The Most Influential Colleges in Soccer Today

By Dr. Winston Ewert and Dr. Jed Macosko

Published: Jun, 24 2022

Find the colleges and universities that have the biggest impact in soccer based on the influence of their alumni in soccer. See which schools have proven histories of attracting and cultivating some of the most influential athletes today.

The best colleges and universities for soccer are represented by a diverse list of both players and coaches in men’s and women’s soccer. In fact, a number of college athletics programs are included on our list for producing top soccer club managers, as opposed to players. For instance, at the top of the list is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, owing largely to the influence of UNC Women’s Soccer coach Anson Dorrance. With 21 championships, Dorannce is the most successful NCAA women’s soccer coach of all time. UNC’s program can also boast alumni like Olympic Gold Medalist Mia Hamm. Another fascinating and noteworthy inclusion on this list, the Nassau Community College in Garden City New York, is the rare public two-year school to appear on a list of top athletics programs. Most college sports rankings are dominated by major athletics programs at four-year colleges. Nassau actually ranks #5 on our list thanks to the distinguished coaching career of alumnus Bruce Arena.

Most Influential Colleges in Soccer

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Portland
University of Virginia
Nassau Community College
Indiana University Bloomington
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
Duke University
University of Maryland, College Park

How We Determine the Most Influential Athletes

For the time period from 2012 to 2022, we identified thousands of influential athletes in 10 of the most popular collegiate sporting fields, who attended or are attending college within the US or Canada. Being influential in the last 10 years does not necessarily mean that someone had to be playing during the last ten years. Influential people can cast very long shadows that can impact a sport for decades. While that is true, our algorithm is time sensitive, meaning that if one athlete’s influence is fading, while a younger athlete’s influence is capturing the world’s attention now, we catch and compare those, as well. The result: we have fun and insightful lists that highlight not only colleges with historical influence in a given sport, but also colleges that are shaping future legends now.

To build the list, we used our machine-learning-powered InfluenceRanking™ Engine (originally developed for DARPA) to find athletes associated with specific sports. Once we find all the mentions of “golfer,” “basketball player,” etc., we produce a numerical score of achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia and Wikidata. Our machine-learning algorithm does not just count citations. It goes several steps further by weighing the importance of web links to and from an athlete’s mentions, meaning larger publications have more weight. Furthermore, we consider web searches and page views associated with a given athlete.

Once we’ve identified and ranked athletes individually, our AI finds the colleges and universities the athletes attended and calculates the accumulative score of all of the athletes associated with the school, for a given sport. In the end, we list the colleges with the largest accumulative scores, and we show, in order of influence, all the athletes that helped produce the schools’ scores.

Find out more about our Methodology. Note: for the purposes of our overall list, the influence of entertainers, TV personalities, and models were adjusted downward.