This has been a long time coming.
The United States’ elimination from the upcoming World Cup in Russia is an unmitigated disaster for soccer in this country. There are a ton of reasons why the next four to at least eight years is going to suck as an American soccer fan, most of which were laid out in this article by Kevin McCauley.
But while this is a nadir for the United States, it is absolutely deserved on every single level by every single person.
This is a system that was designed to fail, whose backers were blinded by obtuse loyalty regardless of faults and whose detractors were all too often focusing on the wrong things.