Andres Cantor was born in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s and grew up rooting for the World Cup-winning sides of Mario Kempes and later Diego Maradona.

After moving to the United States and attending the University of Southern California, he went into broadcasting and eventually became the authoritative voice of Spanish-language soccer broadcasting in the United States, first for Univision and later Telemundo.

He was on the call for the United States’ 1994 World Cup upset of Colombia and Landon Donovan’s famous 2010 goal against Algeria. And he was on the call on Sunday night, when the United States gave its worst World Cup performance that anyone can remember in a 4-1 defeat to a talented but beatable Belgium side before a stadium packed with U.S. fans in Seattle.

Not long after, he took to X (formerly Twitter) to give his thoughts on the performance. The first word he used to describe it? Disgraceful. It was an acknowledgement not of the outcome of elimination, but the quality of the effort.

It is vitally important for the future of U.S. soccer that voices like Cantor, who know both U.S. soccer and the world game intimately, are amplified during the autopsy process. Because there are too many other, less-informed pundits recycling old analyses about the gap between the United States and the rest of the world in talent development and sporting access.

Sure, those remain issues. They are also well-understood by pretty much everyone in the higher levels of U.S. soccer development by now. And the gaps are empirically far narrower than they once were. Player development in this country has come enormously far, with nearly all MLS clubs (and a few lower-tier pro soccer teams as well) operating free academies for elite talent and a direct pathway to the first-team for those good enough. Getting to that level is the harder part, and certainly does come with financial obstacles. But it’s more accessible certainly than a generation ago.

Primarily, this wasn’t about that. Instead, this loss and its humiliating nature in particular was fundamentally a failure of U.S. soccer’s self-congratulatory, inflationary and overly capitalistic culture. And until that is corrected, the on-field results will continue to be less than the sum of the parts.

A Talent Gap, But Not A Chasm

Yes, there was still a talent gap between the United States and Belgium, particularly in key areas of the back line and goalkeeping. But these were modest margins relative to the chasm that separated the USMNT and eventual world champions Brazil in their 1994 meeting at the same stage, or even the 2014 team that was eliminated by a better version of Belgium than this one.

According to Transfermarkt, arguably the world’s authority on the global player marketplace, the United States had the........

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