In 1993, the United States Soccer Federation handed a contract to Rinus Michels. But the Dutch godfather of Total Football, operationalized through his on-field avatar Johan Cruyff, was not hired to coach the national team, or to coach anybody, really.
By this time, Michels, who managed the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League in 1979 and 1980, had already turned down the chance to manage the US men’s national team twice. Once, in 1983, when it would be entered, disastrously, into the NASL as Team America. And once more in 1991, when Bora Milutinović was appointed instead.
The federation’s general secretary Hank Steinbrecher had something else in mind now.
He dispatched Michels, accompanied by his wife, on a three-month-long tour of the United States. Then, one of the sport’s leading minds was to report back on what he found. “He said, ‘Well, Hank, you have a problem. You are a continent; you are not a country,’” the late Steinbrecher recalled when I spoke to him for my book on the USMNT’s history. “‘The football you play in Los Angeles is very different from the football you have to play in Maine, because of your climatic conditions. The football you play in Chicago is very different from Miami.’ He was crystal clear.”
Michels also pointed out that the Dutch federation – whose national team he had coached four times, taking Oranje to the 1974 World Cup final and lifting the 1988 European Championship – had a unified playing and coaching methodology that ran all the way down to the grassroots game.
The Michels report, which seems to have been lost to time, was followed by one written up by the Portuguese journeyman coach Carlos Queiroz, who laid out a blueprint for implementing just such a national philosophy. The key, Queiroz argued, was to build a national training center as an incubator of national soccer talent and thought, followed by regional ones. This insight begat Project 2010, which impounded the under-17 men’s national team in a full-time residency in Bradenton, Florida, in early 1999. The Bradenton camp ran for 18 years and yielded 33 senior national team players – powering the rise of the USMNT in the early 2000s and supplying the current core of Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie, too – an extraordinarily high success rate when compared to other such national talent factories.
Michels was right that developing talent in such a vast country would require a modicum of ideological coherence. But he was wrong in diagnosing this regional diversity as an issue.
If this incarnation of the United States men’s national team, this joyous bouillabaisse of accents and backgrounds and origin stories, has demonstrated anything, it’s that the unusual variety of paths its players have taken to get there is an asset.
For decades, there were hardly any routes into pro soccer north of the border with Mexico. In the vacuum, a tangle of pro leagues and semi-pro leagues and college circuits filled the space, flourishing or failing and sometimes doing both, in rapid succession. Sitting loosely underneath this ragged landscape emerged an equally chaotic youth game that was eventually captured by commercialism.
It all made for a senior national team that’s as varied as the regions and realities they emerged from.
Some members of this team passed through college soccer – briefly in some cases, like in goalkeeper Matt Freese’s, or for all four years like his positional rival, Matt Turner. Freese for personal reasons, because it was expected in his family. Turner because he wasn’t remotely ready for the next level and simply needed more time to mature, to develop with players his own age, but at a competitive level. There’s a plausible school of thought that credits the longevity of the 38-year-old USMNT captain and starting center-back Tim Ream to the four years he spent in college. Had he been a pro for those years, the thinking goes, his body would have broken down sooner. But the schedule in the collegiate game, which essentially amounts to that of an unpaid, part-time pro, allowed him to improve and fill out.
It wouldn’t have made sense for Christian Pulisic to play college soccer, as evidenced by the fact that he was playing in Borussia Dortmund’s first team by the time he was 17. Gio Reyna did the same at an even younger age. But that alternative simply didn’t exist a generation earlier. Tab Ramos, a peer and USMNT teammate of Gio’s father Claudio Reyna, once said that when he emerged from college soccer at North Carolina State the exact same player he had entered it as. It’s just that he had no choice. The New York Cosmos drafted him out of high school, only for the North American Soccer League to crumble.
Tim Weah and Weston McKennie made their competitive debuts with Paris Saint-Germain and Schalke 04, respectively, at age 18.
Others went pro as teenagers but stayed stateside. Joe Scally signed with New York City FC at age 15, just as Ricardo Pepi did with FC Dallas; Tyler Adams with the New York Red Bulls at 16; Alex Freeman with Orlando City at 17; two days before his 18th birthday, Auston Trusty signed with the Philadelphia Union, which also developed Brenden Aaronson. Haji Wright spent time as a teenager with the reincarnated Cosmos, then a minor league team, before heading to Schalke.
For as long as the USMNT has existed, it has benefited from, and actively cultivated, the talent that washed on our shores with each wave of immigration. But it has profited, too, from the prolific siring of European-born children by our armed forces stationed abroad. Dozens of such players, the product of some kind of alchemy between nature and nurture, have fallen into the laps of the USMNT and its coaches. This team is no different, gaining Sergiño Dest via the Netherlands and Malik Tillman from Germany, both of them born to American servicemen fathers. Antonee Robinson was born to an American father in England, albeit one who worked in IT.
And then there is the delightful upshot of birthright citizenship, which brought Folarin Balogun to the team quite by accident – his mother had planned to return to England before having her baby, only to be told by the airline that she was too close to her due date to do so safely. Yunus Musah, who was on the 2022 World Cup team, happened to the USMNT program in much the same way. And so, it appears, did Johnny Cardoso – who missed this World Cup through injury – whose Brazilian parents had him in New Jersey before moving back home a few months later.
The combination of having both college soccer and MLS academies, a tangle of minor leagues, and some combination of all of the above is often dismissed as untidy and inefficient. This magnificent mess is seen as a weakness, an anachronism, as a sign that something is still amiss with our structure. But it’s worth wondering if efficiency is really the objective here. Is more soccer not by definition better? With more pipelines open, more players are likely to emerge, all in their own time and on their own journey.
After all, we do not offer the same chances to every community – in soccer as in all other things. Our elite youth system in the United States caters almost exclusively to the upper-middle class, yet we have produced a senior national men’s team that defies this structure and these strictures. The fact of this team’s delightful diversity made a mockery of the Department of Homeland Security’s hateful “OUR SOIL” social media post ahead of the USMNT’s 2-0 victory over Australia on Friday. The Trump administration, after all, is doing its utmost to rid the nation of birthright citizenship.
In whatever manner they made it to the national team, what counts is that these players got there in the end and formed the most talented and pedigreed version of this team. This team reflects a nation that offers a bit of everything, and a bit of everyone, because there are lots of ways of getting to it. Yet the men’s soccer team that represents this nation is defiantly diverse, in every way, and all the better for it.
The US soccer system has a diversity problem; the 2026 US men’s national team doesn’t.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
