If ever you feel despair about the future of American national soccer, wondering if any of us will live to see the Yanks win the World Cup … or get to the final … or semifinal … well, things could be far worse. You could be in China, wondering when your nation of 1.3 billion people will return to the final stage … of continental qualifying.

This is embarrassing, but China is out of qualifying for 2014. Already. For the second quadrennium running, China couldn’t even make the final 10 — in a continent (Asia) without 10 really good national teams.

What makes this infinitely worse for China?
Soccer is their national sport.

As we know, in the U.S., soccer is, what, the fifth-most-popular sport? Fourth, perhaps ahead of hockey? For sure, it is behind football, basketball and baseball.

China has those 1.3 billion people, a booming economy, they watch soccer all the time … and they can’t find 11 guys who can play. Not together, anyway.

China lost twice in their group to Iraq, a country of about 31 million people, with serious sectarian divides and a shattered economy, and will finish behind Jordan and Iraq. Only the top two get out of the group.

China has appeared at the World Cup only once, in 2002 (thanks, Bora Milutinovic!) and failed to score a goal in three defeats (to Brazil, Turkey and Costa Rica). But at least they were there.

In 2002, we all would have thought China would become a World Cup regular. It has not, and “why?” is asked a lot, especially in Asia.

One of the advantages of the Twitter era is electronically bumping into journalists and bloggers I might never have otherwise seen. In the UAE, where I cover a lot of domestic soccer, I search out and accept invitations to any and all serious tweeters of Asian soccer. It is a very big continent, and so much is going on, from South Korea to Lebanon and Australia.

One of the tweeters is known as WildEastFootbal … and he/she today reposted an analysis from last year that remains relevant, and helps explain the inexplicable — why China remains a football failure.

Here is the link to that blog entry.

If you didn’t follow it, the basics are these:

–Education is China is such a competitive and critical time of life that few parents are OK with their children spending a couple of hours per day doing something frivolous — like playing soccer.

–China, the author writes, has yet to solve sports that require group thinking and creativity, and soccer requires scads of both. To quote: “The sports China excels in, ping pong, badminton, diving, weightlifting, etc., are all sports that are focused on a repetitive motion. Practicing the same motions 1,000 times a day, day in day, out will perfect your skills and lead to success. Soccer doesn’t work that way, it isn’t possible to ‘teach’ the game in the same way.”

–The country has a cynical and worst-case-scenario approach to the game because of past failures and a long history of corruption, and the negativity is a weight on the entire sport.

Anyway … who knew? It’s possible to have 1.3 billion people, tons of money, modest continental competition, really care about the sport … and still suck at it.

And here is a random thought. Back when the U.S. really wasn’t any good at soccer, in the 1980s and earlier, serious people used to say it made the rest of the world wonder “what’s wrong with those guys?” because we didn’t care and weren’t any good at the global game.

Now, it’s China that isn’t any good. Hmm.

So, the next time the U.S. goes out in group play at the World Cup … buck up, U.S. soccer fans. You could be China.