Donovan on U.S. Soccer's Reality Check

Landon Donovan didn't dance around the question. Asked about the current state of U.S. men's soccer, he said the summer will tell us a lot. But the number that keeps coming up is harder to spin.

The U.S. men have won one knockout-stage game in World Cup history. One. That was the 2002 round-of-16 win over Mexico. The 2002 run is still the furthest the program has ever gone.

Donovan said someone told him that stat recently and it hit. You'd think, he said, that the team would have gotten back there by now. It hasn't.

His answer on why is straightforward. The United States does not develop players the way the rest of the world does.

Rich raised the college pipeline. Universities feed most Olympic sports, and with NIL and the transfer portal reshaping athletic departments, Olympic-side programs could get cut. Donovan took the conversation somewhere sharper.

Soccer, he said, is different. The age window where the U.S. loses players is 17 to 20. If a kid isn't on an MLS first-team roster by then, there's nowhere to go. The college game isn't competitive enough to feed the professional level. Players fall into an abyss.

Underneath that is a bigger issue. Youth soccer in this country, he said, is a disaster. Clubs charge high fees. It's all about winning. Coaches want to win. Clubs want to make money. Kids get left behind. The development piece, the thing that actually matters, gets sacrificed to the business model.

Donovan offered a direct comparison from his own career. He played in Germany at 17. His under-16 coach was 60 years old and had been doing the job for 25 years. That coach wasn't trying to get promoted to the senior team. The club wanted their best coach working with teenagers. That was the point.

In the U.S., Donovan said, it runs the other way. The worst coaches are the ones working with eight- and nine-year-olds. Those kids aren't learning the game and they aren't falling in love with it. He called it totally backwards.

He closed with a personal note that reframed the entire conversation. This is his next passion in life. He wants to help fix it. He wants to give the game back to kids.

The World Cup will arrive on home soil soon enough. The results, whatever they are, will reflect a development system the U.S. has spent decades building the wrong way.