As Miguel Ibarra posed for photographs with his new team, Club Leon of Mexico, George Kuntz would no doubt have cracked a smile. It was a moment of validation for a coach who three years earlier had urged nigh every contemporary in Major League Soccer to take Ibarra in the 2013 SuperDraft.

“I still have the texts on my phone,” he says proudly. A memento of what might have been for the former UCI Irvine coach, he estimates half a dozen coaches said no before the Portland Timbers eventually took Ibarra. However they would cut him not long after, casting him into a sea of uncertainty.

Some years later, after a stop in NASL, Ibarra is now a USA international and soon to be plying his trade in Liga MX. Enrique Cardenas - currently with Atlante - is another example of working-class Hispanic players (better off Hispanic players do not appear to hit the same hurdles) falling through the cracks in US soccer and questioned the draft process after going unselected in 2014. “I was certain I was going to get picked,” Cardenas told Top Drawer Soccer. “Going into the first two rounds I was skeptical I would get picked there. But I thought it’d happen in the third round. Picks kept coming in and I was kind of confused.”

For Kuntz, players like Cardenas and Ibarra are not isolated cases. He believes young Hispanic players are often at a disadvantage. “There are a lot of players like Miguel [and Enrique] in unaffiliated men’s leagues that are working on paper work,” he says. “I know Jürgen [Klinsmann] and Tab [Ramos] are working on this, it’s a big push to find these players because they come and go [from the country]. They’re quick, they’re tacticians, they’re technical, they’re street savvy and they’re difference makers in so many different ways.”

Cardenas expressed similar sentiments in 2014: “We’re just going to keep bringing creative players from abroad and players born in the US aren’t going to succeed,” he told TopDrawerSoccer. “There’s something wrong with the system.”

Kuntz estimates that 14 years ago, there were 60,000 players playing in unaffiliated men’s leagues in southern California alone. “There are leagues that are not sanctioned,” he explains. “Kind of renegade leagues to either make a little bit of money or to serve the community and they’re not registered with US Soccer, with AYSO [American Youth Soccer Organisation], or these other organisations that are large soccer organisations.”

As for why they are not registered, Kuntz believes that a registration surcharge is part of the reason, while youngsters in border towns prefer to ply their trade in Mexico. “A lot of kids in San Diego, in Chula Vista, play and train across the border in Mexican leagues with relatives and friends,” he said. “They train with Xolos, the professional team, then there’s a team in Durango. There is always this glory they hear about playing in Mexico. They get to train with good players and they’re paid good money.”

A more recent example that Kuntz talks of is “Choco” Gomez - also signed by Atlante and described as a “midfield maestro” by Gary Kleiban, a coach involved at the top youth level. On his blog, Kleiban alleges the youngster was ”repeatedly snubbed by American pro soccer outlets”, and is further proof that Hispanic players falling through the cracks was not a myth.

That is in part, according to Kuntz, due to a lack of fluency between soccer organisations in the United States. “We’re so fragmented without one body,” he says. “You have these organisations that are competing with each other for numbers.”

A model referred to as “pay-to-play” is also seen as damaging to the prospects of working-class Latino players, with those from lower income households often shut out from the best playing opportunities – and leagues that may attract MLS scouts. Those who are not able to pay for the best opportunities go unnoticed, with few other avenues open to the professional game. In the case of Ibarra, a weak set of safety nets meant that once he was released by the Timbers he had few options to remain in professional soccer despite only missing out on a contract in Portland due to squad size restrictions.

When I first spoke to Kuntz in March he talked of a similar situation with Irving Garcia, formerly of the New York Red Bulls. “The coach [Hans Backe] was embedded in the defensive philosophy,” Kuntz explains, something he feels is detrimental to creative players who need room to express themselves. “It’s like watching a child finger painting,” he added. “You don’t interrupt the process, you let them create.”

Eventually released by the Red Bulls, a brief spell in Antigua followed for Garcia before he drifted off the radar, a consequence of the lack of backup options for those released by MLS clubs.

The college system is still a recognised pathway to professional soccer, but even that avenue can be a distance too great for young footballers from less well-off backgrounds. “I’m helping with a club and the entire team except for two are Hispanic,” Kuntz explains. “I asked the coach if any of these kids are considering college and he said they’d like to but none of them have the grades. Some of them would be eligible for the Dream Act [Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors], where they can still get funds from the government for education. There’s student athletes like that which could still go to college but why aren’t they being seen by scouts?”

Kuntz lives in California, and it was there that he first met Klinsmann when the German moved to the US – their children attending the same pre-school. The pair are still in touch, and Kuntz has raised his concerns with Klinsmann. “[Klinsmann has] been more supportive than most technical directors in getting into those [minority] communities,” Kuntz says. “I’d like to spend more money and have more scouts [finding players]. The problem is the academy players are the ones most seen by coaches.”

However, all is not lost. “The good news is five years ago we probably wouldn’t even be having this discussion,” Kuntz explains. “It would be even worse. When Miguel arrived in Minnesota there was no Galaxy II. Now we have the Galaxy II, the Portland Timbers 2, the Sounders 2. You won’t see guys like Miguel slip through the cracks as much. However, you have states like Arizona and New Mexico that don’t have an MLS team, what are they going to do? It’s going to be up to those [youth] clubs to get them into the academies.”

In a few weeks, Kuntz will reunite with Ibarra when Leon play a friendly in California. Watching the fruition of talent he first spotted at 15 and tried to push into Major League Soccer, he remains both hopeful and optimistic that in the future, Ibarra’s story becomes the exception, rather than the rule. “I think they [MLS] are going in the right direction,” he says.