Chicago Fire general manager Nelson Rodriguez is blunt when it comes to the makeup of soccer in the US. “I refuse to believe that the best people and best professionals are mostly white males. I would find that an incredible set of coincidences,” he says.

And if change comes from the top, MLS has made little progress over the past decade when it comes to its coaching ranks, despite receiving glowing marks from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports for its diversity initiatives – the league received an A+ in 2016.

In 1998 and 2008, the league had four minority head coaches; at the start of the 2017 season that number had grown to just five. This, too, despite an initiative in 2007 requiring teams to interview candidates of diverse backgrounds for any open technical staff position, similar to the NFL’s “Rooney rule.”

Rodriguez says: “I think it’s first about finding those best people and best professionals, irrespective of gender and ethnicity. If that’s truly the pursuit, then I believe it’s only natural that there should be greater diversity just as there is among all professions. Yet soccer [in the United States] continues to be male, white-dominated.”

The root of the problem goes back decades.

One of the most honest assessments of minority hiring in American soccer came from Alan Rothenberg, the former president of the US soccer federation, who told Soccer America in 2014: “From an ethnic standpoint, we were dominated by Europeans who didn’t have interest in Hispanics.”

This feeling, however, was mutual.

“Soccer in the Latino community was lights years ahead of the American soccer scene,” former US Soccer national staff coach Rene Miramontes told the Guardian in a 2014 interview. “Why would they want to come over to the American side and coach there when they had the real thing and it was really, really good what they were doing?”

The US soccer community has been playing catch-up with the Latino community ever since.

But it would be an oversimplification to say that the lack of coaching diversity in American pro soccer in 2017 comes down to longstanding conflicts between the Latino and white American soccer communities. The problem is far deeper and more complex.

“You don’t see that [many] Latino coaches since 2000 when I started with the New England [Revolution],” says FC Dallas technical director and former MLS head coach Fernando Clavijo. “And I really do not know why. But I always thought that for me to get a job I knew I needed to be better, not equal, to anybody else. That’s how it always was for me.”

The problem in MLS, though, has affected more than just Latino coaches. In the entire 21-year history of the league, there have been two African American head coaches.

“I think much like the NFL back in the day, a lot of African American players [in American soccer] didn’t even consider going into the coaching realm because they never thought they would get a fair shake,” says former USA head coach Steve Sampson.

The idea that American professional soccer is a meritocracy where the most qualified candidates are filling MLS’s head coaching vacancies is simply not borne out by the facts.

Of the 22 head coaches currently working in MLS, five got their first head coaching job without any previous coaching experience, while five more were hired with two or fewer years of coaching experience. That means that nearly half of the head coaches in MLS had two or fewer years of coaching experience at any level before getting their first big break. All but one of these 10 coaches is white.

This pattern of hiring inexperienced ex-players to head coaching positions dates back at least as far as 2007 – the year that Real Salt Lake first hired Jason Kreis and, coincidentally, the same year that MLS began its diversity initiative – and has continued ever since.

MLS teams seem to rely on who and what they know rather than engaging in a thorough and competitive hiring process, one that might include a candidate they would otherwise not have considered.

“It’s ‘Oh, we have a guy. He’s been a good guy. He was great in the community. Maybe he was great on the field as well. It would be good for the club to continue that association,’” says the Fire’s Rodriguez about the thinking behind these hires. “As soon as someone starts to have success doing something a certain way, other teams want to copy [that model]. I think it takes patience and a degree of open-mindedness – perhaps even a dash of courage – to buck those trends and try and find a different way.”

One team that has found a different way is Clavijo’s FC Dallas.

In 2014, Clavijo hired a former FC Dallas player and youth coach, Oscar Pareja, away from the Colorado Rapids. Since then, the two have built a young team that has consistently been among the best in Major League Soccer over the past three seasons and which is undefeated so far in 2017.

In contrast to Dallas’s approach – which focuses on bringing players up through the youth system and into the first team – expansion franchise Atlanta United FC hired Argentine coach Gerardo “Tata” Martino to bring his experiences in international soccer to a young organization hungry for immediate success.

Both franchises made these hires not so that they could have diversity for its own sake, but because they valued the passion and perspective on the game that each of these coaches bring with their backgrounds. New York City have accomplished much the same thing with their head coach, ex-Arsenal great Patrick Vieira.

And this is where the story becomes less about the lack of diversity in MLS – something that has plagued every other major American sports league as well as major industries across the country – than about how that lack of diversity threatens the future of the sport in this country.

“I think people in a position of leadership need to take a look at the big picture and ask themselves: how do they want the make-up of this league to be not just this year but 10 years from now?” asks Sampson. “Owners – and it’s really the owners and the presidents of the clubs that are driving this – they’re the ones that have to believe in this and make it a priority.”

If the owners and executives at the top of American professional soccer choose not to make those important decisions, says former US youth national team coach Hugo Perez, US soccer at every level will continue to lag behind the rest of the world.

“We need [diverse] coaches in order for us to be a power in the world,” he says. “If you don’t, you’re going to be the same thing you’ve been for the last 20, 25 years. You need those types of coaches to bring something different in order for us and for our players to be able to compete with the rest of the world.

“Until we do that, and if we don’t have that diversity, we’ll continue to be the same way.”