No Olympics, No World Cup, No Olympics

For the third straight Olympics and fourth time in the last five Games, the U.S. men's soccer team won't be participating in the Olympic tournament.  If they don't qualify for the Paris Games, they'll have gone a full 20 years between Olympic appearances.  Of course, the Olympic men's soccer tournament isn't nearly as important as the World Cup, but that streak is still concerning.

In fact, I'd be willing to say that the failure to qualify for Tokyo is as close to rock bottom as things could be for the U.S. Men's National Team program right now.  Because the U.S. is and should be better than this.  But now, after the embarrassment of missing the 2018 World Cup, missing out an yet another Olympic tournament means that the U.S. men's team will go--at best--eight years without playing in a major global tournament.  That simply should not happen.

Qualifying for the Olympics out of CONCACAF isn't easy.  There are only two spots available, which means you need to win your semifinal at the qualifying tournament.  When you consider the countries in CONCACAF, you'd figure that unless something crazy happened, those two spots should go to Mexico and the U.S., the two strongest, best-financed nations in the region.

Yet in back-to-back Olympic cycles, the U.S. has lost that "win and you're in" game to Honduras.  In 216, there was at least a safety net.  The U.S. won the bronze medal game and a chance to face Colombia in a home-and-home playoff, which they subsequently lost.  But there was no such second chance for Tokyo.  The U.S. lost, and Honduras joined Mexico as CONCACAF's two representatives for the third straight Olympics.

Is failing to qualify for the Olympics an unmitigated disaster?  In most situations, no.  But when this was supposed to be your rebound after the disaster that was the 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign, it doesn't help.  Especially when you consider these are the guys who'll be on the Senior National Team very soon.  Some already are.

Granted, sometimes the players you want are unavailable for whatever reason.  The Olympic qualifying tournament didn't fall into a designated FIFA international window, so European clubs weren't required to release players.  However, that limitation affected every team in the tournament, and you'd figure it would be less of an issue for a nation with a much larger population and talent pool.  (Canada opted to use some of its age-eligible guys in World Cup qualifiers [against those juggernauts Bermuda and the Cayman Islands] instead of the OQT, but that wasn't a concern for the U.S., which doesn't enter World Cup qualifying until September.)

So, frankly, there's no way to sugar-coat this.  It was bad that the U.S. didn't qualify for the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, but that was written off because of the Senior National Team's success.  That all changed in 2018, though.  After the U.S. didn't qualify for the last World Cup, attention turned to Olympic qualifying, which would be a chance to showcase the future of the National Team, players who'd prove that was simply a blip.  Except that didn't happen.  All it did was lead to more questions.

There's really one big question that they failed to answer: What's wrong with the men's National Team program?  If these players are the future and they can't qualify for the Olympics, what does that say about the future of the National Team?  Because everybody else's senior National Teams are much better than their U-23 teams.  And you know they'd love nothing more than to knock off the proverbial "big dog."

It's not like they didn't know what was at stake, either.  That may be the bigger issue here.  The U.S. won its first two group games.  That's great, but all it did was guarantee them a spot in the semifinals.  They lost the final group game to Mexico, which was for seeding, but otherwise irrelevant.  It came down to one game against Honduras...and they got outplayed.

The same thing happened in 2016.  Twice!  They lost the semifinal to Honduras, then, after earning a draw in the first leg, lost the second game to Colombia and didn't go to Rio as a result.  It's not just the U-23's in Olympic qualifying, either.  All the Senior National Team needed was a draw in Trinidad in the final game of 2018 World Cup qualifying.  And they couldn't do it!

If these repeated failures has proven anything, it's that CONCACAF isn't the cakewalk many people think it should be.  In fact, I think in some ways it's harder for the U.S. because there are so many players to choose from and the team is constantly changing, while some of the smaller Caribbean and Central American teams come up together and have been playing with each other for years.

None of which is to make excuses.  If the United States wants to be taken seriously as a soccer nation that can compete with the top European and South American countries, they can't fail to get out of CONCACAF.  If you want to beat the best, you first need to qualify for the tournament.  Even though you're the "better" team, you can't take CONCACAF for granted.  I think that's exactly what's been happening, and it's what's led to these problems.

Since the Olympics is a U-23 tournament, it would be easy to write this off and look ahead to the World Cup.  That would be a mistake.  Because it just exacerbated the problem.  It made the absence of the U.S. at the 2018 World Cup even more glaring.  And it left us wondering if, instead of a momentary blip, it was the start of a trend.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this.  Maybe they are completely unrelated and the Senior National Team will indeed rebound and make the field for Qatar.  But we can't be certain of that.  In fact, with back-to-back missed Olympics on either side of a missed World Cup, the future of the U.S. Men's National Team has never looked more uncertain.