Key Takeaways
- U.S. Soccer estimates 50 to 70 million teenagers are eligible for its national teams on any given day, spread across six continents.
- COO Dan Helfrich says human scouting networks effectively exclude 99.5% of eligible players because they cannot physically reach them.
- The federation is training AI on position-specific profiles to analyze youth match video at scale, no matter where the footage originates.
- Two trends are converging at once: a global surge in youth sports video and the maturation of AI video analysis tools.
- The model is hybrid, with AI surfacing candidates and human scouts evaluating intangibles like body language and on-field communication.
A Talent Gap Built Into the System
U.S. Soccer eligibility flows through citizenship and parentage rather than birthplace, which means American-eligible players turn up in leagues on every continent. Dan Helfrich, who retired last year as CEO of Deloitte Consulting before joining the U.S. Soccer Federation as chief operating officer, puts the eligible pool at between 50 million and 70 million teenagers playing on any given day.
A human scouting network was never built to cover that. “How do you get your scouts, your humans, to all of those places? You can’t. And so automatically, you’re excluding 99.5% of people,” Helfrich said at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The blind spot compounds with the youth pay-to-play club system, which has long screened out talented players from lower-income families before any scout arrived. For decades, the federation has been operating with most of its talent inputs switched off.
Why It Becomes Possible Now
Helfrich points to two forces converging at the same time: the explosion of video availability for youth sports globally, and the rapid maturation of AI-powered video analysis. Together they make scale that was previously impossible suddenly workable.
The system trains AI models on positional profiles, defining the movement patterns, spatial awareness, and technical markers the federation looks for at each position. It then deploys that analysis across video feeds regardless of origin. A right winger at a youth club in Boise gets the same algorithmic attention as one at a New York academy or a semi-pro feeder side in Germany. Geography stops being a disqualifier.
“My view is we can actually scout every single soccer match that a U.S.-eligible player is playing anywhere in the world,” Helfrich said. “Think about that paradigm shift.”
The Human Scout Is Not Going Away
Helfrich was careful not to declare the human scout obsolete. AI handles volume and geography, the things no individual can manage alone, but elite evaluation still depends on signals cameras cannot decode.
“What’s the tone of voice of a player to a teammate when the teammate makes a mistake?” he said. “What’s the body language when the team goes up or goes down?”
The emerging model is explicitly hybrid. AI surfaces candidates at a scale that was never feasible, and human scouts assess the intangibles. Helfrich frames it as the same restructuring playing out across finance and medicine, where AI acts as a force multiplier rather than a replacement.
When the Video Pipeline Becomes the Talent Pipeline
The bet arrives as American soccer hits a commercial high. Roger Bennett, cofounder and CEO of Men in Blazers, has said soccer overtook baseball as America’s third-most popular sport, citing Q4 2024 research from Ampere Analysis referenced by The Economist. Five billion people are expected to watch the World Cup this summer, and NBC Sports posted its most-watched Premier League opening weekend on record in 2025-26.
What has lagged is the on-field product. The U.S. has won exactly one knockout-round game in World Cup history.
For youth sports operators, the more durable signal sits underneath the headline. The same video infrastructure that clubs, leagues, and platforms have been building for parents, coaches, and recruiting is now becoming the raw material for national-team talent identification. Footage captured for a local Saturday match has potential value far beyond the sideline. As federations treat youth video as a scouting layer, the organizations that own the cameras, the feeds, and the data standards move closer to the center of how talent gets found.
“Be realistic, do the impossible,” Helfrich said, borrowing the federation’s own mantra.
Source: Fortune, Nick Lichtenberg, June 2, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/06/02/us-soccer-using-ai-to-scout-70-million-teenagers-world-cup/
Photo: Kristy Walker/Fortune
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U.S. Soccer is deploying AI to scout up to 70 million eligible teenagers worldwide, turning youth match video into a national-team talent pipeline.
