Clint Dempsey and the U.S. team beat Costa Rica 1-0 in the snow last week. Getty Images

It's going to happen eventually. The U.S. men's national soccer team is going to stub all 10 of its toes in qualifying and miss out on a World Cup.

It's happened to former world champions England and France and Uruguay, and may happen to the U.S. this year.

And that might not be such a bad thing.

The U.S. team faces Mexico Tuesday (10:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, where it has never won a game in World Cup qualifying. A loss in Mexico would likely revive concerns that this side, which has been plagued with injuries, and which has struggled adapting to the approach of its new head coach, Jurgen Klinsmann, isn't good enough to make it through an increasingly competitive regional qualifying tournament.

After opening the 10-game qualifying campaign with an ugly loss in Honduras in February, the Americans came away with a 1-0 win in a Colorado blizzard Friday night against Costa Rica. This hardly warrants a declaration that the ship has been righted. (Costa Rica has filed a protest with FIFA, the sport's governing body, seeking to replay the game because of the snowy conditions.)

Failing to qualify for next year's World Cup in Brazil would be devastating for the U.S. soccer faithful who have watched their side play in every tournament since 1990. But in soccer there's a history of spectacular disappointment leading to spectacular turnaround.

"Failure triggers a reaction," said Andy Roxburgh, sporting director for the New York Red Bulls who formerly served as technical director for UEFA, European soccer's governing body. "When France or England or Germany or another country like that has a failure, they reflect and then they react."

Forgotten in the glow of France's World Cup triumph in 1998 is the country's failure to qualify for the tournament in 1994. That disappointment brought about dramatic changes in how France trained and developed players, a process led by Gerard Houllier, who is currently Roxburgh's boss as the head of global soccer for Red Bull.

Roxburgh said Houllier forced the French soccer establishment to focus more heavily on technical skills, even for elite players as young as 13. By the 1998 tournament, veteran stars had given way to a new generation, led by Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira.

In 2004 Klinsmann and his assistant coach, Joachim Loew, took over a Germany team that went winless at the European championship that year and remade a half-century of German strategy, producing a team that played proactively instead of reactively. Germany went on to reach the World Cup semifinals in 2006 and 2010 and the Euro final in 2008.

England failed to qualify for the 2008 Euro and subsequently hired Italian coach Fabio Capello. He was able to convince the Three Lions to break with their traditional 4-4-2 formation and play a far more attacking style. England went 9-1 during 2010 World Cup qualifying and led the continent in scoring.

Now Klinsmann is trying to transform the U.S. squad and is getting pushback at every turn. Landon Donovan, the team's longtime star midfielder, shows little interest in playing for the new coach. A crew of German-born U.S. players who now log substantial minutes for him (Tim Chandler, Jermaine Jones, Fabian Johnson, Danny Williams) are viewed skeptically.

Klinsmann benched longtime captain Carlos Bocanegra in February against Honduras, then dropped him from the roster last week. ESPN analyst and former U.S. national team player Taylor Twellman criticized the decision during the first minutes of the game against Costa Rica, even though Bocanegra, 33, is slowing and got beaten badly for the goal that sent the U.S. home from the 2010 World Cup. In an email Monday, Twellman wrote that Bocanegra's experience could be "invaluable during qualifying."

Klinsmann has argued that change is never easy, and that younger players, such as Bocanegra's replacement, Omar Gonzalez, deserve a chance to prove themselves.

"You only get experience if you play," Klinsmann said last week.

A win in Mexico would silence the critics, but Klinsmann's larger problem may be that he took over the team when no major crisis existed, when the U.S. had recently advanced beyond group play at the 2010 World Cup and made it to the Gold Cup final in 2011.

Truth is, there is probably no quick fix that will vault the U.S. from a second or third-tier soccer nation into the ranks of Spain and Germany. There are likely some terrific young teenage U.S. players, but they need to train differently under a more sophisticated group of youth coaches than currently exists.

Klinsmann is trying to usher in that process as he overhauls the U.S. roster. But to accomplish those goals, he may need a crisis of the sort that would cost him his job.

Write to Matthew Futterman at