For several years now, soccer has been riding the crest of its popularity in the United States. The sport seems to be getting bigger stateside, the wave looming larger as it washes over the sporting landscape.

TV ratings trend upward. Attendance for just about every kind of live soccer grows. Mainstream relevance builds. The national consciousness embraces. American cultures subsumes.

Yet all is not well at the United States Soccer Federation.

Very far from it.

While miles removed from its cash-strapped nadir of the 1980s – and, really, many decades before that – when it barely qualified for its designation as a governing body, U.S. Soccer presently has more simultaneous crises and conflicts roiling than at any prior point in its existence.

Which is all odd because the FBI and Department of Justice were instrumental in bringing down the corrupt upper crust of FIFA, setting the global game on its first wobbly steps on the path toward accountability and respectability. And in the wake of longtime FIFA despot Sepp Blatter's ouster, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati proved the kingmaker in Gianni Infantino's election to the top job in the game. This, likely, will position the United States all that much better to host another World Cup at last – likely in 2026 – even if anti-American resentments linger in some far-off soccer federations.

View photos Sunil Gulati (AP) More

But for its growing global influence, lately U.S. Soccer has hardly imposed order on its own house – the so-called Soccer House, in Chicago.

The issues are various.

The men's national team program is in chaos. The senior men's side faced a must-win World Cup qualifier in just its fourth game of the campaign – a full two years before the actual tournament in Russia – and had to spin and sell last week's win over a woeful Guatemala as some redemptive feat.

Last year, it failed to qualify for the Confederations Cup and had its worst showing at a Gold Cup in a decade and a half. The team itself, meanwhile, is an amorphous grab bag of old, inexperienced and unworthy, with desperately few reliable building blocks and a manager who doesn't look like he'd know how to build a team anyway. The clamor for Jurgen Klinsmann's dismissal hasn't abated much in spite of what he deemed a "statement" victory.

The Olympic under-23 team was hopelessly outclassed by Colombia on the same day and will miss the Summer Games for the third time in four cycles. The under-20 national team sometimes shows promise but didn't compete well at its most recent World Cup. And the under-17s missed their first World Cup in 2013 and then needed a playoff for the first time in 16 years in 2015.

But things with the men are rosy relative to the women's side.

Last summer's Women's World Cup winners, who are favored to win a fourth straight gold medal in Rio de Janeiro this summer, are embroiled in an increasingly ugly collective-bargaining agreement tussle with the federation. Their last deal, negotiated in 2006, expired in 2012. Since then, they have played under a memorandum of understanding with some updated terms. The sides are reportedly very far apart on a new deal. And the players contend that they have the right to go on strike if they don't come to terms, since there is no proper CBA to prevent them from doing so.