The USMNT is a mess. That's the price of the U.S. becoming a 'soccer country'

Even with two wins to start the Concacaf Gold Cup, it appears the U.S. men's national team is in crisis.

Christian Pulisic, Antonee Robinson and Yunus Musah have already asked out of the Gold Cup. A trio of other potential or likely starters, Gio Reyna of Borussia Dortmund, and Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah of Juventus, didn't participate because of the Club World Cup. Then, both Monaco's Folarin Balogun and PSV's Sergiño Dest -- perhaps the two players with the highest ceiling-raising potential in the player pool -- aren't on the U.S. roster because of injuries.

This was supposed to be the USMNT's last chance to test itself in competitive matches before next summer's World Cup -- and a chance to right the wrongs of the 1-0 Nations League loss to Panama. Without something like 80% or 90% of the expected starting lineup next summer, it could have transformed into an opportunity for some fringe players to make a case to play a bigger role in Mauricio Pochettino's plans once the matches matter again.

But then came the friendlies against Switzerland and Turkey: two losses, by a combined score of 6-1, against two teams the U.S. needs to be better than if it seeks a deep run in 2026.

It wasn't just that the U.S. lost these matches -- it was what the losses signified. This was a group of players that didn't appear to care. The play was uninspired, as was the attitude of the team's stars.

Former USMNT star Landon Donovan ripped Pulisic's commitment to the national team. Pulisic's dad responded by screenshotting a conversation he had with ChatGPT. The AC Milan star told Donovan to say it to his face and revealed that he had asked Pochettino if he could play in the two friendlies and then skip the Gold Cup. This led to Pochettino clarifying his role as the manager who makes personnel decisions and his personhood: "When I signed my contract with the federation, I am the head coach. I am not a mannequin."

A year before co-hosting the World Cup, the USMNT under Pochettino promised to be on a steady upward trajectory. Instead, its best players are playing golf rather than soccer. Parents are feuding with former players. The captain and coach are airing their dirty laundry in public. And that expensive, experienced, supposed-to-be-transformative coach has barely changed anything.

That sounds like a disaster -- but it also sounds like the situation at pretty much every world-class national team at some point over the past decade. These are growing pains as the United States is slowly becoming a real soccer country.

American soccer players probably don't care about playing for the USMNT as much as they used to. In the long run, that is a good thing.

Let's go back to 1994, essentially the birth of modern American soccer as we know it. The U.S. was hosting the World Cup, Alexi Lalas was still a harmlessly peculiar guy with a bright-red beard and a guitar, the uniforms were acid-wash denim, and MLS didn't kick off for another couple of years.

Almost none of the players were good enough to play abroad, and even if they could, there was still a stigma against signing American soccer players. So, instead, the U.S. Soccer Federation signed a large chunk of the roster as essentially full-time USMNT players. The team trained together for two years and played in just about every international tournament it could enter. At the 1994 World Cup, more than half of the roster (14 players) listed the U.S. Soccer as their employer.

Four years later, no one was a full-time U.S. Soccer player, but 16 guys were playing professionally in a league that didn't exist in 1994: Major League Soccer. Then, at the 2002 World Cup, an MLS player won Best Young Player as a 20-year-old Landon Donovan led the USMNT to a quarterfinal loss against Germany. Donovan, though, was on loan to the San Jose Earthquakes from Bayer Leverkusen, who had just lost the Champions League final 2-1 to Real Madrid and that Zinedine Zidane goal.

Donovan was shoved into an ecosystem that still didn't have a place for him. Leverkusen signed him at 17. He was a superstar across the youth levels and had to carry the weight of American fan expectation on his shoulders. Donovan has talked about how hard it was to live in Germany and be a professional while his friends were still in high school, an ocean away. He was alone -- there was no one else like him, in a position like him, anywhere else in the world.

If Donovan made it at Leverkusen, it would prove something about American soccer -- that our best players could play for the best teams in the world. But it didn't work out for him at Leverkusen, and outside of a couple of beloved loan spells with Everton, he spent most of his career in MLS.

So, unsurprisingly, playing for the USMNT meant a lot to him. It was a chance to prove that failure at Leverkusen didn't have anything to do with talent. He could play at this level if he wanted to. On a more universal level, for him and most of his teammates, games with the USMNT were the highest-level matches they would play.

The USMNT's matches at the World Cup, Confederations Cup, and against Mexico were much more difficult than the games most of its MLS-based players played weekly. These games were so important, in part, because they could push their limits.

An increasing-but-still-small number of Americans started to play in Europe during Donovan's USMNT career, but most of them began in MLS. And because their numbers abroad were still so limited and most of them weren't competing for titles and playing in the Champions League, winning games with the USMNT was a way to legitimize American soccer -- even if it meant flying thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean every season.

That's not the case anymore. With teenage American prospects at almost every major club academy in the world, eight senior players in the current pool who cost at least $20 million in transfer fees, and a growing number featuring in the Champions League every season, the national team doesn't matter like it did.

As much as FIFA tries to increase its influence, UEFA is still in control.

The Champions League is the pinnacle of the sport: The competition makes around $4 billion per year and the soccer is being played at a higher technical and physical level than anything else we've seen. The World Cup will always be the bigger event because of the history, the scarcity and the fact that the world is participating, but the best players in the world are playing the best soccer in the world on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from September through May.

This has created tensions between leagues and national federations, players and their national teams, and fan expectations and reality.

Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Robert Lewandowski are all incredibly wealthy, all-time great players -- and the main reason is what they've done for their club teams. Their national team careers? Practically irrelevant.

Mbappe became someone your dad knew because of the 2018 World Cup, and the 2022 World Cup final between him and Messi was arguably the greatest game ever. But Mbappe has been paid over $400 million by the various club teams across his career, and Paris Saint-Germain paid around $200 million to acquire Mbappe ... the summer before the 2018 World Cup.

For most of Messi's career, the national team was a weird anomaly -- everyone agreed this was one of the greatest players ever because of what he did with Barcelona. With Lewandowski, Poland has nothing to do with his legacy or status in the game. He will go down as the best center forward of the 21st century -- solely because he has scored 500-plus goals for Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich and Barcelona.

Messi, still in his prime, retired from the national team for a few months, partially because of frustration with the Argentine national federation. Mbappe briefly stopped playing for France -- missing multiple Nations League matches -- last fall. And most recently and most familiar: Lewandowski recently got Poland's manager fired. The Barcelona forward said he wouldn't play in the team's two World Cup qualifiers this month because of "physical and mental tiredness" from the club season, so the coach stripped him of his captaincy. Then, Lewandowski said he would stop playing for Poland if Michał Probierz remained the coach, and now Probierz is no longer the coach.

Similar to Lewandowski, the majority of players at the highest level are tired because they play too many games. The most recent study from FIFPro, the international players' union, found that 70% of surveyed players think a guaranteed rest period each season is necessary. For last season, the study defined 55 games played or more as an "excessive workload," and for the players who hit that mark, 30% of their matches were with their national team.

"The schedule is very tough, especially for those of us from South America because we have 12-hour flights there and 12-hour flights back," said Real Madrid star Federico Valverde, who represents Uruguay at the international level. "There are times when it's too much for our bodies."

This is the downside of what American soccer fans have been wanting. As more Americans are playing at the highest level in Europe, why wouldn't they also feel this way? Why wouldn't they also want to spend less time traveling to and playing with their national teams?

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Keller wonders why USMNT has so much disconnect

Kasey Keller breaks down the situation between Christian Pulisic and Mauricio Pochettino, in which Pochettino said Pulisic isn't allowed to dictate games he plays in.

Even without the Gold Cup, Pulisic is at 58 games since the start of last August. His club teammate, Yunus Musah, would've broken the 55-match mark had he played this summer. Both of them have traveled over 85,000 kilometers (about 52,817 miles) this season between Milan's European matches and games in North America for the USMNT.

In the FIFPro report for last season, they compared a number of young players with their older compatriots. By his 25th birthday, Pulisic had made 338 club and national team appearances in his career. At the same point in his career, Donovan had played only 280 times. Here's the study's author:

"Pulisic, if not for injuries, would have an even greater distance, in terms of appearances, compared to Donovan. This is particularly evident between Pulisic's 21st and 22nd birthdays, where he missed numerous club and national team games due to a long-term ankle injury, COVID-19 and general illness. Overall, Pulisic's incredible number of appearances at such a young age has likely contributed to his worrisome injury record, having had the misfortune of missing close to 100 games since the 2017/2018 season through various injuries."

After the report was published, Pulisic played 58 more games for the USMNT and Milan.

There's a vision of a unified American soccer model -- a professionalized and well-defined way we play, where everyone is fully committed to the cause and developed within the same model. The players add up to something greater than the sum of the parts, and everything makes sense every time they take the field.

This will never happen. How do I know this? Because it hasn't happened anywhere else. You can't achieve this when all of your players are spending 75% of their time doing the same job for someone else. Although the situation arose by accident, the current constraints on the international game force it into dysfunction.

At the club level, teams get to target the players they want, and then they get to specify how they want to play on the training ground every day. They live in the same homes and play in front of the same fans, at the stadium, each week.

With the national team, you're limited by the quirks of birth years, national borders and citizenship rules. Your five best players might be goalkeepers, and there's nothing you can do about it. The squads are almost, by definition, ill-fitting, and then you have even less game and practice time for the coach and the players to figure out how the pieces best fit together. Oh, and then the roster changes almost every time the team convenes for a couple of matches and a few training sessions.

The players don't get paid anywhere near as much to play for the national team as they do for their clubs, and all of the matches either occur during "breaks" in the club season or at the end of the grueling European calendar. And as for the number of truly meaningful games these teams play every four years? You can count them on two hands.

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Herculez Gomez reacts to the USMNT's "embarrassing" situation after Christian Pulisic hit back at critics.

As more and more Americans earn prominent roles in Europe, why should we expect this environment to produce anything other than drama, consternation and disappointment?

That is the reality for almost every major national team, most of the time.

Yes, Argentina is running hot right now, but it was the world's most depressing soap opera for the first 15 years of Messi's career. French fans hated how the team was playing pretty much until the final whistle in 2018, and it has as many World Cup wins as player mutinies. Spain looks great at the moment, but do you remember the last World Cup? When it was managed by Luis Enrique, the guy who just won the Champions League with PSG, and it got knocked out in the round of 16 after attempting over 1,000 passes and not scoring a goal?

Brazil has more raw talent than any nation not named France, and it has had four managers in the past two years. (Brazil is trying to win its first World Cup since 2002.) Italy hasn't qualified for a World Cup since 2014 or gotten out of the group stage since 2006. Germany seemed like it had cracked the code in 2014 -- and it hasn't been out of the group stage since. And England, well, England is home to the best soccer league in the world, and it has never won an international tournament that it didn't host.

All of which is to say: Every weird thing that's happening with the USMNT is normal. The expensive manager whom U.S. Soccer hired last year didn't immediately fix things because they never do. The players don't seem fully committed to their national team because no one is anymore. The former players are mad because soccer has already changed so much since they were playing.

However, the beauty of international soccer -- really, the thing that makes international soccer what it is -- is that next summer almost none of this will matter. Pulisic and Musah and Robinson won't save themselves for the next club season -- it's the World Cup, not the Gold Cup. And historically, the level of dysfunction in the lead-up to the tournament has almost no correlation with performance at the tournament.

In August 2022, Morocco was in way worse shape than the USMNT. It didn't have as much talent on its roster, it had lost in the quarterfinals at the Africa Cup of Nations, and despite qualifying for the World Cup, the federation fired its head coach, Vahid Halilhodzic, who dropped Chelsea star Hakim Ziyech from the team.

Four months later, Morocco was somewhere the USMNT would love to be next summer: playing in the World Cup semifinals.