Questions about the current player pool. Why...?

First off, this is not (necesarily) a Bob Bradley Bashing Thread.
Many posters on those kinds of threads are citing the weakness, or lack of depth, of our current USMNT player pool.

I am fairly aware of the USMNT soccer history before 1980, but, for the sake of conversation, let's call 1980 the beginning of the US' "modern era" (rather than 1990 for reasons that I will soon point out).


Since 1980, a 28-year period, the US has participated in five of the seven senior World Cups, qualifying for every one since 1990.

Since 1980 the US has qualified for every FIFA Olympic soccer tournament with the exception of only one (2004), although the US did not participate in the '80 Olympics because of the Moscow Games boycott. Still, this means that the US has participated in five Olympic tournaments in that time span.

Since 1980, the US has qualified and played in 11 different U-20 Youth World Cups (missing only in '91 and '95).

The US has qualified for every U-17 FIFA Youth Cup since it began in 1985, a total of 12 different participations.

While the NASL went out of business after 1994, and the US was left without "first division" soccer for a twelve year period, MLS is now in its 13th season, and MLS has played its American players far, far more than the NASL ever did. (We also have USL and PDL and I don't know how many other "third and fourth division" leagues we now have.)

The United States has played host to one World Cup and two Olympic tournaments since 1980, not to mention hosting a Pan Am Games (1987), two Women's World Cups, and various U-17 and U-20 qualifying matches.

The FIFA Confederations Cup began in 1992. Since then, there have been seven editions and the US has qualified to participate in three of them (four of eight, half) with the next one in 2009.

If you want, you can even include that the US has participated in four out of five FIFA Futsal Tournaments, and all three of FIFA's Beach Tournaments. ))

The Bradenton full time residency program is now in its ninth year and in that time period 170 players have come through the program, with over 60 of them graduating on to MLS or professional leagues in Europe.

There are currently over three million youth players registered with USYSA, let's say half of them are boys. What are the estimates of how many millions of youth players, boys at every level of youth soccer in this country (rec, competitive, travel teams, ODP, select teams, etc. etc. etc.), have played since 1980? You can also count in the number of boys and young men who have played soccer in high school and various levels of college ball since 1980 in the hundreds of thousands. Many (some?) of those college players have also gone on to play professionally in the US.

We may not have have produced any world class, international-level, stars as of yet, but the US currently has more players than ever playing professionally in leagues around the world.

Finally, the USSF has googobs of $$$, mainly courtesy of the '94 World Cup but also the attendance figures for the USMNT's WC Qualifying games for its last five cycles completely dwarfs what they used to draw before 1980, not to mention the revenues for the increased interest, and sheer number, of internationals played in this country since 1980, probably starting with pre-'84 Olympic matches.



So, given all that, why do we have such a "shallow depth of a players' pool" where one or two injured players (Donavan/Altidore and some more perhaps), or one or two tired players coming off a long season (Dempsy, Oneyewu, et. al.), or a player or two recovering from injuries (Beasley) all contribute to a Bob Bradley "just not having the players to choose from"?

Why?