T&T, which was in last place in the group, is the worse loss for the men’s team in decades. Failing to qualify for the World Cup is a disaster.

I’ve been involved in youth soccer for over 10 years and both my sons have been on recreational soccer teams and their high school varsity soccer teams and both are decent players but I’ve never had them on a club team because we can’t afford it.
It cost significantly more than $1,500 a year. There is equipment and tournament fees and travel cost. Spending as much as $20,000 or more a year is not unheard of to get your kid the best experience and as many training opportunities as possible.
Could my kids have been successful on a club team? Been good enough for MLS? We will never know if that was possible for them or possible for the thousands of other discouraged children that could not possibly hope to afford entry into a program and that is the point.

The pay-to-play model will eventually kill soccer in our country.
The country of Wales has a FIFA world ranking of 14th and the US is 28th.
Wales is slightly smaller than New Jersey but with a third of the population yet still manages to field a better national team than us.

Trinidad-Tabago is a small island nation with a population of about a million yet they beat us yesterday.

Seriously, we are doing it wrong and if we don’t figure out a better way forward than soccer will wither and die here

Is to restructure the game in the USA so that the league promotes and demote based upon merit.

Do it like the rest of the world...

in other countries, their best athletes play futbol. Here, our best athletes play football and basketball. Where are our enforcers on defense? Where are our 6'5" players who should be winning every corner kick in the air? Germany has them. Brazil, no, but they have players whose lives are devoted to futbol and who have been playing from the time they could run. And we all remember what Germany did to Brazil last time. Their technicians, dispassionate and skilled, played as a team, contested every ball, and destroyed Brazil.

In Brazil.