Agreed. That article really puts it in perspective and shows just how much we lost with Earnie leaving. And, yes, it does seem like if that work has any chance of continuing then the next person that is in that role--or a newly created role--will likely have to be American in order to be in a position, culturally, to work with the various youth organizations to the ends Earnie was aiming for.
YTD Claudio Reyna started that process way back in 2009 to little result. YTD Tab Ramos took over also to little result. TD Klinsmann bull-in-a-china-shop combined with Gulati's carrot approach got some traction at least as far as the changes to the Academies. I vividly remember a soccer mom complaining at one of the meetings to review the mandatory Academy financial aid changes proposed by Klinsmann. She stated that providing financial aid would put her son at a disadvantage because "those mexican kids, all they do is play soccer 24x7 and her son has other things including going one day to college to be concerned about". JK smiled and said, "i suggest you focus on your son going to college, he will have a very short stint in US youth soccer". Thank Earnie for giving it diligent effort but the US GOB soccer groups are not budging unless they are forced to move. No wonder he moved back to the Netherlands!
A second exit interview with Stewart .@BrianStraus also spoke with Earnie and delved deeper into USMNT matters:https://t.co/lDEVsD8ulv— Henry Bushnell (@HenryBushnell) February 20, 2023
This immediately caught my eye: “I read this stuff and I think to myself, I’m the guy who knows about who we reached out to and who we didn’t reach out to,” Stewart said. “I can say through this review process that nobody’s been talked to. Nobody.”
Another great interview. I think there's a large subsection of fans who don't love the implication of some of the things he says in there. But taking the two interviews, I'm fundamentally in agreement with the idea that getting to where we want to go is a long term project fundamentally driven by player development (and younger player development is our best opportunity). That the Federation needs to be focused on process over immediate results, and build something replicable and repeatable rather than chasing outliers. The outliers come and go. But if the foundation is strong, the lows aren't as low and the rest of the team is ready and capable when the outliers come.
Yup, the biggest thing he mentioned in both interviews and that I absolutely agree with is that if the US wants to become contenders, we are going to have to produce better players, particularly more creative players. As much as I can get caught up in decrying tactical choices, in the end the team went exactly where you would expect a team made up of the players we have to go. No coach in the world would have been likely to get the team any further outside an uncharacteristic collapse by Netherlands or a series of surprising bounces of the ball. Had we faced Mexico or a similar team in the next round as we did in 2002, we could have advanced another game. But we did not have the personnel to beat the big teams outside an upset if the opponent has a really poor day. The players and the draw will always be the primary factors in how far a team can go. I also think many coaches would have qualified that team and had a solid shot of making it out of the first round. It's much easier to critique coaching decisions and tactical decisions, but in the end none of that is as important as developing enough top-quality players to truly compete. No country has won a World Cup without a roster of top-class players. I don't think the same can be said about winning coaches. We've seen plenty of coaches do well in a World Cup and struggle elsewhere.
Yeah, I love the tactical discussions and the relevant player discussions, and I do think the coach can make a big difference. I don't think there's a coach out there who can reliably work miracles, and the players are the most important thing. But I think that it's super important that the Sporting Director gets a few things. We can optimize to win another game at the World Cup or make a surprising run, but the gap in talent between where we are and being a real World Cup contender is substantial based on talent. The only way to close that gap is to improve overall development, period, and that can take a long time. The Federation needs to focus on raising the underlying water level and not get overly caught up in short term or results based metrics, while still acknowledging their importance. The fans want to be focused on today, results, the coach, etc., and all that is important to some level. But the other part of the job -- the long term part -- is the thing that permanently improves the team, that actually gets you to that level.
I find it confounding to no end that there are people who thought/think that being rid of Stewart is a good thing...
It’s in fact very unlikely our next sporting director will be as good as him or as invested in youth development to the extent he was.
I know, and that's a much much larger issue in the long run than the selection of whomever is someone's favorite pick for manager. Even in this particular greater-leverage-than-usual World Cup cycle. In view of that, I think it's important to point out that managers can definitely ruin teams by tactics, selection, and culture, but they themselves don't really win anything. There's no such thing as a genius playcaller who confounds the other side and wins largely on his own. At best, they get a team to perform to its strengths while mitigating weaknesses, attacking the other side's weaknesses while mitigating their strengths a bit. That's... it. It's the players on the pitch that win it. The manager helps. Setting up a program built for longterm success is a much larger project than simply hiring and firing that guy.
This is why one of my biggest pet peeves around here is how often people want to talk about how coach x beat coach y. No, that's not at all what happened. A team coached by one guy beat a team coached by another guy. The coach likely had some effect on the game but in no way was he responsible completely for the win or the loss in the vast majority of games.
Ding ding ding. One of the biggest misnomers in all of sports. Team succeeds and its because of the talent on the field with the coach getting a little bit of credit. Team fails and its because the coach had poor tactics. Poor player selection. Poor use of players. And my all time favorite - somebody actually tries to put a bunch of blame on the players and is then beat down by others with the no that's on the coach because he didn't motivate them. LOL Sure a great coach can get the best out of a collective group of players maximizing their talent. But what gets overlooked is the last two words there. Their talent. No coach can make a team without talent very good. Period.
No kidding. .........................the youth watchers have seen improvement cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle. Quantity and quality. That's due to work from a number of people. But there's a reason we've been to back-to-back-to-back U20 CONCACAF Champions. [And we could have fielded a truly wicked lineup for the cancelled 2021 version.] And that's without many of our top players, who skip that level. What I would say is that its not rocket science that player and youth development is a fundamentally important aspect of a successful national team program. A lot of that happens at the clubs, of course. So I don't see a reason to believe that the next guy won't value it as much as Stewart. Klinsmann certainly did when he was our technical director. Jurgen was probably a better technical director than coach. I do wish Earnie gave more interviews like this when he was IN THE JOB. More transparency from the USSF would be helpful. But they "circle the wagons."
NEW: The US Soccer Federation (via Sportsology) spoke to Philadelphia Union sporting director Ernst Tanner about the USSF sporting director vacancy. Tanner declined to pursue the post. #DOOP #USMNTMore details, on @TheAthleticSCCR:https://t.co/BCoHTDmlUB— Pablo Iglesias Maurer (@MLSist) February 23, 2023 Good that they reached out but unsurprising that he isn't interested. I imagine the list of candidates will end up being fairly close to the initial list floated by the Athletic. The sporting director job is unfortunately not the most attractive to potential candidates.
Depends. At the national team level, without talent you will only be able to do so much. At the club level, if you are given the time, the players buy in, and you know your stuff you can teach a team full of mediocre-mid guys to be good. You will have the chance to upset and make a run at times. At the national team level, there's just not enough time to do so. So that's where the crucial scouting (USSF, not the coach) and ability to integrate (all coach) is important. An international manager is to me someone who makes changes quick enough to keep the other team off balance. If plan A isn't working, Plan B is ready and loaded. A sub is made and things change. It's hard to say we're playing X way all the time with the national team because the injuries and club commitments. You need to be able to adjust and teach on the fly with a simple approach. So could Pep make Egypt better? Sure, but it's less about the tactics of the coach, but of the coach knowing enough to teach differently to different players. TLDR, coach is incredibly important and means a lot. Players matter more, but it's not an 80/20 thing. We shouldn't be waiting around hiring this to hire that, it's just a wasted amount of time. I could have contacted Peter Vermes for free, Sportsology seems to be a joke. USSF needs to be better.
It's pretty obvious that Sportsology is contacting a lot of people and this very much an exploratory and wide net. However, it also seems to me that they are asking everyone that is asking out of the search to publicly release that they opted out of the running. I guess it's to prove to the fans that there is a search and that it is in process.
Or Vermes was asked about it when he re-signed his contract and now the Athletic writers are calling around the likely suspects in MLS. Regardless of how or why, I'm glad they talked to Tanner. I thought there was a 0% chance he'd be interested, but he's clearly very good at his job.
I doubt they are asking anyone to say anything publicly. I’m sure they’d rather people say nothing. But once you start reaching out to people that stuff invariably leaks and reporters have lots of contacts with agents, MLS front offices, etc. Same way names leak when an NBA or NFL team is doing a coaching search. It’s unavoidable.
Peter Vermes is just one game that’s contacted. You cast a very broad net and then narrow once you have a sense of whose interested. There’s nothing inherently bad about the fact that they reached out to Vermes. The more relevant question is who else they’ve reached out. That’s a better judge as the quality of their search.
Indeed. For people who want a comprehensive search, it'd be weird not to reach out to Vermes, even if I would not want him.
Maybe it was lost in translation. I absolutely would have reached out to Vermes. That's a big name in US Soccer, I'm just saying these sports research firms are largely useless in coaching searches. We'd be better off using that money in house to fix things. Like of course you'd contact Vermes, Schmetzer, Curtain, Dolo, etc. Now they can help formulate a plan for things and getting an outside eye helps. But coaching/vp/gm/etc searches are better off handled by the soccer people in house. Can't fire Sportsology if they goof it up. I guess that's why they do it though. I just think other options are better.
I think the amount we are paying Sportsology is a lot, but is also a drop in the bucket as far the overall USSF budget. The question is also who has better contacts, Sportsology or Cindy Cone and JT Batson (who has been as USSF for like 10 minutes). More broadly someone has to handle the actual outreach and Cindy Cone isn’t actually a full time USSF employee. Sportsology is also likely to have more foreign contacts, but those are necessarily places that the Athletic reporters have sources. And they can do a lot of the prep work for the coaching search itself so that the sporting director can hit the ground running. In the end search firms are super common in pro sports and they end up doing a lot of the grunt work. Michigan hired search firms for jobs that ended up going to Jim Harbaugh and Juwan Howard, both super obvious candidates. But it’s about doing the work to know whose interested in case those obvious candidates say no. They also do a lot of vetting to make sure there’s no red flags in a coaches past that would end up being a problem. Basically what I’m saying is this is industry standard in terms of best practices and it’s not really going to cause much harm using a search firm. Now we have less insight into this but Sportsology aren’t just helping with the sporting director/coach search, they’re also examining the entire structure of USSF (which seems like something they should have done pre World Cup so to hit the ground running once it was over).
Search firms are often simply PR. We should not be shocked US Soccer has one, if for no other reason than we just went through four years of people being angry about a process that wasn't transparent and not comprehensive. Add in a scandal with a touch of nepotism at the end as well .... ... And are you shocked they are going with an outside consultant to contact each and every person? Keeping it in house would just lead to the same conversations whether or not an actual comprehensive review was done. The leg work is real, and I bet they have some good ideas, but part of the payment is buying some level of "outside input" and legitimacy.
did sportsology even know when they were hired it was not only to identify managerial candidates but the one (or two) positions that will make the final decision on that manager?