U.S. Soccer's image takes a beating from simultaneous crises, conflicts

For several years now, soccer has been riding the crest of its popularity in the United States. The sport seems to be getting bigger stateside, the wave looming larger as it washes over the sporting landscape.

TV ratings trend upward. Attendance for just about every kind of live soccer grows. Mainstream relevance builds. The national consciousness embraces. American cultures subsumes.

Yet all is not well at the United States Soccer Federation.

Very far from it.

While miles removed from its cash-strapped nadir of the 1980s – and, really, many decades before that – when it barely qualified for its designation as a governing body, U.S. Soccer presently has more simultaneous crises and conflicts roiling than at any prior point in its existence.

Which is all odd because the FBI and Department of Justice were instrumental in bringing down the corrupt upper crust of FIFA, setting the global game on its first wobbly steps on the path toward accountability and respectability. And in the wake of longtime FIFA despot Sepp Blatter's ouster, U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati proved the kingmaker in Gianni Infantino's election to the top job in the game. This, likely, will position the United States all that much better to host another World Cup at last – likely in 2026 – even if anti-American resentments linger in some far-off soccer federations.

But for its growing global influence, lately U.S. Soccer has hardly imposed order on its own house – the so-called Soccer House, in Chicago.

The issues are various.

The men's national team program is in chaos. The senior men's side faced a must-win World Cup qualifier in just its fourth game of the campaign – a full two years before the actual tournament in Russia – and had to spin and sell last week's win over a woeful Guatemala as some redemptive feat.

Last year, it failed to qualify for the Confederations Cup and had its worst showing at a Gold Cup in a decade and a half. The team itself, meanwhile, is an amorphous grab bag of old, inexperienced and unworthy, with desperately few reliable building blocks and a manager who doesn't look like he'd know how to build a team anyway. The clamor for Jurgen Klinsmann's dismissal hasn't abated much in spite of what he deemed a "statement" victory.

The Olympic under-23 team was hopelessly outclassed by Colombia on the same day and will miss the Summer Games for the third time in four cycles. The under-20 national team sometimes shows promise but didn't compete well at its most recent World Cup. And the under-17s missed their first World Cup in 2013 and then needed a playoff for the first time in 16 years in 2015.

But things with the men are rosy relative to the women's side.

Last summer's Women's World Cup winners, who are favored to win a fourth straight gold medal in Rio de Janeiro this summer, are embroiled in an increasingly ugly collective-bargaining agreement tussle with the federation. Their last deal, negotiated in 2006, expired in 2012. Since then, they have played under a memorandum of understanding with some updated terms. The sides are reportedly very far apart on a new deal. And the players contend that they have the right to go on strike if they don't come to terms, since there is no proper CBA to prevent them from doing so.

U.S. Soccer disagrees. And when the women, through their representative, wouldn't rule out a work stoppage, it moved to sue. The women then countersued.

Last week, the pressure was ratcheted up when, in the wake of their turf battle, the women filed a federal gender discrimination complaint against the USSF, citing the gap in pay between the women's and men's teams.

U.S. Soccer responded by arguing that there should be some correlation between the revenue driven by each team and their remuneration, and disputing the players' claim that they bring in more money than the men. In the court of public opinion, the federation is losing badly. If it also loses when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigates, it could eventually be forced to compensate the players with millions in back pay.

But even when U.S. Soccer wins, it loses.  Gender discrimination is a touchy subject. And because its argument that revenues and salaries should be linked somehow – a point made repeatedly by Gulati, as well as former men's star Landon Donovan on Twitter, for some inexplicable reason – is flawed, given that U.S. Soccer is technically a non-profit. And also because equal pay for equal work is the morally correct thing to strive for. (Revenues, in some ways, are a red herring, since the men's side has more infrastructure and a century of promotion behind it.)

Then, to rub salt into these many wounds, newly retired women's star Abby Wambach was charged with DUI early on Sunday morning. Wambach retired a few months ago, and therefore is no longer a U.S. Soccer employee, but she remains very vocal and public and is universally associated with the women's national team.

But as if that wasn't enough, two men's team regulars took to Twitter to mock her. Alejandro Bedoya took a swipe at her over a comment Wambach had previously made about her belief that national teamers should be natural-born Americans.

And Jozy Altidore then piled on by poking fun at women's goalkeeper Hope Solo, whose husband was charged with DUI last year while driving a women's national team van, with Solo in the passenger seat, also inebriated.

All this silliness suggests friction between the two national teams, whose "One Nation; one team" slogan has slowly devolved into a punch line. A long-time soccer columnist, meanwhile, who is a member of the federation's own Hall of Fame, likened it to the rallying cry of the Third Reich Nazi Party.

Oh, and Solo's domestic violence case was reopened in the fall.

So what gives? And of whose making is the morass U.S. Soccer finds itself stuck in?

It isn't necessarily anyone's fault. The federation probably hired the wrong manager, and then wrongly promoted him to technical director. That happens – that's sports. And feisty labor fights are an inherent part of collective bargaining in a professional environment.

The gender discrimination issue is murkier ground – the women are right to demand equality and fairness; just as the federation is correct in its assertion that its historic support for women's soccer is unmatched by any other country.

As for Wambach: People drink, and then sometimes drive. And sometimes other people stay stupid things on Twitter. (Bedoya was justified in calling Wambach out for her xenophobic comments, but to do so in the wake of her arrest was questionable.) While plainly wrong, there isn't a whole lot a federation can do about those things.

But taken collectively, these many blights are giving U.S. Soccer's image a beating. The optics are poor. And these many concurrent crises beg the question: Is the federation equipped to handle all of this?

As its sport has grown, the scope of its problems has inflated commensurately. Yet the federation has been slow to respond coherently or convincingly to several of the public black eyes it has suffered. If it has responded at all. (When Solo first faced assault charges, the USSF was agonizingly slow in explaining its decision to let her keep playing as the case played out.)

U.S. Soccer, now almost fully mature as a soccer federation, is an outfit that remains fairly bare-bones. And at the moment, it's appearing utterly overwhelmed.

On its most recent tax return, U.S. Soccer's mission is described like this: "To promote and govern soccer within the United States in order to make it the preeminent sport."

Demographically, soccer's continued ascension seems assured. But if the United States Soccer Federation is going to be the one to promote and govern it, it will need to learn from these problems and get ahead of them in the future.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.