Sometimes it’s the coach’s fault

The criteria were rigorous. The data analytics were advanced. The statistics were advanced. The hiring methods were groundbreaking. Most importantly, when US Soccer went looking for a new coach for the men’s national team last year, it had the one thing every successful soccer team needs: a versatile evaluation mechanism.

That wasn’t all. There was more corporate jargon to come. US Soccer Technical Director Matt Crocker calculated that there were 22 elements to coaching a single soccer team — including encouraging “player engagement outside of camp” and supporting “team auditing” — and eight “core competencies.”

This list too, was exhausting. Any candidate for the head coaching position had to possess a “vision-driven identity” — which made the whole thing sound a bit like a plea for help from an optician — as well as a creative developer and a passionate innovator, which, we should emphasize, are absolutely not the same thing.

Crocker must have felt like he and his staff had checked all the boxes, covered all the bases, when the search ended with the previous incumbent coach, Gregg Berhalter, being replaced by himself. With hindsight, there should have been a ninth core competency for the U.S. Men’s National Team coach, unfortunately: Don’t lose to Panama.

It’s been that kind of week for American soccer. On Monday, a few days after that devastating loss to Panama, Berhalter’s team lost to Uruguay, eliminating them in the group stage from a Copa América on home soil. It’s a particularly troubling humiliation considering the country is set to host the World Cup in two years.

The reaction was, well, predictable. The players are filled with regret, sadness and a little self-loathing. The fans are seething with anger. That US Soccer’s response was to promise another thorough review has done little to quell the growing discontent: as far as most fans are concerned, the only viable outcome is an obvious one.

“It is time to make a change at the head coaching position,” read a statement this week from the American Outlaws, the “largest supporters group in U.S. Soccer.” (It was nice of them to say that bit in corporate jargon, the native language of U.S. Soccer.)

That’s not exactly an outrageous demand, it has to be said. Berhalter performed somewhere around par at his first World Championship, guiding a young American team through a fairly demanding group before falling to the Netherlands in the round of 16. But what is effectively his second stint as national coach is dispiriting to say the least.

Although his team won the Nations League earlier this year, it did so after a semi-final defeat at the 2023 Gold Cup — again to Panama, who are proving to be its arch-nemesis — and an aggregate defeat to Colombia in a friendly. A shocking display at the Copa América was much, but it wasn’t really a surprise.

Berhalter also doesn’t have the excuse, as he does in 2022, of having a young team. The United States’ top players are all in their mid-20s and are now approaching what should be their peak.

And while it can be argued that the cost of playing soccer in the United States is too high for many families and limits the country’s talent pool, that argument doesn’t apply here.

Only three members of Berhalter’s Copa América team play in Major League Soccer. He had six representatives from the Premier League and four from Italy’s Serie A at his disposal, plus others playing in Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The United States may not have as much truly world-class talent as it would like to think, but that need not be a hindrance. Venezuela and Panama have both reached the quarterfinals of the Copa. Slovakia, Slovenia, Georgia and Austria have all reached the round of 16 of Euro 2024. Switzerland are in the last eight. Their pools of players are not significantly deeper or of higher quality than those of the United States.

The fact that their results have been so much better, unfortunately, casts a harsh light on the coach. It is hard not to claim that Berhalter has failed to get the most out of what he has at his disposal. And that is ultimately the job of an international coach.

It’s tempting to mock US Soccer’s penchant for the tortured language of management consultants, to dismiss the belief that the best comparison for the complexities of elite sport can be found in the worlds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and to downplay the characteristic LinkedIn atmosphere that surrounds the organization. Yet it’s worth noting that Crocker is smart, savvy and respected.

His work at Southampton and the English Football Association — another place historically fond of root-and-branch assessment — was impressive. He has enough experience to know that impulsive decisions rarely lead to happy outcomes. There’s a non-zero chance that the phrase “react in haste, repent at leisure” will be etched into his soul.

And yet it’s hard not to wonder if everyone involved with US Soccer has, at some point, lost sight of what a national team coach is supposed to do. Not just the organization, with its PowerPoint presentations, its personality profiles and its “abstract reasoning testing,” but also the coaching staff, the players and even the fans.

Berhalter has often spoken about his job as a coach, which aims to “change the way the world sees American soccer.” It’s a message that is clearly etched in the minds of his players.

“We want to change the way the world sees American soccer. That’s honestly one of our goals,” Christian Pulisic said a few years ago.

“Four years ago, we set out on a mission to change the way the world views American soccer,” his teammate Weston McKennie said last year. “And now our motto is to change soccer in America forever.”

There was an echo of that idea in the American Outlaws’ statement. “Every game is not just about the result,” it said. “It is an opportunity to capture America’s attention and build a lasting connection between new fans and the team. It is an opportunity to compel new fans to play the game and enduring fans to share the team with others.”

This is an admirable, if quixotic, sentiment. Soccer is already entrenched in the American sports landscape. Millions of people play it. Millions of people watch it. There is a strong, resilient, well-attended national league. American players are spread across Europe. The women’s team was the best in the world for a long time.

Soccer has been the focus of America’s attention for a while now. Granted, the rest of the world may not pay as much attention to it, but that’s not unusual. Other than the Premier League, no domestic tournament really captures the attention of an international audience. Fans in Italy don’t eagerly consume the latest news from the German Bundesliga. Soccer is characteristically parochial, and that’s all the better.

But more directly, this belief that the United States is not playing to win games but to win hearts and minds puts unnecessary pressure on the players. It creates an urgency, a will to panic, among fans that need not exist. And, crucially, it has clearly warped the way the game’s authorities think.

In Crocker’s hiring process, the process that led to Berhalter’s reinstatement, he rejected the focus on the “next game, the next result” as the kind of narrow-mindedness characteristic of a “legacy coach.” Driven by an insatiable need to grow the game, U.S. Soccer had decided it needed the opposite, a man who could see the big picture, a brain for the fourth phase of the galaxy.

And that’s all well and good until the moment that defeat to Panama means elimination on home soil, and the specter of impending humiliation – and the squandering of the biggest opportunity of all – looms on the horizon.

The job of US Soccer is to think about tomorrow, to think about where the game is going, to have a vision-driven identity. The job of the coach is to take McKennie, Pulisic, Gio Reyna and all those guys and turn them into a team that can win a few games in 2026, maybe make a quarterfinal. There are no eight core competencies for a national team coach. There is one, and it is really, really clear.

Now hopefully the 2024 European Championship will be a success.

Euro 2024 has not been what you might call a classic so far. There have been moments, of course. There are always moments. Mert Gunok’s stunning save to preserve Turkey’s victory over Austria. Georgia’s thrilling, emotional win over Portugal. Hungary’s ultimately futile triumph over Scotland. Ruben Vargas’s artful, curling strike to send Switzerland into the quarter-finals. Jude Bellingham’s acrobatic salvo to save England from blushes.

And there has been color in rich and varied abundance: the dancing dutch fansthe battalions of black-clad ultras, the passions and pregame parades organized by fans from — though not necessarily from — Turkey, Albania, Georgia and Romania. It’s all good stuff.

But the tournament as a whole feels like it’s been struggling a bit to gain momentum. That may well be structural. The group stage was necessarily a slow burn: starting with 24 teams and only eliminating eight ensures that the drama is concentrated in the final round of matches.

It also has a domino effect in the round of 16, where there were too many matches with a clear favorite: Switzerland vs. Italy and Austria vs. Turkey were the only exceptions. As a rule, the rest of the matches were a battle between a fighting underdog trying tooth and nail to turn the tide, ultimately without success.

There is good news for the next two weeks, however: a tasty quarter-final line-up. The meeting between France and Portugal will not be particularly dynamic, judging by this tournament, but there is a compelling tension in a meeting between two teams with realistic ambitions to win the tournament.

Switzerland provide England with their first real test: the match will be a trial of whether a well-oiled, well-drilled side can beat a team with plenty of individual talent.

Spain have been the most impressive team of the tournament so far, with their opponents, Germany, having home advantage and looking a rallying target.

But just as the match between Turkey and Austria was the most intriguing of the last round, the match against the Netherlands could well be the highlight of this pairing.

Tradition dictates that the Dutch, even without their full first-choice midfield, should be the favourites. Turkey, however, are all energy and drive and chaos, and have two of the best players of the tournament in Arda Guler and Ferdi Kadioglu.

The Euros have been flickers and sparks so far. This should be the point where they catch light.