It’s only a matter of time, they tell us. The powerful economy. The changing demographics. All the kids who can’t remember when the USA didn’t have a pro league and Americans couldn’t watch the Premier League every weekend on TV. All of those things, they say, will propel the US men to global dominance one day, if we can only fix one or two things.

There’s only one problem. It’s not going to happen in a long, long time. Not by 2022. Not by 2026, when the USA may be a World Cup co-host, depending on the level of anger over US policies when the vote is taken in June. Not in the next century at the very least. And the women may not win much in the near future, either.

Here’s why We the People of the United States cannot form the perfect soccer union. We’re too far behind. In Europe, soccer has been entrenched since the 19th century. English and German soldiers stepped out of the trenches in world war one to play games during an unofficial Christmas ceasefire. Most of the final 16 clubs in this year’s Champions League boast at least 100 years of history. The sport also has long dominated in South America and large parts of Africa and Asia.

The USA had a good foothold 90 years ago, with a promising young American Soccer League providing the backbone of the players who reached the 1930 World Cup semi-finals (although only 13 teams entered.) But the ASL disappeared a few years later, starting a cycle that would become too familiar through the generations. Without the beacon of a pro league, soccer was relegated to leagues of dedicated immigrants who shrugged off the scorn of the neighbors who eagerly assimilated into “American” sports like gridiron football, baseball and basketball.

In the 1960s, a few different leagues vied for supremacy before the remnants were forced to join up to form the NASL, which had a few good years in the late 70s and early 80s before collapsing under the weight of overexpansion and inequity. In the 1980s, the future of US soccer seemed to be indoors, with several teams averaging more than 10,000 fans per game to see a soccer/hockey hybrid. At the same time, youth soccer started to boom. But with the federation taking a laissez-faire attitude, youth clubs went in all sorts of different directions. Today, we have two national umbrella organizations – US Youth Soccer and US Club Soccer – racing to form regional elite leagues. Confused parents sign up kids for tryouts and hope for the best outcomes while praying they don’t end up spending thousands of dollars on airfares and hotel rooms. A team may travel 700 miles for a blowout instead of traveling seven miles for a competitive game.

Even those who agree US Soccer needs to change can’t get on the same page. In the 2018 federation presidential election, we needed two hands to count all the “reform” candidates in the field. Meanwhile, efforts to unify lower-division soccer and push the USA toward a promotion/relegation system are bogged down in an alphabet soup of brand names – NPSL, UPSL, PDL, ASL and more – most of which insist on being a national framework rather than a regional component of a larger pyramid.

And we’re too litigious. The US soccer community is very good at establishing legal precedent. The old NASL’s legal skirmishes with the NFL were landmarks of sports business law, as was the MLS players’ lawsuit against the league in the late 90s.

What those lawsuits did not do was establish a firm ground for soccer in the USA. Far from it. The MLS players’ suit hindered the league’s early growth. Today, you need a scorecard to keep track of all the legal actions. A possible move of the Columbus Crew to Austin is held up in court. Other actions challenge the lack of promotion/relegation or the disparate pay structures between the men’s and women’s national teams. The new NASL is even suing individual members of US Soccer’s board over a vote that didn’t go their way. Some of these problems could be solved if the interested parties were forced to sit down and negotiate. The lawsuits, though, have simply calcified everyone’s positions and limited the capacity to talk about new approaches to build up pro soccer.

There’s the competition too. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Not here. Even in Washington DC, where thriving immigrant communities love the global game, the local media hailed the NHL’s Washington Capitals as the first major pro team to make a conference final for many years, ignoring the feats of the Washington Spirit (NWSL) and DC United (MLS).

If you want success it’s best to be patient. But we’re too obsessed with the quick fix. Futsal! Focusing on dribbling – no, wait, passing – at an early age! Ending “pay to play” (they don’t say how)! The hotly contested US Soccer presidential election showed we have no shortage of ideas. And a vast contingent of supporters, many of them new to the sport, remain convinced that all evils will disappear if the USA merely institutes promotion/relegation, which will magically yield an exponential rise in investment and make every US child hungry to represent his or her hometown club in its fight to climb the ladder.

Fixing things is indeed easy. All we have to do is make up for generations of cultural antipathy, incentivize people who are currently staying out of soccer to put their money and children into it, ensure the vast expenditures of those who’ve paid to be part of MLS’ effort to accelerate the USA’s pro and youth growth, get kids to put down their video games and get out on a neighborhood futsal court, get the powers that be to check their egos and lawyers at the door, and perhaps build a time machine. Maybe that could happen. Or maybe the Yellowstone supervolcano could render much of the United States uninhabitable.

The good news? There’s little harm in trying, and we’re in good company. Only eight countries have ever won the men’s World Cup. England only won it on home soil – and that was more than 50 years ago. Holland haven’t won it. Mexico haven’t come close. And yet, the sport thrives in all of those countries (and dozens more where a World Cup victory is the most distant of dreams).

It’s certainly close to thriving here in the States. Sports bars catering to Premier League fans are now the rule rather than the exception. Plenty of cities, not just at MLS level, have rollicking live soccer atmospheres. The National Women’s Soccer League has lost a couple of teams but gained more, already outlasting previous attempts at a women’s league. All without a winning a World Cup.

And maybe a wave of talent can coincide with a run of good luck as it did in 2002, when the US men made it to the quarter-finals. Perhaps the US women will win again, though they now face many of the same issues (fractious and litigious stakeholders especially) as the men. We can always dream.