Name 1 club with an incentive to develop professional soccer players? I'll wait.
College soccer doesn't require technical players, and neither does MLS, and neither does the USMNT.
Club soccer is recreational. The more money you spend the more uppity fun club you can join. All kids with money can join a club, not all kids with no money can join these clubs. Are you competing against the best, or are you competing against the best who can afford it?
Good news! Your wait is over. MLS Development Academies have an incentive to develop professional soccer players under the "Homegrown Players" incentive, which exempts those players from the SuperDraft. A player qualifies as a Homegrown Player if the player has been a member of a club's youth academy for at least one year and has met the necessary training and retention requirements. So the list looks like this:
1. FC Dallas (18 Homegrown players signed)
2. LA Galaxy
3. NY Red Bulls
4. Real Salt Lake
5. Vancouver Whitecaps
etc., etc.
In addition to the above incentive for the MLS affiliated DA programs, we should see some very quick changes come up with the new US Soccer President, as virtually all candidates roundly support paying (passing down) solidarity payments and training fees under FIFA RSTP (Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players).
With regard to pay-to-play, please appreciate that virtually every DA Club with boys U15 and above teams are fully funded ... i.e. parents don't pay for training and travel.
With regard to the non-DA teams most of these teams have scholarships for economically disadvantaged kids that represent Flight 1/Gold/Premiere/ODP talent. In my area (Temecula Valley), I can tell you that Arsenal, Hawks, Temecula United and Murrieta Surf all have kids playing for free.
Finally, name a youth sport where parents are not asked to pay? Baseball? Football? Basketball? Hockey? We need to get off this whole pay-to-play issue and recognize that for the vast majority of kids, all youth sports are
supposed to be recreational. Travel and Club teams simply afford parents and players an opportunity to get better coaching, play more games, have more practices, and play on much better fields with better referees. Nothing wrong with it.