Hang in there, U.S. soccer fans. Your national team will dominate the world someday.

That’s been the message for around 40 years now, going back to when Kyle Rote Jr. was a superstar in the North American Soccer League.

He was also a superstar on "Superstars." Teenagers in the 1970s like me knew of him more as the perennial winner in the made-for-TV competition against top athletes in other sports than for his exploits on the pitch.

Older folks associated him with his father, an All-America football player at SMU who starred for the New York Giants in the 1950s.

Rote Jr. started playing soccer because of a football injury, and he eventually became the face of the sport in America.

Maybe today’s heightened concerns of concussions from football will eventually lead to a bigger pool of elite soccer talent and the national team benefits in four or eight years. Not that you can’t get concussed playing soccer, but parents fear it less than tackle football.

The narrative back in the ’70s was that a flock of great young athletes would follow the path of Rote Jr. and the U.S. would become a powerhouse in the world’s favorite sport.

Although soccer did become hugely popular among kids in this country as a recreational youth sport, for various reasons the greatest American athletes have stuck to football, basketball and baseball.

And now we have a team that enters play Monday in the World Cup that even its own coach says can’t win the championship. Many will be surprised if the U.S. can even survive the "Group of Death" that also includes Germany, Ghana and Portugal. The experts will tell you: America is in over its head in this pool.

The fact that the coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, is  German, is curious, perhaps telling. Shouldn’t we be at the point where the national team is coached by an American?

That’s a tough call, and it had to be one for Klinsmann to unceremoniously cut Landon Donovan, the most recognizable American player.

There will be plenty of knee-jerk reaction on whether that was a good move, starting with the opening match against nemesis Ghana (yes, Ghana, with its population of around 22 million compared  to the 313 million in the U.S. is our soccer rival).

But Klinsmann is clearly thinking ahead and, as the Doobie Brothers first sang back when Kyle Rote Jr. was still playing, "Trying hard to recreate what has yet to be created."

This building or rebuilding process includes a large segment of multinational players, seven of the 23.

I find it intriguing. But is it something that will inspire American athletic prodigies to focus on soccer?

When I was a kid, soccer was widely considered fun to play but not so much to watch — still a niche sport.

Now, MLS attendance figures and TV ratings and the U.S. team’s paradoxical stature indicate otherwise.

The interest is now there, but the talent has yet to arrive.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783. Read his blog at staradvertiser.com/quickreads.