Bruce Arena was formally named as Los Angeles Galaxy coach this weekend, taking what the team described as “full control” of the club’s soccer operations.  

This may prove to be an inflammable mix. Arena has been idle since he and Red Bull New York parted ways, and his reputation is running on fumes. He desperately needs another winning run in MLS to exorcise his many ghosts. The team that hired him is in similar straits: AEG needs to fix a dysfunctional locker room, a damaged brand, and hang on to a star making noises that he’d like to get out of town.  

It also may be an impossible job: After the disastrous co-management of the Galaxy by Alexi Lalas and David Beckham’s handlers, the Galaxy was left top-heavy with bloated salaries and a lack of talent. It currently needs more than soothing words and man-management.

Time is a factor. While the Galaxy is in better shape than the Red Bulls were when Arena took the reins, both AEG and the league need to have David Beckham in the playoffs. But looking down the road, the Galaxy also needs to hold on to Landon Donovan and shore up the teams’ pitiful defense. Arena has ten games in which to work might legitimately be termed a miracle. The MLS playoff race is so tight that anything can happen, but the way Houston has been playing lately and the dogged determination being shown by Real Salt Lake seems to indicate that a top two finish and a guaranteed post-season berth will be difficult.

Arena made his pro name by smartly stocking and running a dynastic D.C. team thirteen years ago, and he is widely (and correctly) credited for steering the 2002 men’s team to glory in Korea. Since that time, Arena’s ego seemed to expand while his teams’ accomplishments shrank.  

Convinced his tactics could help the Americans win anywhere, he seemed genuinely nonplussed when that turned out not to be true. His stated ambition to coach an English team was greeted with scorn abroad. When he returned to the club level, his New York team didn’t win a playoff game under his tenure. (He also made the mistake of signing Claudio Reyna as a designated player — a move that arguably cost him his job at the Meadowlands.)

And have we mentioned the arrogance that he too often displays? I sense that it covers up some deep personal insecurities, but where that ego once served to deflect pointed questions, it now serves to invite them. It’s a shame that he doesn’t instead lean back on his humor, which is both incisive and funny.

Arena has shown he can work with some of the biggest egos in the game. Beckham’s clan is smarting after the removal of their hand-picked coach, Ruud Gullitt, and Arena is going to have to deal with a lot of the off-the-field politicking that shadows England’s most famous soccer export. But he showed in D.C. that guys like Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno would play for him, and at his peak, he got guys to believe they could excel in his system.  

Arena also has been smart in inviting Dave Sarachan to join him in LA. Sarachan was Arena’s secret weapon in the 2002 Cup: His gentle personality and eye to detail got that team out of a lot of jams.

Now: A lot of people want to see Arena fail. They blame him for the 2006 debacle (again, with justification) and are sick of his attitude. Smart fans also know what a wreck he left at the Fed: He completely neglected the American youth development system while serving as TD, and the squad is now really suffering as a result. Unfortunately, wishing failure on the man is just as unfair to the Galaxy as Arena has sometimes been to the fans, the players and the folks who covered him.

And, while few are saying it, Arena is the right man for the job right now. There isn’t another American with the combination of experience and grit who hasn’t already been behind the Galaxy’s wheel. Nor is there another quality foreign coach out there who would touch that job right now.

So, wish Arena luck. He’s going to need it.

When RBNY coach Bruce Arena speaks, people react. In fact, it is rare when the provocative former national team coach doesn’t provoke a reaction because his reputation for speaking candidly is well-known.

This week, his interview with Jack Bell at nytimes.com (and his subsequent, and not all-too convincing apologies to Grant Wahl at si.com) is the hot topic of American soccer.

We disagree with Arena on many things; we think he is an egoist and a bully, and we also think his eight-year tenure as technical director will be remembered for failing to deal with some of the very problems he’s now calling out. But there are three items he raised in his Q&A with which should be front-burner stuff.

First, Arena specifically pointed out that American players are locked into a certain income bracket with little room for growth.

Second, Arena said there was a great need for more people in decision-making roles who know what a player ``looks and smells like.’’

Third, Arena pointed out that money alone does not solve problems in sports, but that improving league play is the path forward.

He’s absolutely right on all the counts and his remarks should serve as the launching pad for actual reform.

Point one is critical because the United States is a money-driven culture. As long ago as 1999 we sat with Sunil Gulati in San Diego on the eve of an American friendly match and discussed the low level of MLS salaries. Gulati correctly noted that raising salaries arbitrarily would not improve any of the players and also reminded us that there are financial restraints in any business.

Of course, Gulati was correct … as far as it went. The problem then, as now, is that promising American athletes don’t pursue soccer as a career path. Why would they when they look at what baseball, basketball, football, golf, hockey, tennis offer as financial incentives. It is overwhelming difficult to reach the top level in any sport, but what 15-16 year old who has real athletic ability is going to stay with a game where starting salaries are laughable.

Like it or, when Arena talks about players pursuing graduate school rather than breathing soccer 24 hours a day he is merely telling you what you already should know. Would it make any difference if the top choice in every MLS draft got a $100,000 signing bonus? You bet it might.

Coupled with better salaries is Arena’s second point: this country simply does not have enough scouts and coaches who recognize the qualities in top players. Indeed, you can take the argument further and suggest that if soccer camps, coaching schools and scholastic/collegiate sports produced high-level players we’d already be awash in them. But that system isn’t working in basketball, either, is it? Soccer starts with a smaller pool of potential stars and it needs a different developoment system — working with “what we have” is no longer acceptable.

It is often suggested that MLS needs better players. It isn’t as often suggested that it needs general managers who actually are soccer general managers rather than marketing people, scouts who can draw on a lifetime of global soccer experience and an array of supporting people whose opinions are worth listening to.

If MLS and American soccer in general wants to get better quickly, it needs far more input from knowledgeable soccer people. Remember the “Project 2010” study commissioned from Carlos Querioz and Dan Gaspar some years ago? What file drawer is that in? Did anybody actually try to implement it?

Finally, Arena states the obvious when he says we’ve got to have a better league in order to have better players. His track record at D.C. United suggests he will turn the Red Bulls around, but until the whole league starts marching to a different drummer, one who doesn’t confuse close conference races with actual competitive quality, Arena may be a voice crying in the wilderness.

Arena’s should have been saying much of this for the past four years when he had the national team bully pulpit and the halo effect of World Cup 2002. It’s understandable why he didn’t: the coach knew the talent he had available and admitting that would have been counter-productive.

But for or all his failings, Arena doesn’t deserve a reaction — he deserves to be listened to whether you like what he says or not.

Still sick in bed.

Read this rather revisionist interview with Bruce Arena by Jack Bell of the New York Times. Arena, as usual, makes some cogent points... while having some real blinders on to his own performance. (Not that this is shocking — most human beings suffer from this, your humble correspondent included.)

A couple observations: I remain stunned by the bitterness he shows towards Sunil Gulati — I gather Arena thought he would be the coach forever. I also think his depiction of Gulati as essentially a "superfan" is unfair; Mr. Gulati has his failings, but he does know something about the game.

Arena is correct about the inertia at U.S. Soccer however, and is correct to skewer the organisation's innate sense that the committee is a panacaea. He is also correct that MLS needs better players, and he is also correct to call out American players' resistance to hard work.

One thing puzzles me however: Arena says that the USA must have an American coach. OK... but aren't these the same coaches who are contributing to the culture of failure he so decries right now in MLS and at the youth level?

Bruce Arena seems to have hit a new low; as one can see in this interview with my colleague Grant Wahl. In the interview Arena comes off a pretty bitter guy — willing to take credit for everything that went right but not to fess up to anything that went wrong. We agree with his take on the Home Depot Center, however; and, if Arena truly does show American soccer how “it’s done,” we’ll applaud him. But for right now, this seems kinda sad, no matter how good the copy is.

Some days, this blog practically writes itself. Bruce Arena, on his way out the U.S. Soccer door, let loose a parting blast yesterday at his old bosses, saying the national team couldn’t compete at the highest level until 2018.

"Why did I say 2018?” said Arena at yesterday’s press conference where he was named technical director of MLS’s stragglers Red Bull NY. “Because I know that it's not going to happen in 2010, 2014. We have a long way to go. To get there, you've got to know where you are…We made progress in this World Cup. But we do not have players of the quality and experience of the teams in the group that ended up in the last eight.”

We remember Arena admitting some time ago that the USA had no players in the top 50; but even as recently as a week before the tournament, Area was telling Grant Wahl at SI that the USA could get past the Czechs and the Italians and that Americans could play anywhere. We also never heard Arena tamp down expectations after 2002 by noting (realistically) that the team had caught a few breaks and that the 2006 tournament would be a lot harder. Perhaps his ego wouldn’t allow this, but his comments now sound like sour grapes.

This is only partly true. Yes, the USA doesn’t have top-caliber players, but one thing the USA has been successful at is fielding a competitive team — and that’s where Arena’s prep, which had been so good before, flopped badly this time around. Now, anyone who watched the team this year knew something was off, but the intensive camps conducted with Stalinesque secrecy seemed to heighten, rather than solve it. Remember, even Mr. Nice, Claudio Reyna, opined that perhaps the guys were “overtrained.”

Maybe Arena is reacting to pundits such as Eric Wynalda and Marcelo Balboa, who opined prior to the Cup that this team could actually be a contender at the Cup. (No, we don’t know what meds they were on.) That said, we’re inclined to trust Wynalda’s parting shots at the coach given his closeness to the team "He can take a team to a certain level, but he has no idea where the next level is," said Wynalda, famously. “How much does he know about playing in Europe, other than having a hot dog and a beer in the stands?" Ouch.

All of this reminds us of another national team coach with huge ego problems. Yes, that would be Steve Sampson. Sampson, who it must be said was both far more gregarious and affable than Arena, used to hold court poolside and spout off about a game which, at that point, it was clear he didn’t know everything about. Sampson let the job go to his head and made the classic mistake of thinking a coach could more out of his players than was possible. When the team nose-dived in 1998, Sampson took it very, very badly — but his hurt was a personal one, and he kept it to himself.

Yes, in 2002 he finally admitted that he might have chosen a different roster but he never kicked the guys when they were down, no matter how hard his own team bashed him. (We recall Alexi Lalas and Wynalda were in on that bashing as well, BTW.) And, to give Sampson credit, he became the first — and only — American coach to head a national team overseas. No matter how much Galaxy fans dislike him (and we’re not suggesting he’s the world’s greatest coach, mind you) give the guy credit where it’s due.

Arena, on the other hand, played an arrogant game over the last four years. Yesterday’s comments follow his trashing of his players after the first group game; his attempts to pin failure elsewhere (memorably on the ref in the Ghana game, a new low for American sportsmanship); and his constant bashing and needling of people he felt were inferior to his “great soccer mind.” (Our phrase, and, again: no, we were not among the needled as it happens.)

This leads us to come away thinking two things: The first is that Arena, psychologically, may simply be unable to deal with a high-profile failure. It’s fair to remind everyone that almost all of the Arena era took place well under the American sports media radar. One of the big surprises of Germany 2006 was discovering that a lot more had been paying attention than we thought. America’s failure was widely reported, squarely and with a depth of insight that would have been impossible even eight years ago.

The second is that we wonder what comments like this say to the Clint Dempseys, Oguchi Onyewus and Tim Howards of the world? We suspect these guys are livid today — and well they should be. No one should like being told there’s no immediate hope for the future. Arena had been famously good at giving his players a platform they could perform upon and defending them, without hyping them necessarily. What happened?

Of course, now Arena has to worry about MLS again, a league he has consistently (and sometimes correctly) slammed. Yet even in trying to avoid talking about this, Arena jabbed a meaty foot in his mouth. "I'm not going to worry about the league," Arena said. "I'm going to worry about the Red Bulls. When I was technical director of the national team that was my job. Now, this is my job."

Wait: Being technical director of the national team meant that his job was to… worry about MLS? Perhaps that’s why the 2006 national team crashed and burned — Arena should have paid more attention to the team itself.

Mr. Trecker:

I read your article analyzing Bruce Arena's shortcomings. I think you, as did most fans, are over-reacting.

Here is what I saw:

1. A team with mediocre attacking ability. Why were truly exciting, quick and attacking players such as Adu left off the roster?

My guess is that Arena, as happens to many coaches, became too conservative. Rather than take a chance on adding some young, internationally inexperienced players to the roster, he chose not to risk and rest on the nucleus of players from the last World Cup, counting on their experience. This decision was incorrect:

--Reyna was playing hurt and not fully rehabiliated
--Donovan was in a slump, not having scored in 17 international games
--Beasley was mentally off (was this due to off-field problems?)
--McBride was either injured or off his game, and was not fresh enough to make long runs or run off the ball. He was more effective as a defender than attacker.


2. This points to shortcoming in Arena's coaching--but also is a strength: he committs to certain players and then sticks with them, through bad and good games. His is too subjective, but also loyal to those he likes.

3. Arena has a tendency to ignore the team dynamic and focus on motivating individual competitiveness. This works to a certain point, then tends to harm team cohesiveness.

How do I know? I played for Bruce at U.Va for 1 year, 1979-80.

Overall he is a good coach, and probably should have offered to spend more time analyzing successful coaches and team strategies, to take his own game to the next level. Soccer requires continual adjustment and review, at this level, and a constant search for improvement.

Some time off would have given Arena the clarity and the ability to do this--not firing him.

Stuart Turille

I don't know if this was posted yet or not, but here it is:

NEW YORK CITY (July 18) -- MLS franchise Red Bull New York today announced that it had hired former U.S. men’s national team head coach Bruce Arena to take over as technical director and head coach. Arena replaces Mo Johnston, who was sacked by the club on June 26th.

Arena takes over an RBNY franchise that has historically underperformed. It is currently mired in last place in the Eastern Conference with a 3-6-8 record (17 points), making it the second-worst team in the league, just one point above Real Salt Lake.

Earlier this week, Arena, the winningest coach in American national team history with a 71-30-29 (.658) lifetime record, was told his contract with the USA would not be renewed.

It is unclear at press time whether or not Arena will continue to hold his post at U.S. Soccer (he is under contract until December 31, 2006) or whether his assistant, Glenn Myernick, will be given the reins temporarily while the U.S. Soccer Federation searches for a new coach.

Arena, who enjoyed a successful tenure at D.C. United, winning two MLS titles and one U.S. Open Cup alongside a CONCACAF Championship title on the way to compiling an 87-37-1 record, was deeply critical of the league during his eight-year stint as American head coach.

Most recently, following the USA’s exit this year from Germany in the 2006 World Cup, Arena drew strong criticism for saying: “The way for us to get our players to get better is: We do need to get more of our younger talented players in Europe. We need them in a year-round soccer environment. We need them playing in more intense games to help develop them mentally, as well as soccerwise.”

The remarks were seen as a slam on MLS, and drew an angry reaction from MLS commissioner Don Garber, who said: "I think it's ridiculous. If I were him I'd take a deep breath and think about what I say before I criticize anyone in American soccer.”

Arena later amended his remarks saying that he didn’t intend to blame his team’s performance on the league, but coming within the continuum of criticism that Arena has historically leveled at the league, few believed him.

A successful college coach at the University of Virginia, Arena went 295-58-32, in his college career, winning five NCAA championships.

The announcement will formally be made at 1 pm today in NYC.

I was surprised to turn on the radio in the city this morning (about 8:30 EDT) and hear sports talk radio here... about soccer. Not a dedicated show, but actual callers discussing how America is no longer developing the top-class athletes and instilling team spirit and ethics into kids as well as the fact that the USA was falling dangerously behind the rest of the world as was proven, and I quote, "at the World Cup."

The last time I heard callers actually discuss soccer, kids and the World Cup (when it wasn't going on) on the Fan was back in 1994 during the USA's hosting of it. To hear that today was an intriguing reminder to me of how hard the World Cup performance of 06 hit this country. Could it be that people are taking the sport seriously now? I hope so.

Later on today, more comments from you on Arena (we're over 500 emails, running roughly 20-1 in favor of what we wrote, which is astonishing to us).

Warning: You're probably not going to like it, but I calls it as I sees it: Click here

...can go here. Story is up here; analysis to follow.

Bruce Arena's contract was not renewed by U.S. Soccer this morning; he will remain as coach through the end of the year but an immediate search will begin. Rumor has it he will coach the RBNY team.

The final question about what American soccer has to do to improve, funny enough, has very little to do with the players, the coach, or the team’s management.. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that fans right now who are crowing for Jurgen Klinsmann or Guus Hiddink (Hiddink is the better choice, BTW) to helm the USA are putting the cart before the horse.

Like England is doing this week, the USA has to come to terms with some basic facts. One is that the players the Americans have produced are not very good when measured up against the very top levels of the game. The USA is probably still a top-25 team, but we’ve seen how far the gap is between the ten best and everyone else in the world. The USA is not alone in this, and we can prove this:

From 1986 forward, there have been only 41 different nations to make the Round of 16 out of a possible 96 slots; of the 4, 17 made it there only once. Six made it twice. So, there are 18 teams who have, Cup-after-Cup dominated the 2nd stage. As for the quarters, a remarkable 25 teams have made it into one of the 48 slots; but 11 of those were one-timers.

Only 14 teams in the current generation have made it to the quarterfinals. Germany is 6 for 6; Brazil 5 of 6; England 4 of 6; Italy 4 of 6; Argentina 4 of 6; France 3 of 6; Spain 3 of 6. What does this mean? Just 7 nations — five of them European — have taken 29 of the 48 available slots (60.4%). That means 60% of the time, those same five teams take all but three available slots.

In a world with 208 member nations, that means 203 teams are, essentially, fighting for THREE places.

Some of us might argue, then, that the resources it will take to snag one of those slots far exceed the rewards, and setting aside some of the “spoiled-jock” theories, this seems to be the argument increasingly being made by the NBA and MLB in world competitions. Unfortunately, U.S. Soccer cannot do this — its raison d’etre is, in part, to grow the game and produce a successful national team.

So, the real question, then, before we even talk about coaches, is what can be done to 1) attract superior athletes to the sport and 2) what can US Soccer and MLS realistically do in a ten-year window to give that pool of players an edge?

The first is actually the most difficult problem, to solve. The fact is, the better athletes in the USA do NOT play soccer, and there’s good reason for it: there’s little to no economic incentive. If you’re a talented athlete who wants to have a career in a pro sport, by 12 or 13 you’ve also probably figured out that the Big Three American sports offer the most rewards and the fewest obstacles. It takes a real dedication to athletics for its own sake to want to run track and field or be a gymnast. It also takes real perseverance to succeed at soccer.

Think about it: To be the best, you not only have to train long hours, you most likely have to go overseas, learn another language or two, deal with Byzantine and unfamiliar cultures and coaching systems and all the while know that not only are you unknown in your home town but that all those endorsement dollars your colleagues are getting won’t be flowing your way any time soon, if ever.

Now, the USA has an advantage over many other nations in that it has embraced a number of different cultures and can draw upon a vast reservoir of talent and experience: there are, believe it or not, actually homes in the USA where soccer is and has been the number one sport for generations. The “problem,” as it were, is that many of the folks in this pool speak Spanish, are clustered in urban areas, and are poor. And thus, because American youth soccer is a for-profit enterprise, these folks don’t even get in the door.

This isn’t to say that Anglos can’t play soccer. But the fact that when you survey the country as a whole and see a youth soccer system that is overwhelmingly upper-class and white, you see a lot of folks who could be making the game better left out for reasons of economic, conscious or unconscious prejudice.

Breaking down those walls is the first and most cost-effective step that should go hand in hand with a complete overhaul of how youth soccer is run in the first place. While the folks currently making a nice living off these Premier clubs will howl, it’s time to put the kibosh on them, and make two levels — one that is purely for recreation, the other, a leaner, competitive development process organized by region and subsidized by U.S. Soccer and the U.S. Soccer Foundation. The USA cannot afford to have separate and unequal development systems running side by side so the hedgerow of travel teams, “super-clubs” and all the other groups that proclaim to produce soccer talent — but don’t — need to be slashed down to a manageable size and run centrally. And, most important of all, real forays into the inner cities must be made.

The second question is actually answered by the first: USSF and MLS can go out and take some of the money they spent on ill-conceived marketing and purchase the services of some folks who actually have experience discovering talent and nurturing it. Most likely, some of these folks are going to be overseas, and they need to be imported.

It is important to add that one mistake the USA cannot continue to make is follow the “English” ex-pats and their views of the game. Inarguably, the English players who came over have helped grow the game. But just as inarguably, they have held it back by keeping the sport segregated, ignoring new developments in the game and flat-out alienating mainstream sports people. The folks who run college basketball, hockey and farm-team baseball know something about spotting talent and the USA has an enormous arsenal of professional scouts and athletics experts.

But they sit on the sidelines. Why? Soccer is a sport, folks — these are resources that are not being used purely out of parochial jealousy, and it’s incredibly foolish.

There is one final thing that U.S. Soccer has to do, aside from spending money: Grow up. For too long, soccer has been run like it’s a religious sect with a “you’re for us or against us mentality.” We’ve seen how well that’s worked for our current administration on the world stage. We hate to sound su####iously Soviet, but it’s time to purge U.S. Soccer of their missionaries as well.

Why? Soccer is a SPORT, guys. Sure, for some folks it’s a way of life — but they’re not in the USA, where sports are for entertainment. People can talk about “passion” (even though most of them haven’t a clue what that truly means) until they are blue in the face, but the reality is that until the sport is accepted as a sport and not as something run and played by fringe wackos, it’ll never catch on in the USA. Isn't that the ultimate goal?

So, to those of you out there who think you’re doing the sport a “favour” by proselytizing: Let us say this: Thanks.

Now please shut up, buy some tickets and enjoy the game.

Hey, kids! Today we’re back and finishing up the five-part look at the USA after giving things some time to settle down. Down eat the brown acid, little dudes! The first four parts are here:

One Two Three Four

OK: Time for a quick recap:

In Q. 1 We asked if Claudio Reyna really ever got the USA behind him and if he was the right man for the job; In Q. 2 We asked about Landon Donovan and what had to be done about the USA captaincy in the future; And, in Q. 3 We asked if the USA were an over-trained, tired out side

So now, let’s talk about tactics and the limits of American coaching.

We’ve already noted that the USA entered the tournament with two basic “tactics,” as it were: The first was to be fitter than other teams and try to out work them; the second was to play balls in the air to Brian McBride and hope that he could head them down to someone for a score. As we all saw, those tactics proved woefully ineffective against any sort of superior team.

The USA has crowed for eight years now about playing “attacking soccer.” The problem is, we’re not certain they actually know what that means. Fluid, attacking soccer — to succeed – relies on buildups on the floor, diagonal passes and runs to split the offense, and ball movement in the final third of the field to wrong-foot a defender.

While this all sounds obvious, it’s very difficult to execute cleanly: You need a team comprised of superior dribblers, at least one (hopefully two) midfielders that can actually hold onto the ball through the first tackle, and two or three gents who can cross the ball accurately. You also need a stopper or a solid central team of defenders who can clean up messes caused by having four or five guys running forward and leaving a nice hole in the midfield for clearing defenders to lob balls back into.

The USA, of course, doesn’t have a team that can do this, so it fell back on an old standby, popularized in England and then transported to the USA by a wave of British immigrants (to say nothing of the coaches and players who came with the NASL): Punt the ball down-field to get it out of your half; try and knock it down to a striker running on to the ball, and hope for the best. Note also that the USA always attempted to swing the ball out to the flanks and then cross it back in, the theory being that a ball crossing the face of the goal is harder to defend against than a ball coming straight at it. Most keepers are actually pretty good at snapping those balls up so the percentages — whether you are Sweden or the USA — are pretty low. In any case, if you are unable to get penetration into the box in the first place, a cross into the area doesn’t do your team much good.

A much more effective tactic is running right up the gut. Again, this requires someone who can hold the ball, as well as someone who can shoot it (two core weaknesses of the American side), but as the Germans very effectively demonstrated against Sweden last week, running up the gut keeps defenders honest. Defenders have to compress to protect the middle, allowing your wingers to cut in behind them in the space that subsequently opens up.

On the other hand, if you start on the flanks and never cross into the gut, the defenders can sit in the area all day and lob the ball away — they don’t even need to challenge the flanks because there’s no pressure in the middle to split them, allowing them to just, well, hang out. No wonder so many teams do this against the Americans and England-copiers of the world.

Let’s be fair: it is not entirely Arena’s fault that he did not have 11 guys who are capable of executing — much less remembering — any sort of complex game plan. Yes, you can criticize him and “Mooch” Myernick for not instilling any creativity into the side, but it’s hard to ask them to make the individual players radically better — they can’t do that. You can also crtiticize Arena for not bringing along younger talent — the paucity of which we discussed in Q. 1 and the lack of pressure it brought to bear on positions on the squad. But it would be grossly unfair to suggest that in four years Arena could have magically instilled a set of youth team players with all the qualities that have been historically lacking in the American game.

One thing we will criticize Arena for, though, is not making the 2006 team better a group. In 2002, he achieved when the sum was far greater than the parts. This didn’t happen in 2006 and your guess is as good as ours as to why. Was it players in the wrong positions? Too many injuries? The coaching staff’s belief that they could out-coach any opponent?

So what can a coach do with the players he has?

Bora, along with several other coaches who have been charged with making World Cup no-hopers respectable, showed one path, and it has had far-reaching implications for the game overall. With the USA 1994 — and subsequently with a hal####ozen other teams — Milutinovic realized that the way to level the playing field was to commit fouls about every third pass. This breaks up the flow of the offense and gives the defense — which Bora assumed the USA would always be on — a chance to regroup. This kind of play has been called “cynical,” and that is a somewhat apt term because it changes the game from an expression of skill and flow into a giant game of set-pieces. The problem is, it’s very effective, especially when you have — as Bora did — a group of not-very talented, impressionable folks who could be manipulated skillfully through humiliation into playing tightly defined roles. The other problem is that you can only do it once. It doesn’t grow a squad or make them “better;” it just makes them able to hang in for about 80 minutes longer than they otherwise might be able to.

In the aftermath — and we have seen this in this World Cup — this kind of tactical fouling and movement toward scoring off of set pieces has robbed the game o####reat deal of grace. Perhaps most critically, it has made the game almost impossible to referee as arbiters are reduced to sorting our truly wretched fouls from merely tactical ones; tactical dives from horrible dives, and the rest of the fouls that litter the game. It’s also made the best players even more vulnerable to bad fouls and injury. But the biggest indictment of the tactic, again, has to be that is has done nothing to improve the lot of the second-tier teams. The World Cup remains a closed shop, split between Europe and South America, and it is only the very lucky Asian, African or CONCACAF side that breaks through.

Arena chose a second path, which also has shown its limitations. Memorably (and perhaps too close for comfort) described by a disgruntled former member of his staff as “a Bobby Knight wannabe coaching a JV team,” Arena ran his program as if it was an American sport through and through. And this should be no surprise — he was a college coach, and his role models have been successful American coaches at the college and pro levels. Arena has said more than once that he believes American coaching know-how and technique (not specific to soccer, mind you) has plenty to offer.

Now, if there was a pool of talent consistently coming up to the top, Arena’s thesis might well be correct. But the thing is, while those tactics work for a while on young players, they often fail in the pros (Just ask #### Vitale or John Calipari or Steve Spurrier.) And just because those tactics work in American sports doesn’t mean they translate well to an international game.

Once a player gets out of Arena’s circle and experiences someone else’s idea of a professional program — and I’m not talking MLS — it’s difficult to #### the same lines. This is called “growing up.”

And, we saw the results: in 2002, on neutral ground with a transitional team, Arena saw success. In 2006, with a team split between pros, semi-pros and kids, Arena flopped. Let’s be fair — he’s not the only one. You try to coach Togo as Otto Pfister did and see where that gets you. Even Guus Hiddink, with a stable of pros, struggled to make the Aussies look anything beyond merely functional. Arguably, his 2002 Korean team — which, like Arena’s 2002 team, was constructed of impressionable types in a hothouse — was more creative.

The upshot of all of this is that all of this inexorably points to a system that has to be changed from the base up. The core of American soccer and its reliance on youth teams and colleges – which play different rules than the world game -- has to be radically altered, dismissed or dismantled. The idea that American players have to be treated differently because they tend to be better-educated (and economically solvent) also has to be thrown out the window. In its place must come a system of integrated, fully professional development. Both time and money will have to be spent waiting to see what that program can produce. As we’ve noted, there are examples: USA Hockey is among the best ones we’ve seen, and we will continue to holler from the rooftops that if this sport can turn around its fortunes so radically in 15 years ( This year: ten first round NHL draft choices, 17 players with ties to the USHDP taken overall), there is no reason American soccer cannot do the same.

And that’s the subject of Q. No. 5. Where do we go from here? And what does American soccer need to do? And most of all — how can soccer get the best athletes to play the sport?