Why is the USMNT not Elite? (poll)

Many factors that have been mentioned.

I want to reinforce the idea that was brought up by Landon Donovan on the The Rich Eisen Show though.

In a nutshell he mentioned that in Germany the youth coaches, tactics and even the facilities were in many cases better than at the senior professional levels.

Over here we have guys who think they are geniuses at lower levels and youth levels but they really are not. And the youth facilities are horrible when compared to Senior Professional facilities.
I am not sure any of that can change here in the States. At least not easily.

 

I always recommend Markovits and Hellerman's 2001 book "Offside" on this topic, which basically argues this point. They argue that culturally, societies have a "sports space" and for the majority of countries, this space is occupied by soccer. These spaces were formed around the turn of the 20th century and they never change. The US is unique in that it has 4 sports in its cultural "sports space".

An advantage the US does have is its market size and growth potential. You can already see it on MLS' current trajectory, but continued growth will exert monopsonist influence over other leagues in this region. In the same way that demand for players in Europe has caused a talent exodus from South American leagues, relatively weakening those leagues over time, the growth of MLS will redouble the effect. In the 21st century, UEFA has enjoyed the hegemony that comes with being a monopsonist in the football market as reflected in their World Cup results.

That sounds right; I was too lazy to manually crunch the numbers from the CBA so I tried to Google some quick and dirty numbers. At $14m for instance, though, MLS already has a higher average wage bill than LigaMX and the Argentine Primera (of course a few clubs from those leagues greatly outspend MLS' biggest spenders). So if we set the milestone at an average of $20, that puts MLS in pretty rare territory, especially with 30 teams.

 

Never is a big word, but cultural things like this rarely change at all, let alone quickly. They also can't be directed. Binary attitudes can change relatively quickly -- look at the shift in acceptance of gay marriage, for example.

But that's completely different than large scale shifts in spending habits and significant interests. You don't need soccer to be accepted; you need to soccer to be embraced and nearly every other sport to be marginalized.

It's never going to happen.

And this has always been the argument. I think the argument is valid if we can allow for the complexity.

For one, it's not as simple as X population x Y interest ... Calculations like that require a random sample, and the reality is that the distribution of those that enjoy something for entertainment as spectators does not equal the distribution of high level players -- people with the athleticism and mindset to be a pro athlete. Nor does it allow for the age at which someone must be interested -- many people I know became soccer fans at age 25 or 30 ... And then there's the difference of the person having that be the primary sport in the household when they have children and also that they play with them and can teach them and so on.

Being a hipster soccer fan that went to a bar to watch EPL games in your 20s does not mean you are the type of dad to play a ton of soccer with your three year old.

And the second story I always here is what I call the Uruguay example. We probably don't have as many soccer mad people as Uruguay, but even if we did ... they wouldn't be all next to each other. I've lived in communities where the Latino kids play in the park in pick up games on Saturdays, but there was never the cultural mass to where that's what the White, Black and Asian kids played with them. Basketball was the cross-over sport. American football was probably next for us -- my group was mostly white but had a number of minorities from everywhere ... and that's what we played.

At the elite level, this also leads to big costs and a lack of competition.

We have nowhere where 5M people are all concentrated and crazy with no competition from other sports. We couldn't do it if we tried, and even if we did, then there's the complexity of trying to nationally fund efforts going to a small area.

Lastly, we don't have a cooperative culture. We're very competitive, and that's a plus. But even if we had the community soccer knowledge to have just a huge number of parents who can coach their kids effectively ... it wouldn't be free.

Tons of people volunteer their time for youth sports, but someone needs to pay for the fields. Someone needs to pay for insurance, because everyone in America sues at the drop of a hat. Someone needs to pay for travel at the elite levels because guess, what, see above.

And at the elite level, parents are going to pay for coaching. At some point, it's too much time to ask for a volunteer anyway. And given the abuse and requirements parents give and have now, frankly, coaches and refs are some levels should get paid.

We're a country obsessed with competition, acheivement and greed. It's hard to understand how MUCH it is ingrained in us that value comes from achievement. People are who content with good enough are often looked down on -- look at how incredibly big the self-improvement industry is. Community means less to us as a culture so many of us are transient and so much is individual.

Again, some of that translates to great athletes -- achievement, hard work, individual focus, competition. But the reality is that it means most people aren't going to work for peanuts coaching kids sports at the highest level. It means basically no government subsidies. It means insane and abusive parents who worry that other parents think they won't sacrifice everything for their children.

I don't mean to cast American society as some kind of hellscape like a lot do on the internet. This is all relative, and people do kind things for others all the time. Nearly every parent I know has done volunteer things for their school or sports league.

But at the elite levels, that's not the attitude. The sacrifice of those parents is paying massive sums of money for what they think is the best. And the scarcity of great talent and coaching means there isn't a great free option as you move up.

 

We have a big immigrant community who are for the most part big soccer fans. The challenge is that most of this community adopts the national or even club teams of their home/former country rather than the United States. To me, this is one of our biggest obstacles in the United States when attempting to create a more enhanced soccer-oriented culture. The US Mens Team plays away games in our own country.

Winning solves everything though. If we had a run of success in the World Cup, especially really deep runs, I think you'd see more of this community as avid US fans first.

 

Sports teams lose games.

We're building and building and building our networks of professional clubs and affiliates so as many talented young kids are collected as possible.

Can't snap our fingers and make our wishes come true overnight. Somebody has to spend the money and spend the money for extended periods of time.

 

What are you talking about? Or about whom?

Like, are you saying Crocker is failing? That would make sense of the first part, but not the “their kid” part. And if you mean the posters here, I think it’s safe to say you’re wrong in just about every way it’s possible to be wrong. Or do you mean Generic Soccer Parent? In that case, the last part makes sense, but the first apart is head scratchingly wrong…GSP isn’t diagnosing anything.

What “better talent” are you referring to?

Your post seems like what AI would have created, if fed a steady diet of Tactical Manager and 3four3 tweets long with the greatest hits from Graeme Jones (was that the LA writer who used to go on and on about how the US would instantly get better if we just called up the Latino Sunday League all stars? It wasn’t either of the Treckers. The good thing about the Chivas USA failure is we never have to read that dumb argument again.)

 

Its talking points from 25 years ago.

It's really easy to say "better talent gets shoved under the carpet." Its unprovable. By definition. The only comeback is "I don't know who the better talents are because they're not developed." So, I guess.........................its a feeling?? Based on what? Nobody knows.

Do people think MLS clubs are intentionally not scouting and recruiting the best talent?

I go to the Dallas Cup. I see the swarms of professional scouts, USSF scouts, NCAA coaches, etc. You can't miss 'em.

A player like Daryl Dike in Edmund, Oklahoma was scouted and provided opportunities at multiple MLS academies. He just chose not to go. It was SKC that he wasn't closest to joining if memory serves me correctly. That's what we often here. That these guys who weren't at MLS academies were provided with those opportunities.

Yes. Its possible that if an elite young talent is in Sweetwater Valley, Wyoming, and not willing to move to a club with better visibility, then he might not develop in the way he could. But what is that supposed to prove????

 

For sure, you can't just trust blindly, because its sources may be wrong or it can outright hallucinate things. But they are getting better, better, Two years ago I was not impressed, but now I'm using it more and more and it's really saving me time at some data and research things that would take me much longer. BUT, i still have to teach it because it will make mistakes, then apologize and say sorry I was only looking at half the data or something stupid.

But, it's good now too, that it will site the sources. In this case it's a Forbes article, so that's at least fairly reliable.

But it was from April 2025.

But it's very easy to just do this yourself, since MLS publishes all the Salary data.

From Oct 2025...https://mlsplayers.org/resources/salary-guide

Takes 1 minute with a copy paste and pivot table. then another minute to exclude the 3 non-teams in the data...comes out to $19.7M / team.

ps I also dumped the dataset into ChatGPT to see if it would screw up. Not this time. Perfect.

Using your dataset, I recalculated total payroll by team and then averaged across all MLS teams.

Result (From Your Dataset)

• Average MLS team salary: $19,678,343
• Median MLS team salary: $17,927,990
• Number of teams: 30

(Excluded "MLS Pool" and "Retired" entries from the dataset.)
Source:

Highest Payroll Teams (from your data)

1. Inter Miami — $48.97M
2. LAFC — $30.10M
3. Atlanta United — $28.48M
4. FC Cincinnati — $23.19M
5. Chicago Fire — $23.11M

Lowest Payroll Teams

• CF Montreal — $12.92M
• FC Dallas — $13.35M
• Philadelphia Union — $13.43M
• Toronto FC — $13.65M

Takeaway
Your dataset shows:

Average MLS payroll ≈ $19.7M per team
Most teams cluster between $14M–$22M
A few big spenders (Inter Miami, LAFC, Atlanta) pull the average up

 

Senegal's first World Cup was 2002, and their best ever performance, a Quarterfinal appearance. They didn't qualify before then. Then, they failed to qualify for 3 cycles in a row, before getting grouped and knocked out in the Round of 16 in the last 2 World Cups.

Objectively worse than the USA's World Cup performances. But sure, don't let that get in the way of Senegal being pumped up due to their recent AFCON wins. The US has been as high as 4th in the FIFA rankings, in case you didn't know.

Only a person who doesn't understand soccer at all would say Senegal is better than the USMNT. Which is fair.

 

It's just bizarre nonsense. The Golden Generation, such as it is, didn't lose to Trinidad. The vast majority of them weren't on the team at the time.

Everyone knows the problems; it's not ego or anything else blocking it. It's the solutions that are hard. No one here likes pay to play; everyone here asks okay, who is paying for it?

As for nepotism ... why do I feel like this is all the result of some imagined slight of his own kid at some point so we have to put up with this ranting about how he's right and everyone else is some ego corrupt maniac every six months.

 

YOU are not willing to do a "proper diagnosis". You still have not described what an "elite" team IS! How are we supposed to argue about whether the US IS or is NOT elite, when YOU won't even describe it?

Is "elite" based on FIFA ranking? Then we're sure as hell better than Senegal historically, even if we're slightly below them at the moment. What FIFA ranking must we achieve before we are "elite"?

You just keep saying random things without coherence. I'm trying not to be a jerk about it, but you're being kind of a troll.

 

In my defense, the post I laughed at said 2015. I can believe this for 2025, though I thought it was lowe even for last year.

It's worth noting that in most sports, including soccer, the rule of thumb of where money starts to be come determinative is roughly 3x payroll. To this point, we're running closer to 2x for much of the league (Miami is a bit unique here given how much is wrapped up in one guy). But when the top teams are 3x the crew at the bottom, you lose the ability for that portion of the league to compete.

Obviously, from that list, there's a lot of inefficient spending right now in MLS.

 

This is all incoherent nonsense.

 

Yes FIFA ranks are ass. No one believed them

 

Also true.

~50% of Senegal's team wasn't born in Senegal. [plus or minus depending on the camp.]

Its all part of that crazy stat that more players were born in France at AFCON than any African nation. And by the way, it wasn't even slightly close.

Spain, by the way, was tied for 5th most players at AFCON.

1. France (107), 2. Côte d'Ivoire (29), 3. South Africa (28), 4. Egypt (25), 5. Nigeria/Botswana/Spain (24 each).

There are some people on these boards who don't seem to understand how sports work.

Sports teams lose games. They win games; they lose games.

There are the 10 or so teams capable of winning a World Cup.
Then there's about 40 others that can beat each other on any given day.
There's an enormous amount of parity. You see it in CONMEBOL and UEFA too.

What do we need to do to be one of those 10 teams capable of winning the World Cup?
We're talking about it. Go to Barcelona and go to Madrid and go to San Sebastian and go to Valencia and go to Bilbao and go to Sevilla and go to Zaragoza and go to A Coruna......................and tell me what the difference between the sport is in Spain and the US.

Did people see the video this week of the local kid that debuted for Real Sociedad? He was driving back to his apartment thru the neighborhood and his car was surrounded by people celebrating his appearance for their club. Chanting with flares and everything.

The culture is just different. How do we get that passion? Generations of the sport being an integral part of the community. Generations of KNOWLEDGE of how to play the sport being handed down.

I literally could not get into the club store in the middle of Barcelona. It was so packed with people that I didn't bother. You could go to the club store at FC Dallas and be the only one there. There'd be just a bored sales girl behind the counter.

Meanwhile you can go to the Dallas Cowboys practice facility down the street from FCD's Toyota Stadium, and THAT store is packed with people. its the Cowboys that have been ingrained in the culture for generations. That team hasn't won anything for 30 years.

This isn't meant as a criticism of MLS or the USL or any clubs. Its the reality of the culture difference. We just need to build and build and build. Continue to invest and grow. If people think we're going to be challenging France and Spain and Argentina in the next decade, then they're living in some kind of intricate delusion.

And by the way, we don't have to have some sort of inferiority complex about it. We're doing fine.

And yes, magic happens sometimes. You don't need to tell me. I've been an Indiana University football fan for 25 years. Sometimes there's some sort of cosmic miracle that happens.

 

Even if they were true ... the two ranks are essentially even. There's a huge tier of teams that both the US and Senegal fall into.

But again, it doesn't matter; the best players on Senegal did not develop in Senegal.

 

??
Look at Italy's WC titles and see how many Argentinian players were in those teams.
The titles still are counted.

 

Do you ever think, maybe, you should try and figure out what the discussion is about before jumping in?

The person I am responding to trying to compare the Senegalese developmental system to the US system with the "results" portion being the senior national team.

The problem is that the best players on Senegal were born and developed in France. And therefore the national team current ranking is not a great representation of the development system of Senegal.

It's more indicative of how effective the French development program is.

 

But how would we survive without the input of a know-it-all from Holland?

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I don’t know, but dammit, it would be awesome if we could find out.

 

I got him on ignore, so I missed that part.
However, when you look at the numbers of kids playing soccer the USA has as a pool to fish in, and the ethnic diversity of that pool, there's reason to think a couple of highly talented/gifted ones are/have been among them that could lift the USMNT to the next level.

 

We've had a few guys who are probably borderline Top 100 players or in the next 100 or so.

There's absolutely zero evidence that sheer numbers results in any specific chance of a world class player; we're talking about extreme outliers here that are very low odds. There's obviously things that create a larger chance, but that tracks a lot closer to culture, density or even investment than sheer numbers.

The difference between the US and the next couple of tiers up is two-fold. One is a level of depth of high quality player as well as a lack of a high shared baseline of technique and soccer IQ. We simply don't have a player that you can rely on to plug and play at a certain level.

The other is an absolutely elite player, and those are simply rare.

I think the former is a very hard thing to build but there's clear levels to progress it. I think the elite player thing ... it'll come with the rest.

 

The US also fields several players that weren't developed by the US system...