WHENEVER CONVERSATIONS ABOUT the development of American soccer players occur, they usually focus on the men’s side of the game and the efforts of United States’ men to gain parity with the elite footballing nations of the world: Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, etc.

After all, Americans like winners—plain and simple. And regardless of the fact that soccer is still relatively young in this country, U.S. fans want their team to be among the world’s best and want players who can compete with the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

In looking where the U.S. has fallen short, there’s no shortage of villains. Some criticize the U.S.’s byzantine youth set-up and gaps in player identification; some bemoan the lack of technical development and the scarcity of top-class coaches; and still others attack the short college season and NCAA restrictions on off-season training.

But surprisingly, the biggest problem with American player development is not on the men’s side of U.S. Soccer—which has grown by leaps and bounds over the past two decades. The real problem is the time bomb about to go off in the highly ranked U.S. women’s program.

As the United States women’s national team prepares for this summer’s World Cup, it boasts the most successful program in the history of the women’s game. The U.S. won the World Cup in 1991 and 1999 and won Olympic gold in 1996, 2004, 2008, and 2012. But many of the team’s stars—including Hope Solo, Ali Krieger, Carli Lloyd, Heather O’Reilly, and Abby Wambach—are well into their 30s, and the team’s captain, Christie Rampone, will turn 40 during this summer’s World Cup.

An even more telling sign of the squad’s increasingly dependence on aging veterans emerged this fall when head coach Jill Ellis determined she needed reinforcements to bulk up the team’s defense. Instead of pulling in the next young star, Ellis opted to recall 31-year-old Lori Chalupny and 37-year-old Shannon Boxx.

Youngsters in the U.S. women’s senior team set-up are increasingly rare and a clear gap has developed between the current, aging player pool and the team’s potential replacements.

So how did this gap develop?

For years, the unofficial mantra of American soccer has been “try hard, run fast”—and it’s one that has served the women’s program well. While that same mantra has led to irregular successes on the men’s side, it has been the backbone of the U.S. women’s victories for the better part of three decades. Built on a legion of players developed in the college ranks—a testament to the success of the controversial Title IX—the U.S. simply overpowered its opponents with advantages in speed, fitness, and experience.

Following the success of the team in the 1999 World Cup, which it won in dramatic fashion, the Women’s United Soccer Association became the first all-professional women’s soccer league in the world. It attracted some the world’s biggest stars but budgetary mismanagement forced it to fold in 2003.

Six years later the Women’s Professional Soccer began play in North America but due to financial pressures, and a looming legal fight with one of its own owners, WPS folded after three seasons.

Today, the U.S. is on its third top-tier professional league, the National Women’s Soccer League. It is receiving substantial financial and logistical support from U.S. Soccer (and help from the Canadian and Mexican federations), including subsidies for the salaries of many of the league’s top players. But even with that support from U.S. Soccer, the league is fighting a losing battle against nations like France (which thoroughly outplayed the U.S. women, 2-0, in a friendly this month) and Germany (which recently supplanted the U.S. women as the No. 1-ranked team in the world).

The NWSL had a 24-game schedule in 2014. At first glance, this compares favorably with Germany’s Frauen Bundesliga and France’s Division 1 Feminine—widely considered the two elite leagues in women’s soccer—which both play 22-game seasons. However, the NWSL season is remarkably short in calendar length and does not include the domestic or international cup competitions available in Europe—like the Coupe de France Feminine, the DFB Pokal Women, and the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

In terms of overall length, there is no comparison. In 2014, the NWSL season ran from mid-April to mid-August, a span of 131 days. The 2014-15 Frauen Bundesliga season will run for 254 days, while the 2014-15 Division 1 Feminine season will be 253 days long—giving players in Germany and France four more months of training and games than their American counterparts.

Additionally, many German and French clubs are supported by massive parent clubs such as Olympique Lyon, Paris Saint-Germain, Wolfsburg, and Bayern Munich. Some women’s leagues in Europe now even have second divisions and reserve sides.

For the U.S. to keep up it will need to improve radically—and quickly. Even Ellis admitted as much in a recent discussion about American player development when she said, “If we sit where we are, we’ll get run over.”

Over the years U.S. women’s national team players have proved remarkably resourceful in finding ways to train, and stay sharp, on their own. And the federation, for its part, has done an admirable job, helping break up long off-season stretches by scheduling many national team training camps and friendlies. But while the federation does so at great expense and with great effort—it simply is not going to be enough to keep the U.S. women among the top teams in the world.

While players on the U.S. squad have national team camps to keep them close to the top of their game in the off-season, they are not getting the same number of matches as their European counterparts. For example, in the six-week stretch between the U.S.’s game against Brazil in December and its loss to France in February, most players on France’s squad played between five and seven games for their club sides. Over that same stretch, no one on the U.S. squad played in a competitive match.

For players outside the U.S. national team player pool, the hurdles are even higher.

First are the financial constraints: Many NWSL players make so little money that they are forced to live with host families and get second jobs. And no matter how resourceful those players may be with their money- and time-management skills, they simply can’t replicate the environments of professional European clubs while training on their own. They also fall further behind those in the national team pool because those players are participating in off-season training camps.

The @BostonBreakers are still looking for host families for the 2015 season. Info in attached image. pic.twitter.com/9LC70nv8Ty

— NWSL News (@NWSLNews) February 25, 2015

Many players, unable to break into the national team pool and unable to make a living from the game, simply “retire” to take regular 9-to-5 jobs. Two Boston Breakers players, Jazmine Reeves and Courtney Jones, just retired at the ages of 22 and 24 to pursue careers in the business world. They joined two other high-profile retirees—Nikki Marshall, 26, and Colleen Williams, 23.

Williams explained her decision in an article for Top Drawer Soccer.

The sad truth of women’s professional soccer is that most of us continue to play not for the benefits that one would expect from being a ‘professional’ athlete, but because we’re addicted. There’s no million dollar signing bonus. No showy car, fancy jewelry, or huge mansions as a benefit of becoming a professional. We’re paid pathetically. We live with host families. We take buses on eight-hour trips. We’re equivalent in standards to minor league men’s professional sports.

Yet another #NWSL player opts to retire and take a "real" job -- the reality of female athletes: http://t.co/mpIBqsmVom (by @TheDanLauletta)

— Caitlin Murray (@caitlinmurr) January 29, 2015

Of course, the financial state of the women’s game is not anyone’s fault, per se. Until teams in the NSWL draw sufficiently large crowds, sell more merchandise, and secure a better television contract, things aren’t likely to change. And these types of financial constraints happen on the men’s side of the game as well (although to a far lesser degree). The difference is that many European women’s teams have the benefit of being supported by their larger, male-dominated parent clubs, and this reality puts the U.S. at a serious disadvantage.

When young American women give up the game early, it hurts the U.S. national team in a number of ways. First, the team misses out on any late bloomers, which may explain the U.S.’s lack of any established depth at goalkeeper or holding mid—two positions which take years to master. It also means that players coming from smaller colleges, which typically receive less exposure, have a much smaller window to get noticed.

One can’t help but wonder if a player like Christie Rampone, who played for Monmouth University, would even get noticed today. How many potentially great players has the national team missed out on over the past 10 years?

Second, the lack of ton-notch athletes willing to continue playing for peanuts means there are fewer players pushing the established national team veterans. This decreases the pressure on the current set of players and allows them to stay a part of the national team set-up even when they underperform.

Finally, some Americans are forced to leave the U.S. and seek opportunities abroad. While this has helped some players develop when there was no American professional league (Whitney Engen, Christen Press, and Meghan Klingenberg are three good examples), in the future it will only serve to weaken the U.S.’s domestic league, thus lowering the level of competition for the national team players in North America.

Two high-profile players in the NCAA’s 2015 class have chosen this path: North Carolina’s Satara Murray signed with Liverpool and Stanford’s Chioma Ubogagu is joining Arsenal.

For the players who do stay, their options are limited. Players like Erika Tymrak, Amber Brooks, Kealia Ohai, Jen Buczkowski, and Keelin Winters can’t break into the senior national team pool and are forced to spend a seven-month off-season training on their own. Some, like Yael Averbuch, spend their winters jet-setting around the globe playing on short-term loans wherever they can find work. (Brooks also went back to Germany for a stint with Bayern Munich after the 2014 NWSL season ended.)

The problem has become so pronounced that it is even now beginning to affect members of the national team. World Cup and Olympic veteran Rachel Van Hollebeke and upstart Kristie Mewis were both forced to go on loan to Japan in the fall to get games and stay fit when they weren’t included in the U.S.’s World Cup qualifying squad.

Little of this is the direct fault of U.S. Soccer, which financially supports the American professional league. The federation acknowledges that there is “a major development gap” and recently introduced a wide range of initiatives to improve player development. But the problem may have already outgrown the ability of the federation to fix it, especially when you consider that the current crop of 30-something national team stars will likely be retiring following the 2016 Olympics.

John D. Halloran is an American Soccer Now columnist. Follow him on Twitter.