When talking about US soccer, we must start with the World Cup in 1994. To be honest, there is no other starting point. That is where, according to many, SOCCER was born. That is where American children born a few years earlier were infected with the virus.
"I remember that as soon as I saw the World Cup with my own eyes, I told my mother that this is what I want to do in the future," said Graham Zusi, who did make 55 appearances in the national uniform before retiring in 2017.
"This tournament opened a lot of kids' eyes to everything related to soccer," added Chris Wondolowski, who scored 11 goals for the American national team between 2011 and 2016.
"The World Cup in 1994 is the turning point for soccer in the United States," explains Brian Sciarta, ASN's soccer reporter, whose articles are also published in the "New York Times."
"Two years after this World Cup, the MLS league was established, and thanks to the momentum of the World Cup, the league survived a difficult start that allowed it to reach the excellent place where it is today."
They say that if there is an American football player who plays in the fourth division in Norway - Sciarta is probably the only journalist who knows him and follows his exploits.
So in preparation for the World Cup we tried to find out together with this American soccer expert why the huge sports nation has not yet registered significant success in world soccer, and why there is a certain feeling that it is experiencing a decline?
Reminder: between 1990 and 2014, the USA team appeared in seven World Cups in a row, where in four of them they passed the group stage and in 2002 they stopped only in the quarterfinals.
From time to time, it has managed to create the feeling that it will soon align itself with the football elite of Europe and South America, but it watched the 2018 World Cup in Russia from home when it finished fifth in the North and Central American qualifiers, winning only three games and collecting 12 points out of a possible 30.
"There is no doubt that the 2018 qualifiers were a huge failure," admits Sciarta, but also hastens to make a reservation: "There was also a lot of bad luck, and above all an entire generation of players that was lost due to the use of ancient and outdated methods. The new methods only started to produce players in 2015 , and it probably takes time."
Sciarta says something interesting: "People thought we would become an empire just because we hosted one tournament, but it's a serious and long process."
And indeed, when it was announced in 1988 that the USA would host the World Cup in 1994, American soccer did not exist. It felt so absurd to take the World Cup there, that the media wrote that having a World Cup in the USA was like having a skiing championship in Africa.
There is no doubt that hosting has leveraged football and football culture, but it is important to remember that it is not easy to introduce a new sport to a country that is full of other popular sports.
The second stage of development
"In the beginning, football was not accepted here," recalls Sciarta, "there are many sports with a greater history, but the taste of Americans in sports changes over time. Horse racing and boxing were very popular in the 1950s, the NBA and the NHL were not were mainstream until the 1970s and 1980s, and even the first Super Bowl was held in front of few spectators.
Today, football takes center stage.
It is broadcast more, there are better coaches and serious youth teams, and a lot of interest.
If in 1994 you had told someone that in 2022 there would be a league in the US with 30 teams, an average audience of 20,000 and a system that exports players to Europe - they would agree that this is a tremendous success."
In fact, what Sciarta is trying to say is that American football has undergone a generational change in recent years.
Not only at the level of the squad of players that will make the current team one of the youngest in the tournament, but at the level of thought.
"Not only is our league young, our methods are even younger. The MLS teams only established academies in 2009, and they are still learning how to run it. More precisely, you can say that the modern era of the league in the whole issue of developing young players only started before decade".
And this decade, as Sciarta emphasizes, has yielded quite a few fruits: Tyler Adams and Brendan Aronson (Leeds United), Weston McKenney (Juventus), Gio Reyna (Dortmund) and Alfonso Davis (Bayern Munich and the Canadian national team) are all products of American academies.
There is another long list of players who left MLS for Europe.
"The quality in football is tremendous," Sciarta declares, "you can't compare what was in 2017 to what is today. The money, the facilities, the resources - everything is greater, and this is also reflected in the closing of the gaps from the Mexican league."
According to Sciarta, what we see in Qatar is the beginning of the second phase of the evolution of American soccer.
The first stage was trial and error, now the stage of drawing conclusions: "Even if the team comes with a young squad and with few ambitions, something good is happening in our football, and I believe it will be better in the future."
After the failure in the 2018 World Cup qualifiers came a new coach, Greg Berhalter, who took on the task of making the transition.
He said goodbye to the veteran players who represent the past, and brought in young players who represent modernity.
Although the qualifiers and the last preparatory games revealed quite a few problems, in the USA they internalize that there is a price for a transitional season.
"We have a good team with many young players that can be very unpredictable," concludes Sciarta, "In the 2026 World Cup, which will be held with us, it will be possible to see the real results of the process."
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