"We're better, but we're still far away." That's Janusz Michallik — a man who played indoor soccer in Louisville in the 1980s because there was no outdoor professional league — summarizing the state of American soccer as the USMNT opens the 2026 World Cup on home soil against Paraguay.
Thirty-six years after the U.S. ended a 40-year World Cup absence, the Americans are the 13th-most likely team to lift the trophy, according to oddsmakers. Tied with Uruguay — a country with roughly 3.5 million people. That's the honest baseline heading into a tournament being held, in large part, on American soil.
How far the sport has actually come
The contrast with 1990 is almost absurd. The 2026 squad prepared at a $250 million facility outside Atlanta. Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams, and Folarin Balogun each earn north of $3 million a year at prominent European clubs. MLS — launched in 1996 as a condition of hosting the '94 World Cup — now has 30 teams, seven of which Forbes values at over $1 billion.
When Michallik joined the original Columbus Crew in 1996, they practiced on Ohio State intramural fields and played in an NFL stadium. The national team, before MLS existed, gathered "five times a year at the airport."
"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," journalist Leander Schaerlaeckens, author of the USMNT history book The Long Game, told The Sporting News. "Nobody has done it at this scale."
That's real. But scale and depth aren't the same thing.
The structural problems that haven't been solved
Landon Donovan put it plainly: "The top, top-end quality — I think we're still lacking a decent amount." He's been on three World Cup rosters. He knows what top-end looks like.
Part of the issue is structural and uniquely American. There are 92 professional clubs in England — population 60 million — each running a youth academy. MLS has 30 academies for a country of 350 million. Schaerlaeckens flagged a telling comparison from his research: Madrid and Dallas are roughly the same size. Madrid has around a dozen professional clubs, each with a free academy. Dallas has FC Dallas. 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," Schaerlaeckens said. "And that's one of the cities where we're doing it well."
Then there's the pay-to-play problem. American youth soccer is expensive to access and financially incentivized around winning rather than development. Donovan contrasted his experience at Bayer Leverkusen as a 16-year-old — where a 58-year-old coach had run the under-16s for two decades and cared nothing about results, only about getting players to the first team — with the American model, where clubs win to recruit, recruit to make money, and the player's development is secondary.
MLS academies have helped. But most don't seriously engage prospects until their mid-teens, which is late by European standards.
And then there's the fundamental cultural reality: soccer isn't everything here. It competes with American football, basketball, baseball, and hockey — all with longer histories and, on average, larger financial rewards. A 10-year-old with athletic gifts can go in five directions. In France or Germany, that same kid is probably already at a football academy.
"If the game means absolutely everything and nothing else matters, all of a sudden everybody wants to be that," Michallik said. "The competition for places would be 10 times bigger, just like it is in France or Germany."
One generation, maybe two
Indiana head coach Todd Yeagley — who won the Hermann Trophy in 1994 and has coached the Hoosiers to five College Cups — thinks the U.S. is "one generation away" from genuine world power status. Stu Holden, former MLS champion and Premier League player, thinks it might be his kids' kids who see it.
The 2026 tournament will move the needle regardless of results. More kids will play next year. Attendance will climb. But a deep run by the USMNT — in stadiums from New England to Southern California — could be the cultural moment that connects American audiences to the domestic game in a way that watching Premier League highlights on a phone never quite has.
Schaerlaeckens framed it well: "The next step for American soccer is to create more of that connection between the global game and the domestic game." Right now, plenty of American soccer fans are obsessed with FC Köln or Rayo Vallecano and barely engaged with MLS or the national team. That disconnect is real, and closing it matters more than any single tournament run.
The 1994 squad won one game — beat Colombia, drew Switzerland, lost to Romania, went out in the Round of 16 to Brazil. Fifteen of those 22 players are in the National Soccer Hall of Fame. Cobi Jones and Alexi Lalas are Fox Sports analysts for this tournament. Their influence stretched three decades from a single group stage win and a moral victory against the eventual champions.
What this squad does over the next six weeks won't replicate 1994 — that was landing on the moon, and the moon has already been reached. But the ceiling for what a strong run could mean culturally is still significant. The 13th-best odds in the field suggest the gap between ambition and reality remains wide. The question is whether this summer starts closing it.
