I'll put it quite simply: we insist we are trying to find a "coach." Coaches train teams or individuals to develop in a particular way and they find/develop the pieces to make the coach's vision work. But the fact is that at the national team level players are simply not with the national "coach" long enough or often enough for that to happen unless all the club coaches cooperate and use the players and develop the players exactly how the national team wants and that is NOT going to happen. What the US needs is a manager that is very good at selecting players and devising a system that uses them in the best way possible. What we do not need is a "coach" that thinks they know better than all the collective club coaches that see the players daily. This is true much more on the men's side than it is on the women's but the women's club system is rapidly changing and we need, on both sides, a manager that can and will use the talent pool instead of trying, and failing, to develop it.
Meh, what we call coach others call manager. The problem is selecting a bad coach or manager or whatever you want to call him.
Searching for a new and/or better coach/manager is a lot like fishing with a net. If you cast your net where there is nothing but "trash" fish then you can choose out of the net nothing but trash. We cast our search net to find coaches that can develop talent and mold players to fit in with some system and we find coaches that cannot possibly succeed because they just do not have the time with the players or team. We need to find "coaches" that can look at the existing pool of players and also find players that might help and then design a system to get the most out of what is already there. It is the ability to manage players, the USSF, club coaches and fans for that matter that we should strive to find not the ability to "coach." Greg B. is actually an OK "coach" but he appears to be a horrible manager and does not even understand that on the national team level the very idea of molding players to fit a system is quite flawed. This "cancer of development" infests US soccer and can only be "fixed" if the US chooses a manager that actually manages instead of coaches.
I don't think the term "coach" implies everything that the OP suggests. But the problem with Gregg is that he has not adjusted from club coaching to national team coaching. He has an overly complicated system designed for a club, and still seems dead set on imposing it. Only two kinds of national teams can get away with that: national teams that draw the majority of their players from one club, or national teams that play so frequently that they are almost club teams. Note that the USWNT is the latter, with mostly the same group of players in camp for more than 20 weeks out of each year. The USMNT used to be similar in the early to mid 90s before MLS. All that said, I think the USSF has only recently been hiring coaches who try to do a lot of tactical tinkering -- Berhalter and Klinsmann were the first two in a long time. (Different types of tinkering. Berhalter overcoaches, Klinsmann kept his own players in the dark about lineup and formation changes until the last minute. Similar results.) Bradley used a fairly simple 4-4-2 reliant on playmaking from the wings. Arena used several tactical formations during his two stints with the USMNT, but generally stuck to formations that were widely used by club teams -- he usually played 3-5-2 when that formation was being used by the majority of MLS teams from 1998 to 2000, and 4-2-3-1 when it became in vogue worldwide in the early 2000s. The last coach before Klinsmann to do much tactical tinkering was Sampson, and even he only tried to force the USMNT into a rigid system at the very end of his tenure.
While one may fault Arena's player selection, his tactical approach was very pragmatic: just play the same formation that most of the players are practicing day in and day out with their clubs. (He did use three formations at the 2002 World Cup, mostly out of necessity. But when injuries forced him to return to the no-longer-popular 3-5-2, it was still a formation that the players were familiar with, many of them having played in it within the previous two years.)
Then why do they make the stupid choices they do? We really have not had a manager that manages rather than coaches since the MLS came into existence to stagnate and hamper player development. We keep expecting the National team manager to develop players not to find and assemble them into a working team. The MLS is a good league for everyone in CONCACAF except for Mexico and the US. From the MLS we keep choosing national team managers or we seem to always find ones that "fit the MLS mold." One of the criteria always seems to be that a candidate must "understand the MLS and US soccer culture" as if either the MLS or US soccer culture is a good thing worthy of understanding.
I think what they mean is understanding the differences and challenges MLS presents ( timing of season vs other leagues), the travel, etc and player availability, etc vs more traditional calendar leagues. Everything you have posted is spot on. I have no problem hiring a coach that promotes “ sexy and pretty “ soccer once we are preaching that style from 9 years old and up, and those kids hit the national team.. Until then, give me pragmatism. Honestly, the USSF needs to look at international coaches who consistently ( multiple tenures throughout career) take average talented teams and find and put them a system where they punch above their weight .( whole is greater than the sum of the parts , blah, blah...) That should be the first criteria, and narrows down the list considerably. The issue with the JK hiring is he got credit for Germany’s World Cup win, but Lowe was the brains behind the operation whereas JK was a talisman and not a good coach. He also had world class talent to work with. Hence my stressing a coach who does well with mediocre talent What we DONT need is picking MLS coaches who have never had an international gig before.
What we don’t need is another international coach who has never coached American players and has no interest in their development.
Well said. Watching these players try to follow the GB system against really good teams is like watching a hostage video. I'm convinced that is part of the Dest situation.
Why? Most countries head coaches aren't from that country, and haven't coached that countries players before. Why are we so different? We need to get over this idea that American players are some "special case." Besides, it isn't the head/senior teams coach to care about development at that level. All of that needs to be begin before teenage years. Its the head coaches job to get results with the talent pool he has.
Name a World Cup winning coach who was not from the country that won it. it is a senior teams responsibility to at least have input in how he wants the local talent developed. JK just decided our system was crap and went to Mexico and Germany for players. We were worse off after he was fired because now there aren’t any players either from the USA or elsewhere with real experience after the qualification bubble burst.
None have, but that doesn't mean many haven't had very successful tenures.So winning the world cup is your requirement? Not to threadjack, but this is like comparing "who is the best player in the world" where the theme is how many Worldcups or Champions League titles has XYZ won? It isn't a fair criteria is my point. We simply disagree on this. If you mean input as "this would be nice if we did this" I get it. But most coaches aren't around long enough to be fully invested in youth development, so they aren't going to preoccupy themselves with it.
What we don't need is players that need the national team to coach to develop them. They have clubs for that. And it's not the NT manager's job.
Your post seems to indicate that our players would be better if Klinsmann liked MLS more. In an alternate universe where Klinsmann wasn’t coach, where would the USMNT player pool be today? Who are the specific players who would be better but for the fact that the USMNT coach thought that players playing in better leagues are actually better than those in lesser leagues? More specifically, who are the 25-30 year olds whose potential was limited?
Are their coaches who (1) are secure enough to show the flexibility the op describes, and (2) neither favor MLS nor hold American soccer/MLS in contempt? That would be nice.
I would (like to) think that an international coach would prioritize his record and reputation (getting results) over fitting players into a system. Or at the very least, be quick to ditch a system early on when they realize they don't have the personel to pull it off.
@Cliveworshipper, you never responded to this - I thought I’d add Clint Eastwood post from another thread. Care to comment?