U.S. Soccer is using AI to scout 70 million teenagers. The former consulting CEO running the federation calls it a ‘paradigm shift’ for the sport

For 30 years, American soccer has been the sport of the almost. Almost breaking through. Almost finding its footing. Almost fielding the team its passionate, fast-growing fan base deserves. The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, kicking off this summer across American stadiums, was supposed to be the moment of arrival—but the federation responsible for putting the best possible team on the field has been quietly grappling with a structural problem that no amount of cultural momentum could fix on its own. It has never been able to reliably find its own best players. Now, Dan Helfrich—who retired last year as CEO of Deloitte Consulting to take on what he calls a “passion project” running the U.S. Soccer Federation as its chief operating officer—says AI is about to change that in ways the sport has never seen. “My view is we can actually scout every single soccer match that a U.S.-eligible player is playing anywhere in the world,” Helmbridge said at the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz. “Think about that paradigm shift.” The problem no scout could solve The scale of the challenge is unlike anything in American sports. Because U.S. Soccer eligibility flows through citizenship and parentage—not birthplace—American-eligible players are scattered across every continent, suiting up in leagues from Lagos to Leipzig to Lima. Helfrich puts the number at between 50 million and 70 million teenagers, boys and girls, playing on any given day. The federation’s human scouting network was never built for that. “How do you get your scouts—your humans—to all of those places?” Helmbridge said. “You can’t. And so automatically, you’re excluding 99.5% of people.” That is not a rounding error. It is a structural ceiling that has persisted for as long as the American game has existed—and it compounds with every passing generation of players who were simply never seen. Add in the “pay-to-play” youth