I wrote a book about the last 40 years of US men’s soccer. Here is what I learned | Leander Schaerlaeckens

The mere notion that the United States men’s national team will enter this World Cup with a plausible chance of going on a deep run into the knockout stages represents something of a sporting miracle.

Consider that after the USMNT placed third at the 1930 World Cup – as one of just 13 countries to turn up, mind you – they were almost totally absent from the global stage for six decades. They kicked around the 1934 edition of the tournament just long enough to get smashed 7-1 by the hosts Italy in the first round. And they were there in 1950, stunning England 1-0 in the group stage, an all-time upset wedged around 3-1 and 5-2 losses to Spain and Chile, respectively.

From there, dark decades dawned. Between the 1954 and ’58 World Cup qualifying cycles, the Americans managed to lose their four matches to Mexico by a combined 20-3. They also lost 8-3 to a Canadian team that hadn’t played an official game in 30 years. In the 1950s and ’60s, the USMNT once went 11 years without winning a game. They played matches without a managers, or, possibly worse, with two coaches both under the impression they were in charge. They once lost their head coach and threatened to sue him for breach of contract, only to realize they had neglected to sign him to one. Before a qualifier for the 1974 World Cup, the US national team had to pull a man from the stands just to make up the numbers. Players routinely turned down call-ups, unbothered by the chaos and the $5-a-day per diems.

Things somehow got more embarrassing. In 1983, a perpetually broke and disorganized US Soccer Federation entered the USMNT into the crumbling North American Soccer League as Team America. But several leading national team players, such as they were, refused to leave their clubs for this bizarre experiment. Team America came dead last in the league, scoring the fewest goals by far. The team folded after one campaign.

Given the sum of the above, it’s remarkable that the Yanks managed to close the gap with much of the world, where the soccer scene never stopped evolving. But by 1990 they were back in the World Cup. By 2002, they were on the cusp of the semifinals. They went from the bumbling Team America calamity to producing a team that consistently reaches the World Cup knockout stages in three decades. And in the fourth decade, they may well have built a team capable of doing more. And they did it in a nation where other sports throw up more competition for athletic talent than anywhere else.

It’s easy to get lost in the quotidian swings of following a team, the ups and downs of competitions that never really end. Living through the rising and sagging fortunes of soaring fall runs and then deflating springs is the fun of it, after all. But when you get a chance to take the long view of it, as I did, another perspective emerges. I spent more than three years reporting and writing my new book, The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and its Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out on Tuesday. I dug deep into the USMNT’s history and found lots of things that surprised me even after covering the team closely for more than a decade and a half. I interviewed 150-odd players, coaches, and administrators, and heard stories never told publicly before, particularly as I profiled six leading national team players whose journeys aren’t as well understood as you would expect.

I wrote about Tyler Adams and the geographical obstacles that nearly killed off his nascent career, and his efforts to open up more of the player pipelines his younger self might have benefited from. About Matt Turner, and how it was possible that an entire nation of college coaches could overlook a future starting goalkeeper at the World Cup. And about Ricardo Pepi, whose internal tussle between his Mexican and American identities mirrors that of so many in the borderlands. About Antonee Robinson and the benefits that have accrued to the USMNT from globalization and, in the words of one coach, American imperialism. On Christian Pulisic and the abiding irony that the first true male mainstream soccer star in the United States wants nothing to do with his own fame. About Weston McKennie, and just how close he came to never making it to the professional ranks and how, had he been born just a few years earlier, likely wouldn’t have.

The birds-eye view lays bare the bigger trends, too. US Soccer’s habit of hiring the most qualified foreigner it can find (Alkis Panagoulias; Bora Milutinović; Jürgen Klinsmann; Mauricio Pochettino) whenever some kind of consensus takes hold that the incumbent American manager (Bob Gansler; Bob Bradley; Gregg Berhalter) isn’t quite up to it; only to then convince itself that, actually, its next manager must be American. Then there’s the tendency for the USMNT to have either very happy World Cup camps or quarrelsome ones, which, without fail, correspond to their success.

The USMNT’s story, in the end, is one of yearning and stumbling; momentum and disillusion; cohesion and dysfunction; flying batteries and bags of urine in Central American qualifiers; outsized personalities, brotherhood, betrayal, and punch-ups. An unshakable strangeness, and an almost imperceptibly slow yet unrelenting march up the global firmament.

Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on Tuesday. You can buy it here. He teaches at Marist University.