(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
After ten months, the USA has a permanent manager at the helm of the men's national team. And after all of the suspense, I'm left with two sensations - the first being "This search ended up exactly as I thought it would" and "Why did it have to take so long?" You see, after the World Cup, I was chatting with a friend of mine about who the USSF might pick after Arena. He felt that the Federation should go with a foreign coach; I felt that they would go in that direction, and after they get turned down, settle on a top American coach. It happened in 1995, and it has happened again in 2007.
Some will see Bob Bradley's signing as another blown opportunity by the USSF; others will see it as the right decision given the circumstances. You can find examples of such thinking here and here. I think that once again the USSF backed into their decision in a less than graceful way. It's not that Bradley isn't qualified to be national team coach; he has managed two MLS sides very well (we'll set the MetroStars disaster aside) and has earned the respect of his players. But the way that Sunil Gulati handled the search and then gave Bradley an interim status for an extended period of time is just amateurish. It must be discouraging to be given a job where you know you aren't the first choice, but in the end Bradley acted like the job was his and obtained good results in the friendlies that were placed in front of him.
So why didn't Gulati find success hiring a foreign coach? The unwillingness to give up control of the national team may have had something to do with it (possibly in the case of Klinsmann), but another thing to consider is that the US national team position is not as glamorous or highly-desired as some would like to believe. The advantage of the being the coach of the US national team is its anonymity -- he is not under an electron microscope like his counterparts in most countries. But at this same time that anonymity is a liability -- it's hard to feel important when so little attention is paid by the national sports media. I think it would be difficult for a foreign to completely get used to that. I also get the sensation that coaching the US team, after being abroad, would be considered a step down by those who consider the American game to be inferior (yes, it has made strides over the past two decades in international competitions, but it will be explained so that the USA gets no credit whatsoever). Notice that of the foreign coaches considered, the closest to get the position was a guy who has lived in the USA for many years.
There is also a bit of an inferiority complex in many quarters of the US soccer community. The arguments in favor of hiring a foreign coach (and please correct me if I'm getting this wrong) boil down to (a) hiring someone with better name recognition and (b) finding someone who has the tactical maturity/international experience to take the national team to a higher level. On the first point, in a country whose sports media pays little attention to anything that happens east of New York City, I don't understand how a more widely recognized coach abroad would affect the way the team is portrayed here. On the second, a so-called lack of international experience didn't keep Bruce Arena from being successful at the international level - he was not a tactical slouch by any means. Nor did it hurt Juergen Klinsmann. Believe it or not, there are American coaches who can coach at the international level, and are not naive in the slightest. The problems with tactical and international experience go a lot deeper than hiring the "right" person to lead the national team, and believing that it is distracts from the hard issues surrounding the professional game in this country.
In the end, this is Bob Bradley's moment. His first opportunity will be the Gold Cup, and his second the Copa América. The Gold Cup is the bigger priority, but with the growing number of stars who will sit out the Copa, the USA might have more of a chance than previously believed. The next three months will give plenty of material for Bradley's boosters and critics.
