Mark Zeigler: Soccer in the US has progressed exponentially since the 1994 World Cup; why hasn't the men's national team?

IRVINE, Calif. - In January 1993, the U.S. men's national soccer team arrived at its training facility ahead of the 1994 World Cup at a community park in Mission Viejo.

Torrential rains rendered the two grass fields unplayable. The clubhouse was three months from completion. Players changed across the street in a strip mall next to a Wienerschnitzel.

Thirty-three years later and 10 miles north, the team held its first training session at its pre-World Cup base at the $1.1 billion Great Park sports complex built on a decommissioned Marine Corps air station. More than 5,000 fans won a ticket lottery with 32,000 applicants to watch in the mini-stadium adjacent to two dozen soccer fields regularly filled with youth teams.

The park's balloon ride had a U.S. Soccer logo on it. Two drones buzzed overhead, filming the players wearing the latest biotech on the pristine field below. The media room had a coffee truck and a phone charging station.

It's the latest reminder that everything has changed in American soccer since the last World Cup here.

And that nothing has.

There was no first-division professional league in 1994, the NASL folding nine years earlier and soccer's fading pulse kept on life support by a bastardized version of the sport played indoors on artificial turf with hockey boards. Youth clubs were in their infancy and didn't require a second mortgage to join. Fans of European teams watched games on fuzzy VCR tapes passed around like illegal contraband.

And now?

Major League Soccer launched in 1996, funded in part by the proceeds of the 1994 tournament, and has grown to 30 teams - the majority of them playing in glistening soccer-specific stadiums. Beyond that, there are four other sanctioned pro leagues with another 200 clubs.

Youth soccer is a $5 billion industry, with many families shelling out $15,000 (or more) per year for club dues, tournament fees, private lessons, gas, food, hotels and $315 Nike Zoom Mercurial Superfly 11s.

U.S. Soccer has a $397 million budget and recently opened a purpose-built national training center outside Atlanta with 15 outdoor fields, two more indoors, a 10,000-square-foot gym, 19 meeting rooms and 20 locker rooms. It pays men's national coach Mauricio Pochettino $6 million per year.

And yet?

The men's national team has not markedly improved since … 1994?

It made a big jump from 1990 in Italy, where it lost 5-1 against Czechoslovakia in its first World Cup match in 40 years and unceremoniously exited without a win. Four years later under Serbian coach Bora Milutinovic, the Yanks beat Colombia - Pele's pre-tournament favorite - before a sold-out crowd at the Rose Bowl and advanced to the knockout stage before falling to eventual champion Brazil despite keeping it 0-0 for 70-plus minutes.

Since then, they have reached the round of 16 three times and the quarterfinals once … and been eliminated in the group stage twice and failed to qualify out of the planet's softest region once.

And put an asterisk next to the 2002 quarterfinal appearance in South Korea. It required a cross by Landon Donovan caroming off the neck of a Portugal defender into the net to fortuitously survive the group stage, then a matchup against CONCACAF foe Mexico - the one team with a mental block against its northern neighbor - in the round of 16.

All that growth, all that development, all that money, all that supposed momentum … and nothing much to show for it at the top of the pyramid.

A lot of ornaments and tinsel on the Christmas tree. No star.

U.S. captain Tim Ream is 38 and old enough to remember the 1994 World Cup, old enough to appreciate the explosion of the sport on these shores over the past three decades. He was asked why there hasn't been analogous progress by the men's national team.

"I don't have answers for that," the central defender answered pensively. "I haven't gone into a deep analysis and looked at all the reasons. … There are any number of things that people can look at and analyze. For me, because I'm still playing, I haven't.

"But it is something that I'm sure people are trying to understand. You look at the explosion on the youth level and how many kids are gravitating toward the sport and wanting to play the game, I think it bodes well for the future.

"But yeah, I don't have an answer for your question, unfortunately."

There are plenty of suspects.

A pay-to-play youth system that stifles holistic development. A college system that limits practice and matches. A diverse sports culture that diverts the best athletes. A first-division pro league that relies on expansion fees to stay afloat at the expense of diluting the talent pool. A string of unimaginative coaching hires by the federation. An appetite for playing too many games on home soil instead of sharpening resolve in hostile foreign venues.

"The poor little rich boy of men's soccer," Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, co-authors of "Soccernomics," call them.

In the book's first edition, in 2009, they prophesized that wealthy countries with burgeoning soccer infrastructure like the United States and Japan were "destined to become kings of the world's most popular sport."

In a revised edition ahead of the 2022 World Cup, they admitted: "Well, we were wrong."

Their research found that countries can go from awful to adequate in global soccer by focusing on fitness and defensive organization, hallmarks of past U.S. World Cup teams, "but the final step to excellence is the hardest." It requires innovation instead of imitation.

It's no coincidence, then, that all eight nations to have hoisted the 14.5-inch gold trophy border another champion (counting the English Channel as a "border" between England and France). Africa, Asia and North America make progress, then hit a glass ceiling.

Starting Friday at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium against Paraguay, the U.S. men once again try to break through it. There are positive signs: a roster with European club and international experience, an Argentine coach with tactical savvy, a favorable draw, a nation hungry for success cheering them on (after mortgaging their house to buy tickets).

The federation's official World Cup slogan: "Never chase reality."

But the beauty of the beautiful game is that millions of dollars and people don't guarantee success, that there's a difference between a soccer-playing nation and a soccer nation, that passion and culture and fanaticism matter. Uruguay, with a population equivalent to San Diego County and a gross domestic product that ranks 80th globally, can reach the semifinals. Croatia, with a population of 4.1 and 71st in GDP, can reach the semifinals three times and the final once.

Since 1994, 10 semifinalists have had populations under 20 million. Eight have been under 11 million.

The United States, with one quarterfinal appearance in its history, ranks first globally in GDP and third in population at 342 million.

More than 5,000 of them were at Great Park's soccer stadium Monday to watch practice. Before starting, Pochettino walked to the center circle and addressed them on a wireless microphone that kept cutting out.

"He–o, he–o," he said, every other syllable audible, shaking his head. "We are in the best country in the world, and the technology doesn't work here."

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 2:51 PM.