The big topic online after the 2026 World Cup is how the United States can win the tournament, or conversely, how it can build a stronger soccer culture to develop better players. These discussions led me to reflect on what we have here in the IE. One observation I made while following the discussion was the importance of soccer infrastructure: the number of facilities, access to them, and the competition to control them. While this is a complex issue that I certainly don’t have all the answers to, I wanted to look at what we have here in the Inland Empire and how its soccer infrastructure compares to the number of professional players the region produces.
I also want to share observations from the region and explore whether the solution is simply building more fields or improving how existing fields are managed to help players reach the highest levels. By looking at the Inland Empire’s soccer infrastructure alongside the professional players it has produced, I hope to explore whether field availability truly influences player development or if other factors play a greater role.
There’s no one path
Compared to many American sports, a soccer player’s journey to the professional ranks is not a straight path. Rather, for a kid in the IE, the journey is more like a spider web of connections, moments and tryouts where players showcase their talents to coaches who can open the door for opportunity. Today, that web extends far beyond Southern California. The globalization of soccer has created more opportunities to play professionally both in the United States and overseas. This context highlights the personal effort required to become a professional player, as motivation and determination can sometimes overcome difficult circumstances and limited resources.
While I am not a coach or player, it is clear that some players have the desire to pursue their dreams regardless of the conditions they have available. I will reinforce the point that my youth coaches who follow me would say you don’t need the most expensive equipment or elite fields to become professional. They might say: kick the ball against a wall or play in the street, —something players do around the world. While they are not wrong, that type of street-soccer culture is less common in the IE because young athletes have more competing options, from other sports, organized activities or technology.
Also, at some point, you will have to have a regulation size field for that motivated kid to play in. A player can develop creativity through street soccer and pickup games, but eventually they reach a point where access to organized training and regulation fields becomes necessary. For some players in the IE, the nearest club or quality facility may be more than an hour away. The point is, having a field available and close by is essential.
What makes a field the ‘right’ field?
If following the traditional international model, the ideal field would be natural grass dedicated primarily to soccer, without competing markings or usage demands from other sports that can affect the playing surface. However, in the IE and much of the United States, the more immediate concerns are practical: reliable access, clubs competing for limited field space, affordable reservations, and lighting for evening training.
While these factors represent the ideal situation, many youth and adult amateur clubs must work with facilities that are average, shared, or below the standard needed for consistent player development. To my knowledge, little to none of the clubs in the region own their own facilities, which means most depend on public parks and sports complexes for training and games.
Let’s look at some of the facilities available within the IE soccer ecosystem. These include public parks with soccer fields with floodlights and sports complexes with shared soccer and football markings.
Keep in mind I didn’t include schools as by default some offer grass fields that are used by clubs for games besides the high school football stadium. Pricing for those facilities and reservation is a different process compared to public parks and complexes.
Now I do have a list of pro players born/from the IE, (click here for full list) but this highlight of the full table helps correlate the amount of pro players side by side to the amount of facilities.
| City | Population | Facilities | Pro Players | Names |
| Riverside | 325K | 4 | 10 | -Chad Marshall -Jesus Ochoa -Samuel Ochoa -Norberto Ochoa -Iván Gutiérrez -Jorge Hernandez -David Johnson -Juan Pablo Ocegueda -Calvonis Prentice -Erasmo Solorzano |
| Chino Hills | 77K | 2 | 9 | -Michael Randolph -Aaron Cervantes -Makenzy Doniak -Marco Franco -Malcolm Jones -Kwame Watson-Siriboe -Tyler Wilson -Mike Randolph -Karen Bardsley |
| Fontana | 223K | 4 | 8 | -Maurice Edu -Joe Franchino -Ante Razov -Jalil Anibaba -Ally Prisock -Adrián Ruelas -Jonathan Suarez -Christian Torres |
What does it mean?
Looking at the data, there’s a clear correlation between city population and the number of pro players produced. Bigger cities tend to produce more players. A massive outlier to this is Chino Hills, a smaller city producing loads of pro talent compared to bigger cities with less facilities. Without digging too deeply into why they produce so much, factors like affordability to pay for higher quality clubs as it is a more affluent city could explain why.
Some small cities and towns manage to produce at least one pro player with little to no facilities and this suggests those players’ path to pro may come down to other factors like school fields or they had to travel to nearby cities. Professional player development cannot be explained by facility availability alone.
Having more facilities doesn’t automatically mean a city produces more pros. Menifee, Hesperia, San Bernardino, and Lake Elsinore all have four or more facilities, yet together they’ve produced just two professional players. Fontana and Riverside are the clearest examples of more facilities with a big population that can produce more pro players.
Across the Inland Empire, the data works out to nearly two professional players for every soccer facility. To me, this suggests the IE isn’t suffering from a shortage of soccer fields right now. However, I do think what the clubs do with the fields hinders the potential of making more pro players.
It’s more than just the number of fields
So I did a poll for my followers asking them if there are enough facilities in the IE to produce pro players and the result was a slight majority “no” vote winning by 3 votes (9 “yes” to 12 “no”). Besides what the numbers are, the problem isn’t the amount of infrastructure but its what the people (clubs, leagues) do with the space available. I won’t mention the quality of the fields so much as I said before, players can endure and not become dependent on perfect fields. However, when there aren’t enough fields to meet the demand from clubs and families, a growing region like the IE can create a more competitive environment where organizations fight for access instead of working together to grow the game.
Fields dedicated to soccer are a matter of life and death for teams that want to succeed. Teams often compete with others for availability simply to practice, player retention and coaching consistency. Scarcity doesn’t just limit practice time—it changes behavior. Instead of encouraging collaboration between clubs, it creates incentives to protect field access, compete for players, and prioritize organizational survival over regional development.
Several adult amateur coaches told me that the high cost of these facilities, particularly lights for the evening and space dedicated to proper games/training, leads to tension to form partnerships with other teams. Sadly there is no collective goal for the region to unify to strengthen the culture and development of players. Based on those conversations and my own observations, I believe many clubs ultimately share the same goal—developing players—but often believe their own approach is the best one. With the limitations of availability, one ideal solution mentioned to me from coaches is to collaborate to mend the lack of infrastructure. If no single club can solve the infrastructure problem alone, then collaboration becomes less of an option and more of a necessity.
While the reason for this animosity could be due to the competitive nature of sports clubs, money or no willingness to give up control, it does hinder the geographic challenges of each region for the greater good of the IE soccer ecosystem.
With the Inland Empire being a large, diverse region from inland valleys, deserts and mountains, each subregion prioritizes and implements soccer differently. The desert communities have a smaller population with less local clubs to compete with, priority of other sports and limited training times due to heat. The inland valleys have a saturation of potential players however the fields availability is overcome by the demand of clubs. Economically, some lower-income urban communities face more barriers to accessing high-level club resources compared to wealthier suburban areas, where families may have more ability to afford club fees, training, and exposure opportunities regardless of a player’s potential. Recognizing these regional differences is important because solutions that work in one part of the Inland Empire may not be practical in another.
So what next? More fields or a better system?
I don’t have an answer for how the region can produce more professional players, but my observations suggest the solution is more complicated than simply building more fields. The IE soccer ecosystem is big, competitive and has an over abundance of players in spite of the number of facilities availability. The future also looks bright with the coming of the USL Riverside team in 2028 that will boost local identity, player pathways and community investment to the region. While I think the almost 40 cities and communities in the IE could build more facilities, I think with my observations and experience interacting with the clubs here, a change to the soccer ecosystem is to be more collaborative.
A figure of speech I thought of to sum this up is bees and flowers. Clubs are like bee colonies competing for flowers. The flowers represent fields, and the honey represents player development. Because most clubs do not own their own fields, they compete for access to the same limited resources. The result is that organizations spend energy protecting their space instead of creating a stronger ecosystem together. If all bees make honey, why fight each other?
Building more facilities will certainly help, but the larger challenge is creating a soccer ecosystem where clubs, cities, and organizations work together. For clubs with the resources, investing in their own facilities may relieve pressure on public fields and create more opportunities for smaller, financially challenged organizations. Ultimately, the future of IE soccer depends not only on how many fields we build, but how effectively we use them.