INTRODUCTION
THE GLOBAL GAME of soccer has finally begun to catch on in the United States. The remarkably strong showing by the U.S. Men’s National Team at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, led by Klinsmann, created a sense of excitement across the country, stirring hopes that the United States might finally be on the verge of a great leap forward in soccer.
An especially encouraging development was the unbridled enthusiasm and the sheer numbers of American supporters in Brazil. The United States had more fans who flew to Brazil for the games than any other country except the hosts. There were 196,838 tickets to World Cup games in 2014 bought in the United States, according to FIFA—more than triple the number sold in the next-highest foreign country, neighboring Argentina, with 61,021, and nearly four times as many as the 58,778 tickets bought in soccer-mad Germany, which went to Brazil as a top favorite and won the monthlong tournament. Many of those U.S.-based fans had ties to and supported other teams in the World Cup, but most were cheering the U.S. team and many traveled to games with the American Outlaws, an enthusiastic fan group that was established by three supporters in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2007 and by 2015 had grown rapidly to more than 30,000 members with 175 official chapters.
The United States managed to break out of the Group of Death, which was the most difficult of the eight groups in the World Cup, with stylish performances against three of the world’s best teams: Ghana, Portugal, and Germany. What was arguably the most successful U.S. soccer team ever in the most competitive World Cup ever took second place of four teams in Group G, and advanced along with eventual World Cup winner Germany to the Round of 16. Both Portugal and Ghana were eliminated at the Group Stage.
Coach Jürgen Klinsmann’s team played their hearts out as undaunted equals against some of the great powers of the game, earning respect and plaudits from soccer connoisseurs in the United States and around the world. The U.S. team, which many experts and TV pundits had forecast would end up in fourth place in the Group of Death against soccer’s great powers and be sent home early, even had chances to win their group after beating Ghana and nearly defeating Portugal before Silvestre Varela headed in a cross, or long pass from the side, from Cristiano Ronaldo just before the final whistle that evened the score. It broke the hearts of American fans seconds before what would have been a major upset. The Americans then had mighty Germany nervously on the ropes in their showdown game that would decide the group winner, giving the team that went on to win the World Cup two weeks later one of its toughest games in the tournament before succumbing 1–0 to a second half goal.
After those strong performances against one of Africa’s top teams, Ghana, and two of Europe’s best, Portugal and Germany, the Americans were ousted in the Knockout Round in overtime by Belgium—another top-ranked team. The impressive run and surprisingly confident play that enabled the Americans to emerge from such a difficult four-team group alongside Germany to the Round of 16 caught the rest of the world by surprise and lifted the United States to fifteenth place in the FIFA rankings, right behind Italy and ahead of established soccer powers such as England, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Mexico. It also ignited hopes inside the United States that U.S. soccer could finally be catching up with the rest of the world—and possibly on the threshold of a breakthrough to greater glory. Even President Barack Obama got swept up in the enthusiasm of the 2014 World Cup, saying, “Our team gets better at each World Cup, so watch out in 2018.”
There is no reason that the United States can’t one day excel at the World Cup, the most important tournament in the world’s most important game. It’s been a riddle for millions outside the United States why the world’s richest and most powerful country, with such a passion for sports, seemingly unlimited resources, knowledge, expertise, and an irrepressible drive to be number one, has nevertheless done so little in soccer on the international stage. It’s one of the great sports mysteries of our times. Greater success for the United States in soccer could probably help the country better understand the rest of the world, while at the same time help the rest of the world better understand the United States.
It is a monumental task considering that seven countries—Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, England, and Argentina—have dominated the World Cup for years. They have won the last sixteen times, while the United States hasn’t even made it to the Final Four since the inaugural World Cup in 1930, a thirteen-team tournament in Uruguay that most of Europe boycotted. Yet there are explanations—and some possible remedies—for anyone open-minded enough for the kind of honest examination and reforms that Klinsmann is pushing.
Americans want to be first. It’s part of our DNA. Yet the country’s failure so far to win the world’s biggest sporting event—or even come close—is as much a mystery as it is an open wound. It’s hard for Americans to fathom why so many much smaller countries with far more limited resources are consistently so much better.
Soccer is a game without borders. It’s an international game on an international stage with an international set of rules and standards. Its developments are cascading forward, advanced through an international network of expertise closely associated with the best leagues in the world in Western Europe and the Champions League, a pan-European tournament for clubs where the world’s best soccer is played with tactics and trends that national teams will likely be using in the next World Cup. A big part of the problem for the United States has been that, until recently, its focus was more on the domestic stage, and it tended to follow its own sets of rules and standards without tapping into that international network of the best and the brightest centered in Western Europe.
The United States’ isolationist views on soccer reflect, to a certain degree, Americans’ belief in their own exceptionalism and inward-looking attitudes in countless other areas. The United States is, of course, one of the few countries that still do not use the metric system. That isolationism is one of the key reasons the United States has lagged agonizingly behind the rest of the world in the global game for so long. And many smaller countries seem to delight in being able to tweak America’s nose in soccer, savoring the superpower’s prolonged agony in the only sport that matters for so many countries. Where else can Costa Rica, Jamaica, Chile, and Denmark all beat the United States in the same year? But soccer can level the playing field in surprising ways. In that same year—2015—the United States managed to beat the soccer superpowers the Netherlands, Germany, and Mexico. It’s seen as poetic justice for many countries—where soccer is far more than just a game—that the United States has been a sleeping giant for so long.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Soccer is, if nothing else, a game of momentum swings, and there’s no reason why the United States can’t become a global power—especially with Klinsmann at the helm. The sport is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States, and the U.S. Men’s National Team—the focal point of the nation’s attention in soccer—could certainly win the World Cup one day, as the U.S. Women’s National Team has already done three times. The global situation in the women’s game is almost the exact opposite of that of the men’s. Women’s soccer is more popular and has a longer tradition in the United States than in any other country. Forty percent of the registered youth players in the United States are female, according to FIFA, and girls make up 47 percent of all high school soccer players. At the college level, 53 percent of NCAA soccer players are women, and at the top college level, Division I, the women are even more dominant with 61 percent. Title IX, the 1972 landmark civil rights law that prohibited sex discrimination at colleges and opened the door for equal opportunities for women in sports, played a major role in strengthening women’s soccer in the United States while lingering skepticism about the women’s game in many other nations has held women’s soccer back abroad. In England, women were even barred from playing soccer on fields or facilities that men used from 1921 to 1971, and women’s soccer was banned in West Germany from 1955 to 1970.
In the men’s game, there are many highly motivated smaller soccer nations that have taken enormous strides forward in recent years. They are tapping into the international network of best practices and soccer knowledge—and are eagerly sending more of their best players to test their mettle in the best domestic leagues in Europe, where frustratingly few American players are competing. They are also benefiting from the expertise of German, Italian, and Dutch coaches who have been spreading their knowledge in countries around the world. From Berti Vogts coaching Azerbaijan to Falko Götz coaching Vietnam, Germans have been out and about around the world helping develop the national teams of countries such as Cameroon, Jamaica, Thailand, Kuwait, Scotland, South Korea, Nigeria, Canada, Switzerland, Greece, Bangladesh, and Australia. There were German coaches leading four of the thirty-two national teams at the 2014 World Cup, more than from any other country: Klinsmann (USA), Joachim Löw (Germany), Ottmar Hitzfeld (Switzerland), and Volker Finke (Cameroon).
A strong showing at the World Cup can turn any player for any country into an instant hero back home—as demonstrated by James Rodríguez, who almost single-handedly helped Colombia reach the quarterfinals at the 2014 World Cup with six goals in five games. With legend status in the offing, it’s no surprise that the global competition has been getting more intense—and the gap between the haves and have-nots in soccer has narrowed appreciably. Children and youngsters are playing soccer for six, eight, ten, twelve, or even fourteen hours a day over nearly twelve months a year in some countries. How will the United States fare in the years ahead if Americans aren’t able to match that kind of effort?
The national teams of many smaller countries have raised their game enormously in the last decade, catching up to and sometimes even beating the established superpowers such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Argentina. Just ask the distraught fans of former European champions the Netherlands (1988) and Greece (2004) how it felt when their teams failed to qualify for the quadrennial European Championship tournament in 2016 in France while onetime minnows such as Iceland, Wales, and Albania all made it to the twenty-four-team finals of the tournament from a pack of fifty-three teams competing to qualify.
The way the game is advancing globally means that—truth be told—the U.S. soccer team will have to keep improving just to maintain its level compared to other nations. The United States has been seen as one of the top regional powers alongside Mexico since the 1990s, ranked on average in nineteenth place since 1993 by FIFA, but often enough somewhere near the bottom of the world’s top thirty. The United States has reached the thirty-two-team World Cup for the last seven tournaments, reaching the Round of 16 three times and quarterfinals once. But will the United States really be content to be a top-thirty nation in soccer? Even to become a top-ten team, which is one of Jürgen Klinsmann’s primary aims, is a monumental challenge.
In part because the United States plays in what has been one of the weaker of the world’s six continental federations, a region called CONCACAF (the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football), American teams have made it to seven straight World Cup finals—a more consistent record than more established global soccer powers such as England or even Mexico, which failed to qualify in 1994 and 1990, respectively. But since 1930 the United States hasn’t made it to the semifinals, a position Germany, with only a quarter as many inhabitants, has reached in eleven of the last fourteen World Cups. Why is that?
The United States has made it through the Group Stage to the final Round of 16 in three of the last four tournaments after qualifying for the World Cup only once, in 1950, during six decades in the wilderness between its appearance in 1934 to its next in 1990. Yet it will take a major leap forward to make it to a top-ten ranking—which last happened briefly in 2005—and to become a regular contender for the quarterfinals, semifinals, or finals.
To put the challenge in perspective, it is worth noting how strong the lock is that Western European nations have on the game at the World Cup. Not only have they won the last three World Cups and five of the last seven, but at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, teams from the core countries of Western Europe that are at the heart of the most vibrant network of soccer ideas and advancements won every match against teams from other regions except for one: Switzerland’s loss in a penalty shootout to Ukraine in the Round of 16. Kuper and Szymanski argue in Soccernomics that it is the networking and intense exchange of ideas in Western Europe that make those nations so powerful.
“The region has only about 400 million inhabitants, or 6 percent of the world’s population, yet only once in that entire tournament did a western European team lose to a team from another region,” they write. “In 2006, even Brazil couldn’t match Western Europe. Argentina continued its run of failing to beat a Western European team in open play at a World Cup since the final against West Germany in 1986 … Big countries outside the region, like Mexico, Japan, the U.S., and Poland, could not match little Western European countries like Portugal, Holland, or Sweden. If you understood the geographical rule of that World Cup, you could sit in the stands for almost every match before the quarterfinals confident of knowing the outcome.” The top four teams were from Western Europe: Italy, France, Germany, and Portugal. The four core countries of the European Union—Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands—won a total of twelve World Cups and European Championships between 1968 and 2014. If Spain, which joined the trade bloc in 1986, is included and the dates are expanded from 1964 to 2014, the domination is even more complete: Those five countries have won seven of the last eleven World Cups and ten of the last thirteen European Championships.
At the 2010 World Cup, Western European countries were still dominant but not as invincible and lost six of their twenty-nine games against teams from other regions “in part … because other regions have begun to copy Western European methods,” Kuper and Szymanski write. “Yet, even in 2010, first, second, and third place all went to Western European nations.” Spain beat the Netherlands in the 2010 final and Germany beat Uruguay in the game for third place. “Western Europe excels at soccer for the same fundamental reason it had the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was for centuries the world’s richest region … Geography has always helped them exchange ideas, inside their continent and beyond. In short, they are networked.” At the 2014 World Cup, two of the top three teams were from Western Europe: Germany (first), and the Netherlands (third).
Europe, and especially Western Europe, is where the world’s best soccer is played—the organization, tactics, discipline, and savvy of most European countries where soccer is by far the most important game are superior. The United States has played European teams seventeen times at the World Cup since 1990 and won only once, a 3–2 victory in 2002 with the help of Portugal scoring an own goal, while losing eleven times and playing five ties. In World Cup games against non-European teams, the United States has a better record, winning four of nine games, with four losses and one tie—1–1 against hosts South Korea in 2002.
The United States certainly has a wealth of assets when it comes to sports in general and soccer in particular. It has world-class training facilities; some of the best coaches, fitness experts, and scientific research; and more than enough money and infrastructure to be one of the world’s top soccer nations. There is also an enormous and fast-growing pool of Americans playing soccer nowadays compared to the 1970s: Thirteen million Americans play some form of recreational team soccer, according to the Census Bureau, and even though the number of players registered on teams is lower than that, with 4.1 million, according to FIFA, surveys have found that soccer has become the third most popular team sport, behind basketball and baseball/softball.
The United States also has the world’s largest economy and is one of the most populous nations, two key factors for long-term success at the World Cup, as convincingly argued by Kuper and Szymanski in Soccernomics: “Given the country’s fabulous wealth and enormous population,” it should have been performing better than it has, they write. The United States has nevertheless made enormous progress in the last fifty years. “We think the Americans, Chinese and Japanese will keep improving,” they predict. “The U.S. has the most young soccer players of any country, and Major League Soccer is expanding fast … [They] are fast closing the experience gap. They have overtaken the Africans en route to the top.”
There is indeed surging interest in the game of soccer in the United States, partly due to the increased television exposure as well as greater accessibility of the global game on the Internet. Major League Soccer (MLS), the domestic league, estimates there are seventy million soccer fans. Enormous crowds cheer from the stands whenever there is a game with top teams playing: 109,318 spectators filled Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor in 2014 for an exhibition match between two of Europe’s top clubs, Manchester United and Real Madrid, while more than 93,226 people were at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, for a 2015 game between Spain’s FC Barcelona and the Los Angeles Galaxy. There were 81,944 spectators watching a “friendly,” or exhibition game, played between two foreign teams, Brazil and Argentina, at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 2012. There were also 93,723 people watching the CONCACAF Cup play-off match on October 10, 2015, in Pasadena between the United States and Mexico—even though about two-thirds of the crowd, mostly Mexican Americans, was cheering for Mexico.
Watching some of the world’s best soccer teams in Europe on television has also become a popular pastime for growing numbers of Americans. “After years of being greeted as the ‘Next Big Thing’ that wasn’t, the sport (particularly England’s Premier League, with its enhanced presence on American television), has become a conversation topic you can no longer ignore,” wrote Alex Williams in an article “Soccer Growing in Popularity in New York Creative Circles” in The New York Times in 2014. “There was a time not long ago when Americans—even worldly New Yorkers—could float along in a happy bubble of ignorance, pretending for all practical purposes that the world’s favorite sport, soccer, did not exist. That time appears to be fading quickly … This is particularly evident in New York creative circles, where the game’s aesthetics, Europhilic allure and fashionable otherness have made soccer the new baseball—the go-to sport of the thinking class.”
Despite all that, the United States hasn’t even come close to winning the World Cup—a game that is watched on television by about one billion people, or about ten times as many as the one hundred million who watch the Super Bowl.
WHY NOT?
Until now, some essential ingredients were missing. Part of the problem is that many of the most gifted American athletes still gravitate toward football, basketball, and baseball, which have long been the traditional focus of the media and also offer more lucrative contracts with greater financial security. Another significant part of the problem for the United States is that there is, on the one hand, a game of international standards and practices that most of the world follows, but on the other hand, there is the way the United States plays soccer.
In an interconnected world, it’s hard to imagine how a nation that isolates itself—in certain crucial ways—from the way the rest of the world plays the game and cuts itself off from the global network of collective knowledge and wisdom can be strong enough to string together six or seven wins played over the four weeks of a World Cup to win that trophy. Winning the odd game in a tournament with a plucky destructive style might produce the occasional spectacular upset, as the United States did against England in 1950 and other overwhelmed teams have managed at times, but a team relying on such “lucky punch” wins with fast-break counterattack goals against the run of play is unlikely to achieve the six to seven victories in a row needed to win the World Cup.
The United States likes to do things its own way, and it’s no different when it comes to soccer. Many in the United States tend to view the game through a domestic lens while the rest of the world sees soccer as an international competition. “Soccer (like religion) remains one of the few non-American narratives binding the world together,” wrote Andrés Martinez in a 2014 article in Time magazine called “How Soccer Is Destroying American Exceptionalism.” “The NBA and NFL have followings overseas, but sport still remains the weakest link in America’s hegemonic control over global culture … For most of the 20th century, when so much of American culture was being adopted by others, Americans were adamant about not reciprocating by adopting the world’s sport. Now things have changed … It’s hard to exaggerate how much soccer’s incursion into American life threatens to erode American exceptionalism.”
While most of the world’s best soccer players sharpen their skills and tactics by playing against each other on top clubs in the world’s best four leagues in Europe, many of the best Americans stay home and play in the domestic league in North America. Major League Soccer has certainly improved by leaps and bounds in the two decades since it was created, in the aftermath of the United States hosting the 1994 World Cup. Its increasingly attractive salaries for some of its best players are understandably an incentive for some of them to stay at home rather than play in top leagues in Europe to hone their skills. Reflecting the steady improvement of the MLS, the number of players on various national teams at the World Cup rose from six in 2010 to thirty-one in 2014—playing for eight countries, including England, Brazil, and Iran. Before that, there had been nineteen MLS players at the 1998 World Cup, eleven in 2002, and fifteen in 2006. By comparison, there were ninety-three players from Bundesliga teams playing for twenty-four national teams at the 2014 World Cup.
A major goal of MLS is to become one of the world’s premier leagues by 2022, but it is still seen, from a global perspective, as a soccer backwater—a league for some of the world’s greatest has-beens from overseas who are past their prime and are being put out to pasture. It is a league hurt by its cap on salaries. It is also undermined by its unique drive for parity, which fits the American mold but stands in marked contrast to leagues around the world that have dominant teams fans either love or love to hate. And it is hurt by its aversion to the promotion-relegation system that is used in more competitive leagues around the world. MLS has also been an attractive, low-pressure environment for some of the top Americans, evidently eager to avoid the hassles and intense competitive pressures in Europe. Despite its steady improvement, the truth is that MLS does not rank as one of the world’s top-ten leagues and probably not even in the top fifteen. It is not hard for even an untrained observer to see the difference in skill, quality, and speed in an English Premier League game, a Bundesliga game, or top divisions in Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Scotland, or Ukraine compared to an MLS game. MLS games feel more like Germany’s second or even third division.
At one MLS game on a warm Saturday evening in September 2015 in front of a sold-out crowd of 27,000 at California’s StubHub Center between the Los Angeles Galaxy and the Montreal Impact, former England star Steven Gerrard of the Galaxy and former Ivory Coast star Didier Drogba of the Impact were suddenly going all out for a match-winning goal in the waning minutes of an at times entertaining 0–0 game, playing superbly to try to spark their teams to victory. But right at the most exciting moment of the game, several hundred American spectators stood up and made their way to the exits, presumably to get a head start on the traffic, even though they were missing the best action of the game. It was nevertheless a much more vibrant atmosphere than in 2006, when 20,145 watched at the same stadium, then called the Home Depot Center, as the Galaxy lost to the Houston Dynamo, 2–1. MLS is growing fast and had the seventh-highest average attendance for soccer leagues around the world in 2015—21,574. The most popular team, the Seattle Sounders, had an average attendance of 44,245 for its 2015 home games and 55,435 at its final against Real Salt Lake.
There is nevertheless an appreciable gap in the quality and intensity of the MLS from top leagues in the world. In The Beckham Experiment, Grant Wahl colorfully describes an awkward situation when the Los Angeles Galaxy was on an off-season tour of exhibition games in Asia, in part to raise appearance fees from those Asian teams that paid to host those friendlies, which helped to finance David Beckham’s $6.5 million annual salary. Wahl writes that the Galaxy earned $1 million every time it played an exhibition game on the tour of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, China, and Hong Kong. “The risk, however, was that once those Asian fans actually saw the Galaxy brand, they knew it wasn’t a SuperClub. One MLS executive said his friend in Hong Kong took some high-rolling business executives to the Galaxy’s 2–2 exhibition tie against Hong Kong Union. The Galaxy was ‘an embarrassment,’ he said. ‘My friend goes, “They’re thinking American soccer is crap. Because they view this as your best team, your Manchester United.” And I tell him the Galaxy didn’t make the play-offs last year. “But this is your team with Beckham, and they’re crap.” They thought it was a bunch of boys. That’s not a good thing.’” The MLS’s total salary costs that year, excluding Beckham, were $3.1 million, but five of the team’s twenty players were earning $30,000 or less per year.
There is perhaps no better illustration of the gap between the quality of Europe’s top leagues and MLS than players’ salaries. MLS has a salary cap per team of $3.5 million. England’s Premier League has no salary cap, and the average salary per player is about $3.5 million, as Robert Wilson notes in an analysis in The Huffington Post. He argues that the MLS’s claim that it is closing the gap to Europe’s top leagues is nonsense. “MLS has lost ground over the past 20 years, not gained it. MLS has established its own myth to the contrary, and that myth has been sold to the press and public extremely well. The European leagues since MLS’s inception in 1996, have outgrown, outspent and created an increasingly better product. The gap with Europe widened from 1996 until now, and promises to widen further.”
That cold reality of the disparity in quality is also reflected in what TV networks are willing to pay. American networks are shelling out twice as much to broadcast a foreign soccer league than their own top league. Indeed, NBC is paying $1 billion to broadcast England’s Premier League games for six seasons through 2022. That amounts to $166 million per year for a league of foreigners playing in a foreign country five to eight time zones ahead of the United States, while MLS is getting $90 million per year from ESPN, FOX Sports, and Univision. Can anyone imagine a U.S. network paying twice as much to broadcast games from a foreign basketball league—say, Spain—in the United States as it pays for the NBA?
That wide gulf in quality is one reason why large numbers of American soccer fans flock to the preseason exhibition matches of the top European clubs or tune in to Premier League games on television, yet don’t go to see MLS games in person or watch them on TV. MLS is certainly an interesting and dynamic young league with a bright future, but it is not yet anywhere near the world’s best. It is hurt by a complicated player allocation system, anemic TV ratings, and a pernicious practice of spending small fortunes on aging foreign has-beens with big names who have lost the speed and stamina to continue competing in the top leagues in England, Spain, Germany, or Italy. “It’s not that the standard of play is bad (it’s not, but it’s nothing to fly across the country for either),” writes Ian Plenderleith in the monthly UK soccer magazine When Saturday Comes.
Another important factor that has so far held the United States back from winning the World Cup is that soccer clubs in most countries exist for one reason: to win games and put the best possible team on the field. Nothing else really matters. Soccer clubs around the world spend almost all their resources—and often more than they have—on acquiring players in the international transfer market and on player salaries. “Making profits deprives a club of money that it could spend on the team,” write Kuper and Szymanski in Soccernomics. “The business of soccer is soccer. Rather, they are like museums: public-spirited organizations that aim to serve the community while remaining reasonably solvent. It sounds like a modest goal, but few of them achieve even that.” Clubs abroad are thus often loss-making enterprises falling further in debt each year. They are in a sense more charitable trusts than sound businesses, which do not exist to make profits or pay shareholder dividends. Spain’s top two clubs have more than $1.2 billion in cumulative debt: Real Madrid owes creditors $750 million and FC Barcelona has $530 million in debt. Manchester United is third on the list of most indebted clubs with $510 million. Yet those three free-spending teams have won the Champions League in five of the last eight years.
Soccer clubs in North America, by contrast, are more businesses than public institutions, and thus they keep an eye on the bottom line. MLS clubs try to control costs and have no debt even though many still lose money. There is a vast gap in salaries in MLS between the haves and the have-nots as income inequality remains a major problem undermining the league’s international reputation—in 2014 the top seven of the MLS’s 572 players earned a third of the total wage costs of $130 million. Keeping close tabs on the bottom line is certainly the American way of running a professional sports league, but does it produce great soccer?
The gap between the top European clubs and MLS can be illustrated another way. Real Madrid had revenues of €660 million ($700 million) in 2014–2015. That was more than the entire combined revenue of the four professional soccer leagues in the United States and Canada with a total of sixty-four teams—MLS, the National Women’s Soccer League, the North American Soccer League (NASL), and USL Pro. “One European club, which is fan owned by the way, is worth more than all four leagues and their sixty-four teams combined in the USA and Canada. Two of the richest countries in the world,” writes Wilson in The Huffington Post, referring to Real Madrid. He argues this is further evidence that the gap between MLS and the top European leagues has widened over the years. “In short, mediocrity and second tier status (when measured against our global benchmarks in the [English Premier League] and Bundesliga) has been institutionalized at the highest levels of the game in the USA and Canada. MLS is generating less revenue after 20 years than respectively, the English and German second divisions.”
Soccer clubs around the world face a constant churning pressure to succeed on the field—or end up getting relegated, dropped unceremoniously to the next-lower league level. It is tantamount to the death penalty for clubs that fail to perform. In theory they can, and often do, bounce right back to top flight a year later by winning the lower league and getting promoted. It is a perpetual process that keeps players on every team at every level on their toes 24/7 right up to the final game. There is no “playing out the season” in most soccer leagues around the world because pretty much every team in every league is fighting for the championship, or to qualify for a spot in international tournaments the following season, or to avoid relegation. Soccer clubs in the MLS face no such existential competitive pressures.
* * *
Even though soccer’s popularity has grown enormously in the last decade, it still has a way to go to catch up to the status of football, basketball, and baseball in America. The United States is a global superpower in so many areas, but it has cut a relatively minor figure globally in soccer.
That is changing. Jürgen Klinsmann, the German-born U.S. coach and technical director, is an agent of change, a mover and shaker par excellence. He knows what it takes to win the World Cup. He played an important role as player for his country at three of those tournaments—in 1990, 1994, and 1998—scoring eleven goals in seventeen games and becoming the first player ever to have at least three goals in three different World Cups. His eleven goals in total put him tied for sixth in the all-time World Cup scoring list, just one behind Pelé, the Brazilian superstar who played in four World Cups. Klinsmann was also a captain of Germany’s 1996 team that won the European Championship. Later, after his seventeen-year career as a player, Klinsmann was the coach of Germany at the 2006 World Cup and of the United States in 2014—leading both teams to better than expected results.
As a player, Klinsmann had a knack for raising his game at the right time—when it mattered most in leading his country to two titles. He is remembered in Germany and around the world for playing his best soccer at the big tournaments—at all three World Cups and at the three European championships. “I just always enjoyed the tournaments and couldn’t wait for them to start,” he says. And, likewise, Klinsmann succeeded in getting more out of the two teams he coached at the World Cups.
A tireless reformer and catalyst for change, Klinsmann is forever searching for ways to do things better. He lived for six years abroad as a player in Italy, Monaco, and England, and has spent nearly two decades in California following his career as a player. After coaching Germany remotely from California, he is committed to making the United States strong enough to compete with—and even beat—the world’s best teams, as they showed at the World Cup in Brazil when they defeated Ghana, played Portugal to a tie, and had Germany on the ropes. The United States has also had an impressive string of wins in friendlies against some of the world’s best teams, beating Germany twice, as well as defeating Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, and a historic first-ever win against Mexico on Mexican soil, 1–0, on August 15, 2012.
A delightfully direct man who never hesitates to speak his mind or ruffle feathers in pursuit of his aims, Klinsmann is a maverick who wants to make the United States a soccer power after helping to revive Germany’s National Team with revolutionary reforms that shook up the soccer establishment in his home country a decade ago. His changes upset the status quo—painful steps that nevertheless brought notable results and longer-term strength everywhere he has coached despite running into the resistance and wrath of many traditionalists along the way.
Overcoming that initial opposition as well as plenty of potshots from critics, naysayers, and those leery of change, Klinsmann managed to spearhead reforms that revitalized Germany’s soccer program and put the country’s national team on a trajectory to win the 2014 World Cup. Before that, Germany had reached the semifinals in both 2006 and 2010—with the help of many of the players Klinsmann picked and promoted as well as the new policies he put in place. He shook up the DFB, breaking up its archaic structures in the process, and tried to modernize the institution, creating more than a few enemies by the time he was finished in 2006. Germany has enjoyed the fruits of those far-reaching reforms ever since. Germany players and their coach since 2006, Joachim Löw, have regularly made it clear that Klinsmann deserves a share of the credit for Germany’s success with the changes and reforms he introduced despite serious opposition when he was the German coach. Klinsmann also introduced extensive reforms at FC Bayern Munich that have increased the club’s success, particularly in the Champions League.
Klinsmann turned his focus to U.S. soccer when he was named head coach in 2011. He has been following soccer’s developments in the United States since he settled on the West Coast in 1998 with his family. With a voracious appetite to learn and the resolve to extract the best possible performance out of himself and his players, he has given a lot of thought to how he can unlock soccer’s great potential in the United States over time.
He was often puzzled about what was holding America back in the world’s most favorite game, and he pondered what might be impeding the world’s leading nation in so many areas from achieving greatness in soccer. A German native who has lived abroad for more than half his life, Klinsmann’s meticulous research and eclectic insights have given him ideas about what needs to happen for the U.S. team to someday win the World Cup—despite the fact that not everyone likes the remedies he has introduced.
Klinsmann’s soccer pedigree could hardly be more suitable for the task. Popular pretty much everywhere he played for both clubs and his country due to his contagious style of hard work, exuberance, and prolific goal scoring on the field, as well as his commitment to the sport off the field, Klinsmann is the epitome of drive and diligence. He rarely stops pushing himself, and he has even learned to speak four languages in addition to his native German as an adult—English, Italian, Spanish, and French—to be able to better understand his coaches, his teammates, and the mentality of the countries he has played or coached in.
Klinsmann helped rejuvenate Germany’s soccer with pioneering reforms and a headstrong determination to restore the country’s soccer glory after the proud and success-spoiled Nationalmannschaft had gone through a dismal and dispiriting trophyless period around the turn of the millennium. It was, above all, Klinsmann’s courage—in the face of at times fierce opposition from the soccer establishment, the media, and especially Germany’s professional soccer league, the Bundesliga—to push through the reforms that turned Germany into a world power again. He has faced similar resistance at times in the United States. In Germany, he introduced a new attacking style of play for the Nationalmannschaft. He also brought innovative ideas from the United States on fitness and organization that at first upset some of Germany’s old guard. Klinsmann was a breath of fresh air, and even though it took some time for the changes to take hold, they helped make the team one of the world’s most successful, and most admired, within the space of just two years with a highly entertaining and energized style of play.
In the United States, too, Klinsmann has faced criticism since taking the coaching job in 2011. He has one overriding aim—to make the U.S. Men’s National Team successful over the long term, while making soccer more interesting and accessible for more Americans. He has, in the process, upset some in his first few years on the job. He has unintentionally made enemies of those who disagree with his views. But Klinsmann is used to criticism and was ready for the naysayers, remaining cheerfully undaunted and undeterred as he takes on the challenge at hand: He’s on a mission to make the United States better and more respected in soccer circles, and a contender for the World Cup. He has some precise, painful, and yet refreshing ideas about what this will take.
Love him or loathe him, Klinsmann’s ideas are changing the game in the United States and gradually taking hold. This book, based on dozens of interviews with Klinsmann and my twenty years’ experience writing about soccer in Europe and the United States, attempts to answer some of the most pressing questions American soccer fans have been asking for years: Why hasn’t the U.S. Men’s National Team won the World Cup? What does it take to build dominant team? What separates the USMNT from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy, and other soccer powers? And how will Klinsmann take the United States there?
Copyright © 2016 by Erik Kirschbaum
Foreword copyright © Jürgen Klinsmann
