Juergen Klinsmann tries to globalize U.S. soccer
Siegfried Klinsmann was planning a future for his sons when he opened the doors to a three-story bakery in the hilly woodlands west of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1978.
“A father’s dream is always that one of his sons carries on his business,” says Juergen, the second of those four sons, who was 14 at the time.
Unfortunately for Siegfried, young Juergen had dreams of his own — and they tended more toward sport than strudel.
“I said ‘I’m out,’” he remembers. “ ‘I’m going to go play soccer.’ ”
The two eventually hammered out a compromise. If Juergen got his baker’s degree, his father would allow him to play professional soccer. More than three decades, one World Cup title and a European Championship later, the lessons of that episode still resonate for the younger Klinsmann:
Don’t waver on your convictions. When you chart a course, stick to it. And whenever possible, challenge convention and authority.
Those core values are ones that Klinsmann, head coach of the U.S. men’s national soccer team, figures to return to in his quest to remake the country’s soccer program. In his first 10 months on the job he has already managed a rare trifecta, angering coaches, players and fans. But he also won converts when the U.S. national team reeled off five wins in a row, including a historic victory over Italy in Genoa, before losing last week to Brazil.
Now the real work begins. On Friday the U.S. plays Antigua in Tampa, Fla., followed by a June 12 match at Guatemala as it begins the third round of qualifying matches for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
“The mechanism of soccer is results. It’s extremely important for us what happens in World Cup qualifying,” Klinsmann acknowledges. “Am I able to switch gears based on the challenge? But over the long term I also want to see a development of the game … to learn how to play with the best in the world.”
Helping the U.S. catch up to the rest of the world is a challenge Klinsmann has been building toward for years. One of the world’s premier strikers during a 17-year career, Klinsmann played in four countries — and made a point of immersing himself in the local lifestyle at each stop.
“I was almost fanatic about language and culture,” says Klinsmann, who speaks five languages. “It changed my life. How I look at people changed completely from how I looked at people when I grew up in Germany. You learn to take people the way they are and not the way you want them to be.”
That cosmopolitan viewpoint has proven invaluable to Klinsmann. He has became a student of coaches, learning soccer from the likes of Arsene Wenger (longtime Arsenal coach), Giovanni Trappatoni (former Italy coach) and Cesar Luis Menotti (ex-Argentina coach) and, since moving to the U.S. in 1998, debating philosophies with former USC football coach Pete Carroll, former Lakers coach Phil Jackson and Duke basketball Coach Mike Krzyzewski.
Klinsmann recently took that curiosity to Brazil, where he attended an international coaching clinic.
“I need to figure out how they think,” says Klinsmann, who turns 48 next month. “That’s my competition in the World Cup. I need to figure out how does Brazil function. How does Spain function? How does Italy do it? How can I make a difference with my guys?
“So I have to find great resources here in this country, but I also have to find great resources around the world because it’s a global game.”
That’s a theme Klinsmann comes back to frequently. While the U.S. celebrates diversity in many aspects of daily life, it has long been provincial and isolationist when it comes to the national soccer team. And that, Klinsmann says, has kept the U.S. from closing the considerable gap separating it from world powers such as Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Germany.
“Klinsmann understands when we’ve tried to Americanize our game, we’re on the wrong schedule,” says Eric Wynalda, a former U.S. national team striker and the first American to play in Germany’s Bundesliga. Major League Soccer starts their “games in March and then we question ourselves. Why did our Olympic team not qualify? Because our guys have been practicing for months. Their guys have been playing games.”
More important than changing the calendar of U.S. soccer, though, is changing both the playing style and mentality of the players.
Under Bob Bradley, who had the second-highest winning percentage of any U.S. coach in history, the Americans played a reactive, counter-attacking game — one Klinsmann has dumped in favor of a dynamic, aggressive approach. He has also introduced exhausting European-style training camps and has filled his roster with American players from German, English, Italian and Mexican clubs.
From that collision of competing styles a uniquely American method will emerge, Klinsmann believes.
“The style of play will reflect all the different elements that these players bring from abroad,” he says. “We have a Jose Torres, who is half Mexican. He reflects a Latin way of doing it; very technical, very good in tight spaces. We might have an American-German kid that … wants to have more space. This is something that will always happen with the different backgrounds the kids come from.
“And then you, as a coach, have the challenge to make this really work as a bigger puzzle.”
Pulling that off will require a massive effort, and there’s little time to waste. It was not yet 8 o’clock on a recent weekday morning, but the coach, dressed in a dark blue track suit, is sitting in a hotel lobby not far from his Orange County home, bright-eyed and energetic as he leans forward, an elbow on one knee, to animate his points.
“He’s 24 hours like that,” sighs former Chivas USA coach Martin Vasquez, an assistant under Klinsmann with German club Bayern Munich and now an assistant with the U.S. national team. “That’s one thing that rubs off with his staff and all his players: his enthusiasm and his positive energy. That’s his personality, that’s his character and that’s him as a person.”
But even a good idea can be carried too far, Vasquez suggests. Klinsmann insists his coaches — the youngest of whom is 43 — work just as hard on conditioning as the players, many of whom are half that age.
“He believes that whatever he preaches, it has to come from the leader,” Vasquez says. “We want to be in shape because we preach fitness, we preach hard work, we preach being professionals every day.”
Under Bradley the U.S. team advanced out of the group stage at the 2010 World Cup but lost its first match in the knockout stage to Ghana. Then last June the U.S. lost to Mexico in the Gold Cup final at the Rose Bowl, and soon after Bradley was fired and Klinsmann took over.
When remaking a national program, clearly no detail is too small. But if the task facing Klinsmann seems Sisyphean, keep in mind it’s one he has tackled before. Six years after a playing career that saw him become the third-most-prolific scorer and the third-most-capped player in the history of German soccer, Klinsmann was asked to rescue a German national team that failed to win a game in the 2004 European Championship.
So he hired a sports psychologist, brought in fitness trainers from Arizona and employed coaching philosophies learned in the U.S., drawing the wrath of a German soccer establishment that charged him with Americanizing the team.
The grumbling stopped when Germany made the semifinals of the 2006 World Cup. Klinsmann wasn’t retained after the Cup, but Joachim Loew, his chief lieutenant, succeeded him and carried Klinsmann’s strategy forward, with Germany reaching the 2008 Euro final and the semifinals of the 2010 World Cup — losing both times to eventual champion Spain by 1-0 scores.
Klinsmann will need to be successful in this World Cup cycle for the changes he made in the U.S. program to stick. If that happens, he believes it will hasten the day when the U.S. can be competitive against the likes of France and Argentina — if not Spain and Germany.
And if his bold experiment fails?
Klinsmann says he hasn’t allowed himself to consider that possibility.
“I’ll jump into a new adventure or project and then I’ll see how things are going and I’ll adjust. As a coach it’s important that you kind of analyze your environment and say, ‘OK, based on what you’ve seen now, this is what you have to do.’
“It’s a process that we have to go through over maybe many years.”
