Next Coach

I'm feeling a second wind, so I'll have a look at Luis Enrique in terms of if he's improved the teams he's coached.

Luis Enrique:

• Succeeded Pep at Barcelona B. Coached 3 seasons. The team was promoted to the 2nd division in his 2nd season after 11 years absence. In his 3rd season they made the promotion playoffs but were ineligible for promotion as the 2nd team of Barcelona. Resigned to take Roma job. Significant improvement
  
• Next was Roma, 11/12 season. They finished 7th, sandwiched between 6th place seasons (with a bunch of 2nds before and after the 3-year lull). Resigned with two years left on his contract. No improvement
  
• Celta de Vigo, 13/14 season. When he joined they had been steadily on the rise for years. In 08/09 they finished 17th in the 2nd division, then 14th, 6th and 2nd (gaining promotion to La Liga), then finished 17th in La Liga. They finished 9th the following year (the one season Enrique was in charge). They finished 8th and 6th in the two years following his departure. I'll call it Some Improvement.
• Barcelona, 14/15 - 16/17. Coached 3 seasons. Club had finished 1/1/1/2/1/2 in the prior 6 seasons. 1/1/2 under Enrique. Success in Champions League was similar, if not a bit below recent historical average overall. No improvement.
• Spain 18-22. Lost in Euro semifinal in 2020. Spain had lost in the round of 16 in the 2016 edition. Last 5 WCs prior to this one Spain finished in the quarters, round of 16, champions, group stage, round of 16. They went out in the group stage in 2022 under Enrique. His Spain had, by a wide margin, the worst win percentage (51.28%) among the prior Spain coaches since the turn of the millenium (nearly everyone else was in the 70s% and 80s%). Moderate drop.

 

Story mentions exactly this as context for job’s attractiveness. Re: “relocation.” Moving to USA generally. Zidane has a close-knit family with four sons whose careers he follows. For that reason he’s in no rush to take any job (other than French NT, now off table). https://t.co/JNQdfonEJq

— Paul Kennedy (@pkedit) January 7, 2023

 

Maybe he is too old, maybe he is retired, and I doubt he speaks English, but what about Oscar Tabarez. Led Uruguay (3.5 million people) to R16, QF, and SF in 3 WCs. Finished group stages with 6, 7, and 9 points (our best is 5 pts), and has defeated England, Italy, Portugal and Russia in Russia. His teams can beat the Europeans, something we have not done since 2002.

As an aside, I am not too impressed with the club careers of many of the big-name coaches mentioned here (in terms of being an NT manager). They are playing those club games with a stacked deck.

 

Tabarez will be 79 for WC '26. Van Gaal came out of retirement at 70 to coach the Netherlands for a third time, and was the oldest coach at the tournament at 71.

 

They're typically beating other coaches similarly working with stacked decks. That's the pond they're fishing in.

 

Enrique is definitely a better coach than Berhalter, but they definitely have some stylistic similarities. He was criticized for playing a very complex system for an international side and insisted on continuing to play that system despite the criticism (and questions about whether he had the players to execute it). The Athletic had a very good post mortem on Spain’s World Cup where they detailed these issues in further depth.

To the extent that this frustrated people about Berhalter, it’d probably frustrate people even further when it comes to Enrique.

 

not so much in league play. We all know Bayern will win the BL before it starts. One of 2-4 teams will win the EPL, one of 2-3 will win La Liga. How often to those coaches go into a game when they do NOT have more talent on the field than their opponents.

 

For me, Luis Enrique is the Spanish Berhalter. No, thanks.

 

There's UCL and EL.

 

Anyone else been around long enough to suspect the fed will only reach out to managers they know have zero interest in the job so they can talk about what a wide net they cast before ultimately hiring whatever underwhelming choice they planned to all along?

 

Well of the 5 people involved in the decision making process, only 1 (Earnie Stewart) has ever been involved in an USMNT coaching search before. I don’t think there’s a ton good or bad we can take from previous searches compared to this one.

US Soccer has a new CEO for instance. He may defer to Stewart on soccer decisions, but the process of how we go about the search is the sort of thing where the CEO could insist on certain things for instance.

I’ll judge the decision once it’s made and hope the Athletic or someone has a good breakdown of how the process went down.

 

More from ESPN on the Zidane approach

https://www.espn.com/soccer/united-...inedine-zidane-rejected-approach-to-coach-usa

 

Some are good club coaches that work for whole season, but others are good tournament coaches.
Such as a format Chelsea coach you know who.

 

Please feel free to put forth names of coaches you might like to see hired that you also think might have some interest in the job.

 

Until there is an article like this one about Kasper Hjulmand or Joachim Loew, I agree with you. USSF might as well have asked Pep or Klopp if they were interested in coaching.

The only possible reason why Zidane might have had an inkling of interest in the US job is because Deschamps just signed an extension through 2026 (which really surprised me).

 

Yeah, the chance of Zidane even being interested in a conversation with USSF was extremely low, but he is out of contract and, as you note, France re-signed Deschamps. I hope we keep hearing about who else USSF approaches--but, given that this info came from French media and not American soccer media I won't hold my breath.

 

Since @RefIADad brings up Kasper Hjulmand I'll now spend some time looking at if he's improved the teams he's managed.

• Took over Lyngby for the second half of 05/06 season. They finished 3rd in the second division. Finished 1st next season to gain promotion, and then were relegated again in his last season. Perhaps slight improvement
• Spend the next 3 years as an assistant at Nordsjaelland, taking over head coaching duties there in 2011. The club had been creeping up the table in the years prior (9th, 8,7,6) but then won the league his first year--Nordsjaelland's first Danish championship. They finished 2nd the next year, and then dropped back down to 6th the next (his final year), which appears to be about their average over the last 2 decades. Solid improvement
  
• Succeeded Thomas Tuchel at Mainz the following year (14/15). They had finished 7th in Tuchel's last year, and finished 11th in the season Hjulmand was there--he was fired in February 2015. The club finished 6th the following year. Moderate drop
  
• Returned to Nordsjaelland for the second half of the 15/16 season. They finished 9th (I don't know where they were in the table when he took over). Next season they finished 6th, and then 3rd, and then 6th after that--his last season there. I'd call it solid improvement.
• Took over Denmark in July 2020. His 62% winning percentage is well above any recent predecessors. They reached the semifinal of Euro 2020 (despite losing Eriksen). Finished 2nd in their Nations League group, 1 point behind Croatia and having beaten France twice. Knocked out in group stage of 2022 WC. Moderate to significant improvement

 

If you need to hire someone, are you going to waste your time calling people you know won't take the job? If you wouldn't put yourself through that, why would you think Earnie and Brian would? And yeah, they will be making these calls so let's be real and not use the faceless USSF which is easier to make snide comments about as opposed to an actual person.

 

So far, based only on the limited researching I've done, Kasper Hjulmand has been the best and most consistent at improving his team's play over predecessors. The rest have had very mixed bags, but Hjulmand has consistently brought improvement.

 

Since I don’t think you’re ever going to get a current top club coach to take a national team job except in unusual circumstances (like Hansi Flick), that resume for Hjulmand looks like one that would fit the profile of who could coach the USMNT. Plus, Hjulmand gets us out of this in-house cycle that has led to the current Berhalter-Reyna fiasco. We need a competent outside voice that isn’t beholden to the inner circle of USSF and can be outside of those issues.

 

I mean there’s a very good chance they’ve reached out to multiple coaches in Europe other than Zidane. We don’t actually have insight into that information.

More broadly it’s hard to be mad that they did reach out to Zidane. He was always unlikely to have interest, but I don’t mind them taking some big swings to start.

 

I agree. Of course, I've only really done decent research on 3 potential candidates:

• Luis Enrique
• Kasper Hjulmand
• Paulo Bento

But, indeed, Hjulmand's resume is glowing. Can the USSF get him, though, or will he prefer to stay on for Denmark?

 

I’m fine with taking big swings. I’m the one who said someone needed to ask Pochettino if he had any interest. But you just can’t ask these really big names and call it good. If you are serious about casting a wide net, then you also have to look at more realistic candidates.

Hjulmand is the best mix of accomplishment and attainability that I’ve seen. He’s the profile of outside candidates that have the best chance to actually be interested.

 

I know he went to college here and there are some other connections on the staff to the US, but isn't he more likely just to stay in Denmark? Not sure why he'd leave for the US, unless the Danes want to move on, but I'd be surprised by that, too. I'm all for looking at Europe, but I think there are more difficulties than people think, especially w/ salaries for league managers being what they are now.

 

He's Danish and did a very good job with them. Surely the Danish FA is going to try to extend his contract. Of course, I don't know how much they can pay nor how much USSF might offer. There could conceivably be a significant gulf in those offers.