U.S. World Cup failure exposes progress as myth
Inexcusable loss leaves Americans out of running for soccer’s biggest stage
So it’s confirmed the emperor had no clothes, only now we have to figure out exactly who the emperor was.
Bruce Arena, the coach of the United States men’s national soccer team?
Sunil Gulati, the federation president?
Or the players, starting with veterans such as Michael Bradley down to the up-and-comers like Darlington Nagbe?
The United States has failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, the result of an inexcusable 2-1 defeat Tuesday night at Trinidad and Tobago.
Plenty of words will be written and spoken in the coming days about what went wrong over this disastrous qualifying cycle, but it really comes down to this: As much as soccer has improved its infrastructure in this country over the past three decades, as much as the player pool has expanded, the United States’ high-end players aren’t considerably better than they were when, say, Major League Soccer launched in 1996.
The myth of progress was created and nurtured by the sport’s establishment in this country, which had a vested interest in promoting soccer as America’s “sport of the future.” Only the reality doesn’t match the story.
Eric Wynalda was tearing up the German Bundesliga in the early 1990s. Countless Americans moved to Europe in the years that followed, but none of them reached the next level of global stardom — at least not until Christian Pulisic emerged as a player to watch with Bundesliga power Borussia Dortmund.
Pulisic is only 19, but already the best player this country has ever produced. U.S. Soccer has tried to hold up Pulisic as a symbol of its player development system, but that is misleading, if not downright disingenuous. The system has produced no other players like him.
Pulisic is not to the United States what Xavi was to Spain, the finest example of an entire generation of players from a particular country. He is more like what George Weah was to Liberia, a world-class talent who popped up in a random place with no