Article by Johan Englen

The World Cup is soccer’s most prestigious tournament and the world’s most-watched televised event. Unfortunately for the American’s watching, they won’t be seeing the U.S. Men’s National Team. For the first time since 1986, the team didn’t qualify for the tournament.

To qualify for the tournament, each national team professional soccer players are grouped together based on their citizenship. They must first play against each other within their own regions to see which nations from their region will take the few finite spots in the World Cup. CONCACAF, the United State’s region, comprises all of North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Guianas in Northern South America.

The men’s United States soccer team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup this year. This will be the first time they have not gone to the world cup since 1986. Not only were they eliminated, but qualification was in their hands and easily attainable as they simply needed to win or tie against Trinidad and Tobago. The U.S. men’s team ended up doing neither, and instead were ranked 28^th in the world and lost to the 99th placed Trinidad and Tobago.

This devastating loss brought much soul-searching to the soccer community in America. Not because of the loss itself, but because of how the loss is so prevelant to the United States soccer system as a whole.

“It’s not about [the loss], it’s not about [the last coach], it’s not about [the current coach], it’s not about [the current U.S. soccer commissioner]. As a whole, U.S. soccer is not prepared. They have not done a good enough job of getting this [current US soccer team] ready to play” said Taylor Twellman, a retired U.S. men’s national team and Major League star after the game on his post-game show.

Zach Thomas, a Drury political science and criminology major, has been following the United States men’s soccer since the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

“At its core, it’s an embarrassment to U.S. soccer,” said Thomas. “I mean for a team of [the United States’] caliber our expectation isn’t to go out and win the World Cup every four years. We know that’s not an attainable goal. But we have an expectation that we should be able to beat appropriate opponents.”

Thomas also blames the pay-to-play system of youth soccer in America, whereby playing on competitive teams is more reliant on money instead of merit for young soccer players.

“It’s easy to blame the leadership,” reiterated Thomas. “On some levels the leadership does bear some of the blame, but we need to do a better job as a country, and US soccer as a whole, in investing in youth and building them up.”

The United States women’s team, has never missed a women’s World Cup since the women’s competition began in 1991. In fact, they are quite dominant in women’s soccer. They have won the women’s World Cup three times and placed second or third all other times.

It looks like the men’s team will have to reevaluate their goals in order to keep up with the women’s team and qualify for next year’s World Cup.

“If this loss does not wake up everyone from U.S. soccer – to Major League soccer, from pay to play, to broadcasters, to everything – then we are all insane,” said Twellmen.