The Problems that killed USMNT
The US Men’s soccer team lost a very winnable game against Trinidad and Tobago in 2017, if it were any other scenario it would be not a huge deal. However, the game was a crucial qualification game that the USA needed to draw or win in order to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia and they lost 2–1. It was a strange game in many ways, the USA seemed lethargic and struggled to create anything on the offensive end except for Pulisic, possibly the best American player ever. Against a team like Trinidad and Tobago, playing like this would be a little dangerous but not much to worry unless the USA scored an own goal like Omar Rodriguez did. Instantly it put the Bruce Arena team in a position where the team had to chase the game. The USA eventually lost 2–1 and did not make it to a major tournament for the first time in more than 30 years. It was embarassing for most Americans that their national team had failed to make the World Cup while an underdog like Panama qualified to play in Russia. Although this game was the nadir of the USMNT for the last four years since the last World Cup, the decline has been noticeable even though it has been masked by the skill of Christian Pulisic.
Pulisic is possibly one of the best talents in Europe, he has been developed by Borussia Dortmund to be the ideal modern winger. A player who is pacy, can dribble with the ball and make the right play in attacking situations. He is just 19 years old and shows flashes of maturity which is often rare for young talents. Most young wingers need time and experience to mould themselves into reliable attacking players that can be relied upon in high-pressure situations. Pulisic is already there as a winger and he definitely proved his worth for the US National Soccer team with seven goals and seven assists during the qualifying process for the World Cup. That being said the rest of the team also needs to improve in order to create an American team that can feasibly compete with the likes of Brazil or Germany.
The key problem for American players is the standard of the MLS, the league in which most American players play in. The MLS has become known for years as a retirement home for former top-class European footballers. Players such as Frank Lampard, Kaka and David Villa have all gone to America to continue playing football while making millions of dollars at the end of their prime. David Villa who is now 36 has scored seventy one goals in the MLS over the course of four years at New York City FC. He scored twenty two goals last season as he led NYCFC to the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals, a player whose prime was seven years ago.
I would argue that this is symptomatic of the MLS issues, it needs to attract European stars like Gerrard or Andrea Pirlo in order to sell tickets to fans who may not closely follow their local side but these particular players. This can mean that the standard of football is not as good as a league like the Bundesliga or La Liga which are similar in their player restrictions. The Bundesliga and La Liga only allowed three players who are not EU nationals, the aim of this is to develop young homegrown talent which is why Germany constantly churns out talented players like Timo Werner and Joshua Kimmich while Spain producing players like Asensio and Lucas Vasquez. This would work in the MLS if they had a better standard of coaching, they are a few very good coaches who are the exception to the rule like Patrick Vieria. Most of the MLS have come up through college athletics or are American ex-pros who have only known the traditional American style of football, the tough defence and counter-attacking style.
This type of football works in some ways, it is guaranteed to grind out draws and tight victories but it has a ceiling especially in terms of international football tournaments. In the last world cup in Brazil, America did fairly well and there was the infamous phone call with Obama congratulating Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey. But what a lot of people seemed to forget about that specific game was that America played Belgium and lost 2–1. The score line flattered US soccer, it took an otherwordly Tim Howard with 15 saves in order to keep the scoreline looking respectable. There was a clear ceiling, you cannot rely upon defence to beat teams like Germany or Argentina, players have to go forward and attack which is not in the American mindset.
The USMNT president, Sunil Gulati tried to change this problem but it is clear that he was stubborn and felt like he had to continue his vision otherwise he would be deemed a failure, he brought in Jurgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann is a renowned player and manager for his relentless work ethic and ability to keep an open mind. In many ways, Klinsmann was the perfect fit for the US soccer team for the fact he lived in America and made efforts to understand the collegiate athletics system and also how soccer academies worked in the USA. However, a perfect fit in terms of what the team should play like is not necessarily the reality.
Klinsmann did not have one particular according to senior players within the team like Jermaine Jones and he did not know how to manage the players in terms of temperament especially when it came to selecting his final 23-man squad. The selection of players to take to the world cup is always a contentious issues, decisions relating to certain players will always cause some loss in morale and criticism from the press. However, Klinsmann’s approach left a lot to be desired. When he managed Germany to the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2006, he took the captaincy off veteran goalkeeper in an unceremonious fashion. For the USA, it seemed as if Klinsmann had learnt his lesson from his previous jobs with Bayern Munich and Germany until a certain moment in 2014.
Jurgen Klinsmann chose not to take Landon Donovan to the 2014 World Cup, America’s most decorated football player ever. The decision not to take Donovan is purely a choice of personal preference but it was the way he delivered the news. He set a date to announce the squad but instead he told players earlier in an abrupt fashion, in his mind it was that ‘you are not good enough and will not be picked’. This does not work in football, it is a human sport, you must treat players with a degree of professionalism. With one single act, Klinsmann created tension within the dressing room and divide between the manager and the players which eventually led to him losing the dressing room.
That being said despite Klinsmann’s faults as a football manager, he did lead the USA to the Last 16 of the World Cup and found the future of the US Soccer team in the form of Pulisic. He also tried to create a new culture in which players were pushed out of their comfort zone with a Silicon Valley style ruthlessness. That was one of his only successes, he did not know how to take a side that is less talented than a better international side and negate the talent difference with tactical nous.
Many people do not believe that a team can be set up in international competition in order to overcome the gap in talent but recent examples have proved this theory wrong. A team like Iceland which had just one Premier League player managed to get out of the group and make it to the quarter-fnals, knocking out an English team that had very good players like Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy. Iceland managed to achieve this by playing a smothering sort of defences that prevented all England attacks which eventually broke the spirit of England’s players. This success is obviously not a one-off as they qualified for the 2018 World Cup and have the possibility to be a giant killer.
Team USA under Klinsmann did not embrace the tactical side of the game. In a The Ringer article that has been published recently, Kyle Martino, a respected figure within US soccer stated that a training session he observed was ‘incongurous’. This type of attitude towards tactics was not wholly unusual for Klinsmann as Philipp Lahm stated that the ‘tactical things were neglected’ while fitness was prioritised. This may work at a club like Bayern Munich where there are talented players who can be relied upon to work things out of for themselves but for a side who Klinsmann would see infrequently, it was disastrous.
Respected members of the dressing room like Landon Donovan or Carlos Bocanegra who could have challenged this incoherent style of coaching were pushed out of the USMNT set-up. Klinsmann was ruthless to the point of paranoia and it meant that he often perservered with sessions that did not make any sense which was ill-advised when he was integratung new players into the US soccer set-up.
Jurgen Klinsmann was a skilled recruiter and brought in players like John Brooks, Fabian Johnson and Christian Pulisic, players who could have feasbily chosen to play for Germany but were swayed by Klinsmann’s appeal. That being said bringing in new players who are unaccustomed to their team-mates means that there will be teething issues, the chemistry won’t be there between team-mates. This cost them on a footballing side very little in the short-term but in the long-term it was more impactful.
The players he brought in had grown up in Europe and had played football abroad for the majority of their lives, they were not the prototypical ‘homegrown’ star that many of the American media pined for. The existing players obviously felt threatened by the new talent but there was some more unsavoury undertones.
Anonymous players who were established veterans for USMNT seemed to believe that Klinsmann was partial to German-American players as he was a German himself, they did not acknowledge that these players were skilled footballers in their own right and bringing them into the set-up was a pragmatic move that any American coach would have done. Bruce Arena in his short stint with the US national team in 2016–17 utilised these players to maximum effect as he attempted to mastermind a comeback that would drag America into the World Cup.
However, Arena also missed the point in terms of footballing culture, he set the team back to the same defensive, conservative style which did mean that America experienced the expected ‘fired-manager bounce’ as they won crucial fixtures and beat a very good Honduras side 6–0. He got the results he needed and managed to beat Panama 4–0 thanks to a Jozy Altidore brace. But he made a serious coaching error four days later against Trinidad and Tobago.
It is common for coaches to rotate players when they are playing two games in a short space of team, most European managers do this all time as they juggle domestic competitions and competing in the league. Arena chose not to rotate the side and fielded the same side which had played against Panama four days earlier. It meant that the players were lethargic and energy needed to play a tight defensive style was simply not there.
The Omar Gonzalez own goal was a simple mistake but it would be a hell of a lot less likely if Gonzalez was fresh and had a lot of energy. Arena also messed up on a tactical front, against a team like Trinidad and Tobago, you can not simply sit off them and expect to defend for ninety minutes. In any game of football, you can’t do that as it gives the opponent hope that they can break your team down and eventually mistakes will be made, runs will not be tracked and the opponent’s creative players find space to operate.
USA should have at least had a period of possession in the first half in which they controlled the ball and forced Trinidad and Tobago to chase the ball down. The other key tactical error is that the USA did not understood that grinding out a 0–0 draw is a fairly dangerous tactic. If the other team scores, the American players would have to chase the game and play more risky football which could open them up much more. To grind out a 0–0 draw in the most low-risk manner, a team has to control possession and tire the other team out. Bruce Arena set up his fatigued side in the opposite way.
The problems do not solely rely with the coaches, it also stems from the top management, mainly the leadership of Sunil Gulati. Gulati is a fixture of US soccer, he has been involved in the United States Soccer Federation and is largely responsible from taking the federation from being fairly amateurish to a professional organisation that had paid employees and consistently invested in the infrastructure of US Soccer. However, Gulati was apparently ‘stubborn’ with his decision to continue with a coach who had destroyed the culture of US Men’s Soccer. Gulati refused to see the faults that existed in Jurgen Klinsmann’s tenure as USA national coach in the hope America would pull off an upset at the next big international tournament and his reputation would be increased. He needed to listen to senior players like Clint Dempsey much earlier along with other key management figures like Richard Groff who disagreed with what Jurgen Klinsmann was doing as manager. Gulati did eventually listen but by that point it was much too late, a manager like Bruce Arena cannot turn around an international side in just under a year.
Sunil Gulati also made the crucial mistake of providing concessions to Jurgen Klinsmann in the form of total control over player recruitment and the training of the international squad. In many ways, he gave Klinsmann the keys as he grew the game in America and served as a member on the FIFA council under Sepp Blatter and then Gianni Infanntino. This strategy may work with a coach like Arsene Wenger who can deal with the different layers of the club but for a control-freak like Klinsmann who acted purely on whims, it did not work. Klinsmann had autonomy and set about destroying the team’s culture without any oversight from the most important man in the United States Soccer Federation. It also did not help that Gulati had a strong affinity personally for the charismatic Klinsmann, there really should have been a panel of coaches and officials who came to a consensus on what coach should have been appointed.
This was a cocktail of small problems that led to creating huge issues within the US Men’s National Soccer Team. There was a paranoid and somewhat tactically inept coach, there was a very stubborn team president and also the last key factor in the downfall of the USMNT which was the coaching structure in America as a whole.
The American soccer structure is completely different to most other football-playing nations. From the age of nine or ten, most football clubs will take in young players in the hope of moulding them into being professional footballers. Now, it is true that most football players will not reach the international stage or play in the Champions League Final but that is the reason that teams such as Ajax, Southampton and Monaco take it so many youngsters which they have scouted and then developed into talented players.
In America, it is likley that an athletic kid will not play soccer as their first sport, they would probably play something like American football, basketball or baseball due to the fact the MLS is not as visible in comparison to organisations like the National Football League or the National Basketball Association. They will not fully dedicate all of their time to getting better as a football player and therefore do not reach the same sort of technical stnadrad that exists in South America or in Europe for that matter.
The clear fix to this problem was the US Soccer Federation putting together the type of grass-roots infrastructure that bring a new technical ability to American youngsters and create better players than what has existed in the past. However, Jurgen Klinsmann who was heavily involved in the youth set-up for American soccer and he neglected that side of management. He purely focused on learning new ideas and integrating these ideas in a scattershot fashion into the senior set-up.
By completely neglecting that side of the game, Klinsmann essentially shot himself in the foot, it meant that he did not have many youngsters who he could bring through and start to play football in a manner like a Barcelona or Real Madrid. It was Gulati’s fault that he did not have proper checks and balances on a coach who is fairly green and known for being a little unpredictable. The final portion of blame lies with the MLS. The MLS has a league that is distinctly uncompetitive to competitive league like the Premier League or the Bundesliga, the MLS does not stack up on a sheer quality standpoint. There may be have large scale changes in the last few years but developing coaching across America will take time and rushed decisions will not work.
It is likely that the US Men National Soccer Team will make it to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, they have a team that does not have any division and a football federation behind them that is not fractured and will make smart decisions. The Klinsmann experiment was largely a failure but experiments within football should not be discouraged especially in the case of the USA, they need innovation in order to level the playing field. The reliance on veteran players who are the wrong side of thirty and coaches like Arena can only take you so far. The USMNT needs a coach who has a clear vision and ways to achieve this style of play, the coach would preferably have some club football experience in Europe and will have won major trophies on a club or international level. A manager like Del Bosque or Roberto Mancini would be great appointments as both men have both proved their worth as managers and have the necessary experience to guide teams deep into competitions.
