If US Soccer has a plan, attempting to hire Jurgen Klopp certainly can’t be part of it

If we’ve learned one thing following the firing of Greg Berhalter as manager of the United States men’s national team, it’s probably this: When a respected coach says he wants to take a year off from the endless drudgery of his job, Needed, so that’s probably what they mean.

It makes sense that Jurgen Klopp would reject US Soccer’s advances when he is not even two months removed from emotionally leaving Liverpool. Still, it was worth a shot in the federation’s eyes.

German is as ambitious a goal as the federation can recognize. He is a serial winner at the highest level of club football, a culture-builder who is tactically flexible within a clear guiding ideology. He is also unemployed, eliminating any cost of the buyout, and US Soccer looked ready to open up its salary budget.

Here’s the thing: if you take Klopp’s announcement that he was leaving Liverpool in January at face value, it was not a case of a coach needing a new challenge. He made this call despite having a year left on his contract. He appeared to be suffering from the stress of the constant churn of managing one of the world’s most prominent clubs.

It would have been a huge relief if Klopp had decided to try his hand at international management after admitting he was “running out of energy,” it would have solved exactly two years of headaches for U.S. Soccer.

I’m not sure USMNT fans would have fully appreciated the considerable difference between risk and reward if Klopp had replaced Berhalter.

The best-case scenario is obvious: an ambitious recruit who makes the federation look good, a really great coach who whips up a mighty batch of Schwarzwaldian lemonade from the lemons he inherited, maybe a run to the 2026 World Cup semi-finals and then some. Happy memories when he either returns to club soccer or retires outright.

In the worst case, ongoing headaches will turn into diagnosable migraines. One would be that Klopp was right: that his potential is exhausted and that he lacks the wherewithal to master the nuances that distinguish international football from its club alternative. The second is that he won’t be able to handle the crash-course adaptation to international football, that he may get more from individuals but can’t pull it off collectively in time for the World Cup. A ‘Luis Enrique’s Spain’ scenario if you like.

In any case, the result will be a tremendous solution – and an expensive one. US Soccer will return to the recruiting desk after the World Cup and will be feeling financially strapped in search of a long-term option.

So while Klopp looks great photoshopped into a USMNT hat, the reality is that gambling is far more expensive than an Adobe suite subscription.

When a federation can’t select the best unemployed manager in the game, what does the potential ‘best’ appointment look like? That’s a question that Matt Crocker and US Soccer will work to answer in the coming weeks in hopes of securing the right coach for the World Cup by September. The names will keep churning through rumors like an endless conveyor belt. Some of my colleagues highlighted some of the most talked-about options, Klopp among them.

Perhaps rushing to meet Klopp’s asking price with some combination of salaries, sponsor ideas and NFTs was an expensive stopgap that won’t address the bigger issues in the game.

Is it driven by the hiring process, an approach Crocker has emphasized in seeking to reappoint Berhalter in 2023? Does this appointment respond to the issues that arose during Berhalter’s brief second tenure and put the program on a better footing? Or was it a grand scramble that could have been better planned and executed given Klopp’s months’ notice?

Does US Soccer really know what it wants from its next male manager? Does he have enough time to figure it out?

“Progress has been made,” Crocker said Wednesday in the wake of Berhalter’s firing, “but now is the time to turn that progress into victories.”

win! This is a great start. American sports fans are passionate about winning.

The point is: If winning were that easy, the USMNT would be 22-time World Cup champions.

To say it’s time to win after six years of, uh, everything they did under Berhalter is an implicit admission of failure. If you’ve set aside a modest budget to buy a handful of citrus trees, waiting six years as they bear fruit occasionally in hopes of a bountiful harvest to come, then an entire Brazilian grove’s worth before a big event. Uprooted those trees to import produce… Are you better at growing citrus? And what was the point of nurturing that little plot in the first place?

Crocker has repeatedly sworn that Berhalter’s second appointment was the result of rigorous interviews, research and data-driven evaluation. If that process is thrown out the window in exchange for a “spend big on famous club coaches” model, then it is simply admitting failure beyond one appointment. Trust the process, as they say – but please, keep updating the process based on new information.

Encouragingly, Crocker appears to have learned from one of the federation’s mistakes in the 2018 process that led to Berhalter’s initial appointment. His predecessor, Ernie Stewart, stipulated that the coach who would help the team bounce back from its failure in World Cup qualification would have to speak English. This ruled out options like Marcelo Bielsa and Tata Martino and significantly reduced the pool of candidates.

Of course, Berhalter was hardly the first native son to coach the USMNT. The program has been in disarray domestically since the 1994 World Cup, when the team was led by Serbian coaching nomad Bora Milutinovic, with all but one appointment. The one exception, Jurgen Klinsmann, is marked with an asterisk because he put down roots in California years before being appointed in the hopes of staying in the federation’s mind whenever Bob Bradley is fired.

At times, it was beneficial to be trained by someone from America. The program’s best performances in the modern era were overseen by Bruce Arena and Bradley. Both had in-depth knowledge of the player pool at a time when scouting and talent identification were not so readily global. Both had clear ideas about how they wanted the team to achieve results, taking into account the strengths of their pool while ignoring the weaknesses.

Neither of them were afraid to embrace conservative national ideas about ‘grit’ and playing straight football. Both used parts of that DNA to their advantage. Arena led the USMNT to the 2002 World Cup quarterfinals, and Bradley led the team to a runner-up finish at the 2009 Confederations Cup, defeating all-time Spanish giants en route to the final.

As Crocker figures out what’s ‘best’ for the next appointment, the final appointment may actually be a homely one. Steve Cherundolo and Pat Noonan are former US internationals who are thriving in MLS, while Jim Curtin is familiar with many of the players in the pool and provides a fresh perspective. If one or the other of these options is hired, the pressure on them to perform better will increase as the fanbase moves on from the second Berhalter era.

The ‘best’ fare may even be international. Milutinovic helped transform a generation of USMNT players into program legends and brought a fresh approach to setting the team up for success on home soil. He had substantial coaching experience at the international level, leading Mexico during their hosting of the 1986 World Cup.

Her CV is comparable to that of another nomadic international manager, Hervé Renard, who most recently led the France women’s national team. Renard is not a celebrity coach, even if he has a catalogue-ready face, but he has extraordinary achievements to his name: two Africa Cup of Nations titles (with Zambia in 2012 and Ivory Coast in 2015), leading Saudi Arabia to the . a shock World Cup win against Argentina in 2022, and leading a troubled French team to the quarter-finals of the 2023 Women’s World Cup just months after taking charge. He checks a lot of boxes for a potential stopgap solution, with a very high top floor and a very low floor.

The ‘best’ option may actually flop. However, getting the best version of him may require a year of patience in addition to a huge salary – two resources US Soccer cannot afford to waste. Again, risk and reward.

Ultimately, the need to achieve this rental extends beyond the region. You don’t need to look very far into our comment sections to know that USMNT fan morale is at an all-time low. Depending on how much importance you place on the Gold Cup, the team won’t play another high-level meaningful match until a World Cup group-stage opener in 2026. This appointment is one of the few remaining opportunities to inspire the fans and rebuild morale to achieve the maximum. Support before hosting the World Cup.

Crocker and the federation leadership did not ask Tim Weah to move his hands behind the defender’s head. However, he is responsible for reappointing a coach who did not prepare his team to compete in the Copa America. Whoever is ultimately hired, the federation needs to make their choice with full confidence that it is the ‘best’ choice for the next two years – and preferably they have the ‘best’ case to justify that selection. There should be a clear definition of ‘.

(Top photo: Wolverhampton Wanderers FC/Wolves via Getty Images)