JAMES PALEOLOGOPOULOS: In a matter of weeks, North America will host one of the world's biggest sporting affairs: the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with the Northeast hosting some of the massive men's tournament.
Among the 48 teams are the hosts: the United States, Canada and Mexico. Is this the year the Yanks win the championship? They're not big favorites, but compared to the last time the United States hosted the tournament in 1994, the team’s far more prepared.
That's what soccer writer, Marist University lecturer and Fishkill, New York’s Leander Schaerlaeckens hones in on in his new book “The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, Or Thereabouts”
He's here with me now, Leander, how are you?
LEANDER SCHAERLAECKENS: I'm very well! We've got weeks to go until the World Cup - it's starting to feel very real.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Leander, just to get the ball rolling, as an American reporter, it's my sacred duty to ask the following every World Cup: Leander, has soccer finally arrived in the United States?
SCHAERLAECKENS: I think, to an extent, that question is a little bit ahistorical - soccer actually had a golden age in the United States in the 1920s, when the American Soccer League was the best-funded league in the world and was poaching some of the greatest players from the UK.
But like so much in American men's soccer, it all went down in a haze of dysfunction and infighting, and that league collapsed. It was finally killed off by the Great Depression, and so, since then, for most of that time, American men’s soccer has been in a bit of a wilderness, but it's in a place now where, conceivably, if a few things break right - or maybe a lot of things break right - this could be a very positive and encouraging World Cup for the American men.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Before we dive into this title and seize on a bunch of what you just mentioned, we should emphasize for the listener: we're talking here in early May. We're almost a month away from the tournament's kickoff.
The United States men's team finds itself in Group D - that features Paraguay, Australia and Turkey. It's not the group of death, but there are no pushovers here, technically.
Leander, how are you feeling about Team America at this point?
SCHAERLAECKENS: This is the most talented and the most pedigreed team that the U.S. has ever had.
That does not necessarily translate to results at the World Cup, that's the difficulty, right? The World Cup comes along every four years. You've got a few years, a few games to make it count. It tends to come down to a single game, I had this conversation while I was reporting the book, with Carlos Bocanegra, a former national team captain, and Landon Donovan, its longtime star, and they both said “Every World Cup I've ever played in came down to a single play.”
So it's very, very hard to project these things, but all the elements are there. They have the talent, they have the experience now, which they didn't have in 2022 when they went to Qatar with a very, very young team.
They have one of the world's most famous coaches in Mauricio Pochettino - all the elements are there.
But there's 48 teams that go to the World Cup and you have to win five consecutive knockout games, and in all of its history, in the 11 World Cups that the U.S. has been to on the men's side, they have won exactly one knockout game.
So, the odds of winning the thing are not great, but they could show well at this thing.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: In “The Long Game,” you explain how the U.S. has been faring in this tournament over the years.
Incidentally, it all started with a relatively high mark in the first World Cup - third place, I believe. In the years that followed: chaos - a lot of entertaining chaos - and frankly, it's only been over the last 30 years that this national team has seen concerted efforts to train up its youth and get its systems up and running.
SCHAERLAECKENS: It's really been an incredibly long journey for this team, to go from being competitive at the very first World Cup in 1930 as you mentioned - we should note, only 13 countries bothered to show up, and most of the European powerhouses didn't deign to travel to Uruguay, so that skews that result a little bit.
And then in 1950, the U.S. has this fluky win over England down in Brazil, which is still considered one of the great upsets of all time, and since then, they've just kind of been adrift, right?
There was, at one time, between the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. had an 11-year streak where they never won a game. In the 1970s, at one point, they didn't have enough players to field in a World Cup qualifier, so they had to pull a guy from the stands just to make up the number.
So, we are talking total international irrelevance.
That really starts to turn around in 1983 when U.S. Soccer, which was too broke to put on more than one game a year, fielded its national team in the old North American Soccer League, which is where Pelé played and Beckenbauer played, which at that point was crumbling.
But … you had two desperate parties who were willing to go for a little bit of a Hail Mary, so U.S. Soccer enters the national team in a club league, which is very unusual, and they come in dead last.
The whole thing ends in tears, they score the fewest goals, but it was a spasm of ambition. It was an attempt to sort of reboot this national team, and that starts in the early 80s.
So to me, that's really where kind of the modern era begins - that's what I wanted to focus on: the rejuvenation of this program, now to a place where it's a competitive national team that, on its day, can beat just about anybody, if a few things break right.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: So, in the first half of the book, we see the time is a bit of a flat circle: baseball teams hosting and even running soccer teams, which we still see to this day to some extent. These are in the very early days, the early-1900s, late-1800s.
The pay was relatively competitive sometimes: you talk about American teams poaching English and Scottish players as well.
In addition to these teams, we have a number of clubs built within the country’s immigrant communities and also factories, that includes Greek American Atlas Astoria in New York, Gremio Lusitanos here in Ludlow, Massachusetts, Bethlehem Steel: your book tackles some of this early era.
SCHAERLAECKENS: Soccer is just about as old as any competitive sport in the United States.
The game that is credited as being the very first gridiron football game actually was played by rules that more closely resembled soccer than football, but it was then kind of restyled going forward.
This game has been played here for a very long time. It's kind of ebbed and flowed and there's lots of theories on why soccer never stuck sort of permanently.
One of the most compelling, I think, is that generation after generation of young immigrants who came to the United States, children who had to make new friends, who had to fit in in new communities, would ditch soccer just as soon as they got here, by and large, because they wanted to fit in, and they wanted to seem American and the way you did that was by playing American sports with your American friends.
And so, soccer sort of got left behind in the Old Country, and it always had sort of this scent of being sort of foreign, right?
There's another theory that sort of the dominant Western cultures don't adopt other people's sports: they develop their own. Cricket turns into baseball when it comes to United States, rugby turns into gridiron football, but soccer sort of shows up fully formed, right?
And so, that makes it kind of incompatible for Americanization in a cultural sense to a lot of people, so there's lots of reasons that soccer doesn't really fully catch on, until globalization kind of overturns those currents and suddenly makes it more appealing to be associated with a sport that's really played more seriously in the rest of the world and American children don't just ditch soccer whenever that sort of rite of passage of their youth ends - like slumber parties and the Boy Scouts or whatever: they actually stick with the sport and we start to get a more serious and deeper pipeline into the national team.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: The emergence of the U.S. Men's National Team: we hear a great deal about how some of the first players were sort of everyday guys, how some of them were struggling just to make it to whatever country they were traveling to in order to play.
This was a period where being a member of the US Men's National Team meant making history… but also some pretty bad drubbings.
SCHAERLAECKENS: Yeah - the early years of the national team: it wasn't anything like a profession, right?
Playing soccer was something that you did on the side and for a lot of players, those early World Cups even required a real sacrifice, where they would have to take a leave from their job to make a lot less money from soccer than they were running a mechanic shop or whatever it was and it meant being away for a long time, and it meant that they would have to sort of leave their families and leave their environments to go on these long European tours.
It was just a sport that wasn't fully-formed as a professional circuit yet, in the way that baseball might have been at the time, like you were very much wildcatting in the wilderness if you were a soccer player for almost all of the history of the sport in this country.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Plenty of misfortunes followed the team’s first World Cup, to a point where this team was, as [recounted] in the book, losing by a ton of goals most of the time it was on the road.
It's not until the 70s-80s, as you say, that we see something… kind of come into focus: you've already touched on a literal Team America…
SCHAERLAECKENS : By the early 1980s U.S. Soccer is so broke that they can only afford to put on one game a year and there's some years where they don't play at all.
So, they come up with this experiment: that they're going to enter the national team into the North American Soccer League, which is this totally novel thing to do, because soccer exists on kind of these parallel tracks.
You've got club soccer, which is like the Yankees and the Lakers, and then you've got international soccer, which is the national teams, which is much more like your team at the Olympics. And so, to cross over between those two is highly unusual.
So, they enter “Team America,” as they call it, into the NASL, this old league that's crumbling. Pelé is long gone. They're having trouble just staying relevant and paying the bills, they're shedding teams every single year and so, they're like “You know what? We have to Americanize this league. That's what's going to fix this thing.”
So they enter “Team America.” The trouble is that some of the best players on the U.S. National Team, like Ricky Davis, who plays for the New York Cosmos, actually have no interest in joining this new team.
They say “Why would we join this upstart franchise? We're well settled with our teams” with the Seattle Sounders, whoever they might play for.
And so, what they wind up fielding on the national team is really kind of a tribute band of the actual national team, because the most of the important real players aren't interested in participating.
They have a squad that's too small, they only have 13 players. They have this Greek-American coach, Alketas Panagoulias, who actually has no interest whatsoever in coaching. He thinks his job is to just chain smoke along the sidelines and tell his players to go out there and compete.
Needless to say, the whole thing ends in tears. They end dead last by the end of the season, they're drawing fewer than five figures to their home games in Washington, DC, at RFK Stadium.
They were supposed to have three Beach Boys concerts after their games: that was the big draw. Only one of them actually happens. They score the fewest goals in the league, and after this one season, Team America folds, and the following year, the NASL finally collapses, and the whole thing is just a big old dud.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: The team just wasn’t meant for those times – [I mean] made for those times! I just wanted to get a Beach Boys reference in there. It's truly something to behold: North American Soccer League history, in general.
Either way, as you mentioned, in the 80s-early 90s, we see bona fide efforts to get the US Men's National Team program in a place where it's not losing 6-8 goals without scoring once.
In your book, you give U.S. coach Bob Gansler his due, as well as his successor, Bora: there’s a number of Bora anecdotes in this book. These are the characters that make up the foundation of this current iteration of the US men’s national team.
By the end of the 90s: there are training camps, there are facilities, there is a new generation of player under development…
SCHAERLAECKENS: 1994 is really the seminal moment that kind of seeds the rest of soccer's growth, kind of throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, because … FIFA had taken a risk by allowing the US to host a World Cup finally, in 1994 - they'd been angling for it for years.
They were ultimately convinced [by] the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles – [it] drew six-figure crowds to its semifinals and finals of the men's soccer tournament, which finally showed FIFA the thing that most needed to see, which was dollar signs.
So in ’94, the World Cup comes here, and U.S. Soccer makes a really big bet. It had initially planned to play in sort of smaller venues, in kind of slightly smaller markets and they say, “No, you know what? We're going to go really big. We're going to play all the biggest stadiums, borrow all these NFL and college football stadiums, we're going to set our pricing aggressively, and we're just going to hope that people come.”
It's important to note here that, about a month before that World Cup, a poll found that 80 percent of Americans didn't know what the World Cup was or that it was coming to their country. So, this was a big, big bet that they were making.
The World Cup turns out to be a huge success: the U.S. doesn't embarrass itself. It survives the group stage, avoids becoming the first home country ever to not make it to the knockout stages - not by much - but they got through, and that World Cup winds up setting attendance records for both average attendance per game and total attendance that still stand today, even though the World Cup expanded after 1994, from 52 games to 64, as it went from 24 teams to 32.
This time around, in 2026, it's going to have 48 teams for the first time and 104 games. It's the first tournament that's going to be across three countries, rather than just one or two and all of that grows out of that 1994 World Cup, because they have such a big surplus at the end of it that they use that money to seed Major League Soccer, to seed all of these efforts - to create a better youth pipeline, to seed the 1999 Women's World Cup that was here and the 2003 Women's World Cup.
So, all of those things flow forth from the success in 1994 - it really changes the sport, not only in that it sort of pushes it into the mainstream, but also that it gives it the cultural cachet and the cash to do all of these things that the sport was sort of desperate to accomplish in order to get better in this country.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: Throughout your book, you dive in and out of player profiles. You talk about Wappinger Falls’ own Tyler Adams, you talk about Matt Turner's unconventional path towards into professional soccer - in fact, there are few conventional paths, if anything, when it comes to this team.
While I'm reading them, I'm also realizing these team members come from different walks of life. Also - soccer moms and dads seemed to be load-bearing parts of the national team.
SCHAERLAECKENS : The paths to the national team are as varied as the players on the national team themselves, right?
They all have their own little circuitous routes into the pros, they've all sort of faced their own challenges. The six players I chose to profile all tell interesting stories about globalization and assimilation and identity and equity and accessibility.
The thing that they tend to have in common is that in order to be seen by the right people in American youth soccer and in order to find that path into the pros, and then ultimately, if you're good enough, the national team: you need a lot of money.
And so, historically, our U.S. national teams, men and women, have overwhelmingly come out of the upper-middle class because you have to play travel soccer: it's very expensive. More often than not, you play college soccer - do you have a full scholarship? Perhaps not. So, there's money required to get yourself through that.
And so, the paths… Tyler Adams, for instance, who was born and grew up partly in Poughkeepsie, and then, after his mom found a new partner in Wappingers Falls - the nearest professional academy for him is the Red Bull youth team in North Jersey, and so they're driving an hour-and-a-half each way, almost every day of the week by the end - there's an accessibility problem there, where even in an affluent area, there wasn't a high-level environment for him to play in.
Ricardo Pepi, one of the other players that I profiled, he's from the borderlands, he's from just outside of El Paso. And ultimately, when he's 13, he gets picked up by the FC Dallas Academy, which means that he's ten hours away from home… just to be able to kind of pursue that dream.
And so, the common thread between all of these stories is that there are still not nearly enough high-level environments to develop enough quality players that will get you to a place where you become a soccer power like Spain or France or Argentina, because, ultimately, building a really good national team is a numbers game: you need lots and lots and lots of high-level prospects in order for a few of them to turn into stars and carry your national teams.
So it was really a pleasure and really eye-opening, even though I've been covering this sport for ESPN and Fox Sports and Yahoo Sports and now for The Guardian for 15 years, to talk to these players who I knew and had talked to before, but also their parents - about just what they went through in order to keep their kids playing.
The long drives: Ricardo Pepi’s dad would tell me stories about how he would have to borrow money basically every weekend to be able to get Ricardo to these travel team tournaments. He would pawn the deed to their car just so he would have gas money in order to keep them on the road and to keep Ricardo playing, because if he stepped out of that environment, he just wasn't going to make it as a soccer player.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: It's hard to believe that just a decade ago, we had Taylor Twellman yelling ‘What are we doing’ amid a very infamous World Cup qualification crashout – the book also covers that period of stagnation.
There's been a fair amount of drama, so to speak… but still, progress, as you write. We now have a massive first division with Major League Soccer. Some of the lower divisions have players unions and coherent schedules, and those lower leagues aren’t seeing 10 or 20 percent of their teams folding each season.
From your view, Leander: what does the 2026 World Cup hold for soccer in the United States?
SCHAERLAECKENS: This is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic, but the 2026 World Cup - in footprint, in cultural cachet, in the amount of revenue it drives - is going to be the biggest sporting event of all time.
There's going to be 104 games over 39 days, spanning the entire North American continent. As the organizers like to put it, it's going to be four Super Bowls a day for more than a month.
And, again, that's going to sound like an exaggeration, but I don't think this country is entirely prepared for what's about to hit it: the World Cup is a really big deal and the 2026 World Cup is an order of magnitude bigger than it was in 1994.
Soccer has already arrived in the United States. It arrived in the 1920s. It also arrived as the world globalized, and it became very easy to watch the Premier League and the Bundesliga and the Spanish league and the Italian league and Major League Soccer solidified.
I think that the next frontier for this sport is becoming one of the big games in this country - up there with the NFL, up there with the NBA, up there with maybe where baseball was and perhaps still is, and to really kind of become part of the American fabric in a way that it has sort of been on the precipice of becoming for years now.
Some people like to joke that soccer has been the sport of the future since the 1970s - there's an element of truth in that, and so really, this is an opportunity to do that. It would just be really nice if everyday fans wouldn't be priced out of this thing the way they’re threatened to be.
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: I would be remiss if I didn't mention that while the US Men's National Team is looking for glory in the World Cup, their women's counterpart does not have a trophy shelf: they have a trophy room.
I realize that program has benefited from the relative [newness] of the women's tournament, but still that's a lot of hardware on the women's side of things really is something.
SCHAERLAECKENS: Yeah, it's something that the men's coach Mauricio Pochettino talks about as well.
He said ‘We aim to emulate the women's team. We want to be as good as they are. They dominate the sport. We'd like to do the same. We can learn from them’ because this is one of the rare countries in the world where the women's national team is both more famous and more accomplished than the men's national team, right?
And so if, by the end of this World Cup, the men are as well-known as the women, that'll have been a really good tournament for
PALEOLOGOPOULOS: This has been Leander Schaerlaeckens, speaking with me about his new book “The Long Game” which is due out on May 12. Leander, thank you so much for your time!
SCHAERLACKENS: Thank you for having me. This was fun!
