Well...................he did win national titles as a youth coach. I'm just putting the name out there. We can and have done a lot worse. Anthony Hudson was worse. I think Luchi ticks a lot of boxes. Bilingual. Good recruitor. Works well with young players. X's and O's? Maybe not his strength. Then again, you're not getting some sort of tactical savant to coach a U20 team. I saw Brian Sciaretta mention Omid Namazi, who apparently impressed folks as the U18 coach. Assistant to tab in Houston and the U20s. [Griffin Dorsey getting Luchi Gonzalez fired is some sort of alternate universe craziness.]
You called him a tactical "savant." That's pretty high praise. What makes you think he is a tactical savant?
It is hard to tell of course. But Perez had the same guys playing top soccer as 15 year olds who then couldn't string two passes together as 17 year olds under Richie Williams. But Perez had to go to El Salvador to get a job and Williams has been gainfully employed by USSF and MLS every day since.
What exactly is tactical savant? His ES team is welll organised and overachieving. He was the best youth teams coach we ever had.
You're the one who highlighted it when quoting. Are you saying you called someone a tactical savant without knowing what it means? Savants are generally one in a million in the general population. So yeah, allowing for some translation, we're talking about someone who is very strong tactically. I think he's done a good job with El Salvador. They had two home games and came away with 2 points in the window, though; let's not get ahead of ourselves that he's some kind of savant. It doesn't take a wizard to get a couple of 0-0 ties at home in Central America. And I don't know how the Honduras game went, but the US still should have won if people can hit a header. If Weston or Pefok or Miles puts one of those on goal, is he a tactical savant? I'm not sure what makes him our best youth coach we've ever had as he coached the u15s for two years. That's it. How in the heck do you make that determination from a short U15 stint? No one called him our best youth coach until he and US Soccer split ways, and people wanted to blame US Soccer for something else.
Are you kidding me? There are no savants in that business. That was exagerration to empasize coaches tactical ability, which he definitely has. And yes, you can compare youth coaches based on 2 years experience, and he easily was our best youth coach. The kids that he's chosen were different and they played different soccer. And his team was overachieving in GC as well and looked as good as our against Mexico.
He was a U15 coach!!! Seriously -- are telling me you've watched enough U15 games to compare Hugo Perez' tenure to other coaches? What formation did he run? Why were his tactics better? Who were the kids chosen and why were they different? This is the first roster I can google: https://www.soccerwire.com/news/u-1...erez-calls-32-players-to-march-training-camp/ I don't expect many people to make it from U15; this has 3 (kind of) -- Sam Vines, Jonathon Gonzalez and Nick Taitague. Subsequent rosters have Adams, Weah, Matt Real, Chris Goslin, Jonathon Amon, Ben Lederman, Juan Pablo Torres, and well, that's all that is recognizable. I don't know what is special about those rosters. I don't know what generates: "Easily our best youth coach." The players seem to really like him. The trade articles were praise-worthy. But he also had the 1999 and 2000 classes at a pretty young age. I'm glad they played well, but I'm not quite sure how you judge any of this. His teams didn't seem to develop a slew of USMNT players (not that I expect that). Results are kind of pointless at that level, but I don't think there was a dominance there (I can't even find a list of results). Dude's probably a good coach. The pushing out may or may not have been justified (I've heard two completely different stories). But it's 14 and 15 year olds. I don't even know how you measure that kind of thing. And that's before we get into the idea that Hugo Perez, coaching the El Salvadoran full team, would be interested in coaching a US U20 team or something today.
Plenty of people including me seen plenty of games. You missed a few not that well known guys from his rosters including Pulisic, Haji Wright, Josh Perez, Joe Gallardo, I believe, DLT etc.
The worst coach in the world would have had Christian Pulisic on that roster and playing well. Kid was a prodigy. He hit some really talented classes, though most of them didn't end up being the players from the classes that made it (not that I expect the U15 coach to get that right). And that said, Christian was playing on the U17s for part of that stretch, I believe. Same with Wright. I did just read the thread on here when he was removed and some of this makes sense now. I get the cult-status now. (It's weird to read that thread with the lionization of Perez, Kleiban and a whole bunch of players who never made it.) It's not entirely or even mostly about Perez, it's about who he was matched up against. Sounds like he was a good youth coach, but the fervor seems more for reasons that had little to do with coaching. He's a symbol against the good old boys network, against some of the perceived or real anti-Latino sentiment, and generally just against US soccer. I do find it interesting the initial rumor was that he got fired for too many Latino kids. The next class, of course, would end up have a very strong Latino influence despite that. From reading, he made kids play out of the back, etc., which was a common dictate. Aside from players liking him, I'm not picking up that he was this amazing coach, aside from having a really talented class. I saw it with Kleiban as well -- if you are willing to self promote and you want to publicly criticize USSF, you can become a cult hero in no time. One thing I will say: I can't imagine anyone all that good stays a youth national team coach for all that long. Why? It's a low paying, low impact job. Someone like Luchi will help the USMNT far more as a player development director at Houston or something, and get paid more for it.
You are trying to make a political issue out of that, what is a total nonsense. Klejban is exactly like you, just on opposite side. Perez is a very good coach, as you haven't seen his teams you aren't qualified to have that strong opinion. Go find video of his team playing Brazil, Portugal, etc instead of listening to rumors. Pulisic wasn't a prodigy, he was a very good little kid. Messi was a prodigy, Pulisic wasn't. Not a single person expected him to turn into BL starter in a year. A lot of people rated Wright as high or higher than CP. He had a good U-17 WC, but nothing special. The whole team severely underachived after been taken from Hugo. I don't know where"too many Latino kids" rumor came from, almost exclussively Latino kids was Tab's U-2013 team, and Tab kept on coaching after that.
I saw Pulisic at the 2014? Nike Friendlies and he dominated (which was a U16/U17 team, I think). No one should have preferred Wright over him though he had more goals, etc. I absolutely expected him to be a star and I wasn't the only one. He was as close to can't miss as one can be. I have no issues with making it political; I don't remember any of that crap. But the departure thread is FULL of it. The rumor comes from something from twitter in that thread ... like I said, I don't any of that. I've seen Perez' El Salvador. They look organized. But I still don't see any real evidence the dude was a technical savant or the best youth team coach ever. Two years with the beginnings of the 1998 and 1999 classes is going to make a lot of people look good. Just like Tab gets a lot of kudos for a stacked 2000 / 2001 group.
Why do we think the U20 job is a short-term thing? Things may be different now, but Ramos was in charge for 4 cycles. Rongen for 4 of 5. Schmid had a couple go-rounds. The current U.S. Soccer administration might not want it to be like that anymore (I have no idea) but people in the job recently seem to have found it pretty good, or at least as good as just about everything they were able to otherwise land apart from an MLS head coaching gig.
Kids don't improve in straight lines. At some point Pulisic was dominant, at some point he wasn't. As I said his U-17 WC performance was anything, but dominant. Actually Josh Perez looked better than him there, and Fiorentina, blah blah blah he was major hope. Find me one post here where someone would have called Pulisic a future superstar. And I had fights with multiple posters who claimed that Wright would be one. Pulisic, Wright, Gallardo they all looked much better under Perez than on U-17 team. And talking of impossible to miss: Wes was missed, Aaronson was missed, Paredes was missed, Hoppe was totally missed somehow while all Klejban's kids were hyped beyond believe and still are, and all that after Hugo.
I do think Hugo Perez was a good youth coach and probably better than most we've had (as I feel like its been very hit or miss amongst our youth coaches). I also think he's done a very solid job with El Salvador and I'd like to see him get an MLS job after this and see what he does with it. But tactical savant? Pep Guardiola is a tactical savant, Marcelo Bielsa, and Hugo Perez has yet to do anything to demonstrate he is tactical savant. I don't think it's a bad thing to have someone from outside the good old boys network in the program and I also don't think its a bad thing to have a high profile Latino coach either. And I think there is value when people are willing to call out USSF when there is valid criticism or mistakes being made. But not everything USSF does is terrible and people often see all sorts of conspiracies when none exist. And often some criticisms come in bad faith or are just criticizing for the sake of it. I also think with Hugo Perez, we don't have a public accounting of why he got fired. There's rumor and innuendo but in a vacuum of information all sorts of ideas have been allowed to fester with no confirmation as to their veracity.
Was Hugo Perez a better coach than Richie Williams? Of course. Richie Williams was not a good coach, and from all accounts, just kind of a jerk. But I'm not giving Hugo Perez credit for having Christian Pulisic on his team. That's all. My issue has just generally been the superlatives given. I just don't really get how someone can't be just a "good" coach -- everything seems pushed to extremes. We can stop now. Not sure if you were referencing it, but when I said can't-miss, I meant more in the sense that the player was guaranteed to develop into a strong player as an adult. I do not expect the U15 team to resemble the USMNT and I would never put that expectation on ANY coach. Literally no one can project player development that well, and even if they could, (a) they'd work for a club and make a fortune and (b) they probably would put together some terrible U15 teams as you have to balance projection and performance at that time.
Hugo was interviewed by a Salvadorian reporter and asked about his experience coaching the USA youth team and specifically Pulisic. He said that he identified Christian as an outstanding player and called MLS academies to encourage them to recruit him. He said they told him that Pulisic was "too small".