Extremely Detailed Article on the Last 7 Years of US Soccer on the Ringer

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On May 22, the players were expecting just another typical practice day. Instead, it quickly became an inflection point in Klinsmann’s tenure and a symbol of the larger battle that Klinsmann, who’d recently signed a contract extension, was waging for control of U.S. Soccer.

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The final roster wasn’t supposed to be announced until a week later, but that day, a few players were pulled aside as they walked off the practice field, about to be culled from the herd in shock. The setting was too informal, and the process too rushed, for Klinsmann to offer anything but a platitude on the side of the pitch for all to see: You know, I’ve just got to go with my gut here. We’re not going to bring you to the World Cup.

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The early roster cuts weren’t just a surprise for the players. No one in U.S. Soccer had been briefed, including Gulati and Flynn. As the dejected players walked off the pitch, it slowly dawned on federation staff that Klinsmann wasn’t just dropping a few players from the group of 30; he was announcing the final 23-man roster for Brazil.

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The last player to learn that he would not be traveling to Brazil was also the most controversial: Landon Donovan. The forward had stayed after practice to hit a few free kicks, and when Klinsmann called for Donovan, shivers of panic went through U.S. Soccer staff. Most of the cuts so far had been players on the fringe of the roster, but Donovan was the most famous American soccer player alive and the team’s all-time leading goal-scorer. It was his last-second goal in 2010 that had propelled the USMNT into the knockout round. Then on the wrong side of 30, he was no longer quite the player he once was, but few inside the locker room believed the team was better off without him.

Donovan and Klinsmann had butted heads for years, dating back to when the coach put his reputation on the line to bring the forward to Bayern Munich. On loan in 2009, Donovan made only six substitute appearances and didn’t score a goal. The episode played a major role in fracturing the club’s faith in Klinsmann’s judgment before his firing.

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Unbeknownst to him, Donovan also became mixed up in power struggles between Klinsmann and the board as well as Klinsmann and the squad. "Rummenigge and Hoeness couldn't understand why Klinsmann had desperately wanted to sign Donovan back in the summer in the first place," a club insider said. "They let him make one signing in winter and were very surprised that he again chose Landon. He was advertised as 'world class' by the manager but obviously couldn't quite cut it at this level. Both the club and the players lost faith in Klinsmann's judgment as a result and the cracks were getting bigger by the minute.

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“The single dumbest thing that Jürgen Klinsmann has ever done. Period,” said Richard Groff, a former member of U.S. Soccer’s board of directors. “I don’t know anybody that agreed with that decision. No one. And I was furious.”

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Everybody thinks this whole, like, California, blond surfer-dude attitude is Jürgen. [But] he is very German. I mean really German. Really rigid on a lot of things,” said Payne. For those inside U.S. Soccer and for many of the team’s veteran players, the problem was not that Klinsmann wanted to enact change, but that his plans lacked continuity. Many of Klinsmann’s innovations — from motivational speakers to yoga classes, fitness regimes, strict nutrition controls, and constantly evolving tactical schemes — were introduced one day and forgotten the next. It was hard for players to tell whether a Klinsmann decision was calculated “creative disruption” or just the whim of a coach who woke up with a new idea.

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In a blockbuster piece in the Sporting News by Brian Straus published after the Honduras match, multiple U.S. national team players blasted Klinsmann and his assistant Martin Vasquez anonymously, arguing that both lacked the tactical sophistication to lead the team.

Their complaints echoed those of Philipp Lahm, a German national team star and fullback for Bayern Munich during Klinsmann’s brief tenure there. In his 2011 autobiography, published after U.S. Soccer had hired Klinsmann, Lahm blasted his coaching methods. “We practiced little more than fitness [at Bayern]. Tactical things were neglected. The players had to get together before [games] to discuss how we wanted to play,” Lahm wrote. “After six or eight weeks, all the players knew it wouldn’t work with Klinsmann. The rest of the season was damage limitation.”


NBC Sports’ Kyle Martino had also been hearing complaints from players about Klinsmann and Vasquez’s tactical shortcomings. The week after Straus’s piece came out, he traveled to California to watch the team practice. “I saw it firsthand. The training sessions were incongruous. They were muddled. They didn’t make sense, and they didn’t prepare the team for the weekend,” he recalled. “The players didn’t know what positions they were playing until the day of the game. I mean, it was a mess.”

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Everybody thinks this whole, like, California, blond surfer-dude attitude is Jürgen. [But] he is very German. I mean really German. Really rigid on a lot of things,” said Payne. For those inside U.S. Soccer and for many of the team’s veteran players, the problem was not that Klinsmann wanted to enact change, but that his plans lacked continuity. Many of Klinsmann’s innovations — from motivational speakers to yoga classes, fitness regimes, strict nutrition controls, and constantly evolving tactical schemes — were introduced one day and forgotten the next. It was hard for players to tell whether a Klinsmann decision was calculated “creative disruption” or just the whim of a coach who woke up with a new idea.

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In the aftermath, Klinsmann blamed the poor results on referees, and privately told U.S. Soccer officials that he believed some of the matches were rigged.

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For those inside the federation, alarm bells were ringing. They’d heard the grumblings about player discontent going back years. Gulati himself had heard much of it firsthand. He had a long history of backchanneling with players to keep a pulse on what was going on inside the locker room, a tactic that some in American soccer circles believed undermined the authority of his coaches. In 2014, women’s national team coach Tom Sermanni had been fired after what some viewed as a players revolt

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As 2016 began, the Klinsmann question vexed Gulati. He polled U.S. Soccer’s leadership and players, outside confidantes, and even some journalists about what to do regarding his embattled coach. Gulati had gambled heavily on Klinsmann, and even as reports filtered back to him that Klinsmann wasn’t working out, Gulati was hesitant to make a change. “Sunil keeps very close counsel, and I think that did not serve him well over time,” said Edwards, the former U.S. Soccer vice president. “People have their style, and until now the [U.S. Soccer] membership tended to defer to the president, particularly on the men’s coach.”

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Awaiting a phone call the next day, Arena instead received a vague note from Flynn saying that his appointment would have to wait. Flynn, unbeknownst to anybody outside the U.S. Soccer hierarchy, was awaiting a heart transplant that could save his life. Flynn received word of a potential donor the morning after the initial meeting with Arena, and immediately flew to Kansas City for emergency surgery. His recovery timetable was eight weeks, minimum, before he could return to work. The decision to hire or fire Klinsmann now rested solely with Gulati. Klinsmann’s failures in March and subsequent refusal to accept responsibility for the team’s struggles had prepared him to pull the trigger. But with Flynn incapacitated, he began to waver.

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By the time Gulati was finally ready to fire Klinsmann, the situation would be worse. Instead of taking over for the full Hexagonal cycle, Arena would be given only eight games with a team that lost its first two matches. There was still some margin for error; it just wasn’t big enough.

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From the opening whistle, it was clear that Arena had miscalculated. The U.S. played slowly and without energy. It confounded the coaching staff and players on the bench. “It was clear to me when we took the field that we were playing like we already qualified for a World Cup,” said McCarty, who started the match on the bench. “Trinidad looked like the team that was trying to qualify. I was shocked at the level of passivity.”

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o this day, Arena is defensive about his decisions, accepting responsibility in word then proceeding to blame others for the result in Trinidad.

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In a sense, he’s not wrong. The failure to qualify for the World Cup was a collective failure of the entire American soccer community. It was a flawed outsider, Klinsmann, and his divisive leadership that clashed with an insular organization — led by Gulati — that was unwilling to loosen its grip on power or admit to its own mistakes. It was Arena’s overreliance on veteran players and his inability to reunite a divided locker room in a short period of time. The centralized power structure, and the small size of the media core covering it, encouraged an echo chamber where the thought of missing the World Cup was considered impossible until it happened.

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Asked if there was a single snapshot of that night burned into their memory, multiple players recall the sight of Pulisic, the most blameless person in the entire catastrophe, still in full uniform, weeping in the shower. “You just feel sorry for the kid, because a talent like his deserves to be seen on the world stage this summer,” McCarty said. “It is incumbent upon everybody in U.S. Soccer to make sure no other group of players ever has to feel that way again.”

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USSF is run like a kid playing MM mode on FIFA

everything done shooting by the hip.

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