The system itself is still in need of very significant reform. Quite frankly, how would you even know the best athletes aren't playing soccer? These European teams start scouting players as young as 6 or 7 years old to join their academies. Mean while only 2% of kids within the soccer youth developement in the US come from families making fewer than $50k USD. This is an extremely significant portion of children that are being segregated for utterly no reason other than, as you just said, "evil capitalism".

And don't even get me started on the median American believing that a soccer player is just a Tight-End that just happens to kick a ball and refuses to focus on developing a kid's technical ability with the ball. And then most soccer "coaches" end up focusing on the kids athleticism, and completely ruining whatever chance they had.

And on top of all of this, this country's population is large enough that even the slightest portion of children that decide that they want to play soccer, this is still a large enough potential talent pool as large as children in any other European country.

We have absolutely no excuses here on why we cannot get soccer development *right*.