The 2008 edition of the European Championships was an unbridled success. The quality of play, the desire to compete by the participants on the field and the enthusiasm of the crowd were all of the highest order.
A few weeks ago. as a preview to the Euros, an opposite type of soccer festival was touring the European playgrounds. Its style was apprehensive, the prevalent thought on the field was the avoidance of error and the joy that was evident during the best European games was largely missing.
If anyone happened to have caught a listless, dour and rather forgettable string of the performances by the United States team, the inferiority to the skill and class of the best European players was all too obvious. To an impartial observer, the US play was averse not only to mastery and exuberance but to any coherent plan and game tactics. The US National team played with the same ineptness that one often sees on the US youth level – bereft of tidy control of the ball, coordinated movement of men and ball and, most of all, purpose.
The players appeared shackled and restrained, robbed of the choices that they would otherwise be instructed to take by their European club coaches and managers. It’s as if a genie of soccer was bottled back up by an evil sorcerer.
That sorcerer’s name is Bob Bradley, also known the head coach of the US national soccer team.
Bob came to preside over his team in a very curious way.
He wasn’t the first choice for the job by the US Soccer Federation (USSF) and its president Sunil Gulati. In the summer of 2006, it was long presumed that the only legitimate candidate for this program was the recently available gaffer of the German team, an ex-international superstar striker Jürgen Klinsmann.
Klinsi, as he is known to the world wide football audience, had several built-in advantages over other available candidates – he was a permanent resident of the United States, making his home within twenty miles from the main training center of the US team, in a beautiful oceanside community of Huntington Beach, California. His English was nearly perfect – especially if one pitted it against a bewildering pile of words masquerading as Bob Bradley’s sentences – and his pedigree was deemed more than adequate.
Taking a heretofore floundering German team, a team that hadn’t progressed out of a group stage in the Euro 2004, to the semi-final match of the 2006 World Cup and a third place finish was considered a monumental improvement by the Germans themselves and Klinsmann’s subsequent resignation from Die Mannschaft presented almost an unbelievably lucky opportunity for the USSF to advance the game to the next plateau on both the domestic and the international levels.
Sunil Gulati, recently appointed as the president of the USSF, was certainly analytical enough to recognize a gift from the soccer gods when he saw one. Quickly, the pursuit of Klinsmann commenced.
While officially Jürgen was “taking time off to be with his family”, an approach was made to his representatives. By the fall of 2006, the action was heating up and the scuttlebutt emanating from the talks was promising. By all accounts, this was a marriage made in soccer heaven – the USSF was getting itself an international quality coach to replaced a fired (and, by 2006, hapless American) Bruce Arena and Klinsmann was getting a gig for which he barely had to leave his own house. The excitement was palpable. The fans, the media and the players involved were praising this development in unison. It seemed as if nothing could derail Klinsmann’s train of destiny as it steamed toward its anointed purpose of bringing the American soccer out of its uncouth wilderness.
Then, a loud thud.
A crash of hopes, dreams and aspirations.
A catastrophic defeat.
While the wedding invitations were being sent around with unbridled glee, Jürgen Klinsmann left the USSF at the altar.
The exact reasons for this abrupt end to courtship were never revealed to the public. The US soccer media was too timid to question the purported authority and Klinsmann himself wasn’t about to spill the beans either. The likely areas of disagreement however aren’t as difficult to find as the American media pretended. All one had to do was to cast an eye on Germany, where the erstwhile Klinsmann assistant – now promoted to the number one slot – Joachim Löw demanded and received a full control over the junior German teams that competed for the Schwarzrotgold. Gulati however reserved the right to appoint the national youth level coaches for himself while Klinsmann undoubtedly wanted a unified program.
The failure of the negotiations surely did not smell like victory for the USSF. With a winter camp – typically used to gather and test the off-season MLS players – rapidly approaching, the team desperately needed a coach but hiring one of quality on such a short notice was a daunting task.
And so Gulati punted and took an easy way out. Instead of expanding his search to include other renown candidates with a commensurate pedigree, Gulati panicked. The camp had to take place hell or high water. Offers went out to several interested parties, which was essentially anyone who was available to bail the the head negotiator out of the predicament that he placed himself in. At that moment, anyone with breath would have sufficed.
But there were plenty of strings attached to the proposal. Without the necessary vetting process, the job was qualified as interim with only a potential of becoming permanent, yet it had to be handled on a full time basis. To sweeten the pie, the candidate was guaranteed a U-20 coaching job, in case a superior candidate was found and hired meanwhile.
Unspoken came the third rule – whoever accepted the money and the corresponding responsibility still had to defer to not only the USSF but to MLS on a number of issues and this represented the greatest challenge to any outside candidate.
MLS, due to the geographical and economic reality of the United States and its sports milieu, is a spring-to-fall league. The first matches take place beginning in April and end in late October for the regular season and in November for the play-offs. In the intervening six months, each team has to squeeze in thirty contests, on top of the US Cup, an All-Star off-week and a few international friendlies. Due to these requirement, a decision had been made by the MLS top brass to not to take weeks off for the international FIFA dates or even rescheduled the games between teams losing its top players to the international calendar.
Regardless of what one thinks of MLS, this rule had some solid logic behind it, as other options would have entailed the loss of stadia, good weather or revenues.
So, while the MLS scheduling conundrum could be taken as an unimportant tertiary story to the US National team, there’s a very important tie in between the league and the USSF – simply put, Don Garber, the MLS commissioner, sits on the board of the USSF and Sunil Gulati himself is also a president of the Kraft Soccer Properties, am organization behind one of the most successful MLS franchises, the New England Revolution.
This tangled web of interests directly impacted the fate of the US national squad.
The MLS powers expressed in no uncertain terms that an incoming head coach of the US national team had to defer to MLS when the conflicts between the club and the national team arose. Nowhere was this more evident than at the 2007 Copa America, where several MLS players were held back from participating in the tournament.
Clearly, such a coercive conduct would not be palatable to an international coach of note. One’s reputation is his record and his record depends on having players of his choosing but that’s precisely what an American coach doesn’t get to enjoy.
No wonder the negotiations with Klinsmann failed. It’s highly doubtful any established European or South American coach would accept a job under such conditions.
And so none did.
When the search for a competent coach proved fruitless, Bob Bradley had the interim tag removed and was signed to a long-term contract.
His qualification was having a middling won-loss record that hadn’t included a play-off win since the early part of the decade. On his pedigree, he was an average coach in a poorly respected league, whose top club is ranked a whopping 284th by the IFFHS.
But he was willing patsy for the Fed.
Nice article. All true. And that’s the worst part about it.
the bitterness
The U.S. Soccer federation are a bunch of a-holes. But, is that not true of any federation?
I don’t think that many American fans were dancing in the streets with Bradley’s hiring, but I don’t think he has done a terrible job, but he doesn’t have the greatest raw materials.
Has the author just discovered this already storied past? Who cares about Klinnsman. He’s moved one, so should the US national team, and so should it’s fans.
This article is typical of small time sports writing where space is needed to be filled.
Here’s an idea, write about your headline. Or at the very least follow it to some sense of resolution or discovery.
WE ALL KNOW THIS STORY ALREADY.
The problem, to add a point, is not Bradley. His mediocre coaching ability is suited to the mediocre talent of the national pool of players. It’s a lot like a dull over weight soccer mom driving an overburdened mini-van to the field, when we would rather see a tightly shaped cougar driving a rag top coupe. But that’s not what we have for the US team. Once US soccer fans realize that the players are not the finest athletic specimens to begin with (let’s face it, the higher end athletes are out earning a living doing something else) we will all be in a more realistic mindset toward expectations.
We simply need a coach that can inspire better than he can strategically coach. Tactical brilliance is not the answer because our soccer athletes are not capable of keeping up the high level of play of their European or Brazilian/Argentine counterparts. Any results of excellence that they may have put out in the past was achieved by inspiration, whether the media put them to the test or they played in front of their home fans or whatever.
The US national team needs a leader, to be blunt, someone who can inspire them. Someone like Braveheart. Or Patton. Or Gus Hiddink.
So this seems like a rehash from of the hiring process of over a year ago. Still not really sure what he was trying to say other then they should have hired Klinsman. Here’s a couple of things that the author missed.
The other position that Bradley also was hired for was the U23 Olympic team.
The author alluds to the losses this spring to England and Spain and tie with Argentina. But yet didn’t mention the wins earlier in the year at Poland and Switzerland. Nor did he mentioned winning the regional championships last year.
Is US Soccer in crisis, no. Is it in transition, you bet. They have just started the new World Cup qualifing campaign and will be looking at a number new players over the next two years. In addition they are in the process of adding several new development programs. Is US Soccer where we as fans would like to be, no. But they are making a lot of the steps to get there.
This article rates a big so-what. There isn’t one iota of new information here — all this was universal knowledge months ago. The entire US program has exactly one world-class player at the moment (Tim Howard) and Bradley’s job is to get this lunch-pail team to the World Cup, not to win it. By the time the young players with true international potential (Adu, Altidore, maybe Bradley) have sufficiently matured in European league competition to make the US even an outside Cup contender, hopefully there’ll be a real coach in place. And if the brain-dead USSF can be bludgeoned into giving that coach real control over the program, maybe we’ll stop getting smoked in world youth competitions and losing our most gifted young Latino prospects to Mexico.
I have to agree that the USMNT is not likely to win the world Cup in 2010, but that it should do better than was done in 2006.
I blame MLS, the single entity owned league and its pitiful salaries. Why are the better athletes going elsewhere? Because an entry-level salary of 28K is so pathetic, they could do better flipping burgers! Only the fanatically dedicated youth soccer players stick it out and maybe flourish. The rest just give it up and move on to anything else that will pay them a living wage and enable them to have a life. How many potential superstars are we losing?
Until this situation changes the US will never field a competitive team. Regardless of the Coach!
Simple answer to all your comments.
It takes time, ask the rest of the world.
Bradley is not a world class coach but with the poor talent pool that makes up the USMNT even a world class coach could not be successful in the next World Cup. The soccer community has been hoping for improvement that has not come. The MLS level of play is so bad that it is not developing world cup players. The few players who go to Europe get experience as “role” players so when they are called in to the National team they show some good individual play but the team lacks leadership and cohesion. An answer to the problem would be a multi-tiered professional system that started developing players in their mid teens like Europe and South America. Club soccer, High School soccer and College soccer can not develop the kind of players that are needed to compete at the World Cup level. Look at American baseball for an example if you don’t like the foreign examples. There is no money in US soccer so there is no success.
“Tactical brilliance is not the answer because our soccer athletes are not capable of keeping up the high level of play of their European or Brazilian/Argentine counterparts.”
That’s the kind of low aim drivel that American soccer fans should reject outright. We don’t need a brilliant tactician, just a competent one. And it matter little that currently we don’t have Brazil/Argentina skill level. We DO have sufficient skill to be competitive, even if we would lose 9 of ten games to top 5 teams. The skill level will improve and we will have the horses eventually. But you still need a leader with an a creative, intuative soccer brain. Even Brazil would fail much of the time if Bob was leading them with simplistic and rigid tactics and mis(under)utilized personnel.
From the article:
“The players appeared shackled and restrained, robbed of the choices that they would otherwise be instructed to take by their European club coaches and managers. It’s as if a genie of soccer was bottled back up by an evil sorcerer.
“That sorcerer’s name is Bob Bradley, also known the head coach of the US national soccer team.”
Now, if the author would have spent the rest of the article backing up this supposition (e.g., exactly how does Bradley “rob” the players of choices? or shackle them? or restrain?), instead of re-hashing the Klinnsman courtship, this could have been interesting.
–chuck
Americas best athletes are playing football,baseball and basketball. Imagine if Lebron James or Ladanian Tomlinson or Barry Sanders grew up playing soccer then we might have a chance but they didnt. Our team sucks and the majority of Americans don’t care.
The article was great and a reminder to what all of us already know.
Gulati is an idiot, he is the sorcerer and the culprit. What does he know about the beautiful game? Has he ever kicked a ball? (Or even saw a ball?)NO!
Well, Bradley what should I say about him? He is not a soccer pro, he should get involved with tennis. Poor guy is so confused, he doesn’t even know the first thing about the game. I often wondered if he has been watching another program during the MNT games. But of course I can’t blame him, anybody would take the position if offered.
Unfortunately our Soccer is in trouble as long as Gulati and Bradley spearheading it.
We must get a competent coach, maybe a foreigner, who has the game in his blood.
And where is Rothenberg?
And a word to Ray Ramano; Where do you come from insulting us? You must hate us Americans, where do you come from? And the rubbish you are talking about! You are ignoramous!!!
Yes, we have the possibility of young and upcoming talents, need to be trained and cultivated by someone who believes in them. By the way not you!
All the countries you have mentioned have other sport interest that they excell in besides soccer.
Soccer elites and powers are keep on changing, just recall the great Hungarians and back in the mid fifties and where are they now? I stated my case for Ray Ramano.
The problem is not a lack of athleticism as Robby suggests…pure athletic ability does not a world class footballer make (reference Pele, Maradona, Messi, etc. all guys how are 5’8″ or less, quick but not track stars or anything, but incredible skill and vision)
I think America’s main problem is the lack of true academy programs that feed in to true club systems. The fact that the US tries to push all athletes through a high school to college model, means that the US will always be behind the international football curve.
exactly how does Bradley “rob†the players of choices? or shackle them? or restrain?
I thought the way the US played in Europe – scared, inhibited, mechanical – was the proof?
the fact that usa try to lure Klinsman to be they managager is ridiculous , even more so now , or any other time , because american soccer is consider even less that a litle hood league , never was an will never be , usa shoud get new players , new twams , and a new structure , to much stuff to said about usa soccer , not worth it
Currently, the United States have a good bunch of players. Better than any bunch before. Especially with the likes of Altidore, Bradley and Adu coming up. Whoever be the coach, he has a strong squad to work with.
US need more fan in soccer, with more fans soccer have more money, with more money soccer have more players practise these beatiful sport, and with more money more investement on young players formation, in portugal the clubs have young teams with formation academy, in academy the players with 14 years are professional and win a salary.
Great article, I dunno if more fans is what is neccessary. I think the U.S. fans will gain interest when that team wins. 2002 World Cup is good proof, games in the middle of the night and replays, with decent ratings. Nothing huge but large numbers for the early morning games. I believe if better soccer was given to U.S. sports fans, the quality of soccer in this country would sky rocket. I read another great article on here that talks about just that. I have barely any soccer ability and I learned what I know from watching and then trying. That was it. If talented players get the chance to study and try out things they see in top quality games there skill level will increase and more interest will be given. Soccer is not boring, it is just boring on American soil.
Well-written article and valid comments on our national team, its players and coach.
Unless Gus Hiddink is totally not interested in the job, or has some unrealistic demands, I can’t think of any more qualified candidate, until one of our own becomes eligible.
Since his days, as a player for the Washington Diplomats(NASL), he has definitely proven himself as a top level coach, able to take mediocre teams, of different cultures, i.e. PSV, South Korea, Australia, Russia; and make winners out of them.
I’d vote for Gus Hiddink for now!
All the best!
/ge
Maybe this is true, Maybe its not… Here’s an idea, when you right an article bashing an entire national team and federation, maybe you should talk to people (also called sources) and then cite them within your article so your readers know that you know what your talking about. As you have not done this, I have to conclude that you have no clue what your writing about… Also, you conclude that the federation is in crisis, and your proof of this is the fact that we lost to europes best team 1-0 away from home, and to England 2-0 in Wembley. Brilliant, we are in crisis b/c we are not a top ten team in the world. Why is it that every time I come to this site I also find one crazy article bashing US soccer and MLS with facts that are either completely made up, or badly distorted to support conclusions that are completely unwarranted? There is a lot wrong w/ US soccer, and these problems can easily be illustrated without using complete lies and half-truths.
For more perspective on how the MLS treats its own:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/soccerinsider/2008/07/not_so_super.html