US Soccer finds a superior alternative after decades of disarray

In 1993, Rinus Michels, the Dutch godfather of Total Football, delivered a verdict to the United States Soccer Federation that has echoed through the decades. “You are a continent; you are not a country,” he told Hank Steinbrecher, the federation’s general secretary at the time. Michels was not speaking as a coach—he had twice turned down the chance to manage the US men’s national team—but as a consultant dispatched on a three-month tour of America. His mission: assess the state of the game from coast to coast. What he found, Steinbrecher later recalled, was a land of stark regional contrasts. “The football you play in Los Angeles is very different from the football you have to play in Maine, because of your climatic conditions,” Michels explained. “The football you play in Chicago is very different from Miami.”

Michels also pointed to the Dutch model: a unified playing and coaching methodology that ran all the way down to the grassroots. The US had nothing of the sort. His report, now believed to be lost, was followed by a blueprint from the Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz, who argued that the answer lay in a national training centre to incubate talent and ideas, with regional centres to follow. That insight gave rise to Project 2010, a $50 million, 12-year plan launched in 1998 with the goal of making the US a World Cup contender by 2010. Its most visible legacy was the U.S. Soccer U-17 residency camp in Bradenton, Florida, which opened in early 1999 and ran for 18 years, producing 33 senior national team players. The Bradenton programme powered the USMNT’s rise in the early 2000s and supplied the current core of Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie. It closed in 2017, overtaken by the spread of U.S. Development Academy programmes.

Michels was correct that a nation of such vast scale needed ideological coherence. But he was wrong to treat the country’s regional diversity as a weakness. This incarnation of the US men’s national team—a “joyous bouillabaisse of accents and backgrounds and origin stories,” as the football writer Leander Schaerlaeckens puts it—has turned that very variety into a strength. The paths players take to reach the squad are as different as the climates Michels observed, and that diversity of routes is now seen as an asset rather than an accident.

A system of many entry points

For decades, professional soccer in the United States had few established pathways. In the vacuum, a tangle of pro leagues, semi-pro circuits and college programmes filled the space, rising and falling in rapid succession. The youth game that emerged was chaotic and commercialised. That ragged landscape has produced a senior team whose members arrive from every direction. Some have passed through the college system—briefly, in the case of goalkeeper Matt Freese, or for a full four years, as his positional rival Matt Turner did. Freese chose college for personal reasons; Turner because he simply was not ready for the professional game and needed time to mature. The veteran centre-back and captain Tim Ream spent four years at St. Louis University, and there is a credible argument that those years extended his career. The collegiate schedule, essentially a part-time, unpaid commitment, allowed him to develop physically without the wear and tear of full-time professional football. The 2026 World Cup roster includes eight former college players, including Mark McKenzie (Wake Forest), Miles Robinson (Syracuse) and Cristian Roldan (Washington).

That option would have made no sense for Christian Pulisic, who was playing in Borussia Dortmund’s first team at 17. Gio Reyna did the same even younger. But that alternative barely existed a generation earlier. Tab Ramos, a USMNT teammate of Gio’s father Claudio Reyna, once said he emerged from North Carolina State the same player he entered it—he simply had no choice, because the North American Soccer League collapsed just after he was drafted. Today, players like Tim Weah and Weston McKennie made their senior competitive debuts at 18 for Paris Saint-Germain and Schalke 04 respectively, having developed entirely inside European academies.

Others turned professional as teenagers but stayed stateside, signing directly with Major League Soccer clubs. Joe Scally joined New York City FC at 15; Ricardo Pepi did the same with FC Dallas; Tyler Adams signed with the New York Red Bulls at 16; Alex Freeman with Orlando City at 17. Auston Trusty joined the Philadelphia Union just before his 18th birthday, and the same club developed Brenden Aaronson. Haji Wright spent time as a teenager with a revived New York Cosmos—then a minor-league side—before heading to Schalke. The FC Dallas academy has become a particular factory, producing Pepi, Chris Richards and McKennie. In 2023, 95% of the US U-20 World Cup squad had spent time in an MLS academy, and in 2024 more than three-quarters of senior call-ups had MLS ties.

The USMNT has also long drawn talent from the children of American military personnel stationed abroad. Sergiño Dest was born in the Netherlands to an American serviceman father; Malik Tillman was born in Germany to an American serviceman father. Antonee Robinson was born in England to an American father who worked in IT. These players, products of a mix of nature and nurture, have effectively fallen into the national team’s lap.

Then there are the players brought in by the simple accident of birthright citizenship. Folarin Balogun was born in Brooklyn because his mother, planning to return to England before giving birth, was told by the airline she was too close to her due date to fly safely. Yunus Musah, part of the 2022 World Cup squad, arrived in the USMNT programme in much the same way. Johnny Cardoso, who missed this World Cup through injury, was born in New Jersey to Brazilian parents who moved back home months later. The principle of birthright citizenship—now the subject of political attack—has quietly enriched the national team for years.

The squad also reflects the country’s immigrant heritage. Cristian Roldan’s parents are Guatemalan and Salvadoran. Tim Weah’s father is George Weah, the former Liberian president and Ballon d’Or winner. Mark McKenzie has a Jamaican father, Haji Wright has Ghanaian and Liberian ancestry, and Alejandro Zendejas was born in Mexico and moved to the US as a child.

This combination of college soccer, MLS academies, minor leagues, European pathways and the unforeseen consequences of geography is often dismissed as messy, inefficient, an anachronism. But it is worth asking whether efficiency is the true objective. More pipelines mean more players emerging on their own timetables. The elite youth system in the United States largely serves the upper-middle class; the senior national team, however, defies that structure. The team’s diversity made a pointed mockery of the Department of Homeland Security’s “OUR SOIL” social media post before a recent match, and of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle birthright citizenship. Whatever route they took, these players have formed the most talented and pedigreed squad the country has ever produced. The team reflects a nation that offers a bit of everything and a bit of everyone, because there are many ways to reach it. The US soccer system may have a diversity problem; the 2026 US men’s national team does not.