These are the best of times for soccer in Puerto Rico, and the worst. On an island better known for baseball or boxing, soccer has steadily gained participants at the youth level and made a splash on the international scene by staging and winning matches. Now, its under-20 men’s national team is participating in the Concacaf qualifying tournament in Mexico, looking to qualify for its first World Cup appearance, this summer in Turkey.

But the booming participation and interest in the sport are tempered by financial and political uncertainty that threaten to undermine its advances.

Puerto Rico’s U-20 team performed poorly and was beaten by Jamaica, 4-1, in its first match of the tournament. The four semifinalists will advance to Turkey. Puerto Rico, which has never participated in a World Cup at any level, faces Panama on Thursday.

In the professional game, however, the Puerto Rico Islanders, who have played in the second division in North America (the N.A.S.L.) and built an international pedigree and following, are in danger of disappearing. Earlier this month the club announced it would skip the entire 2013 season.

Last August, Spain, the reigning world champion and back-to-back winners of the European Championship (2008 and 2012), made an unlikely excursion to face Puerto Rico, which did not qualify for the 2011 or the 2013 Concacaf Gold Cup and was 134th in the FIFA rankings. (Spain won, 2-1.) It was a high-water mark and an affirmation that soccer is booming, taking root and challenging the traditional sports like basketball and baseball (not to mention a prodigious payday for the Spanish federation).

“It is crazy, but we had Spain here, and I think it’s a hit,” said Gabriel Mota, who plays for Puerto Rico’s U-17 team. “My family is poor, and this feeds my dreams to play pro. The new Puerto Rican generation likes soccer.”

The Puerto Rico-Spain match was an attention getter. The political connections of the federation president, Eric Labrador, and the match promoter eased the payments of $900,000 from the sports ministry and $500,000 from Puerto Rico tourism ministry to invite La Roja, which charges about $3 million (for the game and amenities) for friendlies.

There are also shifts in resources at the grass roots of Puerto Rican sport. Henry Neumann, the former head of the sports ministry, known as the D.R.D., said that under a program called Cancha Abierta (Open Field) the agency provided soccer fields in 300 of 326 of the island’s public housing projects, in many cases converting basketball courts to five-a-side soccer fields. In those public programs, more than 70,000 youngsters are participating, he added, and the D.R.D. receives more requests for coaches and facilities than for any other sport.

“Basketball is still king, but soccer has moved into the second place in participation in the last three years,” Neumann said. “Baseball has been in a nose dive.”

Carlos Delgado, a former major league baseball player said: “There are a lot of kids playing soccer. I wish more were playing baseball, but the important thing is that they get exercise.”

For Puerto Rico to qualify for Turkey, it must recover from the loss to Jamaica and beat Panama Thursday in Puebla, then wait for the result of the last match in the three-team group, between Jamaica and Panama. The University of Indianapolis forward Reid Strain, who scored the only goal for Puerto Rico, had his nose broken against Jamaica.

“We didn’t have a good start,” midfielder Emmanuel D’Andrea said. “This is a different level. We made juvenile errors, but we’re motivated and hope to have a different result [against Panama].”

In Bayamón, a working-class suburb of San Juan, youngsters outfitted in Real Madrid and other jerseys of European clubs wait to play at a new, three-field soccer complex built by the city. Also in Bayamón, the Juan Ramón Loubriel stadium, a former baseball park and the home of the Islanders, was refurbished at a cost of $3 million to host the match against Spain and adapted into the largest soccer stadium in the Caribbean.

Normally, the Islanders play in the Loubriel, but the club’s fortunes are tied to Puerto Rico’s political currents, as the team’s management and owners are closely identified with the prostatehood P.N.P. party, which was ousted in last November’s elections. Without subsidies, the sponsorship of the island’s tourism bureau, or a commitment from the new government, the Islanders were financially adrift.

“It’s lamentable,” Labrado, the federation president, said. “[The Islanders] have uplifted the sport in Puerto Rico, but there’s more to soccer here than the Islanders.”

Some may see parallels to the blossoming of soccer in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s, when explosive growth at the youth level, even without a pro league, in part led to Major League Soccer.

Time will tell if soccer displaces the traditional sports of the Boricuas. Next March, Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan will stage Pool C of the World Baseball Classic, which includes host Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Spain and Dominican Republic.

In January, a delegation of marketing representatives from FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, was dispatched to help Puerto Rico develop sponsorship and commercial potential. The island, a U.S. territory, is the geographic gateway to the Caribbean, with almost four million inhabitants, and many more Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland.

“There’s a lot of possibilities,” Gregory Engelbrecht, FIFA’s development manager, said. “If they do it right, there can be a lot of progress.” The local federation receives about $250,000 a year from FIFA. “Compared to the rest of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico has much better facilities. There’s a lot of interest in soccer from different groups, but there’s a lot of criticism [of how things are done].”

On a highly politicized island, which was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493 and became a U.S. territory in 1898, criticism is a constant. So are organizational hiccups.

The Islanders organization received flak for favoring United States or Caribbean imports over local players, thus limiting talent development and slowly eroding their fan base. The semipro Puerto Rico Soccer League has been inactive since 2010, and the baseball winter league took a one-year sabbatical in 2007-8 before returning. Jackie Marrero, one of two players currently under contract with the Islanders, is with the U-20 squad in Mexico.

Despite the progress at the popular level, the island could be left without of high-level soccer.

“I think the Islanders will disappear; they just don’t want to say it yet,” said Eduardo Cantore, who was born in Argentina and writes for a Web site about Puerto Rican soccer. “The time is right to relaunch the pro league of just local teams. Of the players on the Under 20 squad, none of the guys playing in a university will now return to Puerto Rico to become pros. Playing for the Islanders was a dream job for them.”

Keyvan Antonio Heydari is a soccer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter.