‘One generation away’: Why hasn’t USMNT established itself yet as a World Cup power? originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
When Janusz Michallik moved from Poland to the United States as a teenager in the 1980s, he discovered a nation that preferred its soccer to be played indoors. The one major professional outdoor league was gone just months after he landed. The United States national team had not seen the inside of the FIFA World Cup in more than three decades. This was an entirely different world than the one his family left behind.
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He played for four different indoor teams in six years, including one from Louisville that won a league title and folded almost immediately. Soon after becoming a citizen, he accepted an offer to play exclusively with the U.S. men’s national team in preparation for a home World Cup in 1994. When training began, the California facility designed for the participating players wasn’t finished, so instead they ran on the nearby Pacific beach.
The circumstances surrounding the current national team seem almost Star Trekian compared to what Janusz, Cobi Jones, Alexi Lalas and others experienced in the early 90s. With the World Cup returning to North America for the first time in three decades, the 2026 U.S. squad began practice in a $250 million facility opened just this year near Atlanta. Eight current players earn their livings in Major League Soccer — the U.S. outdoor league launched two years after the ’94 World Cup and now comprising 30 teams — and 13 more began their ascent with MLS academies or senior teams. Multiple star players, including Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams and Folarin Balogun, earn more than $3 million annually playing for prominent European clubs.
“We’re better, but we’re still far away,” Michallik told The Sporting News. “I’m happy. I think we’ve come a long way. We started in 1990; that’s the way I look at it. Before that, it didn’t really matter for Americans.
“But I think sometimes we forget how old this game is. When you look at history, we’re still in that second gear.”
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As the World Cup begins for the USMNT on Thursday in Los Angeles against Paraguay, the Americans are ranked by oddsmakers as the 13th-most likely team to win the trophy. Tied with Uruguay, which has 1/100th the population of the USA. Would it be fair to add some emphasis in that statement? Like, “just” the 13th-most likely team to win? It certainly seems reasonable to ask this simple question before the planet’s biggest sport event launches from one end of North America to the other:
Why aren’t we better?
Upon returning to the World Cup in 1990 following a 40-year absence, the USMNT lost all three games by a combined score of 8-2. They improved massively from there. They have competed in seven of the eight World Cups contested since and advanced from group play in five. In 2002, when they defeated rival Mexico in the Round of 16, the Americans reached the quarterfinals and lost a controversial game to Germany.
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“We’ve made a ton of progress. Major League Soccer, and what the national team is now, the facilities we have here – we’ve made tremendous, tremendous progress off the field,” Landon Donovan, a three-time World Cup star who’ll work this event as a Fox Sports game analyst, told SN. “On the field, we have players at world-class clubs all over the world. We have all these youth development academies with Major League Soccer. As a general statement, we have more depth than we’ve ever had. But the top, top-end quality – we’ll find out more this summer – but the top, top-end quality, I think we’re still lacking a decent amount.”
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Only two of 26 players on the U.S. roster were born when the event last came here, and only 38-year-old defender Tim Ream has been around long enough to have any memory of what took place. All of them grew up, though, in the soccer universe that resulted from FIFA’s insistence the U.S. start a major pro league as a condition of being awarded the ’94 Cup. The money that event generated helped to facilitate the growth and progress of the league and the sport. Television and the availability of the in-person experience grew enthusiasm.
And yet American soccer faces obstacles foreign to players in England, France, Germany or Spain.
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“I think it’s hard to contextualize that in this country, because as Americans, we are exceptionalists. We want to be the best at everything,” former MLS champion and Premier League star Stu Holden told SN. “We are so far behind the game just from purely the history of the game in this country … But, yeah, we need to set the bar higher, having a mentality we can compete with the world’s best, that we’re not an inferior soccer nation.
“The second we can start thinking like that, playing like that, we have talented enough players to go toe-to-toe with some of the best countries in the world. It’s just we don’t have the depth and the breadth.”
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Soccer journalist Leander Schaerlaeckens spent the past several years researching the history of the U.S. national team for his fascinating new book, “The Long Game,” and the story he tells about the period before Paul Caliguiri’s left-footed goal to clinch at position at Italia ’90 in the final qualifying game is even more bizarre than previously discussed.
After appearing in the initial World Cup in 1930 and beating Belgium and Paraguay on the way to finishing third of the 13 participants, the national team went on a sporting journey that seems almost fictional. During one period in the 1950s and ’60s, the U.S. went 11 years without winning a game. At one World Cup qualifier for the 1974 tournament, there weren’t 11 players available to suit up, so they recruited someone out of the stands.
“Just the degree to which it had become a clown show was kind of shocking, to be honest,” Schaerlaeckens told SN. “It was really unserious: gathering for a qualifier the day of the game or, if they were lucky, the day before. Not having jerseys, or not having balls to practice with. It was a complete ‘Bad News Bears’ situation.”
It is instructive, perhaps, that he used a baseball metaphor to make his point. Soccer still is new enough to the culture to have few such reference points. There were a few pockets of passion for the sport across the U.S. in the middle part of the 20th century: St. Louis, New Jersey, Southern California. There was a professional league from 1968-84, the North American Soccer League, that generated isolated attention for the signing of the great Pele. If you were a sports-obsessed youth in the 1960s or ’70s, though, soccer almost never was available on your television nor played in your community.
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“It existed in these sort of regional, ethnic leagues that were very much designed to not be attractive to mainstream America. That’s where immigrants who were still yearning for the old country would gather and celebrate themselves, in a way,” Schaerlaeckens said. “It just wasn’t around or wasn’t visible, at all.”
That’s the country into which the FIFA executive committee, in July 1988, dropped the 1994 World Cup. It commonly was described as a soccer desert, but it was too fertile a land for that to be true. The U.S. was more a vast, unplowed field. And look what has grown here since.
MLS is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Forbes ranked seven of the league’s teams among the top 30 most valuable in the world, with Inter Miami, LAFC, Los Angeles Galaxy, New York City FC and Atlanta United all estimated to be worth at least $1 billion. The league requires its teams to operate youth academies, and that’s where such prominent USMNT players as Chris Richards, Alex Freeman, McKennie and Adams accelerated their careers.
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A soccer fan in the U.S. with access to cable and streaming services can watch men’s games from England’s Premier League and Championship division, Spain’s La Liga, Italy Serie A, Mexico’s LigaMX and the Eredivisie from the Netherlands, along with UEFA Champions League and its lesser competitions.
Now, the nation will be home to a majority of the 104 games in the 2026 World Cup, in stadiums from New England to Southern California.
“I don’t know that another country has done as much structural work and made as many wholesale improvements as the U.S. has in 40 years, certainly not coming from a place where they weren’t at a World Cup for 40 years,” Schaerlaeckens said. “And nobody has done it at this scale. I think there’s a reason you don’t see India and China, the most populous countries in the world, really compete at the top level. Because organizationally, it’s just a nightmare. The reason why smaller countries like the Netherlands and Uruguay tend to do well is if you have soccer tradition and you have soccer infrastructure, it’s just a lot easier to organize.”
It has not been a direct ascent. MLS nearly collapsed inside its first decade, and three owners – Philip Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Bob Kraft – operated the entire 10-team league in order to rescue and stabilize it. When the league at last saw fit to expand again, in 2005, Chivas USA bought in at a price of $7.5 million. By 2023, San Diego FC’s expansion price was $500 million.
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After advancing in World Cups in 2010 and 2014, including from the alleged “Group of Death” at Brazil, an aging national team failed to qualify for the 2018 event in Russia. That led to a substantial examination of U.S. Soccer operations and the exit of president Sunil Gulati, who’d been in charge a dozen years and was instrumental in the growth of the sport.
And there’s still the obstacle here no established soccer power encounters: other popular sports. Young athletes in the U.S. can choose among American football, baseball, basketball, hockey. They all have substantially longer histories here and offer, on average, greater financial rewards.
Holden has a 10-year-old daughter and sees how children her age drift toward other sports. “Because their friends play baseball, and their friends play flag, and so they’re not training every single day or committing to soccer in a way they could seriously have a shot at being an elite-level athlete.”
Holden has come around to believing children playing multiple sports at young ages is a positive, though more sports are demanding specialization from their participants. But, he said, “I do actually think soccer is more a sport that requires some level of specialization, just because of the technicality and how different the main skillset is to the rest of the sports.”
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Obviously, the rest of the world is using their feet while a vast number of American youths swing bats, shoot jumpers and catch back-shoulder out routes.
“Why aren’t we like everybody else? It’s better, but why isn’t it at the top? The main point, I would say, it’s because (soccer) isn’t everything,” Michallik told SN. “It’s that simple. If it was everything, all eyes would be on this. Everybody would be talking about it. The stature of the game would be elevated. The pressure would be much higher. The competition for places would be 10 times bigger, just like it is at France or Germany.
“If the game means absolutely everything and nothing else matters, all of a sudden everybody wants to be that. Every kid’s focus is only on one game. And if you don’t make it in (soccer), then you go to volleyball or basketball or hockey.”
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Todd Yeagley was finishing his education at Indiana University at precisely the point when the World Cup first came to the U.S., but he’d already grown up in the game in a way few could match. His father, Jerry, spent 30 years as head coach at IU and won six NCAA championships, the last of those in his final season, 2003.
Todd won the Hermann Trophy presented to the best collegiate men’s player in 1994 and went on to a seven-year career in MLS. He became Hoosiers coach in 2010 and has taken them to five College Cups – sorry for another outside sport comparison, but that’s the equivalent of basketball’s Final Four – and the 2012 title. Yeagley knows the youth soccer circuit because it’s literally his business – that’s where future collegians are discovered.
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“We’re such a big country, and that’s a little bit of a blessing and a curse. So many of the countries that have the game as the most popular game and they have generations playing have an advantage, because all the young players want to be the next Messi, the next Neymar,” Todd Yeagley told SN. “They’re still looking in our culture and going: How can I be the next LeBron or Tom Brady? That’s still a challenge.
“That said, I think our coaching 100 percent has improved in the time that I’ve been as a youth player and to see it as a college coach. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily broken; it’s just we’re really big and there’s a lot of leagues, and it’s a little bit fractured on the youth side. I think we’ve also started to realize we need to get some of our better coaches with the younger kids. I think we had it a little backwards for a while with a lot of clubs, where the better coaches were with older players and the mom and dad and volunteers were doing the 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds. That can work in some communities, and that’s OK, but in the rest of the world some of the better coaches are in those youth ages and they’re really giving the foundational work and the love of the game.”
Donovan has seen youth soccer on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, as someone who played most of his career in MLS but also was at Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen as a teen and spent two short stretches with Everton in the Premier League.
He is concerned about common practices in the American version, which often is described as a “pay-to-play” system. It is curious, as Schaerlaeckens mentioned, so simple a sport can be so expensive.
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“In this country, the focus around youth soccer is based on winning and making money. It’s not around developing good players,” Donovan told SN. “That’s the simplest way to put it. The incentive for clubs and coaches is to win, so that they can make money.”
In the European clubs where he participated and observed, it’s not exactly altruism dictating the approach. They want to make money, too, but it’s a more logical process.
“They couldn’t care less about winning. Because the incentive is to make this 8- or 9- or 10-year old play for the first team,” Donovan said. “The incentive is not to win a soccer game so that you can recruit more kids to make more money. The incentive is to get that kid to the first team; one, so they can play for the first team and help win and two, so you can sell that player for 10s or 100s of millions of dollars.
“When I was at Leverkusen, I was 16, and the coach there was a 58-year-old man who had been coaching the under-16 team for 20 years because he was really good at it. He had no aspirations to be a first-team coach. They couldn’t care less about the result of the game; everything we were doing was on getting the right players they wanted to develop the right minutes in the right positions.”
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The introduction of academies in the Major League Soccer structure has helped correct some of these issues, but most don’t become fully involved with prospects until their teen years. And there are only 30 teams in MLS in a country of 350 million. There are 92 pro teams in England — with 60 million residents — all of which operate academies.
“In the book, the academy director at FC Dallas pointed out Madrid is roughly the same size in population as Dallas,” Schaerlaeckens said. “Madrid has about a dozen professional soccer teams, which means it has a dozen professional youth academies: high-level environments players can go to for free. Dallas actually has, by American standards, a really good youth academy in FC Dallas. But it has one.
“If you’re a kid with any kind of talent in Madrid, you’re 12 times more likely to end up in a professional academy than you are in Dallas. And that’s one of the cities where we’re doing it well.”
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Whatever occurs over the course of the next six weeks across North America, the impact upon the sport here is unlikely to match what occurred in 1994.
Because a revolution no longer is necessary.
Now it’s more about evolution.
Holden said he believes “my kids, or my kids’ kids” will see the U.S. rise to world power status. Yeagley suggested it could be “one generation away” from that level.
“Soccer is going to get a shot in the arm regardless of the national team’s success. That’s a fact,” Yeagley said. “Everyone’s going to be paying attention more. There’ll be more kids playing next year. Attendance will improve at every level of soccer.
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“However, if our national team does very well, it could be a place and time where you go: That was maybe the time that turned the corner. That’s what the opportunity is. You don’t want to put too much weight on this summer, but you won’t have the opportunity for a lot of years to be able to see it in your own country, for that young kid to see it and follow it close-up.”
Michallik was part of the original MLS as a member of the Columbus Crew, starting in 1996. He played in a league where most of the teams used NFL or college football stadiums as their home fields, and a couple played in minor-league baseball parks. The Crew practiced on Ohio State intramural fields.
“I remember talking to guys saying, ‘I hope this league lasts longer than any league we’ve been a part of,’ because I’d been part of five or six or seven failed leagues,” he said. “Having a league to play in: That’s the most important thing. Think of the national team before that. Those guys were getting together five times a year at the airport.”
This is a nation in which every major professional men’s league presents the best competition on the planet: NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB. Except one: MLS. There are some who call themselves soccer fans, who follow the USMNT, but reject the U.S. domestic league.
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“MLS, to a certain segment of soccer fans, is a cheap punchline,” Holden told SN. ‘I think it discredits how great our league is. It’s OK to embrace for still being more American. We need to get over this inferiority complex and feeling like we need to do everything like everybody else.
“Come July 20, the day after the World Cup final, I don’t expect MLS to be front-and-center on every sports talk show. We’ve still got a lot of work to do in that respect … We have everything here to be legitimate, it’s just not going to happen with a snap of the finger.”
All that makes the USMNT uniquely American will be on display when they kick of Thursday, and as they continue through the tournament for as long as they last. We saw in 1994 what a certain degree of success could do for the individuals involved and the sport at large.
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Of the 22 players on the roster then, 15 are enshrined in the National Soccer Hall of Fame. Jones and Lalas are analysts with the Fox Sports team broadcasting the tournament on US television. Tony Meola is part of the popular “Call It What You Want” podcast, an analyst for CBS Sports broadcasts of the UEFA Champions League and co-host of the Counter Attack program on SiriusXM. Eric Wynalda is co-host of SiriusXM’s afternoon drive program, Wynalda Talks Football. Marcelo Balboa works as a Spanish language analyst on Apple TV telecasts of MLS. Their influence on the game has endured more than 30 years.
And they won a single game at that World Cup. Drew Switzerland. Beat heavily favored Colombia. Lost to Romania. Held eventual champion Brazil to a single goal but were eliminated in the Round of 16.
“I don’t think it’s realistic or reasonable for this to have the sort of groundswell ’94 did because there was nothing here in ’94. It was like landing on the moon,” Schaerlaeckens told SN. “What I think the game can accomplish this time around is to push soccer further into the mainstream. Because you have a disconnect now, where soccer is very much a mainstream sport, but what that actually means is people watch the Premier League and the Bundesliga and Serie A or whatever, and the Mexican League, and it hasn’t necessarily connected to the men’s national team in particular, or to MLS and the NWSL.
“Sort of the next step for American soccer is to create more of that connection between the global game and the domestic game, to make it more than this hipster thing where you’re really into FC Koln or Rayo Vallecano, and people get more invested in the local teams.
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“Kids who see American players – ideally from their state or their metro area – get rich and famous are going to want to emulate them. If you talk to the generation of players on this team: How many were inspired by Landon Donovan scoring against Algeria in 2010? Out of the ones who grew up in the U.S., it is most of them. You just need to create more of those moments.”
