Mickey the Mouth
The Syndicate News Wire
- May 21, 2026
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Christian Pulisic is widely seen as the United States’ best player, but it’s debatable whether he cracks the top 100 in the world. Photograph: Shaun Clark/ISI Photos/Getty Images
The US men’s national team roster for the 2026 World Cup will be unveiled on Tuesday, and according to head coach Mauricio Pochettino, the team is suffering from a talent deficit.
“We are USA,” he said after a 2-0 loss to Portugal in March, which followed a 5-2 loss to Belgium three days earlier. “And we are competing against Belgium, Portugal. I think for sure Belgium and Portugal have in the top 100 players, few or some players playing in that top 100. I think we don’t have [that].”
Some could argue that there are a few US players that could crack that list, but it definitely doesn’t feature a critical mass, or any near the top of it. The Guardian spoke to several current as well as former coaches, academy directors and executives about why.
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Catching up
We can start from a point of agreement: the pool is getting better.
“I think we’re getting close to being a league or a country that produces a top-50 player,” said Pablo Mastroeni, Real Salt Lake manager and former USMNT midfielder.
“I think there’s no question that every year there’s more and more good players. Are there more exceptional players? That’s what everybody’s looking for,” said former USMNT midfielder Tab Ramos, who served as U-20 national team head coach, an assistant on Jürgen Klinsmann’s USMNT staff and US Soccer youth technical director.
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“[The ’94 World Cup squad] was nice … but those players were nowhere near the top,” said San Jose Earthquakes academy director and the club’s former manager Luchi Gonzalez, who led the academy then first team of FC Dallas and served as an assistant on Gregg Berhalter’s USMNT staff. “And now we’ve got players in the top 200 maybe, or top 300, so we’ve made progress but it’s slow progress. We got to be realistic that it’s going to continue to be slow progress.”
The challenge, then, is how slow progress plays in a global scene where, unlike the US women’s national team, the American men are chasing the standard rather than setting it, aiming for a constantly moving target.
“It’s not a time trial, and to show improvement, you’ve got to be accelerating faster than other players around the world,” said Sunil Gulati, the former president of US Soccer.
“Certainly, in a lot of ways, we’ve made strides,” said former USMNT manager Bob Bradley. Bradley coached in college soccer, MLS and abroad, where he became the first American to lead a Premier League team. “But when you’re stacking up players against the best players in the world, the best clubs in the world, what happens from a young age in so many of the traditional soccer countries, we’re still playing catch up.”
Indeed, the US has only had a functional men’s league for the last 30 years of its modern history. And that league, MLS, has only recently started to truly prioritize player development. US Soccer initially led that effort through its Development Academy system, which began in 2007 and folded in 2020. MLS took control of the boys pipeline later that year by launching MLS Next, which now has more than 260 clubs. In 2022 MLS launched Next Pro, its own lower division, separating its reserve teams from the United Soccer League ecosystem.
“In the top level countries around the world, it is the domestic leagues that play a big role in player development. MLS, when it started, wasn’t really in a position to do that other than the players who were playing in first-team games,” Gulati said. “That’s changed dramatically.”
As MLS’s first-ever signing, Ramos has seen the league grow from 10 teams playing in American football stadiums to a 30-team competition in which every team operates and funds their own academy structure, with many playing in their own facilities.
“We couldn’t necessarily ask any more of MLS, and where MLS has come to and what they’ve done over the last 30 years,” Ramos said. “So at the top level, I think we’ve accomplished a lot more than likely we thought we could.”
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Culture
When he was 11 years old, Ramos and his family immigrated to the US from Uruguay, one of only eight countries to win the men’s World Cup. The head start – the sheer, uninterrupted history – top-flight soccer had there goes hand-in-hand with another obvious ingredient fuelling their advantage.
“We just don’t have a soccer culture in this country,” Ramos said. “And in the last 30 years, that hasn’t really improved that much.”
He highlighted how the attention and resources of a community can revolve around their high school football games, and not just under Friday night lights in Texas at a stadium that could cost more than $50m, but even where he lives in southern New Jersey. His daughter attends the games with her dance team, which draws him there too. He’s not sure he witnessed the home team score a touchdown all season, but culturally, by default, the town still turned out to support them better than the men’s soccer team who won their conference.
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In addition to allocation of resources, the clear consequence of the crowded American sports landscape is soccer losing its top athletes altogether or for too long during the precious window for development.
Mastroeni said he has marveled at the athleticism of the French national team, most of whom he felt could’ve been college football players. Gonzalez believes if there wasn’t the competition with other sports and all male youth athletes were funneled towards soccer the result would be at least 10 players in the top 50. But he also cautioned that it’s about more than participation numbers, which actually compare favorably to the countries the US is chasing.
“It’s the culture of the game. It’s not there, living the game, it’s not the majority [of people] here,” Gonzalez said. “Even good talent and good players, they’re not in survival [mode], it’s not their dream to play in a Champions League. Some kids, it is, and it will be a reality, like Christian [Pulisic]. With time, you’re going to see more of them.”
Acknowledging soccer may not ever be “our game” but just one among others, he’s still optimistic the US will produce multiple top-20 players in his lifetime. Bullish about the prospects born in 2008 and 2009 now breaking through at the professional level – including Red Bull homegrowns Adri Mehmeti and Julian Hall, Philadelphia Union and Manchester City-bound Cavan Sullivan and Borussia Dortmund’s Mathis Albert – Red Bull New York academy director Sean McCafferty has “no doubt” an American player will be regarded as top-50 soon. Ramos thinks a top 20-30 player developed in the US “could come anytime” but because of their passion, upbringing and environment rather than some new initiative.
“[Argentina’s way is] the players playing on their own, is the players playing everywhere,” Ramos said. “It’s happened organically.”
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Youth soccer
To Bradley, the most important stage of youth development starts before a child has even joined a team.
“How many kids grow up in a house where the ball is there – or a small ball, or a tennis ball – and where, in some ways, they are introduced to all parts or some parts of the game when they’re little? To develop a passion, to make sure that the foundation for being good with the ball is all there,” he said.
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Indeed, perhaps the three best prospects so far of the academy era in the US – Pulisic, Giovanni Reyna and now Sullivan – were all raised by parents who both played soccer at a collegiate level or higher. While an increasing percentage of American parents understand the sport, Gonzalez points to Denmark, where publicly funded or professional academies provide grassroots programming.
“In an ideal world, if I had the right budget, I would create a grassroots program that at least works with the youngest players the right way, like in Spain and Portugal, and then have it trickle into our academy one day … There’s not enough care and attention in Zone One, in the grassroots,” Gonzalez said. “So what we get are deficient players at U-14. Really good players, players that will be in the national team, players that will play pro, but they’re not going to be world-class.”
Gonzalez also pointed to the mentality factor, referencing the extremely competitive youth environment in Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico where a game is a “war” that an American sports psychologist would probably find traumatic, and a competitive edge among players from wealthier European countries, too.
Juxtaposed with any of those nations, particularly one like Uruguay with just 3.5 million people, the size and population of the US does guarantee talent slips through the cracks, while its wealth engenders greed, politics, and fragmentation in youth soccer. The pay-to-play model is not unique to the US but Ramos noted that the best players, including himself, have usually been able to play for free.
Today every club part of MLS Next is required to have a scholarship framework, and MLS Next Pro president Ali Curtis believes opportunities for kids have significantly expanded over the past decade. Nevertheless, both he and Bradley stress that the sport can still spread to “all neighborhoods”.
“That is very important,” Curtis said. “You want to make sure that you have kids that are from poorer areas and poor neighborhoods that are connected to our sport.”
To Bradley, the challenge doesn’t stop there.
“It’s not only getting kids started in the game, but it’s then identifying the right ones and then helping get them get to places, coaches, fields, games that help them,” Bradley said. He added that some promising coaches must juggle other jobs to make ends meet, preventing their own development as well.
Issues like affordability, accessibility and travel demands will keep inviting criticism of the American system. But according to Marlon LeBlanc, head coach of Brooklyn FC, the notion that youth soccer is broken is “really, really, really, really uneducated and alarmist in manner”.
“I think there are a lot of things that we are doing right in terms of youth development,” said LeBlanc, who coached in college, the Philadelphia Union academy and led their second team as well as the US under-18 national team. “I do believe that it’s better than what it was five years ago, better than what it was 10 years ago, and better than what it was 30 years ago. It’s a different landscape. I think that there’s a lot to be excited about.”
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The jump to the pros
At the academy and youth national team level, international competitions offer reason to believe the US is gaining ground. LeBlanc winning the Uefa Friendship Cup with the U-18 national team in 2025, including wins over France, Argentina and Portugal, is an example of that. The hurdle in producing top players that LeBlanc highlights is the very end of the development timeline, where talent and hype collides with the need for first-team minutes. LeBlanc brings up the fact that most of the top 50 players in the world would be considered attacking players, while young American attackers in MLS often find their transition to the pros blocked as teams tend to spend more at their position on big-name players.
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“How often do you see a No 10 that’s an American? How often do you see a No 9 that’s an American? How often do you see wingers that are Americans and playing regularly in Major League Soccer? You’d be hard pressed to think of them,” he said.
LeBlanc acknowledges signs of progress this season, including the Red Bulls’ Hall and Orlando City forward Justin Ellis, but points to the norm of teenage wingers at big clubs in Europe such as Lamine Yamal (Barcelona) and more recently Max Dowman (Arsenal) and Rio Ngumoha (Liverpool) being entrusted early with meaningful minutes.
Still, while American players who secure a European passport can move there as soon as the age of 16 – like Pulisic, Reyna and now Albert with Dortmund – McCafferty maintains they can still benefit from starting their career in MLS.
“I don’t think that going to Europe is always the best answer. I think what we’re seeing in our league here is these young players can play in stadiums with tens of thousands of people, real pressure,” he said. “Whereas if they’re at a club in Europe where he’s playing in front of two men and a dog [at academy level], that doesn’t develop you, right? And so we want to make sure that these young players almost get the chances earlier.”
Red Bull New York and Real Salt Lake are at the forefront of the youth movement this season in MLS, which seems closer to an inflection point than an anomaly. Both those clubs have prioritized player development and clearing the path to first team opportunities.
“Sometimes I look at some players [at other teams] and they’re just blocking pathways. And for me, the young, exciting players that are coming through, give trust to more of them,” McCafferty said, adding that players’ eventual transfer is a return on what all clubs ought to realize is not an expense but an investment.
He reckons the US has maybe reached double digits in terms of academies with the appropriate full-time staff, and that there remain elite academies abroad far ahead, noting the scale of the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan strategy.
“We are just learning that [selling model],” Gonzalez said. “In Dallas, we had $40m to $45m in transfers from kids coming just from the academy in a three-year period. And that was like, holy shit. That was a wake-up, like, ‘Wow, this is a legit business.’”
“I think our league was always about trying to prove that we were good enough, and it’s really hard to do that if you have a whole league of just young players. And so I think now we’re comfortable with who we are as a league,” Mastroeni said. His RSL winger Zavier Gozo made a late push for the World Cup squad and seems set to be the next notable American export to Europe. He’s one of the faces of the latest generation to ignite hope that it can lift the USMNT to a level, always relative to the rest of the world, that it’s never been before.
“I still think we probably live in a generation of impatience or, if I’m being even a bit more harsh, entitlement. It takes time,” said McCafferty. “We are in the infancy stages of this.”
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