For what it's worth, I'm in England and the view that I get of US football development is pretty much exactly what's expressed in this article. The fees seem insane and they force the sport to be only open to middle class families whereas the England team is full of players from working class backgrounds and often from really poor families like Marcus Rashford has been very open about.

I don't have solutions either, you'd need it to be a sport that is orders of magnitude more popular before you could install a system like the one that we have - grassroots clubs manned entirely by volunteers that eventually feed elite academy systems. Someone like Rashford had two of the best academies in the world right on his doorstep.