Rob Stone: US Manager shortlist is Ramos, Tata Martino, Marsch, Berhalter, Friedel, Osorio & Vermes.

I think he was a terrible fit for an older team with a set style completely different than what he likes. For a young team that he has a chance to mold to a style he could be great. Chile played great for him before their legs started falling off and the US has some real hard working pacey players. Mexico is also starting to get some of those so I could see him with either but Mexico's veteran players might fight him like Argentina's did. He'd do better here as he'd have a more receptive audience. Does he speak English?

 

Let's get a coach that prefers young talent for WC's. One that sees talent even if that talent doesn't get all the minutes for club. The US is rebuilding, we need a coach that gets it.

 

His style suits more for Mexico than the US. And the article also states that FMF are looking at a foreigner coach, not someone from in house. Then that means no Almeyda for them, no wonder they haven't hired him. And we are the opposite, we are looking to hire someone in house who is familiar with MLS so they can fill the NT with MLS players, I guess.

 

Murica.

 

Sampaoli's proven willingness to play a 35 year old central midfielder for every minute at the World Cup would make him a very popular choice on Bigsoccer for the US position.

 

The soccer clique in the USA is far too tribal to give the job to a South American with no ties to the dons here. It's not happening.

 

Meanwhile, Osorio's willingness to start a gritty, past it 39 year old against Brazil may provide the final ray of hope for a certain blue collar US star.

 

I said during the WC that I'd be open to considering Sampaoli. It's hard to tell what went down in the Argentina dressing room from the outside. I think it might have been a group of veteran players who cracked under the pressure of trying to win during Messi's last prime-age WC when the group as a whole wasn't that talented. The way Sampaoli had Chile playing prior to his La Liga move seems like a good fit for this up-and-coming generation of US players.

That said, I don't want someone who's not fully committed to the job. If he really wants Mexico and would treat the US job as something he'd do if that falls through or until a better opportunity comes along, then I'm not interested. I think that's the advantage of an American coach--you know they're just as mad as us about not qualifying and will work to the best of their abilities to make sure it doesn't happen again. I think you'd have to gauge the commitment level of foreign coaches on a case-by-case basis.

 

Tenorio talked to the currently lounging on a beach Caleb Porter, who commented on the US position:

https://theathletic.com/473120/2018...th-carolina-plots-his-return-to-the-sideline/

 

Woof.

Opinion discarded.

The nationality of the players is of utmost importance. Can't field an ineligible player, or you run into problems.

The nationality of the coach should have minimal importance. Whether it's an American or an Armenian that best fits the role, so be it...

 

It's written kind of weirdly. The author says "above all he would like to see an American coach get the job," but then the quote that follows is Porter saying "If you're going American..." it should be Vermes or me or whatever.

Also, even the paraphrase isn't some dogmatic statement that it has to be an American. He just wants it to be an American. Which, given that he is an American who would like the job, ain't exactly shocking.

 

SUMurica

 

Sampaoli is probably a better fit for younger guys willing to run their legs off, but he's also a guy who openly says he doesn't really do game plans and it was clear he had no real plan B for Argentina after his main concept failed. So if you're looking for someone tactically sophisticated, he's not your guy. But he might be able to get us to play that plan A really well.

 

I didn't say he's not entitled to that opinion. Nor was I surprised.

Just that I will give it no weight. Goes the same if it were any other American MLS coach that comes out and says that the next coach needs to be American above all else.

No thank you. That is wrong thinking.

 

For US Soccer, that's almost never been the case. Pretty much every coach in our history had existing ties to the country. The only two coaches who were true outsiders were:

Bora Milutinovic - Yugoslavian coach, hired in 1991 after Bob Gansler failed to win a game in the 1990 World Cup, which apparently annoyed some American coaches. In the '94 World Cup, led the USA team to its first WC win since 1950, its first knockout round since the 1930s, nicknamed "the Miracle Worker" by the president of USSF - and then unceremoniously fired by USSF a year later in 1995, under slightly bizarre circumstances (USSF claimed he'd "resigned" by a "mutual decision"; Milutinovic said nope, he'd been fired; the USSF then said, yes, they fired him, but they really, really didn't want to)

Dettmar Cramer - West German, very experienced around the world, considered the father of Japanese football; coached the USA team in 1974 for about four months before being hired away by Bayern Munich and immediately winning two European Cups.

George Burford (maybe?) - Wikipedia says he was born in England, apparently coached the team in 1924 and in 1928. No idea of his background.

And that's it.

There've been plenty of coaches who born in other countries, but they all immigrated when they were young or had coached in the US prior to being selected as the US national coach.

 

I've heard this line before about the rarity of truly "foreign" coaches.

Who cares?

Just because coaches often have connections to the country doesn't mean that they need to.

Get the best guy you can. Here's a free hint, it's not Sarachan or Ramos.

Go from there.

 

Oh, I agree with you. I'm just saying it's unlikely that the USSF will go in that direction, based on previous pattern.

 

Blame MLS is silly. MLS for a couple decades has been the baseline reason we qualify every time. Our player pool as a result is always no worse than the best MLS has to offer, plus foreign players.

That worked right up until last cycle, when MLS' domestic pool started drying up. My theory is a combination of liberalized international slot rules -- such that most teams are majority foreign starters, and thus only a sprinkling of players per team are fit, sharp, and could even possibly be NT worthy -- and more recently the end of Bradenton and a shift to MLS academies for domestic development, which they did not earn through performance in growing players but rather by default.

So you have more foreign players in MLS, more like England is with the cosmopolitan EPL, and then you have MLS more responsible for growing the future despite no particular established knack for doing so. Mind you, the 18-20 year olds coming up are good, but for a period there the high water mark was like Nagbe and that's not saying much.

No, 1998 is much more prosaic an explanation. If you look at the roster, though we had some kids coming in, a lot of the team was like Dooley (36), Regis (29), Wegerle (34), Stewart (29), Ramos (31), Wynalda (29), Agoos (30), Preki (34), Sommer (29), Balboa (30).

I also think you're ignoring that it would be kind of underwhelming to start:
Keller
Pope Burns Dooley Regis
Stewart Jones Deering Maisonneuve Reyna
Wynalda

Many of those are actually the foreign based and it comes down to a golden generation ageing out and then a cycle before the 2002 bunch came in.

 

The comparison I would make is to England. The irony is so many on here tout England as like the solution to all our problems. Go play there and you're set. The actual data is more erratic.

That was just a digression. My point would be that year after year England is an elite league, but, work permit rules or not, in practice it is a cosmopolitan league where certain checkbook teams might barely start an Englishperson.

The implications of this for an English team are straightforward. It is a high quality league but ironically when England fields its NT you end up going down the roster saying, "who?" at the end. That's because most lineups are like the UN there. When they need to call up 23 English players for a team, it gets complicated.

I'm not saying this as some xenophobe, I have nothing against foreign players playing here, I'm just saying the implications of a cosmopolitan league are that when my Dynamo play they start 8 foreign players and most of the rostered Americans are filler, we're contributing maybe 1 player towards the NT (was Beasley). Some teams are closer to half American, I just think this creates a more complicated pool to pick from. Fewer American starting MLS players, less choice.

I also think part of the problem is that what used to be a team trained together at Bradenton in residency through high school is now essentially turned over to international and domestic academies. Not every American player has the necessary dual passport to go to ManU academy at 14. And most MLS academies, while increasingly becoming the pipeline to MLS in lieu of college and traditional club, have not really earned the responsibility but instead had it dropped in their lap, and often struggled. My Dynamo have rarely had HGP last past a year. Currently I think we have 1 senior team HGP and then another player who used to start here but had criminal issues signed direct to RGV.

 

Not my theory, Sampson's. I think Wynalda and Ramos and Lalas have also said similar things.

These guys came back to MLS from Europe and some top teams/leagues. Ramos would have been in La Liga, Lalas was in Serie A, Wynalda was in the Bundesliga. They went to teams playing in NFL stadiums, with no practice facilities, probably not much medical staff, flying coach all over the country. The game on the field was brutal. Wynalda and Ramos both had injuries they got from bad fouls they got in MLS.

All these guys think getting the league off the ground was important but that it definitely impacted their quality of play.

Qualifying has had little to do with MLS. It has had more to do with the move to the 32 team tournament and CONCACAF sending 3.5 teams. We qualified 7 years before MLS into a much harder tournament to get into in 1990. Should have qualified in 1986. MLS has never been better, but we failed to qualify into a 32 team tournament in 2017. There is just no data point that point to MLS being the reason we qualified 1990-2014.

 

Do you think they are going to say, hmmm, maybe that 1994 core team got a little old? Like admit maybe they specifically got overripe?

I also think there is a certain arrogance to how they responded to the Harkes decision. I recall Harkes being 31 and both he and Wegerle playing on basically one good leg at that point. I think you had this entrenched veteran team of players some who had been there since 1990 that reacted to a slight shakeup -- not enough IMO -- by imploding in France. Sorry, I see how we instead reacted to Donovan as growth.

There have been 2 periods when I felt like this team was unprofessional. 1998 and last cycle. I know generally this has been a fairly professional team where things were handled quietly and the team was put first. But the 1998 team and then ours last cycle (CR in particular away) were the only teams of ours I have ever seen quit.

So I decline to hold that team up as paragons.

I also think you need to look at the names of the teams where players were at in 90, 94, 98. Often enough it was lower division England or Germany. There would be maybe one guy at Liverpool or Everton. The idea that it could only have been better for them to be at Millwall or Preston or Karlsruher is not as obviously true as you suggest.

 

In terms of the foreign coaches question, I think facility with English is requisite. I don't think they need to have coached here before but I would like to see some signs of commitment here where they don't just walk in a few years regardless how it goes. It would help to live here or be a regular vacationer. I always liked how Henry vacationed here before he played here. And he as a result wasn't some constant moaner about MLS, and played here for years.

Klinsmann, to me, even though he lived here, had no respect for the league, and with half the team playing there, in a down ebb, that got things toxic. And while we might debate the value of location, at a certain point the coach just needs to put his head down and deal with it, not complain to the press and make things worse.

But that's really more staying power, in terms of coaching, what I would like to see is engagement with and knowledge of our pool, and not just some abstract formation and style they want to play, but having constructed something custom for us. I think that is easier for a domestic coach but a foreign coach who did his homework like he wanted the job could catch up fast enough to sell it. But if they aren't from here I want to see that homework.

 

Our "top players" based in Europe who moved to MLS were mainly playing for second or third division clubs.

 

Anyone EU citizen has the same rights to work as English citizens. That will end with Brexit. It will be interesting to see what change in terms of visa requirements.

Dynamo may not be the best example as they're the cheapest club in the league.