Georgia State Is Quietly Building Atlanta's Next Soccer Pipeline

Aaliyah Faddoul finished her junior season at Georgia State the way she has finished most of them: on a list. First Team All Sun Belt. Nineteen starts. A team high six goals and 17 points, on 85 shots with a shooting percentage north of 50 percent. She has been on the field for every minute of conference play in three straight seasons, and every fall she adds another line to a résumé that already includes Sun Belt Freshman of the Year and back to back All Conference selections.

Aaliyah Faddoul goes into her senior season as one of the top attackers in the Sun Belt and in the Southeast. (photo: Sofia Cupertino for the SDH Network)

Faddoul is from Ontario, Canada. She came up through Liverpool FC Michigan Central Academy, won three National Florida Super Y League titles as a teenager, and was invited to a U20 tryout with the Canadian national team before she ever set foot on Georgia State's campus.

That is not an unusual story on this roster. It might be the most normal one.

This fall, Faddoul shared a locker room with two players who would graduate and turn professional within weeks of the season ending. Emily Glenn, a forward from Atlanta who came up at St. Pius X, signed her first professional contract with ZNK Međimurje Čakovec in Croatia's First Division, with preseason starting this July. Brook Nelson, a midfielder who arrived at Georgia State as a junior college transfer from Salt Lake Community College in Layton, Utah, signed with FHL in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland.

Go back further, to Faddoul's freshman year, and two more names turn up. Eva Diez Lois and Jimena Cabrero, both from Santander and both products of the same youth club in Spain, were teammates of Faddoul's in 2023. Diez Lois signed with Getafe in January 2024 and has since moved to Real Oviedo Femenino on a deal through 2026. Cabrero's path also ran through Getafe before she landed with Racing Santander, back home in Cantabria.

Four countries. Five players, three years apart. One roster.

The local kid who never had to leave, until now

Glenn's path is the version of this story Atlanta soccer fans will recognize fastest, because almost all of it happens here. She played at St. Pius X and with Concorde Fire in the ECNL, then spent four years at Georgia State without ever needing to leave the metro area for the sport. In 2024 she led the team with five assists. In 2025 she started all 19 games, scored six goals, and put up 38 shots, second most on the roster.

Čakovec, in northern Croatia, will be the first time soccer has taken her anywhere else. Her agency, Play Sport Agency, announced the signing with ZNK Međimurje Čakovec as Glenn's first professional contract, calling her "a very talented attacking player from America with experience playing at the D1 collegiate level."

Glenn posted a farewell message to Georgia State after the season ended, the kind of post that reads less like an athlete's exit interview and more like someone closing a chapter they weren't quite ready to close. She wrote about how much she loved playing for the Panthers, about the coaches and staff, about teammates who she said always made her smile no matter what. She even thanked the MARTA train drivers she could count on to show up.

That is what four years of never having to leave looks like from the inside. Glenn is proof that the talent Atlanta produces can stay local through college and still get all the way to a professional league in Europe. The open question, the one that runs through everything Georgia State's coaching staff talks about when the subject turns to the women's game locally, is whether the path she took, staying home through college before turning pro, is one other Atlanta kids can see clearly enough to follow.

A pipeline Joyce and his staff built on purpose

Georgia State has become a destination in women's soccer for players with pro aspirations. (photo: Sofia Cupertino for the SDH Network)

If Glenn represents homegrown talent finding its way out, Diez Lois and Cabrero represent something closer to the opposite: a pipeline that runs in a fairly specific loop, between a youth club in Cantabria and a university in Atlanta, and back again, one that Joyce and his staff have cultivated rather than stumbled into.

Both players are from Santander. Both came up through Club Deportivo Monte. Both ended up at Georgia State, an ocean and most of a continent away from home. And both are now playing professionally in Spain, close to where they started.

Diez Lois arrived first, playing five seasons for the Panthers, twice earning All Sun Belt Second Team honors, and setting the program's all time record for games played with 88 appearances. She signed with Getafe in January 2024, and this year moved to Real Oviedo Femenino on a contract running through June 2026. Cabrero's path ran through Getafe as well before she landed with Racing Santander, effectively home.

Joyce has built Georgia State around a possession heavy style that stands out in women's college soccer, where a lot of programs still lean on pace and power and getting the ball forward quickly. His teams are asked to keep the ball, which means he is recruiting technical players who are comfortable and brave receiving it under pressure, the kind of profile that tends to come out of clubs in places like Cantabria rather than out of a typical American youth pipeline.

That profile also happens to be where the professional women's game is heading. Possession based teams that can shift shape in the middle of a match, dropping from a back four into three center backs with wing backs, or switching the midfield from a single pivot to a double pivot depending on what the game calls for, are the teams setting the pace at the highest levels. Players who can read those moments and adjust on the fly are the ones clubs are looking for. Joyce's program asks exactly that of its players, year after year.

What Utah and Iceland have in common

Nelson's story runs in the opposite direction from Glenn's, geographically and developmentally. She came to Georgia State from Salt Lake Community College, where she had been First Team All Conference and helped her team to a second place finish at Junior College Nationals. She arrived in Atlanta as a transfer, not a headline recruit, and left as a team captain.

This past season she started all 13 games she appeared in, scored her first career goal against Appalachian State, and finished with five points. Now she is in Iceland, signed with FHL, a club representing Fjarðabyggð, Höttur, and Leiknir out of Hafnarfjörður.

Put Glenn, Nelson, Diez Lois, and Cabrero side by side and the throughline is not where any of them came from. It is what Georgia State did with them once they got there.

The pyramid that exists on one side and not the other

Georgia State's men's and women's soccer programs share a building, a budget cycle, and in conversation, a frustration. Earlier this year, head coaches Brett Surrency and Ed Joyce sat down together and talked about what it takes for a young player in Atlanta to find their way into the sport at the highest level the city can offer.

On the men's side, Surrency described something that has become close to settled. If a boy in metro Atlanta is good enough, everyone, including rival academies, generally agrees on where he should end up.

"There's no fighting the elephant in the room," Surrency said. "There's one professional MLS team in this market, and if you are sending your players to that, and they ultimately have that upward trajectory into the first team, that's a feather in your cap as a club."

Joyce does not have an equivalent sentence to offer about the girls' side, and he knows it. The youth landscape for girls in Atlanta, he said, is fractured across leagues and acronyms in a way the boys' side largely is not, and there is no consensus yet about which path gives a player the best chance.

"It's still very much conjecture of which club is the best one to go to," Joyce said. "Streamlining that pyramid, and that kind of outflow of talent, would be really helpful."

Georgia State's roster, in other words, is not evidence that the pyramid Joyce wants exists. It is evidence of something else: that even without it, the program has become remarkably good at finding players, wherever they come from, and sending them on to professional careers, wherever those careers happen to be.

What gave the boys' side its clarity was not a plan so much as a presence. Atlanta United arrived a decade ago, and the pyramid Surrency describes did not get drawn up on a whiteboard. It formed gradually, around a club that was simply there, winning, visible, and obviously the place a serious young player in this city wanted to end up. Atlanta's NWSL club is set to begin play in 2028, and it is reasonable to expect something similar on the women's side once it does, a center of gravity the youth landscape can organize around, even if the competing clubs and leagues still cannot agree on the best route to get there.

College soccer is also positioned differently in the women's pipeline than it has historically been on the men's side. For most of Atlanta United's first decade, MLS academies offered an alternative to college for the players good enough to skip it. In women's soccer, college remains a central part of the pathway to professional play, for Americans and internationals alike, which means a program like Georgia State's is not on the periphery of that pipeline. It is positioned to be one of its main junctions in this city, a local proving ground a new NWSL club could lean on the moment it exists.

An outside read on what a pyramid looks like

Joyce has a useful frame of reference for what a more defined system produces, because he has coached inside one. Before he arrived at Georgia State, he was the head boys soccer coach at Greenville High School in South Carolina, where his team went a perfect 27 and 0, won the 2006 state championship, and finished the season ranked first in the country by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

"The Cage" in downtown Atlanta is become a proving ground for potential pros. (photo: Sofia Cupertino for the SDH Network)

He has also coached on both sides of the Atlantic, growing up in Shefford, England, before working his way through programs at Presbyterian, Ohio, and Campbell on his way back to Atlanta. That dual perspective shapes how he talks about player development, less in terms of any single pathway and more in terms of what happens to the players who never reach the very top of it.

In the conversation with Surrency, Joyce returned more than once to the idea that the structure of the sport tends to focus on a small number of future professionals at the expense of everyone else playing the game, and that Atlanta's growth as a soccer city should mean better experiences up and down the pyramid, not just at its peak.

A city that might finally have a place for them

For the first time in Faddoul's career, and Diez Lois's, and Cabrero's, and Glenn's, and Nelson's, Atlanta is getting a women's professional team. None of these players have spent a season in this city with one.

Joyce has talked about Atlanta becoming recognized internationally as "a total soccer town now," pointing to the growing number of Atlanta and Georgia based players trickling toward national team pathways and the excitement around the men's side playing a mile down the road from campus. The women's side, he hopes, can follow the same trajectory, particularly with a home World Cup this summer and the Women's World Cup in Brazil arriving next.

What Georgia State has already shown, across four countries and at least five players, is that the talent and the development are there, and that the development specifically matches where the women's professional game is going. A new NWSL club building a roster and a style from scratch will be looking for the same things Joyce already asks of his players: comfort on the ball, tactical range, the ability to shift shapes and adjust mid match. It would not need to look far to find players who have already been training that way, or a staff that already knows how to produce them.

The piece that has been missing is a professional stage in the city itself, one that could give the next Faddoul, the next Glenn, a reason to imagine their career staying a little closer to where it started, and give a new Atlanta club a pipeline that is, in a sense, already running.

For now, Glenn is getting ready for preseason in Čakovec. Nelson is settling in outside Hafnarfjörður. Diez Lois, two years into her own professional career, is in Oviedo. Cabrero is in Santander, close enough to where she grew up that the loop has come full circle. Faddoul has shared a roster with all four of them at different points across her three seasons in Atlanta, and she still has a season of eligibility left, playing for a program that keeps finding players like her, keeps preparing them for exactly the game professional soccer is becoming, and keeps sending them somewhere.