THE last time America failed to qualify for the football World Cup, the tournament still included West Germany and the Soviet Union. But when the sport’s signature event kicks off in Russia next year, the stars and stripes will be conspicuously absent. In much of the world, there is little shame in missing the event: well-regarded teams such as the Netherlands, Ghana and Chile will also be staying home in 2018. Unlike those countries, however, the United States enjoys the great advantage of belonging to CONCACAF, the confederation for North America and the Caribbean—a region so weak it has not had a single team reach even the Cup’s semi-final stage since 1930. Even though America is far from a footballing powerhouse, its streak of seven consecutive World Cup appearances was one of the longest in the world.

The United States stumbled out of the gate in “the Hexagonal”, as the final stage of CONCACAF’s World Cup qualification tournament is known, suffering a home loss to Mexico, America’s arch-rival, and a brutal defeat to Costa Rica. Even then, the country had nearly a 70% chance of qualification with three matches left to play. And heading into the very last match, a mere draw against humble Trinidad and Tobago on October 10th would have been sufficient for America to secure an invitation. Failing that, as long as either Honduras or Panama failed to win, the United States could still sneak into the Cup through a playoff against Australia.

Somehow, they fell short, in embarrassing fashion. The United States did score first in its final match. Unfortunately for America, however, it was a 17th-minute own goal. Later in the first half, Alvin Jones doubled the Trinidadian lead. The United States regained a glimmer of hope in the 47th minute when Christian Pulisic, a 19-year-old star in the making, scored to bring his team within striking distance of qualifying. But the rest of the match passed without another goal. Meanwhile, Honduras beat Mexico 3-2, and Panama squeaked by Costa Rica thanks to a phantom goal that never actually crossed the line—CONCACAF has not yet adopted the goal-line technology that helps referees determine whether a goal has been scored. That closed off America’s final path to the tournament in Russia. Following the crushing setback, Bruce Arena, whom the team had hired as its manager less than a year earlier in the hopes of reviving its somnambulant qualifying campaign, announced his resignation.

On one hand, it took a remarkable amount of bad luck for America to fall short. With so few scoring events, football is a high-variance sport: teams frequently outplay their opponents for 89 minutes, only to be defeated on a fluky goal or penalty call. The chances that the United States would lose by an own goal and that both Honduras and Panama would defeat stronger teams were vanishingly slim. America probably had a few breaks go its way to achieve its streak of seven straight World Cup qualifications, so it should come as no surprise that fortune would some day cease to smile upon the Yanks.

But on the other, the fact that the United States put itself in such a precarious position that a single own goal could knock it out of football’s marquee tournament speaks ill of the process that led up to that point. America dwarfs the rest of CONCACAF in population and GDP and dominates countless other sports, and football is widely played across the country. Nonetheless, the United States merely remains an upper-tier side by CONCACAF’s modest standards, rather than a uniquely dominant one. American fans can only hope that following the indignity of the country’s finest footballers watching the 2018 World Cup on television, the lords of the sport in the United States will at last embark on the fundamental reforms necessary to vault the team into the global elite.

The middle-class trap

Long a minnow in global football, 20 years ago the United States was thought to be a rising star in the world’s most popular sport. Its successful hosting of the 1994 World Cup sparked widespread interest in the game, which has historically ranked a distant fifth among team sports in popularity behind American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. Two years later the country founded a proper domestic club league, Major League Soccer (MLS), which in theory would offer talented young American athletes a path to fame and fortune in football and reduce the chances of defections to other sports. In 2002 the United States reached the final eight of the World Cup, its best showing since the inaugural Cup in 1930, before falling to a German team that wound up going all the way to the championship game.

Since then, however, the team’s progress has flatlined. The United States failed to win a single match in the 2006 World Cup, and was eliminated in the first round of the knockout stage in 2010 and 2014. To an extent, this recent pattern of treading water reflects the broader trend of football in the United States: much better than it was, but still with a long ways to go. America is yet to mint a single genuine superstar in the sport (though Mr Pulisic certainly has the potential to become one). And after two decades, MLS revenues remain a fraction of those of America’s more established sports, and are lower than even those of the second division of football in England.

It would be easy to overstate the risk to the development of football in America that the team’s absence from the 2018 World Cup represents. Although television ratings for MLS remain grim, that may actually reflect American fans’ sophistication: despite a time difference of five to eight hours, they tune in in droves to watch the English Premier League. Liga MX, the top division in Mexico, also bests MLS’s ratings numbers on American soil. Similarly, American sports media dedicate far more coverage to football than they once did. When the United States failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1986, the New York Times ran a threadbare four-paragraph Associated Press report. This time, the Grey Lady alone has run six articles. Fox Sports paid a reported $400m for the rights to broadcast the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in the United States. And supporter culture is indisputably on the rise in America. Those who believe that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference will be heartened by the response to the decisive match against Trinidad. Just like in any other footballing country, the disappointing result was met with a wave of outraged calls for the heads of both Mr Arena and Sunil Gulati, the president of the United States Soccer Federation (USSF).

Yet although the foundation of interest in the sport now appears solid, producing world-class talent requires infrastructure for player development as well. And in America, that remains woefully shaky. The countries that compete for World Cup championships all have methods of identifying promising youngsters early, and coaching and training them intensively by the time they are teenagers. Following a poor performance at the 2000 European championships, Germany set up a comprehensive scouting and development system to ensure that no prospects were missed or unnurtured. Spain countered with a “fidelity strategy”, which sought to promote the use of homegrown players by creating a cohesive academy system across the country. The Dutch may have missed qualification for Russia, but they came close in a much tougher confederation despite a population of only 17m largely because of their youth programme.

America has much to learn from these countries. Even at the earliest ages, it lets many potential stars fall by the wayside. Whereas college basketball coaches scour playgrounds and high school gyms looking for the next Michael Jordan, youth football in America operates on a “pay-to-play” system, in which the sport is treated as a mere extracurricular activity that well-off parents can choose to invest in for their children. As a result, boys whose parents cannot afford expensive club dues, and often related travel costs, are frozen out of the player-development pipeline. This burden falls disproportionately on Latinos, who are both likelier than other Americans to grow up in football-loving families and likelier to be poor.

The problems arguably get worse in the teenage years. At ages when European prospects are already playing full-time for professional clubs, America relies on high schools and colleges to develop talent. This works fine for sports like basketball and American football, in which university teams are essentially run as big entertainment businesses with an unpaid work force. But in football, college athletes play just a three-month season, possibly tacking on a 14-or-so match schedule in an American summer league. “Student-athletes” are not allowed to receive pay for playing football—or even to play alongside professionals in a summer league—without relinquishing their eligibility to play in the college game, the largest and most comprehensive development system in the country. And amateurism is hard to reconcile with the demands of training to compete with the world’s best.

America’s systemic enforced amateurism also has a hidden cost. Lower-division clubs in Europe, as well as top-tier teams in Latin America and Africa, stay in business by discovering young talent and then selling it on to rich European clubs. As a result, they often prioritise the development of prized prospects over the imperative to win matches. In contrast, colleges want to win at all costs, and would be much less willing to, say, play a green youngster in a high-pressure game in order to give him experience.

Finally, the business model of the highest level of football in America was designed largely to ensure the financial security of club owners rather than to make the country a magnet for elite talent. MLS has a salary cap and centralises player contracts, depressing player wages. And without the promotion-and-relegation system that prevails everywhere else, there is no market mechanism to punish clubs who refuse to pay up for players. A club looking to join MLS has a better chance of acceptance if it shows it can probably extort a cushy stadium subsidy from its hometown than if it spends years developing sustained footballing success or a passionate fan base.

Time for a wake-up call

Will the failure to qualify for the World Cup prove enough of a shock that America will at last confront the inadequacy of its current player-development model? Any knowledgeable supporter could offer an immediate reform agenda: dedicating more money to subsidise the sport for children and teenagers to ensure that all promising athletes can learn regardless of their families’ income; setting up a promotion-and-relegation system in the professional game; and encouraging young players to ply their trade in Europe in the meantime, as Mr Pulisic has done. Unfortunately, immediately following the defeat to Trinidad, the signs were not encouraging. Mr Arena stepped up to the podium and declared that “there’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing”. Mr Gulati has refused to step aside and been cagey about what reforms, if any, he would support.

Mr Arena, however, is already gone. Mr Gulati’s time may be up soon as well: he faces an election next February, and the American Outlaws, the national team’s largest supporter group, is calling for his ouster. And a pair of legal challenges may force the USSF to embrace reform even if it would prefer to drag its feet. Two clubs have filed a claim with the Court of Arbitration for Sport to demand that America institute promotion and relegation, which are mandated by FIFA, football’s global governing body, but are not in place in the United States. Separately, a federal court in Brooklyn is hearing a case accusing USSF of violating antitrust law by denying certification to the North American Soccer League, a competitor to MLS, as a second-division circuit.

With the World Cup set to expand to 48 teams, and the United States the oddsmakers’ favourite to host the tournament in 2026, the 2022 edition may be the last with a truly competitive qualifying process for America. But the debacle for qualification for 2018 has left the structural weaknesses in the country’s approach to player development bare for all to see. There can be little doubt that ample raw material for all-time great footballers can be found in a nation of 320m with the world’s largest economy. Both fans of the American team and those around the world who want to see the finest talents achieve their potential should hope that the United States does not let this crisis go to waste.