Why isn’t the U.S. better at soccer?

It’s been a satisfying few months as a sports fan. “My” Knicks have their best chance at a championship since 1973. And Jack Hughes’s overtime winner over Canada in the Gold Medal Match in Milan represented a triumph for the men’s hockey team.

So is it too much to ask that this is also the year when the U.S. men’s soccer team breaks through, with the World Cup set to kick off this week on North American soil?

The 23 previous hosts have a pretty good track record, with 6 outright wins (though none since France in 1998). Another 7 hosts made at least the semifinals. So an optimistic spin on this data might suggest that the U.S. has a 50/50 chance of making the final four, something we haven’t done since the inaugural World Cup in 1930.

But that’s not what the smart money thinks. Prediction markets give the U.S. only a 10 percent chance of reaching the semifinal. No spoilers, but our forecast is in the same broad range.

Most host nations, of course, have better soccer legacies than the United States. (Or at least, better legacies in men’s soccer; our women’s team has won 4 of the 9 Women’s World Cups.) The two tune-up matches the U.S. played in advance of the tournament are typical of our not-quite-arrival on the scene. We beat Senegal 2-1 last week but then lost by the same scoreline to Germany in Chicago yesterday, conceding a goal in the second minute. These aren’t bad results: Germany is our 6th-ranked team in PELE and Senegal is 16th. But it’s more of the win-some, lose-some outcomes that have long characterized American soccer.

Soccer has long been considered the “sport of the future” in the United States, but that’s sort of a running joke: the future has never really arrived. Soccer exploded as a youth participation sport in the 1970s and 1980s, and by 1978, the New York Cosmos were drawing almost 48,000 fans per game at Giants Stadium. But by 1985, the North American Soccer League was defunct.

Perhaps there was a little spark of something there, because American soccer had truly been through its Dark Ages. The U.S. failed to qualify for a single World Cup between Brazil 1950 — when we miraculously beat England 1-0 but lost our other two games — and Italia 1990, when our return to the global stage was marked by a 5-1 loss to Czechoslovakia.

What might be less well known is that American soccer looked more promising in the early years of the sport.

Silver Bulletin’s PELE ratings are calculated back to the first international match in 1872. And as you can see above, they began with a relatively optimistic prior about the United States, with an initial PELE rating of 1904. That would rank us about 15th in the world today, in the same general vicinity as Turkey, Uruguay, Belgium and Italy.

That initial rating is based on three factors: the size of our economy (always enormous), the year that we first joined FIFA (1914, nine years before Brazil did) and a regional coefficient. The regional coefficient does a lot of work, and there’s room to debate whether it’s too high or too low. But the USMNT lived up to the model’s expectations in the early years. Our first two World Cup matches in 1930 were 3-0 wins, producing an all-time high rating of 1958 on July 17, 1930, before we got crushed 6-1 by Argentina in the semifinal.

However, the U.S. didn’t play any international matches between 1937 and 1947. Early attempts at domestic leagues never really cohered. And with a World War going on, we had more important things to do. But when our team returned after the war, it was in much worse shape. We lost our first six matches after WWII by a combined scoreline of 36-2, including indignities such as a 11-0 loss to Norway. Our 1-0 victory over England in 1950 is one of the World Cup’s greatest all-time upsets. But it was an upset precisely because we weren’t very good. Indeed, that’s the only World Cup match we won between 1930 and 1994.

So what went wrong? You could chalk it up to soccer being viewed as a “foreign sport” after World War II, but the game was invented by England, our ally, not the Axis powers.

Two other factors probably played a larger role. One of them is football — or excuse me, American football. The gridiron codes developed in the late 19th century at places like Harvard and Yale steered our version of the sport in a different, more rugby-like direction. While the optimal body types for American football and soccer aren’t really the same, football has long been the focal point for amateur athletics.

And the NFL developed into a huge commercial enterprise in the 1950s and 1960s during the Dark Ages for American soccer. Not to mention other homegrown sports like baseball and basketball. The United States is not exactly lacking in athletic prowess, as our women’s team and our success in other sports show.

But it’s fair to say that soccer has long had a reputation in the U.S. as an “immigrant game”, with our strengths in regional and ethnic pockets of the population. In theory, that might nevertheless play to our strengths. Even amid a recent period of immigration backlash, the U.S. has more than 50 million foreign-born residents, triple that of any other country. It’s hard not to notice, though, that our soccer success has tended to rise and fall with our immigration levels, the Dark Ages coinciding with a more isolationist streak before and after World War II.

The U.S. finally qualified for the World Cup again in 1990, though we lost all three group stage matches. In 1994, we got an automatic berth as hosts and turned in a more promising performance, beating Colombia in the group stage, albeit on an infamous and tragic own goal, before bowing out respectably 1-0 to eventual champion Brazil in the Round of 16.

The next decade or so represented steady upward progress. Yes, the 1998 team was overmatched in France. But in 2002, we won our first and heretofore only World Cup knockout stage game in Jeonju, Korea, defeating rivals Mexico dos a cero. Meanwhile, MLS was established in 1996 and was proving more stable than past leagues like the NASL.

Since then, however, we’ve been treading water, with highlights like Landon Donovan’s dramatic late goal against Algeria to advance us to the knockout stage in 2010 and lowlights like failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup at all after washing out against Trinidad.

This year’s team isn’t on a particularly promising trajectory. We hosted Copa America in 2024, which had typically been held in South America, but failed to advance out of a relatively weak group featuring Bolivia, Panama and Uruguay.

Meanwhile, we haven’t beaten any team in the current PELE top 10 since a 4-3 win over the Netherlands in 2015. So we can beat the Senegals and Algerias of the world, but not the Germanys or Brazils — although we do seem to have a knack for drawing England.

If you’d asked me in 2002, I’d have expected MLS to become a much bigger deal by 2026. And the league is successful in some ways. MLS now has 30 teams, and it’s a solid draw, attracting more than 20,000 spectators per game.

However, the league lacks traction as a national focal point that aspiring athletes dream of playing in. Google searches for MLS-related terms are only one-fifth as high as the NHL — and less than 1/30th the volume for the NFL.

MLS has an unusual, centrally-owned structure, with the 30 franchises being more like true franchises in the McDonald’s sense, with strict spending limits and a risk-averse approach. Exceptions famously can and have been made for aging stars like Messi and David Beckham. Overall, though, the combined player market values for MLS is “just” €1.4 billion, according to Transfermarkt. For comparison, PSG (€1.37b), Man City (€1.32b) and Arsenal (€1.25b) each have nearly as much player value on their rosters by themselves.

It’s surprising, given the extremely lucrative market for sports franchises among multi-billionaires, that in a famously capitalistic economy, the United States doesn’t have a few teams that are attempting to compete with the world’s best. LAFC and Inter Miami have franchise valuations of $1.2 billion — that’s the estimated market price for franchise resale, not the Transfermarkt player valuations described above — but that’s lower than even the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets. A rival to MLS called USL Premier, which would feature full relegation and promotion, has been proposed, but is in the very early stages.

But aren’t our players increasingly successful in Europe? Although Christian Pulisic has had an arguably underachieving career, the answer is basically yes. In addition to factors like region and GDP, PELE uses Transfermarkt valuations for a country’s top 23 players to help set its priors. Even after adjusting for persistent inflation in player values, the value of the U.S. roster has roughly tripled since 2005. It’s also become more skewed toward attacking players, in contrast to our history of being stronger at defense and goalkeeping.

However, the twin development pipelines of MLS and Europe don’t necessarily lead to a highly coherent approach to international matches. Our 2026 World Cup squad is split between 8 MLS players, one in Liga MX, and 17 on various European teams. No two members of the 26-man roster play on the same club team.

How much this matters is hard to know. In our research for PELE, we found that rosters heavy with players from domestic club leagues slightly overperform, but the effect is minor. The bearish case for this model is Africa, which has lots of soccer talent, but almost all of which plays in Europe. The only African country ever to reach a World Cup semifinal was Morocco in 2022. However, Brazil and Argentina export most of their best talent to Europe and have been perfectly fine, obviously.

These mixed signals make the United States one of the harder teams to rate. The World Football Elo Ratings have the U.S. 38th. PELE has them 29th. But the FIFA rankings, which are also based on an Elo-type system, have them 17th.

What accounts for the difference? The comparatively more optimistic rating for the U.S. in PELE than in the World Football Elo Ratings reflects the effect of the priors that I described. Basically, PELE thinks the U.S. should be better than we’ve seen from match results alone. This prior has some predictive power, especially given that high-stakes international matches are relatively infrequent.

The aggregate Transfermarkt value of our optimal 23-man roster ranks 17th in the world; that’s the main benchmark PELE is using. We also calculate a “GDP prior” based on GDP, region and soccer legacy (as measured by the first year in FIFA), and which plays a secondary role in the system. There we rank even higher: 9th. Granted this is tricky, because the regional variable carries a lot of the load, and there aren’t a lot of good comparison points for the United States.

So basically, PELE endorses the notion that the USMNT “should” be better at soccer than it is. Probably not a top-flight team: the soccer hegemony of Latin America and Europe has been quite persistent over time. But PELE is always trying to nudge the U.S. a little upward, and we are often failing to live up to those expectations.

What about our #17 ranking in FIFA? Well, it’s wrong. That’s not to say we aren’t capable of playing that well, and 17 versus 29 isn’t that big a gap. But FIFA overrates the quality of our resume from match results alone.

It’s wrong for a simple reason: FIFA doesn’t account for home-field advantage. Since 2015, the U.S. national team has played 134 of its 179 matches on home turf. That’s 75 percent, roughly double the average of 37 percent for other participants in the 2026 World Cup.

We host a lot of friendlies and regional competitions like Copa America. These matches are often well-attended and popular. But home-field advantage makes the going a lot easier in soccer. In the World Football Elo Ratings, a home match is worth 100 Elo points. Ignoring draws, that increases the win probability between two evenly-matched teams to 64 percent for the home team. PELE uses a considerably more complicated system for home field, incorporating travel distance, altitude, and long-term performance for home teams both collectively and individually, so each team gets a customized factor. But the United States’ home rating (+83) is fairly high.

However, we’ll get to take advantage of home-field advantage in the 2026 World Cup. All of our group-stage matches will be played at home, and the knockout-stage draw has also been set up in a favorable way for us. Should we make the Round of 32, it’s guaranteed to be a home match; there’s an outside chance we could play our Round of 16 game in near-neighbor Vancouver, but then the U.S. hosts everything from the quarterfinals onward.

Put another way, that #17 FIFA rating inflates our stature because it’s largely based on home matches. But since essentially all of our 2026 World Cup matches will also be played at home, it’s a pretty decent approximation for how tough of an out we’ll be in this tournament. Indeed, we’re the 16th most likely team to win the World Cup according to PELE. Although those chances are only around 1 percent, they’re considerably higher than they’d be in a tournament played in Qatar or Russia or Spain.

That leaves us in a position more like that of the 1980 Olympic hockey team — not this year’s Hughes brothers-led edition. Winning our group will be the first step, since that would set us up to play a 3rd-place team in the Round of 32. Our most likely R32 opponents are Bosnia, Egypt and — this one would be interesting — Iran. Those are winnable matches. Beyond that, we’d probably need a Miracle on Grass. But stranger things have happened in soccer.

Share