realistic path to a professional career in their own country, the ceiling is limited.
The good news: academies like YSC in Philadelphia are now producing professional teenagers.
The bad news: not every MLS owner is investing in them.
5. The World Cup seeds the next generation, not the current one. Jake put this well after we wrapped: the 1994 World Cup planted seeds that took 30 years to grow. The 2026 tournament isn't going to convert casual fans into MLS season ticket holders overnight. What it will do is put a kid in a stadium, let them watch the best soccer in the world played on American soil, and send them home wanting to play.
That's the compounding return; it’ll just take a decade to show up.
Why It Matters
The honest answer I was hoping for from this conversation was the flashy one: World Cup comes to America, soccer explodes, MLS becomes a rival to the Premier League within a decade. Mark didn't give me that, but what he gave me was actually even more interesting.
American soccer fandom is real and growing, but much of it is flowing toward the Premier League rather than the MLS. My friends who are genuinely into soccer have chosen English clubs they root for on Saturday mornings. They know every player, watch every game, and've never been to an MLS match.
That's the real problem Mark is describing. The World Cup can grow the tent, it can get more kids playing, it can make soccer more culturally visible, but until the domestic league produces enough homegrown talent that fans have a reason to care about American clubs the way they care about Manchester City or Arsenal, the interest is going to keep flowing abroad.
The youth academies are the answer (albeit a slow one). Unfortunately, patience is the one thing American sports culture is genuinely bad at.
If you’re interested in reading Mark’s book, American Soccer Nation, you can check it out here.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake