I'm just wondering who's going to step up on defense
This would only work if he was a player/manager. Klinsmann's only advantage over Bradley is that he might represent someone who can actually finish with any consistency for the Yanks.
It's not a manager's fault when you've scored all of 2 goals (all by Clint Dempsey) over a two World Cup span. This is pathetic. We need to throw like $20 million at John Wall or Lebron to start training for 2014.
EDIT: Or Denard after his Michigan playing career is over.
To take it a step further, until the kids to turn out to be elite athletes grow up wanting to be soccer players, the US will never be a truly major player on the game's grandest stage.
That is starting to happen right now.
The U.S needs a coach that has been there. Klinsmann has won as player and came in third as coach. He know what the players are experiencing. If it not Klinsmann he has to be someone outside of America to take us to the next level.
Yes the top athletes are not playing soccer in America. But its more about the training at the youths levels that develops the talent. The entire infrastructure needs to be changed. The U.S Federation is attemping to move in the right direction. More and more youth American players are abroad. Residency is helping but only 30-40 per age group get the training. Academies are also a positive step.
I think US player development is moving in the right direction. Every MLS team is required to field an academy now. For a very long time our theory on development was to log as much game time as possible. On the other hand European development focuses on technique and practice. They actually have a 4.5-5 to 1 practice to game ratio.
This year Claudio Reyna was put in charge of youth development for US. I think he is a good pick because of his background and popularity with US fans.
But those practice ratios are at least partly because European teams focus on developing players as investments that can be sold on for millions of Euros to fund their operations (see the recent article in the NYT Magazine on the Ajax academy where years of the academy were funded by the sale of Wesley Sneijder to Real Madrid).
I do agree that the US system puts too much stress on winning at young ages, rather than learning how to handle the ball, developing touch, etc, resulting in too much of the kick and chase that continue to characterize a lot of US soccer.
If if our "best" athletes aren't playing soccer, you'd think we'd be able to start generating enough talent at the tier 2 / 3 level of athlete in our country to be competitive against the best of countries who are 1/150th our size, especially since we didn't cull our population like the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution and we have a shitboat more resources going into our national soccer program than India. The whole monkeys/typewriters/Shakespeare thing. To me, so far this World Cup (and the Confed Cup earlier) we're showing that we're at least compettitve consistently with the top soccer nations.
the good news is that many USMNT players are now playing overseas but the coaches are still MLS by products, not sure if that is best match. until more US players get more time or play with better club teams overseas, we still may have the kick and chase mentality of the MLS.
great to the the us team come back in the second half. if we could just stay focused at the start of the game!