When the United States men's national team arrived in France for the 1998 World Cup, 16 of their 22-man squad were Major League Soccer players. That ratio was not coincidence. MLS had launched in 1996 as a condition of US Soccer's successful bid to host the 1994 tournament, and the league's early identity was bound tightly to the national team's fortunes.
The numbers that followed tell a more instructive story than any single result. According to the Guardian, the Americans started an MLS player an average of seven times per match across their three group-stage fixtures in France — a winless campaign, it should be noted, played out in a fractious atmosphere. By the 2002 tournament, which remains the programme's modern peak with a run to the quarter-finals, that average had fallen to 5.4 MLS starts per match. In 2006 it was 3.33; by 2010, two; and by Qatar in 2022, one.
The most telling detail in the Guardian's account concerns the final group-stage match against Iran at that 2022 tournament — the first time the United States had started no MLS players at a World Cup since the league's founding. A milestone, of a kind, though not the sort that any league communications department would choose to publicise.
What that drift reflects, the Guardian argues, is less a failure of MLS than a consequence of its own developmental success. The league's increasing emphasis on youth academies and homegrown pathways has helped produce a generation of players good enough to attract European clubs at an early age. Those players then spend their formative years — and, in most cases, their peak years — in England, Germany, Spain, or Portugal rather than in the United States. MLS, in this reading, has become less a home for the national team's best and more a conveyor belt feeding leagues elsewhere.
For this summer's tournament on home soil, the USMNT will again arrive with a squad drawn largely from abroad. The context is different from 1998 in almost every respect: the league is older, wealthier, and more technically sophisticated, and the players it has helped develop are competing at the highest levels of the European game. Whether that represents a satisfying return on three decades of investment will depend on what the national team does once the fixtures begin.