NEW YORK — Here is what makes being the coach of the US national soccer team different than coaching any other sport in the country:
In any other sport, coaches view their jobs and measure their success in very simple terms — the idea is to win more often than not by molding the skills and talents of the players on their roster with their personal style and approach to the game.
If only soccer were that simple. If it is, Jurgen Klinsmann, the former German star who held his first news conference as coach of the US men’s soccer team Monday morning in New York, certainly does not see it that way.
To him the style of play of the national team “should reflect your mentality and your culture,” and part of Klinsmann’s task, as he sees it, is to define an American style of play in a way that it has never been defined before.
Klinsmann is not starting from scratch in that regard — he has lived in this country the past 13 years and is raising a family in southern California.
It is a fairly absurd idea really that a country of 300 million people could be defined and reflected by the way 11 men chase a ball around a grass field for 90 minutes. But it is an approach to international soccer that is gospel in most of the world and it is what makes the Klinsmann experiment, no matter how it turns out, such an interesting shot in the arm of US soccer at this crucial moment for the sport.
Bob Bradley, the tight-jawed US coach who was fired last week, seemed to live in track suits and took an elementary school gym teacher’s no-nonsense approach to the game. He was Microsoft to Klinsmann’s Apple. The eccentric, European iconoclast graces the sidelines in tailored dress shirts and already pushed the Germans to think differently about the game. After years of flirtation, he now wants to try to do the same for the US.
“Brazil, you know how they are going to play,” Klinsmann said, no doubt referring to the razzle-dazzle of so-called samba soccer perfected by the Brazilians over the past 50 years. “Italy, they sit back and wait for a mistake, and then they kill you.”
As for a US style? Right now, Klinsmann could offer little more than a shrug, and that to him is where his job begins.
“America likes to decide on its own what is next,” Klinsmann said. Given that, he spoke of the need for the US team to take a more “proactive” approach, to impose the pace and style of the game on opponents. “It’s a starting point,” he said.
Klinsmann did this once before, taking over the German national team before the 2006 World Cup. Out went the country’s organized, almost militaristic approach to the game. The Germans played as if liberated by a free-flowing style that reflected a new, more diverse country that wanted to be liked rather than simply feared.
On the other hand, his year coaching the legendary club Bayern Munich is largely considered disastrous.
But can he pull off the same national team trick in the US, an adopted homeland where the soccer culture, to say nothing of the culture as a whole, is a world apart from anything that exists anywhere else in the world? That will likely depend more on the emergence of a decent US striker, or more depth and technical skill on defense, or the cultivation of midfielders with the patience to play the ball through the midfield.
Klinsmann certainly was not ready to pitch himself as a miracle worker.
“It’s come a long way,” Klinsmann said of soccer in the US, “But we have quite a long way to go to climb back into the top 10 in the world.”
Fortunately for most soccer fans, the first glimpses of the Klinsmann way will arrive quickly. His team faces Mexico in a friendly next week in Philadelphia, and he hopes to name his roster and his first group of assistant coaches Wednesday.
World Cup qualifying is less than a year away.
Klinsmann’s contract only carries through the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Financial details of the agreement will have to wait until the US Soccer Federation files its tax return.
Read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2011/08/01/klinsmann-and-the-meaning-of-soccer/