The differences are jarring. The men's squad has struggled in comparison to the women's team, which has long dominated the sport and won four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals. They have historically struggled while playing the greatest teams in the world and failed to qualify for both the 2018 World Cup and the last three Olympics. How could a nation that is so strong in women's soccer and so dominant in other team sports for men be so far behind the rest of the world in men's soccer? In his book Switching Fields, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Dohrmann focuses his investigative attention on the system that the US uses to develop male football players, exploring why the nation has struggled for years to generate top talent. Yet instead of concentrating only on the past, he looks forward, connecting with coaches and players who are changing the way talented prospects are unearthed and developed: an American living in Japan who devised a new way for kids under five to be introduced to the game; a coach in Los Angeles who traveled to Spain and Argentina and returned with coaching methods that he used to school a team of future pros; a startup in San Francisco that has increased access for Latino players; an Arizona real estate developer whose grand experiment changed the way pro teams in the United States nurture talent.