If we’ve learned one thing following Gregg Berhalter’s dismissal as manager of the United States men’s national team, perhaps it’s this: when an esteemed coach states they need a year away from the endless grind of their job, they likely mean it.
It’s understandable that Jurgen Klopp would rebuff the advances of U.S. Soccer when he isn’t even two months removed from emotionally departing Liverpool. Still, it was worth a shot in the federation’s eyes.
The German is as ambitious a target as the federation could identify. He’s a serial winner at the highest level of club football, a culture-builder who is tactically flexible within a clear guiding ideology. He’s also unemployed, removing any buyout cost, and U.S. Soccer was seemingly willing to open its salary budget.
Here’s the thing: if you take Klopp’s announcement that he was leaving Liverpool in January at face value, this wasn’t the case of a coach needing a new challenge. He made this call despite having a year left on his contract. He looked beleaguered, harried by the stresses of perennially keeping up with the constant churn of managing one of the world’s most prominent clubs.
Even if Klopp had decided that dabbling in international management was enough reprieve after admitting he was “running out of energy,” this would have remedied U.S. Soccer’s ongoing headaches for exactly two years.
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I’m not sure the USMNT fanbase fully appreciates the considerable gap between risk and reward if Klopp had replaced Berhalter.
The best-case scenario is obvious: an ambitious hiring that makes the federation look good, a truly great coach crafting a potent batch of Schwarzwaldian lemonade from the lemons he inherited, perhaps a run to the 2026 World Cup semifinals and some fond memories when he leaves to either return to club soccer or retire outright.
The worst-case scenarios would turn ongoing headaches into diagnosable migraines. One would be that Klopp was right: that he’s out of gas and he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to master the nuances that distinguish international soccer from its club alternative. Another is that he simply wouldn’t be able to handle the crash-course adaptation to international football, that he could get more out of individuals but can’t pull it into a collective in time for the World Cup. A ‘Luis Enrique’s Spain’ scenario, if you will.
Former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp turned down an approach from the USMNT (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
In either case, the result would be an underwhelming resolution — and a costly one. U.S. Soccer would return to the hiring desk on the back of the World Cup and feel financially strapped as they look for a longer-term alternative.
So while Klopp looks very good photoshopped into a USMNT hat, the reality is that the gamble is far more expensive than an Adobe suite subscription.
When a federation can’t land the best unemployed manager in the game, what does the ‘best’ hiring possible look like? It’s a question that Matt Crocker and U.S. Soccer will work to answer over the coming weeks in hopes of securing the right coach for the World Cup by September. Names will continue to churn through the rumor mill like an endless conveyor belt. A couple of my colleagues highlighted some of the buzziest options, Klopp among them.
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Maybe rushing to meet Klopp’s asking price with some combination of salary, sponsor considerations and NFTs was an expensive stopgap that wouldn’t address the bigger issues at play.
Is that a hiring driven by process, an approach Crocker emphasized upon reappointing Berhalter in 2023? Does that hiring respond to the issues that came during Berhalter’s brief second tenure and set the program up on better footing? Or was it an opulent scramble that could have been better planned and executed given Klopp’s months of notice?
Does U.S. Soccer really know what it wants from its next men’s manager? Has it had adequate time to figure that out?
“There has been progress made,” Crocker said on Wednesday in the wake of Berhalter’s firing, “but now is the time to turn that progress into winning.”
Winning! That’s a great start. American sports fans are awfully fond of winning.
Here’s the thing: if it was as easy as just wanting to win, the USMNT would be 22-time defending World Cup champions.
Saying it’s time to win after six years of, uh, whatever they just did under Berhalter is a backhanded admittance of failure. If you set a modest budget to buy a handful of citrus trees, waited six years as they occasionally bore fruit in hopes of a bountiful harvest to come, then uprooted those trees to import an entire Brazilian grove’s worth of produce ahead of a big event… are you any better at growing citrus? And what was the point of nurturing that smaller plot in the first place?
Gregg Berhalter was dismissed on Wednesday (Eduardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images)
Crocker has sworn repeatedly that Berhalter’s second appointment was the result of arduous interviewing, research, and data-driven assessment. If that process is thrown out the window in lieu of a “spend big on famous club coaches” model, that admits a failure beyond just one hire. Trust the process, as they say — but please, keep updating the process along the way based on new information.
Encouragingly, Crocker seems to have learned from one of the federation’s follies in the 2018 process that led to Berhalter’s initial hiring. His predecessor, Earnie Stewart, determined that the coach who would help the team come back from its World Cup qualification failure had to speak English. It ruled out alternatives like Marcelo Bielsa and Tata Martino and whittled down the pool of candidates significantly.
Of course, Berhalter was hardly the first native son to coach the USMNT. The program has skewed domestically with all but one hire since the 1994 World Cup, when the team was led by Serbian coaching nomad Bora Milutinovic. The one exception, Jurgen Klinsmann, carries an asterisk as he’d set up roots in California years before being appointed in hopes of staying in the federation’s mind whenever Bob Bradley was dismissed.
At many times, being coached by someone from the U.S. paid off. The program’s best runs in the modern era were overseen by Bruce Arena and Bradley. Both had intimate knowledge of the player pool at a time when scouting and talent identification wasn’t as effortlessly global. Both had clear ideas for how they wanted the team to get results, catering to their pools’ strengths while accounting for the weaknesses.
Neither was scared to embrace stereotypical national ideas about ‘grit’ and playing direct soccer. Both used parts of that DNA to their advantage. Arena led the USMNT to the 2002 World Cup quarterfinals and Bradley led the team to a runner-up finish at the 2009 Confederations Cup, beating the all-time Spanish juggernaut en route to the final.
As Crocker figures out what’s ‘best’ for the next appointment, the ultimate hire may indeed be domestic. Steve Cherundolo and Pat Noonan are ex U.S. internationals who are thriving in MLS, while Jim Curtin is familiar with many players in the pool and offers a fresh perspective. If any of these or other alternatives are hired, they’ll feel increased pressure to overperform as the fanbase gets past the second Berhalter era.
The ‘best’ hire may be international, too. Milutinovic helped turn a generation of USMNT players into program legends and brought a fresh perspective to set the team up for success on home soil. He brought ample experience coaching internationally, having led Mexico when it hosted the 1986 World Cup.
The USMNT, who will host the 2026 World Cup, exited the Copa America at the group stage (Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
His CV is comparable to that of Herve Renard, another nomadic international manager who most recently led the France women’s national team. Renard isn’t a celebrity coach, even if he has a catalog-ready face, but he has standout accomplishments to his name: two Africa Cup of Nations titles (with Zambia in 2012 and the Ivory Coast in 2015), leading Saudi Arabia to the World Cup shock win of the century against Argentina in 2022, and leading a turbulent French team to the quarterfinal of the 2023 Women’s World Cup mere months after taking the job. He checks a lot of boxes for a possible stopgap solution with a very high upside and a low floor.
The ‘best’ option may indeed be Klopp. However, getting the best version of him may require a year’s worth of patience on top of lavish wages — two resources U.S. Soccer can ill afford to waste. Again, risks and rewards.
Ultimately, the necessity to get this hire right extends beyond the field. You don’t need to scroll far into our comments sections to find that morale among USMNT fans is at a nadir. Depending how you value the Gold Cup, the team won’t play another high-level meaningful match until a World Cup group-stage opener in 2026. This appointment is one of the few remaining chances to galvanize the fanbase and rebuild morale to get maximum support ahead of hosting the World Cup.
Crocker and federation leadership didn’t tell Tim Weah to swing an arm at the back of a defender’s head. They are, however, accountable for re-hiring a coach who didn’t set his team up to compete at the Copa America. Whoever is ultimately hired, the federation needs to make its choice with full confidence that it’s the ‘best’ option for the next two years — and they better have a clear definition of ‘best’ to justify that pick.
(Top photo: Wolverhampton Wanderers FC/Wolves via Getty Images)
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