Before I begin, I’d like to state the fairly obvious and point out that I don’t know former footballer and recently-employed head coach, Jurgen Klinsmann. Away from the world of football, he might be wonderful. For all I know, he may be as warm and tender as a perfect cut of filet mignon, as generous and giving as Sol’s nourishing rays, and as witty and humorous as a half-arsed soccer blogger.
I don’t intend to impugn on who this man is in his private life. I don’t want to speak to his deeper character. Truth be told, if this was simply a case of a man not being very good at coaching football teams, this blog entry wouldn’t be a thing. Sometimes we’re just not good at the thing we’re trying to do and it’s enough that we simply tried.
Sadly however, I feel compelled to write this because to me, the staunch defense of this man among quarters of the US soccer fan base, reaches climate-change-denier levels of frustrating.
Klinsi has just stepped down from his latest coaching gig, heading iconic Bundesliga side, Hertha Berlin. Three months, 10 games, 3 wins. He goes out “Full Jurgen”, claiming his decision is due to a lack of support from a club that as of the end of the January transfer window, had brought their spending for the season to $120m. For that amount of expenditure, you can happily fail to support me any time you like. Twice.
Despite this, I’m still seeing a wide range of claims that no, no, no, Klinsmann is a good manager and that it was a glaring error for the USSF to fire him back in 2016.
The thing is, all of this – and I mean all of it – would be completely different if he wasn’t a famous European ex-player with a wealth of goalscoring exploits and a World Cup to his name and instead was simply found coaching at a college in Virginia, or was called “Bob” or something.
However, when some fans look upon European Futbol, they devolve into something akin to a lovesick teenager, pining after the physically attractive, popular Prom Monarch, so mesmerized by how pretty they are that they willfully ignore the preponderance of evidence that the person in question is a colossal wankpuffin.
It’s this kind of individual that for some reason, sees Klinsmann as our own imported slice of Europe; a bit like the shard of Krypton from which Superman built the Fortress of Solitude. There was a time when former USSF President, Sunil Gulati seemed to agree. The man literally spent years trying to bring Klinsmann into the US Men’s National Team fold, displaying a level of infatuation not often seen outside footage of screaming girls fainting at Elvis Presley concerts.
I was on board at the time. He seemed to have done a good job getting the DFB to revamp German football and he’d had a good run coaching the national team at the 2006 World Cup… before curiously stepping away.
I mean, there was that stint at Bayern Munich, which was as weird and disastrous as it was brief. But from the outside looking in, it seemed fraught with politics and probably had little to do with how Jurgen would fare elsewhere (or so we thought…).
I’m not going to completely regurgitate my analysis of Jurgen’s stint with the USMNT as head coach and technical director as I did so towards the end of tenure and that blog entry is still available.
As far as I could tell, his activity in the role of technical director, seemed to amount to him technically directing the USSF to feel sad about how much the US soccer landscape sucked. One of the biggest excuses for the way his tenure fizzled out is literally that he was hobbled by the USSF’s development programs. I don’t deny the setup fell somewhere between “absent” and “crap” but after five years, his fingerprints should have been all over it.
Well, the detractors vociferously inform me that the youth development structure in the US is still pants, so either Klinsi did nothing in that area, or he was as ineffectual as the predecessors he liked to condescend and browbeat about football culture. I’m guessing probably a little of both but more the former.
So here’s the thing: with this latest bout of head coaching floppery, it’s hard to actually defend his record any longer. He had that early success with Germany which in terms of on-field tactics has since largely been credited to Joachim Loewe. Then there was the Bayern debacle. His Hertha Berlin tenure was even worse. We’ve already gone over the USMNT, which is more debated but there’s a thread running through it all, from friction between him and various detractors when he first coached Germany, right up to his claims today of a lack of support: a bright, neon line of contentiousness. And yet despite some pretty public displays, it’s something that strangely fades into the background when it comes to assessing him as a coach and man-manager.
Let’s get something straight (and as I said in opening, away from soccer, he could be a brilliant bloke), Jurgen Klinsmann does not lack charisma and personality. Being frank and forward isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, this isn’t simply a guy presenting honest home-truths. This is something that has been in the background his entire career.
As a player, his tenures at clubs were rarely drama-free. His last season at Inter (registered trademark) Milan was one of locker-room division and on-field disappointment. En route out of Monaco, he grumbled about the attitudes of his teammates. He clashed with Lothar Matthaus for club and country. He artistically mimed the exclamation point for his departure from Bayern by kicking seven shades out of an advertising structure. Even his warmly-recalled first spell with Tottenham Hotspur saw him trading barbs with Alan Sugar as they parted ways.
I’m not going to put all that on Klinsmann. Who knows what was happening at Inter (Milan, not to be confused with Miami) and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Matthaus and Sugar weren’t above being douchenozzles. Such a frequent pattern can’t all be on everyone else though, and we all saw the level of tact he applied over a certain Landon Donovan briefly putting his mental well-being over soccer and a certain Fabian Johnson asking to be subbed due to a tight hamstring.
Even if we go back to the thing he’s credited with doing well – the revamp of Germany’s youth system and NT setup – it’s noteworthy that he also sold similar concepts of transformational change to both the USSF & Bayern Munich. In those cases, it never materialized.
So this is starting to read like a hit piece and that (honestly) wasn’t my intent. However, the fact that 4 years on, we still have people gazing wistfully into yesteryear, pining for the days when America set records for shots saved against Belgium, makes this weeks confirmation of the pattern something I feel needs to be noted.
So why weren’t the US better under Bruce Arena and Greg Berhalter? That’s a fairly simple answer: they’re not very good either.
I love Arena as an MLS coach but his main skills are in man-management and the mystic arts of circumnavigating the league’s opaque roster rules. He wasn’t tactically nuanced even in his prime and the world game has long passed him by in that regard.
Berhalter needs no explanation. His squad selections and gameday strategy scream “where am I and why are those 22 men chasing that round thing?”.
However, those guys performing poorly, the USSF program having issues and Jurgen sucking, aren’t all mutually exclusive. Just because the replacements haven’t set the world alight, doesn’t mean we should have kept faith with a guy who had seen increasingly disappointing results and performances in recent years and whose legacy is now categorically one of limited success.
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