Jeff KassoufOct 13, 2025, 07:55 AM ETCloseJeff Kassouf covers women’s soccer for ESPN, focusing on the USWNT and NWSL. In 2009, he founded The Equalizer, a women’s soccer news outlet, and he previously won a Sports Emmy at NBC Sports and Olympics.
play1:15Alex Morgan looks back on her first-ever USWNT goalAlex Morgan reacts to her first goal for the USWNT in a friendly vs. China.
play0:36Pochettino: We must be more clinicalUSMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino believes his side need to be more “clinical” after their 1-1 draw against Ecuador.
Who should be the starting striker for the USMNT? (3:54)Herc Gomez and Shaka Hislop discuss the USMNT attacking options as Agyemang, Balogun and Wright all battle to start. (3:54)
Alex Morgan looks back on her first-ever USWNT goalAlex Morgan reacts to her first goal for the USWNT in a friendly vs. China.
Pochettino: We must be more clinicalUSMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino believes his side need to be more “clinical” after their 1-1 draw against Ecuador.
USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino believes his side need to be more “clinical” after their 1-1 draw against Ecuador.
How are those opponents scheduled, and how do cities and stadiums ultimately host those games? As U.S. Soccer’s managing director of administration, and vice president of events, respectively, Tom King and John Terry (not that John Terry) are primarily responsible for those answers.
Their combined task is less a single jigsaw puzzle and more a game of speed dating. As they move from one conversation to the next, they hope to find a match — multiple, simultaneous matches, in fact, as they work on opponents and venues for several future games at once — before they lose their potential partners.
“The relationship side of it is so important,” King told ESPN. “In some ways, it can be almost a sales job where you’ve got a chance of getting an opponent, and you just chase that down like the last bus at night until you get ’em closed.” For King, that could mean waking up at 3 a.m. to call colleagues in Europe.
Terry works in tandem to find an appropriate venue. Neither the opponent nor the venue can be finalized without the other — and without either, there is no game.
Ideally, they try to secure the best possible opponents for the USMNT and USWNT, in addition to extended and youth national teams, while placing games all over the United States. But the hoops they must jump through can make it difficult.
“To the extent possible, we want to get our team to different parts of the country,” Terry told ESPN. One of his guiding questions is: “How do we spread our national team and get as many people watching as possible?”
Fans see the results — the opponent, the city and the venue — and, at times, the patterns of games can appear counterintuitive to U.S. Soccer’s stated goals. Why are they playing in California, Connecticut or Orlando again when they haven’t played in other parts of the country, like the Pacific Northwest, in years? Why is the U.S. playing another game against the same opponent? And tickets cost how much?
U.S. Soccer’s decision-makers took ESPN behind the scenes to answer how — and why — opponents get scheduled, why venues get selected and how that affects ticket prices.
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U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes and U.S. men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino have their own wish lists for opponents that they communicate regularly to U.S. Soccer officials. From there, King evaluates who is available and begins his sales pitch to other federations, and Terry works on finding the right venue. Everything is interdependent.
U.S. Soccer considers a handful of factors in selecting hosts for games, from the climate and the city’s historical fan support, to quality of hotels and training facilities and broadcast constraints — including for the opponent.
Venue-specific challenges are as basic as capacity and availability. Scheduling the USWNT against another top-10 team in the world like Brazil at the 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, as U.S. Soccer did in April, might be a risk worth taking, for example, but a game against lower-tier Portugal makes more sense at an 18,000-seat stadium. The stadium requirements can be as granular as needing a venue with four locker rooms for a four-team SheBelieves Cup event, for example.
There are moments, Terry said, when he must call venues and press for a quick answer on locking in a date, or U.S. Soccer risks losing a prospective opponent. Sometimes, a venue operator is only interested in hosting a game if the opponent is appealing enough.
Lead time is “golden,” King said. It means venues are more likely to be available, and it allows U.S. Soccer to better promote the game. Crisis management, however, is part of their jobs, and sometimes U.S. Soccer works for months on plans that never come to fruition.
Other times, the venue is what needs to change. The U.S. women’s national team will end 2025 with a pair of games against Italy in soccer-specific stadiums in Florida, but the original plan for the international window called for a different European opponent in a baseball stadium 2,500 miles away.
The next team on Hayes’ wish list was Euro 2025 semifinalist Italy, but Italian officials did not want to fly their players to the West Coast of the United States in the middle of a European season. Thus, the grand idea of a unique event in Seattle, where the USWNT has not played since 2017, was dead.
Each contract for a friendly match is unique, but they all start with what the opponent needs, King said. Successful, popular teams often command an appearance fee to play on the road, and some might also require bonuses based on the commercial success of the game. (King declined to specify those costs due to the sensitivity of negotiations.) Other visiting teams might agree to get a stipend or ask to have certain expenses covered for a delegation of 30-50 people.
“We’re very agile; we’re not bureaucratic,” King said. “When we have an opponent to go after, we go after it. We don’t have multiple layers of approval to court a certain team.”
Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford is a perfect case study for how a myriad of factors can lead to what looks like a result antithetical to the federation’s desire to spread out games.
When the USWNT hosts Portugal there on Oct. 26, it will mark the 19th game for the U.S. men and women combined at the stadium since it opened in 2003. The USMNT just played there in June, in addition to their high-profile game against Germany two years ago. That’s a high frequency of national team games for a utilitarian college football stadium in a mid-sized city — but it is not without reason.
Cost is a factor in all scheduling, of course. MLS stadiums (which generally seat around 20,000 people) might cost around $200,000 to rent, while larger NFL stadiums could range from around $500,000 to roughly $1 million for a game, Terry said. Bigger markets are also more expensive because everything costs more, from utilities to turn on the lights to wages for security, ticket scanners, and every other stadium worker.
Alex Morgan looks back on her first-ever USWNT goal
Alex Morgan reacts to her first goal for the USWNT in a friendly vs. China.
Cost is only part of the equation for any game, Terry said. “The first litmus test is: Is it available to us?”
Which explains how the USMNT ended up hosting four-time World Cup champion Germany in East Hartford in October 2023. U.S. Soccer officials had no doubt that the game would be in great demand among fans no matter where they played it. The problem was finding a place to play.
Orlando has also become a frequent stop for the men’s and women’s national teams for its mix of warm weather and accessibility to both Europe and South America. Driven by the anomaly of the COVID-19 pandemic, Exploria Stadium (as it was called then) hosted five straight USWNT games in January and February 2021. The USMNT played there between those games and returned in March of each of the next two years for official matches.
“In a perfect world, we’re not going back to the same venue within a year,” Terry said. “It’s an inexact science; it happens because there are other factors that require it.”
All the aforementioned factors for opponents and venues affect the cost to the fan. Rising ticket prices have become endemic across the sports and entertainment industries. Soccer — with high-profile events including next year’s Men’s World Cup in the U.S., Canada and Mexico — is not immune.
While CONMEBOL’s Copa America last year and FIFA’s Club World Cup this summer — both hosted in the United States — sparked controversy and sparse crowds due to high ticket prices, U.S. Soccer has no influence on setting prices for those games. Still, they certainly hear the complaints — including the grievances aimed at their own events.
Two factors complicate that position. For a start, the resale market — which neither U.S. Soccer nor event organizers control — is where prices balloon. A front-row seat to the USMNT vs. Ecuador friendly in Austin last week cost as low as $84 before fees (which can add up quickly) roughly a week before the game. At the same time, a front-row resale ticket just a few sections away cost $297.50.
U.S. Soccer recently announced that it would cap tickets sold to the American Outlaws, the largest supporters’ group for the U.S. national teams, at $45 plus fees for all games hosted by the federation through October 2026.
“We’ve always believed soccer should be for everyone,” American Outlaws co-founder Justin Brunken said in July. “This partnership with U.S. Soccer helps eliminate one of the biggest barriers — cost — and makes it possible for more passionate fans to stand, sing and support together.”
Still, that partnership is limited to American Outlaws members and not the wider public. U.S. Soccer is experimenting with free parking for everyone at this month’s USWNT game in Hartford. The federation worked with sponsor Coca-Cola for discounted concessions earlier this year at a men’s national team game in Nashville.