SAN JOSE — It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
By year four of his professional career, Earthquakes midfielder Tommy Thompson was supposed to be an MLS star, a talisman for one of the best teams in the league, a generational playmaking machine, and a fixture on the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team’s roster.
That’s what you would have been led to believe when Thompson signed with the Earthquakes as the team’s first-ever homegrown player after one year at Indiana University.
Instead, Thompson has shown little more than flashes of that prodigious talent, more often with San Jose’s minor league affiliates than with the big-league club.