If US Soccer has a plan, trying to hire Jurgen Klopp certainly can’t be part of it

If we’ve learned one thing from Gregg Berhalter’s firing as coach of the U.S. men’s national team, it’s this: When a respected coach says he wants to take a year off from the grind of his job, chances are he means it.

It is understandable that Jurgen Klopp rejected US Soccer’s advances, less than two months removed from his emotional departure from Liverpool. Still, in the federation’s eyes, it was worth a shot.

The German is as ambitious a target as the federation could identify. He is a serial winner at the highest level of club football, a culture builder who is tactically flexible within a clear guiding ideology. He is also unemployed, which eliminates any buyout costs, and US Soccer seemed willing to open up its salary budget.

The point is, if you take Klopp’s announcement that he would be leaving Liverpool in January literally, this was not the case of a manager in need of a new challenge. He made the call despite having a year left on his contract. He looked haunted, wracked by the stress of having to keep up with the constant flow of managing one of the world’s most prestigious clubs.

Even if Klopp had decided a foray into international management was enough of a reprieve after admitting he “had no energy left”, it would have solved US Soccer’s ongoing headache for exactly two years.

I’m not sure US national team fans realize how big the risk-reward difference would be if Klopp had replaced Berhalter.

The best-case scenario is clear: an ambitious appointment that puts the association in a good light, a great coach who turns the bad experiences he has had into a powerful Black Forest lemonade, perhaps a place in the semi-finals of the 2026 World Cup and beautiful memories when he leaves to return to club football or retire for good.

The worst-case scenarios would be that persistent headaches would turn into diagnosable migraines. One would be that Klopp was right: that he’s run out of fuel, that he doesn’t have the resources to master the nuances that separate international football from the club alternative. Another would be that he simply can’t cope with the crash-course adaptation to international football, that he can get more out of individuals but can’t pull it together as a collective in time for the World Cup. A ‘Luis Enrique’s Spain’ scenario, if you will.

In either case, the result would be a disappointing solution — and an expensive one. US Soccer would go back to the recruiting desk after the World Cup and be left feeling financially strapped as they search for a long-term alternative.

While Klopp may look very good photoshopped into a USMNT cap, in reality the gamble is far more expensive than subscribing to an Adobe package.

If a federation can’t find the best unemployed manager in the game, what does the “best” possible hire look like? It’s a question that Matt Crocker and US Soccer will attempt to answer in the coming weeks as they hope to find the right coach for September’s World Cup. Names will continue to flow through the rumor mill like an endless conveyor belt. A few of my colleagues have highlighted some of the most talked about options, including Klopp.

Perhaps rushing to meet Klopp’s asking price through a combination of salary, sponsorship considerations and NFTs was an expensive stopgap that wouldn’t address the bigger problems.

Is this a process-driven hire, an approach Crocker emphasised when he reappointed Berhalter in 2023? Does it address the issues that arose during Berhalter’s short second term and put the programme on a better footing? Or was it a lavish scramble that could have been better planned and executed given Klopp’s months-long notice period?

Does US Soccer really know what they want from their next men’s manager? Have they had enough time to figure it out?

“Progress has been made,” Crocker said Wednesday after Berhalter’s firing, “but now it’s time to translate that progress into profit.”

Winning! That’s a great start. American sports fans love to win.

Here’s the thing: If it were as easy as just wanting to win, the U.S. national team would already be the reigning world champions 22 times.

Saying it’s time to win after six years of, uh, whatever they did under Berhalter is an indirect admission of failure. If you set a modest budget to buy a handful of citrus trees, wait six years while they bear fruit intermittently in the hope of a bountiful harvest, and then uproot those trees to import an entire Brazilian orchard of produce for a big event… are you any better at growing citrus? And what was the point of tending that smaller plot in the first place?

Crocker has repeatedly sworn that Berhalter’s second hire was the result of painstaking interviews, research, and data-driven evaluation. To jettison that process in favor of a “spend a lot of money on celebrity club coaches” model is an admission of failure that goes beyond just one hire. Trust the process, as they say — but please keep updating the process as new information becomes available.

Encouragingly, Crocker appears to have learned from one of the federation’s follies in the 2018 process that led to Berhalter’s first appointment. His predecessor, Earnie Stewart, stipulated that the coach who would lead the team back from a failed World Cup qualification failure had to speak English. It ruled out alternatives such as Marcelo Bielsa and Tata Martino and narrowed the pool of candidates considerably.

Berhalter, of course, wasn’t the first native son to coach the USMNT. The program has been domestically skewed with all but one hire coming since the 1994 World Cup, when the team was led by Serbian coaching nomad Bora Milutinovic. The lone exception, Jurgen Klinsmann, wears an asterisk because he had put down roots in California years before his appointment in hopes of staying in the federation’s thoughts when Bob Bradley was fired.

Often, being coached by someone from the U.S. paid off. The program’s best runs in the modern era were led by Bruce Arena and Bradley. Both had intimate knowledge of the player pool at a time when scouting and talent identification were not so effortless globally. Both had clear ideas about how they wanted the team to perform, taking into account the strengths of their pool and the weaknesses.

Neither was afraid to embrace stereotypical national ideas of grit and direct football. Both used parts of that DNA to their advantage. Arena led the USMNT to the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, and Bradley led the team to a runner-up finish at the 2009 Confederations Cup, beating Spanish giants en route to the final.

While Crocker figures out what’s “best” for the next hire, the eventual hire could indeed be domestic. Steve Cherundolo and Pat Noonan are former U.S. internationals who have thrived in MLS, while Jim Curtin is familiar with many of the players in the pool and offers a fresh perspective. If either of these alternatives or others are hired, they will feel greater pressure to perform as the fan base moves beyond the second Berhalter era.

The “best” signing can also be international. Milutinovic helped mold a generation of USMNT players into program legends and brought a fresh perspective to prepare the team for success on home soil. He brought with him extensive experience as a coach at the international level, having led Mexico when they hosted the 1986 World Cup.

His resume is similar to that of Herve Renard, another nomadic international manager who recently took charge of the French women’s national team. Renard isn’t a celebrity coach, despite his catalogue-worthy face, but he does have some notable achievements to his name: two Africa Cup of Nations titles (with Zambia in 2012 and Ivory Coast in 2015), leading Saudi Arabia to the World Cup-shattering win of the century against Argentina in 2022, and guiding a turbulent French team to the quarter-finals of the 2023 Women’s World Cup just months after taking the job. He ticks a lot of the boxes for a potential stopgap with a very high upside and a low floor.

The “best” option may well be Klopp. But getting the best version of him may require a year of patience, on top of generous wages — two resources US Soccer can ill afford to waste. Again, risk and reward.

Ultimately, the need to get this hire right extends beyond the field. You don’t have to scroll far into our comments section to see that USMNT fan morale is at an all-time low. Depending on how you view the Gold Cup, the team won’t play a major, high-level match until an opening match of the 2026 World Cup group stage. This hire represents one of the few remaining opportunities to galvanize the fanbase and rebuild morale to garner maximum support ahead of hosting the World Cup.

Crocker and the federation leadership did not tell Tim Weah to swing an arm at the back of a defender’s head. They are, however, responsible for rehiring a coach who failed to prepare his team for the Copa America. Whoever is ultimately hired, the federation must make its choice with full confidence that it is the “best” option for the next two years — and they must have a clear definition of “best” to justify that choice.

(Top photo: Wolverhampton Wanderers FC/Wolves via Getty Images)