Several people are talking about moving the entire HQ. My point being is that its a 1500 employee organization and people are complaining because an executive wants to require 4 or 5 of them to no longer work purely remote. So your answer is now to move all the executive leaders to another state but leave behind all the support services in Chicago. Ok... I'm done. I forget these boards and discussions 1) are not logical and 2) opinions don't have to be based in experience or fact. Carry on ..
Maybe if we put down the weed whacker, step back and smell the coffee, what we see is various coaches uncomfortably sitting at a conference table with Earnie, Eggy and "Essence of Jay" doing a critique of coaching and "deciding" on tactics, selection etc. As the various uncomfortable coaches decline the move to Chicago Huis, others who don't mind a centralized top down approach will step into the vacated slots. While Klinsmann was adamant about being totally in charge (he also grabbed the sporting director title) he happened to be the kind of guy who told his players they should discuss tactics among themselves, you will recall. His philosophy revolved around individual players pushing themselves to the limit, at the highest level they could achieve because that was the only way to learn and get better. Klinsmann was lucky in the sense that we did not have a deep nor wide pool, as he found out early against the Brazilian u23's, which meant that he could decide certain players were irreplaceable - Dempsey, Bradley, Jones e.g. - and the tactics and formation would more or less default into something that suited those players. When gaps opened here and there he would fish something out of MLS ( vide, Beckerman) rather than pretend Bradley could play as a 6. Klinsmann had his faults. He would not play young guys. The failure of the soccer establishment to grasp that timeous meant that they had to pull Sciaretta out of the closet to write an erudite essay on the great player talent gap and shift blame to the innocent from the guilty. Look at the strides we have made with developing younger players post Klinsmann. The question now is how they will relate to the national team. I am skeptical. I don think the kind of a priori evaluations Egg makes about talent will be helpful to the program, the public or the players. Tab Ramos who launched some good careers with u20's has left the federation. It seems to me that there is a lack of balance in Chicago House which will show slowly but surely as we progress towards Qatar. After quali's, I expect they will pull Sciaretta out of retirement again to write "Lack of Talent 2.0" before moving on to new adventures.
california was the wise choice "because weather." i have a friend on another national team residency and they are there for the weather, as are several other sports' national teams. and then other countries even come there to train. once in a blue moon it rains or you have santa ana winds and it's hot. but 350+ days......mild and reliable temps, not hot, not cold, not a bunch of monsoon weather. not buried in snow or wind howling. second place would be someplace like colorado "because altitude training." chicago is obviously a bureaucratic decision. forcing the staff to camp there is control. they can do what they want but guess who the boss is. if you are under foot you have a reminder. if you are telecommuting you can get ideas you are your own kingdom. because otherwise, if it sounds like we are not hiring YNT coaches while we consider how to deal with space, we are more concerned with the control mechanism than with development. only idiots would leave YNT without a coach "because office space." are the kids playing soccer in the halls? do you really need an office to coach? i see the emphasis on tactics, whether we are ready or not, as similar control. this is how we will play. this is a project that will last as long as needed. stick with the project and we won't fire you. the tactics are as much of an entrenching exercise as a sporting choice. we are all in our jobs and on this mission, and as long as we stick together on our quest, no one will be fired. i will be curious whether the project continues if we struggle in qualifying again.
San Diego, LA, Bay area Colorado Springs there are reasons existing centers are where they are there is a reason teams from Chicago go train in the south somewhere in their winter
Was this the same Klinsmann who took 19yo Green, 20yo Yedlin, and 21yo Brooks to WC2014? If your assertion had any shred of truth you should be able to name at least a few young players that were available between 2011 and 2016 that Klinsmann should have played but didn't? Any names? Any?
dude, i am not suggesting they pick our team. i am saying it's odd that the sort of player a committee would think was the best in MLS at their spot, can't even get one call for the Nats. age would be a fair response. except we already call old farts, just oddly not the consensus good ones. so when we glitch on age we don't even pick the right old fart. i could get if it was like, well, sorry, but younger long and brooks over the old farts. but we have ream in who will be well into his 30s. ok, if age isn't that big a deal how about defenders who can defend? or not a mediocre keeper just because at a point ages ago he was the heir apparent.
Yeah, he's just wrong on this. JK was the one who had some n*ts on this issue. Dual nationals from out of nowhere. Green who was a kid. Morris from college. Ibarra from USL. Pulisic from YNT/barely playing at Dortmund right into WCQ. Berhalter is more like Arena, who similarly seems to prefer a 25 year old mid career guy getting time over someone just getting started. Hence Saief and Lletget over McKennie. GB has been sparing with kids, dual nationals, and it often doesn't seem to matter how their game performance goes. I thought Pomykal and Holmes looked good. Poof. People try to make this into "MLS Versus" but I think it's more an artifact of the fact that a kid here has a better chance to be playing young than one at PSG. And a mid-career "Wondo" here is often going to look better numbers on paper than a Euro based player facing tougher competition. I think it's a reflection of some sort of analytics that favors playing time and isn't weighted to where they play. And I think the analytics is silliness where we confuse scouting new players and how that would be done, with how to evaluate established NT performance. Once you are in camp I have a direct comparison. Once you play games I have that tape. "Club form" once established should be besides the point if you play well for us. You are not still selling me on your role here, and even if some new kid is coming up with impressive club form/numbers, the whole point is whether they can translate that to NT play. At which point they have their own NT numbers and tape. To me the obsession with club form is a cross between PR backpatting bleeding over to the sporting side -- you can wow the fans with all the club affiliations, but the coach should focus on NT performance -- or is us confusing lasting talent with how any given club week went. The basic value of player x to the team shouldn't be dramatically rising and falling each week like stock prices. Not unless they shred their knee or get a coke habit. I could understand if a forward can't kick a ball and has 1 goal all season. But that's months of form. That's not did he play or score this week. This last part, that players don't change based on how their weekend went, is like basic international coaching knowledge. This is where I lament having a coach so bad or ignorant of what he needs to know as a NT coach that he is literally relearning basic fan understandings on the job. Right up there with "Camp Cupcake flashes." Every Camp Cupcake there is a player or two that tricks you and falls back to earth when subjected to normal friendlies. Only this guy drags that reality-check process out most of a year, or even still has them on the team. Usually this takes "March." This, to me reflects a nepotism hire. For someone who was on the team a few years, he seems lost with the mechanics of how it all works. Usually this job is more earned and in the process of earning it you learn enough to do it. Or you in your spare time study up. This is us paying for his apprenticeship.
Correct. Euro snob par excellence. Now cherry pick Morris and you're all set besides saying that Yedlin was in Seattle at the time. Young players available? Finlay. Let's go with just one for now. I cant produce a laundry list of weeds for us to get lost in. Then you can say not good enough and I'll say he needed development and it was clear Berhalter was not developing him and you can say that it is not National team manager's job to develop players and I would say that was the problem we actually began discussing before we decided to get into the weeds. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Klinsmann gave Finlay 3 caps including a WCQ in 2016. He has not been seen since under Arena, Sarachan, or Berhalter. Try again?
in the future we should have people from different resume types or competencies in the different jobs. half the problem here is berhalter and stewart have similar career paths and blindspots. stewart can't tell berhalter NT wisdom because he was GMing MLS when Berhalter was there. it's not like you have a former NT assistant, or someone from outside with NT experience, balanced against and informing a MLS guy. you have 2 noobs from MLS reinforcing each other, both from budget teams.
Grew up in the bay area on the peninsula about a 35-40 minute drive North of San Jose. Yes, San Jose is typically the hottest part of the peninsula and bay (always imagined because it's kind of the top of a U in reverse, with Mountains to the South, East and West, which seems to cause the air to sit there a bit, but regardless it isn't crazy hot, it's just warm to hot, not like Burning Man during the summer, just the hottest part of the Peninsula/South Bay. I don't see why it would be a problem at all. Loads and loads of high schools and local colleges and universities train there in the summer w/no problems, I don't know why it would ever be an issue. It sure as hell isn't the issue Chicago is in terms of weather, and it's also got LA to the South, Sacramento to the East as well as Reno (which now has a USL team), Portland and Seattle to the North as well. I have no particular issue w/the bay area not being the answer, I just think it's crazy to make Chicago the center of things. What is near Chicago other than the city itself? Nothing. You can do the Northeast just because of the pile of cities, or you can use the West Coast/California for the weather and the cities and soccer culture. Not sure why we can't just open multiple hubs anyway. If we have a a massive, fertile developing community in Dallas, we probably should have an outpost there, why not just have outposts in LA-Chicago-Dallas-somewhere in the NorthEast, and maybe Bradenton for the South? We have a mammoth country with pretty distinct and unique soccer cultures that are quite different from one another culturally, demographically, all of it. Why the insistence on jamming everything into Chicago, which may be the single least relevant location on top of all the other issues?
something happened because it's odd to go from camp cupcake to WCQ playing time.....and then *poof* disappear. he had a knee injury last year and we should be real, was a different player from end of 2016 until this season. he would be a poor choice for now as he's going to be O-30 at a position where we have some YNT talent coming up. but then that would be the ArenaBerhalter approach is pick the established pro even if over the hill instead of the upside kid.
I suggest that they could move the technical staff. Never said anything about all the executives. That would be dumb. Watch them do it.
If Inter-Miami ever get past the politics, and gets Freedom Park approved, it's a huge complex including a large amount of office space.... With Florida weather and no state income tax, it would be a heck of a lot easier to recruit coaches!
California has everything going for it to be the soccer training hub other than location for players in Europe who would have to add more hours to an even longer flight. With so many there now it is definitely something to consider. Chicago doesn't have much of an advantage there either although it's just coaches being forced there and so far not players.
Great insight into the half-time talk from Jesse Marsch in their game vs Liverpool.Interesting to note the emphasis placed group cohesion and re-aligning mentality before addressing any tactical components. pic.twitter.com/unNplaA25U— Darian Wilken (@CoachDarian) October 3, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...lzburg-im-not-treated-like-an-american-coach? marsch telling his team to get stuck in, in german. so that's two languages he can do what berhalter doesn't.
you need cali or colorado for the long camps. camp cupcake. summer camps when players are off. for both european travel is irrelevant. the short camps should be where the first friendly of the pair is. chicago is not a predictable soccer destination and is basically an attempt to place the NT apparatus under foot so they know who the bosses are. if individual coaches are off on their own then they can start to deviate from script, even if in subtle ways they think would help. but if you are in one place your ideas can be monitored. you are completely on corporate message, or, you think you are making a useful suggestion to the group but instead you have manifested heresy, which is appropriately policed. this is how dictatorships run. it is telling to me they don't even have the space to enforce their policy but would rather not hire a coach and mess up development, than risk heretical thoughts and actions.
"warm" and "mild" are not the same things. miami is warm in the winter but in the summer at times just hot and humid. that might have its uses for a hot and humid tournament but is less than ideal for effective training/use of energy. we're talking about a place that for the full team is a summer training site. west coast you have pleasant temps most of the year where players expend more energy playing soccer as opposed to dealing with the sweatbath. colorado you get the fitness benefits of altitude.
It seems that people are arguing a lot of different things here (and none of them are about Berhalter's coaching philosophies). Not sure where the idea came up that the coaches need to be in the same place as camps will be held. I understand USSF logic that they want all the coaches in the same place. That doesn't need to be in Chicago, nor anywhere that has a good climate for training. Planes fly everywhere. If coaches don't want to sign a contract with USSF because it's in Chicago, then move the location to somewhere they do want to live. I suspect that Chicago itself isn't the problem--it's the rest of the requirements that they don't like (and, it would seem, the low pay).
the deal is not that the coaches have to train their teams in Chicago ie camp where they office. that is actually the absurdity of it all. the deal is they have to office in Chicago. which means they have to move there and with their families. even though no one wants to train there. it is absurd to (a) make coaches sit in a common office building for the sake of doing so and (b) make the office location no where near where they want to train. JK as i understood it lived in California with his wife. California is also where we train a lot. Voila. He could have been made to move to Chicago or do office hours there, but why? So they can look over his shoulder? So they can dictate or encourage tactics? So they can enforce uniformity? So they can create false bonhomie? So they can monitor negative press interactions? The only slightly sporting reason in there is tactical uniformity which is of dubious value given the tactics. I think people who try to fix what we are doing by deviating from GB's crocked concepts should be given a medal. The idea here is if you are in a single office and even hint at deviation you are exposed as a heretic. Enforced in part by watching each other and in part by the forced collegial atmosphere where you are "letting the others down." all the coaches really need are access to certain infrastructures, access to practice fields, and a location and equipment for a scouting/analytics staff. you might want them to be in particular places spread around the country, or they could be in the house of the coach. you want the players to centralize so they can be trained (but otherwise they spread to the 4 winds). but the coach can be anywhere -- can telecommute -- and only needs to centralize for meetings and camps. as long as he has the right resources at his home.
you are going to get a few different responses here (1) i signed up to be a soccer coach and not sit in an office (2) Chicago? (3) i could do this anywhere (4) i am not going to submit to this degree of tactical control (5) i am not going to submit to this degree of overall control (6) you hired me as the sports expert, you stick to administrative and fundraising bs (7) i am not going to have some GM telling me who to select (8) i reserve the right to shift tactics given what i see in the pool a likely result of these conditions is to clear out the better candidates who will have bigger egos in service of a mediocre servile, pliable coach who owes getting the job to his willingness to go along with anything
question i have is how much of this is a response to JK perhaps "going rogue." people forget the initial version of this tactical debate was c. 2011 when bradley got canned. we had a similar version of the same discussions, eg, we need to get more technical to advance deeper. we go out and hire a german coach. the german coach presumably did his video work and many of the camps where he lived. i know initially we spread out and tried a passing game. maybe that's what he sold them. and then 2014 i guess he decided we weren't good enough at pretty and reverts back to more defensive tactics. i don't know if the pendulum should have swung soooooo far, but we had a lot of pointless possession and not enough chances, lost games late, ran out of gas about 60' in. you bring the coach into the office and it gets harder for them to go off script. that, or, conversely, forcing the pick to be the type of guy willing to locate in the demanded place and go to an office itself directs our coach towards being a corporate kiss butt. end of practical-minded deviations. at least until USSF approves of a change. if people are like, "but bruce?" JK got big enough he could deviate from the script but started sucking and threatened elimination. they thought bruce would suffice. bruce was always a short termer and due to desperation not required to stick to script. sarachan was also just a short term place holder. we are now back to enforcing what JK was hired for.
one reason i would be concerned if this remains the fed making identity and tactics decisions, is while i would trust a coach to make sports decisions, well, some more than others, the last people i want deciding what sports direction we need are fed people. this whole 433 prettiness obsession feels like, well, parents of soccer kids who have snobby half considered ideas of whether certain ideas of soccer look better, who then get elected or hired to leading fed positions by pursuing power within the soccer organization. who then order the coach around. i don't think because we elect you president or hire you at the fed for an office gig that you know a thing about really coaching soccer. this whole thing feels shallow and half baked, and with a mediocre nepotism coach to boot, just feels like a fed deal. like parents telling the coach how to coach. it gets worse in some other countries where the fed is corrupt or interferes in things, but i want the coach coaching and the fed running the non profit side.