As the US ready to hire a new manager, it’s fashionable- and fair- to discuss whether they’ll finally adopt a style of play.
By Sanjay Sujanthakumar
Earnie Stewart is edging closer to hiring the next USMNT coach, but the pool of candidates appears regrettably shallow.
Oscar Pareja denied a report he was interviewed for the job. RB Leipzig assistant Jesse Marsch seems set on challenging himself in Europe for a while. Marsch – an assistant under Bob Bradley for the MNT – also took issue with how US Soccer sacked Bradley in 2011. Today, Bradley is the most qualified American MLS manager but forgotten or ignored in this conversation, and he might not want to leave LAFC anyway. U-20 coach and youth technical director Tab Ramos isn’t in the running. Peter Vermes told Tony Meola and Brian Dunseth on SiriusXM FC that after an “informal” conversation with Dan Flynn before the summer, US Soccer hasn’t followed up with him.
Stewart started his role as the first ever US men’s general manager by constructing the “profile” for the next MNT boss, and according to Paul Tenorio of The Athletic, that process included consulting “several people with significant ties to the national team.”
In recent interviews, a variety of American soccer luminaries have also weighed in.
Landon Donovan said “‘my preference is someone who knows the league [MLS] and knows American players – so an American coach in the league or coach who’s coached in the league would be the preference.’” Steve Cherundolo said, “‘I think it’s important that the coach understands how MLS works, and also knows his way around Europe… I would like to see Earnie hire someone who understands the American mentality, somebody who knows how to grind out results in CONCACAF. That’s what the national team needs right now. We need to qualify for the World Cup.’” Claudio Reyna echoed his former teammate Cherundolo’s sentiment, stressing on SI’s Planet Futbol TV that getting results – not style of play- is of paramount importance. Of course, navigating the waters between the two is the eternal dilemma for a coach in this sport.
In the context of failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, an emphasis on results over substance makes sense.
Considering the expansion to a 48 team tournament after Qatar 2022, this will probably be the last cycle where not qualifying is even remotely possible. But is that what we’re actually worried about, and what’s guiding Stewart’s decision? Discussing the overall direction of the program at The Athletic, Peter Vermes asked, “‘Where do we want to be? Who do we want to be?’ If your only objective is to qualify for the World Cup, then just a hire a head coach. Just fucking hire anybody. You go hire a soccer coach, he can qualify the team for a World Cup, he can. But that’s not making any advancements.’”
Jurgen Klinsmann was supposed to launch the USMNT to a level where they could compete with the best teams in the world while playing “proactive, attacking” soccer. That didn’t happen. And now here we are, a myriad of soccer communities in a land of 330 million faced with this question and entangled in this debate yet again, after a World Cup where a country of about 330 thousand qualified from Europe and a country of about 4 million – nearly equal to the population of Oregon – reached the final.
Klinsmann was far from perfect, but even Pep Guardiola couldn’t have pulled that off given the US player pool then. Or now.
Reyna admitted, “At the moment we’re slightly limited… we have a lot of talent in the younger ages but at the same time, if we’re honest, there seems to be a lack of national team players in core peak ages.”
Where the pool will be in four years is rather unpredictable.
But it’s already clear that there is a new, promising generation of American players – even beyond the foundation laid in the last year of Miazga, Adams, McKennie, Weah and Sargent – that is heading to Europe in unprecedented numbers as early as they can (Reyna’s son Gio, Richie Ledezma, Ulysses Llanez, Alex Mendez, on-loan Chris Richards, the list goes on) or aspiring to, springboarded by MLS (Gianluca Busio, Andrew Carleton, Chris Durkin, etc.). Klinsmann, who irritated Don Garber and MLS owners in urging players to make this jump and remain in Europe, would be delighted. In the aftermath of the Catastrophe in Couva, Geoff Cameron reiterated Klinsmann’s vision in a piece at The Player’s Tribune: “Our best young players need to be playing in the top European leagues. Period. It shouldn’t be looked at as a negative thing… Even better if they came up in MLS for a few years.”
Cameron, who played four years of college soccer, is probably the last of a dying breed of MNTers. It’s been more than a decade since the Development Academy was formed. The trajectory of the career of an American player has evolved and so has the player itself (even off the field… Alexi Lalas played the guitar, not Fortnite). What hasn’t changed much is the perpetual sense that we are stuck at a crossroads of what exactly constitutes American soccer identity.
Will the US play a counterattacking or more possession-based style? There is no doubt about what cannot be lost on the kids – or what must be regained – from the editions of the MNT that Donovan, Cherundolo, and Reyna were a part of. The US must again become difficult to play against. To that point, Donovan said, “… we’ve had a spirit that has kind of defined our style and it’s the one thing countries have always said about us, that they hate playing the Americans because of that spirit, and that ability to keep going. We don’t get down when we get scored on. Mentally, we’re very tough. From a psychological standpoint, that’s a style that we should in my opinion always carry with us.”
The US were once a model of grit and the value of being difficult to play against. That stopped in the 2018 World Cup cycle.
That was lost in the 2017 Hex failure. Jorge Luis Pinto, who spent the last cycle managing a Honduran side in transition, told TYAC:
“The Americans were very difficult to contend with in the first game under Arena. They pressured the ball and played confidently and attacked. They were a different team months later, and in the worst sense. They looked tired, unimaginative, out of ideas. The back four were very static, hardly moving. They had very few ideas. Only a couple of the players- Wood, Pulisic, Bradley– seemed at all invested in outcomes. It was a turn of events we could not predict.”
Göztepe and Costa Rica midfielder Celso Borges agreed.
“When (Costa Rica) reached the World Cup quarterfinals, we would look at video of older American teams, how compact they stayed, how they went into tackles, how they made late runs. It was a way to overcome talent, to encourage the collective and show a will to win. When we played the US late in qualifying at Red Bull Arena, they lacked that fight. When (Marco Ureña) scored first, we felt we had them beaten. You’d never say that against the US before that year. They were the model in effort and energy.”
That’s a devastating account of last autumn’s failure. And the US certainly must again become hard to play against.
But being hard to play against shouldn’t compromise potential progress in terms of style of play, especially if the pool permits it and it can be executed, not just exhorted. Former US defender and favorite for the MNT gig Gregg Berhalter could marry grit and control of the game, reestablishing the right culture but charting a new course for the American approach with the ball in translating his passing patterns onto the international stage. This season, facing relocation to Austin, the Columbus Crew had the third lowest payroll in the league but two weeks ago ranked “sixth in total possession, fifth in passes per game, and second in pass accuracy.” Berhalter has somehow steered the Crew into the playoffs, and the perception that he’s getting the job because his brother is the USSF chief commercial and strategy officer is unfair.
It’s fair to question the process of how Berhalter became the manager. But context should also inform that debate, and criticisms of process should be separated, when possible, from criticisms of Berhalter. Besides, Peter Vermes and Marsch, for different reasons (control and career arc, respectively), likely don’t want the job right now. Unless Stewart surprises us with a foreign pick, it’ll be up to Berhalter to build, not a “better version of itself” – as Lalas described the last USMNT we were proud of – but a version we’ve never seen.
Sanjay Sujanthakumar is a coach and journalist based in California. He is writing specially for The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @the_Real_Kumar.