Accountants, Lawyers, and Soccer Players

On Tuesday, after the US men's national team lost to Belgium at the World Cup, there was a raft of articles purporting to explain why we’ve, so far, failed to develop a competitive men’s team. For example, ESPN’s Dan Wetzel blamed the pay-to-play approach of a youth sports system that caters to privileged families. “[T]he hard stuff that makes champions can barely exist. It’s one way you end up with a World Cup team of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots: representing a soccer culture built to develop well-adjusted D-III players, lots of future accountants and lawyers, along with the occasional European pro, but not a full team full of the necessary resolve.”

There’s a lot to unpack there.

First, it was surprising to see so many articles seeking to explain what went “wrong,” given that I had heard no serious soccer person suggest that the USMNT ever had a real chance to win. My guess is that the executives at the media companies told everyone, “You can say whatever you want, except anything that could undermine our commercial plans,” so the day after the match was the first day the pundits could publish the thoughts they’d been carrying for weeks.  

But it was the line in Wetzel’s piece about the soccer system producing “accountants and lawyers” that really made me think—less about soccer, and more about how we make choices in our personal and professional lives.

The current pay-to-play system means that kids don’t pursue soccer simply because it’s fun—else, everyone would be content with local parks and recreation leagues. And families don’t pursue it with turning pro in mind—otherwise, they would enroll their kids in pre-professional soccer academies once they’re adolescents, as they do in most countries with elite talent. Instead, they pursue the sport to secure college admissions and scholarships. 

The dynamic reminded me of Madeline Levine’s findings in The Price of Privilege that, in well-to-do neighborhoods, “success” is narrowly defined as admission to selective colleges and participation in sports, which crowds out other types of achievement. She offers an example from her own life: “While my children were in junior high school, I sat through scores of ball games for my two sons who were interested in athletics and a single evening of poetry for my son who was interested in the arts.” 

And even while sports are valued, they are often part of a child-rearing culture where everything that’s not academics is still really about academic achievement. It's easy to get swept into a version of this where the urge to get kids music lessons is because playing an instrument looks good on a college application—not necessarily because art is an inherently valuable human experience (and surely not because we’d want their kids to pursue art professionally). Even community service can quietly become more about how it looks than what it does.

But when we pursue an activity only as a means to something else, rather than for its inherent value, we tend to do only what is required to get good enough, without  the deeper motivation that would carry us further. 

That’s how we get a soccer development system that produces more accountants and lawyers who were good enough to get the D-III scholarship than world-class players. 

The same dynamic plays out in us as individuals. We work hard enough that it becomes a burden, yet not hard enough to be truly great. And then we get passed by people who love the activity authentically, so they can work even harder without it feeling like a burden.

The cost of that messy middle: we sacrifice the pursuit of joy—even just the joy of sitting around on the weekend.

I mention all of this because I’ve seen lots of leaders struggle with work-life balance, and it’s almost never about how much they work. Instead, it’s typically a combination of (a) not authentically enjoying work they’ve taken on, and (b) the burden of everything they believe they “have to” do in their personal lives. On both dimensions, their choices are shaped by notions of success they picked up from everyone around them.

I’ve never seen a route out of that situation that goes through productivity and life hacks. The change occurs only when they recognize that the story they’re carrying about “success” no longer resonates, and they’re emotionally willing to broaden it. That’s when the options open.