The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts

by Leander Schaerlaeckens

The gripping account of the U.S. men’s national soccer team’s winding saga from obscurity to the global stage as they stand on the brink of a seminal World Cup in 2026

For almost half a century, the U.S. men’s national team existed on the fringes of world soccer—out of sight, out of mind, and, more often than not, out of the World Cup. Between 1950 and 1990, the program toiled in irrelevance, a collection of part-timers playing before empty bleachers.

Then, things began to shift, and today’s U.S. men’s team is loaded with young and pedigreed talent, expected to make its mark at the 2026 World Cup. The story of this team’s rise to prominence is a dramatic journey, with setbacks, buffoonery, misunderstandings, glory, and a wide, eccentric, talented cast of characters. With unprecedented access to former and current national team players, coaches, and administrators, Schaerlaeckens traces the sport’s evolution in the U.S.—from its outsider status to its modern foothold—and the challenges that have shaped the men’s national team along the way. From systemic obstacles in youth development to an American sports culture that expects instant dominance, he explores why success has been elusive, and why that might finally be changing.

With insight, wit, and razor-sharp storytelling, The Long Game is an unforgettable look at the past, present, and uncertain future of American soccer— and the team that could redefine it all.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Soccer, History, Football, Historical

Kindle Edition

Published May 12, 2026

Reviews

[Michael Auth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this book since I heard the author appear on the scuffed podcast last spring, and it lived up to my expectations. I feel like this book was designed in a lab for me. Our national team has such an insane history. I didn’t know that for a brief period in the early 20s, the American League paid their players more than Europe’s leagues, and that soccer was more popular than (professional) football for a bit, before two competing federations destroyed each other, and then of course, the Great Depression came.

The Great Depression is also an accurate descriptor of the USMNT and the state of the sport in the country from WWII until the 90s. There was an 11 year winless streak in there, as well as a national team camp where 2 people claimed to be the head coach, and had to pull someone from the stands to make up the numbers once.

Throughout the book there are some really funny personalities on display, some of which you think owe their insanity to the time they come from. For example, the head coach during the ‘94 cycle didn’t let them drink water or stretch, cut the tongue off of a player’s cleats, and one time subbed Wynalda off immediately after he scored a goal because he felt the striker could’ve shot with his other foot. Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach during the ‘14 and large parts of the ‘18 qualifying cycle, was equally hilarious.

But then at the very end, the book surprises you by profiling the current manager’s (Poch) own hilarious backstory and beliefs, somehow more ridiculous than his predecessors. He keeps lemons around him because he believes they suck up and remove bad energy, which he has developed the ability to see and manipulate.

I definitely have more appreciation for the state of US Soccer than before reading the book, and hopefully this time around as World Cup hosts we have a similar soccer boom as in 1994.

[David Auth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well researched and organized book. Really difficult to blend sports, history, and stories about current players without it feeling too jumpy or getting boring but Schaerlaeckens really does a phenomenal job in this. I enjoyed the part about Poch at the end, he sounds genuinely insane but I guess you can’t argue with results (if we get grouped next month I am going to KMS).

[Reverenddave]

After all the nonsense in America right now had diminished my enthusiasm for this summer’s tourney, The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts really did a lot to restore my excitement for the upcoming World Cup. The book moves efficiently through the different “cup eras,” giving insight into the team dynamics, coaching approaches, and the expectations (or lack thereof) for the teams. At times I wanted more detail – usually on the eras that I have the most memories of – but it also means that the book never felt bogged down when discussing eras I have no memory of or connection to. The book mixes into this capsule bios of players likely to feature this summer. I liked them, they definitely filled in backstories and details about the players I didn’t know and got me more interested in some that Ive perhaps yelled at on the tv screen, but they do make the book feel very anchored in the moment. It makes for a great book to read in advance of and around the 2026 World Cup, but I do wonder how well that part of the book will age even as soon as the next cup. All in all, excellent read for USMNT fans.

(NetGalley provided a copy of this book for review.)

[Phillip Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got to read The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and It’s Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts by Leander Schaerlaeckens. I’ll be honest with you, I learned a lot more than I thought I was going to from this book. It’s worth a read.

Thank you Netgalley and Viking for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Great insight into teams past.
While I have admittedly fallen from my peak of soccer knowledge, I still went into this book thinking that I would learn a little bit but know most of what was being discussed. I’m pleased to say that I learned a lot in this book.

One of the best things that Leander does is get a lot of former players on the record, discussing pretty heavy things around the program over the last few decades. There were several perspectives that I’d never heard before, and it really helps shape how I feel about some events.

The Klinsmann of it all.
I loved the absolute vindication that I felt reading the stories about Jurgen Klinsmann. The big fraud was exposed as a charlatan who didn’t know what he was doing. It was glorious to me personally, because it meant that I was right all along.

The details that Leander went into in this book were staggering. It’s a must-read is only for all of the anecdotes about the Klinsmann era and how awful it was.

I really hope Claudio Reyna continues to be kept away from the sport.
When Leander dove into the 2022 World Cup ridiculousness that came from the Reyna family, I was stunned. I knew the main story: Gio Reyna didn’t get the playing time his parents wanted in Qatar, so they threw a fit. Tried to blackmail the federation and the coach (and longtime family friend) Gregg Berhalter. It was a mess.

Little did I know the revelation that Claudio Reyna regularly emailed the federation to complain over the years and things like Gio’s playing time. He would also go on sexist rants whenever he played in a game with a woman referee.

Keep that man away from that sport and all sports forever.

[Aaron White · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine this has to be the definitive book on the history of the U.S. Men's National Team program, with how in-depth it goes from a historical documentation perspective. I learned so much about the decades before I was old enough to start following soccer (90s), and understand better many of the reasons which (in hindsight, of course) clearly have contributed to the U.S. taking longer than it should to become majorly competitive at the international level. I also really enjoyed some of the current star player profiles. Reading about how players like Adams and McKennie grew up, and into the roles they have now, elevated my fandom. The books has so many people that were interviewed and its full of amusing and insightful anecdotes.

Despite being a fairly lively and entertaining read, there are a good number of grammatical issues and a writing style that I often found myself frustrated by. Sometimes sentences will just stop and not finish a thought. And the structure in which the author bounces around almost comes off a stream of consciousness at times, less than having a very well-defined path of storytelling that makes sense and takes you on a consistently building journey. It's almost like a tale of two stories - there's the history and then there's the biographical pieces, and while I do like having both, they just don't always gel in a way that felt as cohesive as maybe it could have.

Regardless, I have to recommend this to anyone wanting to know about how the national team has progressed to where it is at the start of the 2026 World Cup, right as the Americans are looking strong and attempting to write a brand new chapter unlike any they've ever had before.

[Selah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know anything about the USMNT going into this, and almost nothing about the World Cup or the landscape of soccer globally going into this book. I picked it up from the library's ready to read section on a whim since the World Cup is here and my husband loves soccer. I love sports and wanted to get to know this sport better. This was fun to read, interesting, and informative on the inner workings of the USMNT world for the past almost 100 years. I liked the writing, the brief biographies on players between sections, the slow buildup to 2026, and the general breakdown of each era. I especially liked the overview of the USMNT coaches and their philosophies/approaches to soccer and coaching. For my American brain raised on gridiron football, as the writer calls it, it was very helpful. It's also been fun to bond with my husband and talk with him about it after each chapter. :)

[Kyle Foley · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

Whether or not you think you know about the history of the USMNT, read this.

My only (minor) knock is that the sections about current players being interspersed throughout the book threw off the flow. They were great, and I learned a ton the entire time, it was just slightly odd every time they popped up.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought from evil empire, since I can legitimately expense those purchases as research for my sports-and-society class.

Narratively, a lot of fun, with amazing stories about how marginal US soccer was for years, including the time someone turned down a chance at coaching the national team because he'd worked his way up to his desired full-time gig, as maitre d' at an SF restaurant, and didn't want to risk that much better job. The US is essentially an international joke until the 1990s, that one fluke win over England in 1950 aside, and then it's alternately doing better and worse than expected, as well as running through coaches. You could absolutely make a droll indie comedy about Jurgen Klinsmann's path to vibe-based coaching of the US national team for a couple of years, during which the team (let's be British) were doing pretty well, and then...weren't. At least US players are getting better, with some eventually becoming starters in top Euro leagues. So it's sort of like the US in soccer is akin to the Dominican Republic in baseball. We end on a questioning note, as Schaerlaeckens notes we've been here before--touted foreign coach is going to bring some essential outside-of-America...something to our national team, to help it make the leap, and maybe this time it will take. The storytelling is lively, and he's talked to scads of people and interviewed, he estimates, 150, so we get insider details about why, say, the 1998 and 2006 teams imploded, as well as a recent scandal I hadn't even clocked involving feuds between multiple generations of US stars and their sons.

Analytically/contextually, I wanted something more. Consider Jonathan Wilson's Anatomy of England, about how British soccer fortunes, and thus those of the nation, are perceived as rising or falling based on a key match. What's the plotline here? I don't think he's quite worked that out. In some sense, this is a defamiliarized story: US as underdog, underestimated by its own coaches at times as well as sneered at by Europeans and South Americans, and playing a brawny, muscular, unsutble style, something maybe more akin to what the 19th-century game was before rugby and association football grew apart than modern soccer. (I remember thinking something like this while watching the US v the Dutch in 2022--the passing was not quite crisp enough to break the Dutch defense.) Which is weird, right, given the US's unquestioned global power.

Is this a story of inefficient resource allocation that we need Malcolm Gladwell to rip off someone else's research to explain, tendentiously? Should the US be doing better than it has? Or is it something where we still have essentially not devoted commensurate resources to success, and so the general mid-ness of US results is entirely predictable in a sport where 92% of club results (as noted in the last edition of Soccernomics) are attributable to payroll? Not to mention the thinness of the developmental pipeline here as compared to Europe's. (Though what's the correlation with World-Cup results, since those teams spend much, much less time practicing? Apparently Transfermarkt ratings are considered a solid proxy for quality for national teams, so maybe we're back at payroll.) Or is avoiding a US-exceptionalist model the answer? Italy has missed the last three World Cups, and England and France both missed in 1994. Wilson's whole book explores 70+years of continuous hysterical reactions whenever England doesn't do well. In other words, could the plotline be, welcome to the rest of the world's experience?

The player biographies interspersed with the team narrative start out strong (Tyler Adams and Ricardo Pepi are both interesting stories, and for Pepi Schaerlaeckens notes FIFA's schizophrenic and anxious relation to the Spanish-speaking presence in the US, such that many national-team home games against Mexico are located in very white, very northern cities to avoid the problem of 3/4 of the stands cheering for the visitors, which also points to the federation's alienation from players from Spanish-speaking households--he smartly notes that the US is gerrymandering a fan base away) and then lose focus, with the chapter on Christian Pulisic, which I assume is in there because he's the most famous member of the team, a particular challenge due to his lack of interest in public speaking. Side notes in other chapters point to this team as Trump's nightmare in particular, with players like Folarin Balogun, who scored two goals in the US opener against Paraguay, born in Brooklyn literally while his parents were visiting and later choosing the US from among a range of countries he could represent, a basic story shared by several teammates. (In that light, a pungent irony is that many of these players chose the US because their route to the starting XI was immediate, rather than being blocked by better, or equally good, players in the other countries they could represent.) We are still a backwater.

So, very much a first-draft-of-history take. Which I enjoyed, though I needed more.

[G Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are an American and you want to read a book before the World Cup starts, you MUST read this book. This love letter to American soccer history tells an incredibly well-paced account of the history of soccer in America from inception to present with just enough emphasis on the so-called "modern era" of American soccer which started in 1990.

There will be no dearth of books on soccer published in the run up to this coming World Cup -I've already read and reviewed a few of them- but at present, I can say with a good deal of confidence that this is the best one being published about American soccer. If you are a novice who knows nothing about American soccer, but eager to learn, you will get a "just the good bits" history of soccer in the US, some player profiles on some of our best currently active players (the bit on Antonee "Jedi" Robinson is a particular standout that reads less like a character profile, and more like a delightful short story), behind the scenes bits of our recent history, and all of it told with an incredibly pointed narrative.

Without embellishing the narrative (though he occasionally gets a little prosaic), Schaerlaeckens is able to recount the history of American soccer not as a history, but as a story that seems to inexorably lead us to our current moment. The framing of every metaphorical brick laid to get us to our present moment is such that even in the midst of so much evil surrounding this World Cup, I was getting excited all over again. When you live soccer fandom everyday, it can be easy to get too in your feelings about the state of the program. But taking the macro-view as Schaerlaeckens puts it in the closing pages of his book, you see a program that has made consistent and persistent progress to become a true footballing nation.

For novices, this is history, for true believers, this is church. The Long Game is the perfect book for American soccer fans to read in the run up to the 2026 World Cup.

[Peter Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been a fan of the US men's soccer team since we hosted the World Cup back in 1994. I always try to explain to non-Americans or non-soccer fans that it provides me an opportunity as an American to root for a national team that is more David than the Goliaths we have in other sports. So reading about our fractured and mostly underperforming history on the men's side was a pleasure as well as illuminating. It's odd to me that we placed 3rd in the 1930 World Cup, beat England in 1950, and then basically abandoned the sport for 40 years. Things have changed drastically from when I was a kid when it was almost verboten to mention the sport to now where it's more accepted although not at the level of most of the rest of the world. The author explains those lean years and has more than enough drama since 1994 to flesh out an entertaining history of the squad. My hopes for 2026 are modest as progress since the last World Cup has been excruciatingly slow, but the overall journey makes for a great read.

[Jeff Rueter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never before has someone so thoroughly chronicled the United States men's national team, recapping not just the results but the context and the characters at the heart of this program's fits and starts. Even someone so deeply entrenched in American soccer is bound to find plenty of fresh tales and hilarity, while preserving rapidly fading chronicles of the pre-war days where soccer stood a chance nationally.

Leander handles this with his typical masterful grasp of his prose, keeping what a lesser author may have compiled into one coherent narrative from the start to the last. It's an impressive work, and one I'm bound to revisit over the years. Must-read before, during, and after the 2026 World Cup.

[Ben Leeds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m admittedly a USMNT casual, but I really enjoyed this. It was phenomenally pieced together to intertwine this year’s World Cup squad with the rollercoaster of past World Cup cycles as well as the state of soccer in the United States as a whole. I was wowed by the dedicated research too — some of the facts and anecdotes almost seemed too absurd to be true, which gave parts of it a witty tone that I liked. Great job Leander!

[Vooh Eheve]

When FIFA chose America—a country without a rich domestic football culture—to host the World Cup in 1994, they changed the sport for ever. “The Long Game” describes the legacy of that tournament. Major League Soccer now attracts talent from all over the world, and the best American players are scouted by top European clubs. The success of the tournament in 1994 also encouraged FIFA to take the World Cup to East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

[Ryan Arbuthnot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good read and interesting insights

The strength of this book might be the history of the early years of US Soccer. Many stories and insights that I had never heard before about US Soccer’s earliest forays into international soccer. The section about the 94 team and Bora Milutinovic was also very good. I also really enjoyed the chapter on Weston McKennie. It was my favorite of the individual player profiles.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early history of the US men's soccer program was great but I felt the author getting a little over his skis trying to magic together a narrative as it got closer to the current day. Still a useful bit of context for things that happened well before I was born but a somewhat biased account in respect to the current day.

[Greg Tate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A (mostly) straightforward account of the history of the US Men’s National soccer team. Really well researched and well written, my only gripe was sometimes it felt like the timeline as presented was a bit convoluted or hard to follow. Overall minor quibble!

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is exactly what I needed to fully get me into the World Cup mood! I learned a lot that I didn't already know about the history of the USMNT. The sections talking about some of the current players felt more like fluff than anything, but the rest was incredibly fascinating.

[Jimmy Schiemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelent book. Mixes both history and soccer which I love. Is very critical of the US in terms of how soccer talents are developed (but more importantly why not more talent is developed!) excellent pre world cup read.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's never been a better telling of this history of this program. Not to mention the unprecedented access to the players and events that have led us to 2026. There's something in here for everyone - casual or diehard. Pick it up and join in!

[John Schorg · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's mostly OK as an overview of the history of the U.S. men's soccer team, but it doesn't spend as much time as you'd like on the fallow period where the sport disappeared from view. Might be worth it just for the stuff about Mauricio Pochettino and lemons...

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

🦶 It spent more time talking about the coaches than I would’ve liked, but for somebody, like me, who has barely any knowledge of the USMNT’s history and wants to learn quickly because of the World Cup: it’s a solid book.

[Kimberly Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing wasn’t very good (which is odd since he’s a journalist), but the information was super interesting. Although I should have read this before the US got knocked out of the World Cup, when there was still hope.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was an interesting and insightful read as we head into the World Cup next week.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[George Togman]

I spent $30 on Berhalter propaganda

[Eric Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid history, lesson on the development of men’s soccer in the United States. Factual and unbiased, and I enjoyed the snippets about current players on the roster.

[Nathaniel Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did I buy this book after Gio Reyna's trivela to open the World Cup? yes. Is my rating influenced by the US advancing to the knockout stage with a game to spare? Also yes.

[Leonard H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, recent history of US men's soccer and a preview of the current players. Perfect book to read while watching the World Cup.

[Corey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read and insightful to why the US soccer is where it currently is. Love seeing the progression currently in the World Cup

[Paul Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent history of men’s USA soccer