Jurgen Klinsmann Year 1 Report Card

Its been a year. I read a interesting article, summarizing Jurgen's first year in charge (don't remember where), but that had me thinking, what sort of grade does Jurgen deserve. I picked 5 categories that he should be measured against, and graded him on each, and then came up with an over all letter grade. I'd be curious to know what you all thought.

Tactics - This one is pretty obvious. How have the tactics been thus far? Has he adjusted his tactics when needed? Etc.

Expansion of the Player Pool - Has he done a good job of bringing new players into the fold?

Use of the Player Pool - Is he putting guys in position to succeed or is he playing guys out of position?

Youth Development - Normally I wouldn't throw this in there, but this is one of the things that Jurgen harped on before being hired, so I think its only fair for us to judge him on this.

Results - Overall have the results been better, the same or worse under Jurgen?

My grades

Tactics (C-) - Things looked promising for about 15 minutes against Mexico, and they we looked like shit until the Slovenia game (where it should be noted that we switched formations back to something similar to the Bob Bradley era). Overall though, his use of a lone target striker, three defensive midfielders and Jose Torres as a deep lying play maker has made us a side that plays far to slowly and far to predictably through the midfield, allowing teams to just set up camp and shut us down offensively.

This has been disturbingly evident against Canada, Antigua and Barbuda and Guatemala.

The only reason this grade isn't worse is because he's at least shown signs that he isn't entirely married to his preferred tactics.

Expansion of the Player Pool (F) - Guys like Fabian Johnson have been a godsend. And it will be interesting to see what Danny William can do if he's ever played in the right position and helthy. That said, it seems pretty likely that Bradley would have also brought these guys in if their paperwork had been filed earlier.

Aside from that, Klinsmann really hasn't brought in anyone that wasn't already on the radar under Bradley. And the fact that he has brought guys like Orozco Fiscal, Castillo and Rogers back into the mix at varying time and to varying degrees is disturbing. His omission of guys like Gonzalez (before he got hurt), Lichaj, and Kljestan is just as bad.

Use of the Player Pool (D+) - The only reason that this isn't an F is he gets a bit of a pass for Landon and Clint not being available together. That said, his use of Jose Torres as a left back, Jozy Altidore as a lone striker, Danny Williams as a right wing, and Maurice Edu as an advanced midfielder shows horrible judgement.

His omission of Michael Bradley in the first couple months of his tenure is laughable.

Youth Development (INC.) - While he's hired some new faces, the only youth national team to compete in anything meaningful on his watch was the Olympic team, which failed miserably by every stretch of the imagination. I'm going to give the guy a break though and wait and see how the U17s and U20s perform before I completely pass judgement here.

Results (D) - You can't ignore wins over Italy in Italy. And even though Scotland is about on par with a U12 girls team these days, the US did what they were supposed to do. Aside from that, there isn't another result so far under Klinsmann that any US fan should be proud of.


Overall Grade = D

Results seems more like a C- to me. He's met expectations in WCQ, no more and no less, which would be worth a C, and then I kick it down a half grade due to disappointing friendly results overall (with the Italy result keeping it from being worse, but then again, friendlies should take a back seat to WCQ in grading results anyway).

I don't have much of a gripe with trying out Torres at left back in the right situation. I have bigger beefs with other aspects of JK's personnel usage than that.

I think this is a little harsh. I would give him a C+/B- as the results are what counts.

Tactics - The US seems marginally better at possession in the Klinsmann era - but it's not threatening. I think he learned the wrong lesson from the Gold Cup Final. My opinion is that the backline was completely inadequate and new personnel have needed to be tried. Klinsmann's view seems to be that the center backs, at least, were fine. So instead of trying new center backs, his remedy has been to flood the field with holding midfielders.

Expansion of Player Pool - Was willing to try by fire players like Beckerman, Castillo, O-F, Rogers, Boyd, F Johnson, Williams, Cameron and Shea. The last 4 were extremely obvious calls, the others were more experimental and Klinsmann's biggest success so far is probably Boyd.

His worst failure, as I allude to in the Tactics above, was his failure to try any new center back other than O-F until the Scotland match.

Use of Player Pool - Klinsmann clearly wants to ram as many CMs onto the field as possible. Bradley did so as well but favored ones with attacking vision while Klinsmann, surprising everybody, prefers holding midfielders. I have no problem with Torres as a left back against A-B though.

Klinsmann clearly favors physical strikers - despite being "Latin", Gomez was only selected after he went from in-form to IN-FORM so that not even Klinsmann could ignore him. Other than Gomez though, the majority of the playing time has gone to Altidore, Buddle, Agudelo and Boyd.

Klinsmann should not be criticized for benching Bradley at first - any new manager would have done the same to win the fans over, due to the moronic firestorm of criticism that followed the player. He did take too long to bring him back in though - although even that served a purpose, allowing critics to see the error of their ways and make claims about a magical new and improved player. His benching of Jones was worse than his benching of Bradley.

One refreshing aspect of the Klinsmann era has been the lack of worry about left backs, until the injuries/"tiredness" spell hit in May/June. Having these players is just luck, but Klinsmann wasn't doing anything wrong until he skipped the back in form Lichaj.

Youth Development - I'm not going to grade Klinsmann's tenure on this. He's not Claudio Reyna.

Results - The Scotland match is the brilliant success of the Klinsmann era, where his ideal personnel setup caught an opponent by surprise and utterly crushed them. Perhaps Scotland scouted by Bigsoccer and expected a more creative but lightweight US side. Slovenia was finely done as well, more of the type of attacking experiment everybody expected out of Klinsmann last July. Italy was great but it was also just bunkering. There were plenty of disappointing friendly results as well.

A-B and Guatemala were merely adequate. Thus, the C-/B+.

General Comments: I didn't have high expectations when JK was hired because I don't think any coach is going to make a huge impact with the current player pool. We are past the point that the American spirt and conditioning can take us consistantly far into tournaments. While we have some good players playing consistently at a high level (Howard, Donovan, Dempsey), we don't have enough and most likely won't have enough this cycle. My hope was for him to start the transition to a consistent winner who can play multiple styles, has depth in all positions, and make in game adjustments.

Tactics - I liked the fact that he tried some different formations and players in some different positions. The first year is when you should be experminenting. There will be some positions which work (Fabian) where as other which still are either a work in progress (Torres) or was changed a little too much (central midfield). B+

Expansion of the Player Pool - He had added a young forward which we diffently needed (Boyd). He found a solution at left back (Fabian). However, he hasn't found resolved the central defender issue (need depth for when Gooch is out form and Boca is getting old). Right back has also started to become an issue. I don't get worked up about Lichaj not playing as of yet. He will be added if he continues to develop and get playing time. Lastly, I would really like to see our backup keeper get a little more playing time (both club and country). An injury to Howard in the wrong part of qualification could make it little too interesting... C+

Use of the Player Pool - Every coach is going to have some favorites and some which you wonder why they aren't selected. The glaring poor spot was putting Gooch into the lineup when he clearly wasn't ready. I don't see why bringing in Castillo is distributing. He has good pace and is comfortable in the ball. Yes, he needs to improve his defense, but it's not horrible. He should be in the equation along with Klejstan and others. B

Youth Development - This is the most distributing because this were I would expect a lot of visionary and discussion on improvements. Crickets. While I'm not expecting immediate results, I haven't heard enough. D+

Results - He has had some great wins and a series of dull games. Scotland and Italy comes to mind. B

Overall - I would put him the B/B- range. He has shown enough that gives some hope, but still some areas of concern.

This drives at the heart of many of my issues with Klinsmann. He seems more interested in placating the mob rather than actually putting the best team on the field.

Player pool F? Results D? Yeah, I'm sure if Bob was still the head coach or if the USF would have hired Bielsa the team would be a lot better.

I agree USF could have hired Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho or stayed with Bob and I bet they would be getting the same results as JK. Klinsmann is the doing the best he can right now and the team will get better.

I don't remember you being around very long, but the common sentiment among the very vocal group that wanted Bob fired every time he blinked seemed to think that our player pool was a top 10 team in the world and that Klinsmann was the savoir that was going to push us farther than any of us could ever dream.

1 year later, that entire crowd has either disappeared, or is blaming that same player pool for Klinsmann's shortcommings.

I find it comical.

Some people will always complain about something so that will likely never change, but I still think hiring JK was the right decision just wished it could of been done earlier like right after the 2010 WC.

Excellent thread...

Tactics B
Exp of pp: D
Use of pp: F
Youth dev: C
Results: B

Add, style of play: B

unfortunately, these grades were a bit too accurate to fly on bigsoccer haha, the paragraph under use of player pool is pretty spot on

What's more amusing is folks who still can't admit Bob stuck around too long and should have had the good sense to step down after the 2010 World Cup. Or should we blame Sunil for not asking for Bob'ss resignation, like 99% of the other WC national federations did of their coaches?

Grading a national team coach who has to step in mid-cycle is an exercise in...? since there are few comparables, and it is by definition a retooling exercise.

I wanted Klinsmann in - and predicted (based on past performance, ie when he was the German National Team coach) that results would be unimpressive in the first year. And through qualifying.

I'll grade Klinsmann on how we do in Brazil, assuming USMNT gets there.

And give myself an A for being right on target in forecasting Klinsmann's first year, and skeptics reaction. Ok, an A- since I didn't expect the winning streak this past spring, including the win over Italy.

Yes, WCQ is the must.

I would agree with you, but here is the problem - JK used stupid language like "five game tournament" and expressed how hard he expected the team to play in a friendly. He ran out there very limited rosters and gave a lot of minutes to his starters. He did not use the bench. He did not bring in new faces and really didn't experiment with the lineup. And the results were mostly below expectations. Won't say poor overall, but below expectations based on his actions.

Again, if he was experimenting with the formation/roster or TURNING OVER THE DEFENSE, you could give him a pass on friendlies, but by all indications he was going balls out and learned very little from it.

1) I don't think that there is a single solitary person that actually thinks that Bob had run his course.

2) Blame Sunil. His entire recruitment of Klinsmann was a total embarassment and beyone unprofessional.

C-/B+? Quite the range.

Woops. C+/B-.

Well said sir.

Probably this one . . .
http://espn.go.com/sports/soccer/st...od-first-year-klinsmann-much-do-jeff-carlisle

1. What's this have to do with this thread?
2. Most every one felt Bob should have left after 2010 (and if AV panned out, he would have). And again, this has what to do with JK's 1st year in charge?

Had to step in? Did you not miss his diatribe at the end of WC '10. Wanted to step in. Begged to step in. One year into a cycle should not be a big deal, especially when you have the luxary of ELEVEN friendlies during that period.

He's a trailblazer. I love this crap. Keep inventing excuses for sub-par results.

Then there is no reason to post in this thread. It is a simple question. How was the last year? At work, we call them 'Annual Reviews.' Hell he could win the WC or not even qualify, but at that point you will likely sound like Captain Obvious.

How did he begged to step in if he told Gulati that he will only take the job if he had complete control? Someone who is begging for a job will take any job even if you don't get complete control.

Again, go watch his 'commentary' after the US/Ghana game. He was not speaking to the viewers he was talking to Soccer House. That was a 'hire me, hire me' speech.

And someone who talked that much, I would expect him to know the pool a helluva lot better than he has demonstrated thus far.

That speech was awesome and he talked the truth, Alexi Lalas looked like he wanted to stab Jurgen with his pen . Also if he wasn't hired by USF last summer he would of probably been hired to be the manager of Tottenham this summer.

Tactics: C He did what he needed to in order to get adequate, but unimpressive, results in qualifying. I don't think there's any reason to grade his tactics in friendlies.

Expansion of the Player Pool: C This year we got Boyd, Fabian Johnson, Joe Corona, and Danny Williams. Not a bad group at all. We also lost Timmy Chandler, that's a big deal to me. I won't blame him for Omar's injury or George John's winter debacle, but I'm not happy with what we've seen at CB.

Use of the Player Pool: C Lots of head-scratchers here for me, especially in how he's used our midfielders. This has generally been in friendlies so he doesn't lose much here from me, but I've seen nothing really positive from this. His failure to call in Lichaj was pretty bad.

Youth Development: D- The failure of the U23s to qualify for the Olympics ultimately lies at his feet. The decision to hire a novice coach part time was a bad; really bad.

Results: C As with tactics, in the only games that mattered this year his results were satisfactory, but nothing more.

Overall: D+ We are in the top of our group in qualifying, as we should be, though it's only on goal differential. We failed to qualify for the Olympics on his watch. That is unacceptable.

I expect he'll improve over the next year.

Umm we didn't Timothy Chandler he is more than likely coming back by next month against Mexico.