Nobody wants to say it, but Jurgen Klinsmann was right (for all of his faults) - our development system is holding us back from being true contenders on the world stage. And nobody - from all of the YMCA programs at the bottom all the way up to USSF at the top (I am pretty sure I spelled the acronym wrong) and everything in between has no motivation to change it because there is so much money to be made by keeping the status quo. It's kind of like Texas athletics - sure, they want to win NCAA championships, and they do compete for them, but so much money can be made from that racket that nobody wants to rock that cradle.
If USA truly wants to compete for the World Cup, it's going to be painful. People are going to have to give up on milking soccer in the US for every dollar they can get out of it and truly start investing in it, with the knowledge that it will probably take decades before there's a ROI - in fact, they'd be investing not for themselves, but for the next generation. But the odds of that happening are pretty much nil because humans by nature are greedy and that would take far too many people being benevolent for something like that to ever work here.
