Winner of 15 straight Directors’ Cups in a country where college sports are not just big business but near professional, Stanford could well claim to be the biggest and best sports university on the planet.

It may not have the No. 1 football team, or the archetypal jock school, but having won at least one NCAA title for the last 34 seasons, it can definitely stake a claim to having performed at a consistently high level for longer than all of its current undergraduate students have been alive. Not to mention most of its graduate students and perhaps even a handful of its faculty.

In all this time it has been home to countless Olympians and professional athletes from all of the big-money sports. With all of this in the back of my mind, I was recently flicking through a copy of the Stanford magazine and came across an article about Ryan Nelsen ’01, who will be captaining New Zealand to their first World Cup in 28 years.

With such a storied athletic history behind it, it seemed natural to assume that ex-Stanford players must have represented their countries on the biggest stage. Endeavoring to write this column about these characters, I trawled my way through the Internet and contacted people in the Athletic Department to pick their brains. Official Stanford Athletics Archivist Jim Rutter was a great help, but what quickly became apparent, and was confirmed soon after by David Kiefer from Media Relations, was that Nelsen will be the first graduate of Stanford’s men’s soccer program to play in the World Cup.

Another Stanford graduate, Chad Marshall ’03, narrowly missed out in joining Nelsen at this year’s tournament when the U.S. Men’s National Team’s head coach cut his pre-tournament squad down from 30 to the official 23.

Other than this, the only real link Stanford has with the World Cup is that it hosted six games when the USA hosted the tournament in 1994. As Stanford was dropped from the short-list of possibly venues for the U.S. World Cup bids for both 2018 and 2022, the tournament won’t be returning to the Farm any time soon.

And so the greatest sports tournament on the planet and arguably the greatest sports school in the world remain effectively strangers.

I admit that I probably place a greater importance on this sport than it perhaps holds in the USA, but this is undeniably a big statistic.

Why this is the case comes down to a core difference between sport in the USA and elsewhere in the world, and though the power and wealth of the big four American sports cannot be ignored, it is not the principle reason for this divide.

Here, only a few professional athletes do not go to college; back home in the U.K. it is unheard of for a serious prospect in a big sport to go on to higher education. Promising soccer players are scooped up by the top clubs when they are barely into their teens, and the very best may well be playing in the biggest games and earning million-dollar salaries before they are even old enough to attend university.

As a result, college sports abroad are distinctly amateur, and, except perhaps in the core Olympic disciplines, none of the universities have the facilities to properly develop sporting talent.

Even here, of the 23-man USA squad heading to South Africa, eight did not attend university, and many of those that did left early to pursue club careers. Big European teams have phenomenal resources, money and power at their disposal, and, while no absolute guarantee of future success, it would be a brave kid who turned down the chance to develop at one of their academies.

This is epitomized by the fact that the entire men’s soccer roster at Stanford is American. The Cardinal, with all that it offers, is still not enough of an attraction for the best young international players.

Nelsen’s achievement, though, proves that Stanford can be a stepping stone to soccer success. Not only are the facilities superior to some smaller nations, but there may be particular positions on the field that could benefit from a longer development period.

Strikers are often at their exciting best when in their late teens or early 20s, but, at the opposite end of the field, the top goalkeepers are usually seasoned talent who need not just years of experience but also the intelligence and leadership to command their defensive lines with authority. An education from one of the world’s top academic universities offers the more cerebral players something that will make up for the delay in starting a professional career.

Only time will tell whether or not more Stanford players can make the leap from college to representing their country, but for now get ready to catch a little bit of Cardinal history this summer. Set your alarm clock for 4:30 a.m. on June 15, and watch Ryan Nelsen become the first Stanford player to take the field in a World Cup game as his New Zealand All Whites square off against Slovakia.

Next issue, Tom Taylor will go trawling for another Stanford-World Cup connection. E-mail him ideas at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.