Highlights from the introductory press conference with new US Men's National Team heald coach Jürgen Klinsmann:
Big focus on Klinsmann's living in the U.S. for 13 years: Is this really that big of a deal? I think this matter's more to casual and fair weather fans than the core US soccer fans who just want to see the team and game--throughout all levels of development--improve.
"The style of play should reflect the culture of the country": In the same thread, Klinsmann and US Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati both emphasized that Klinsmann isn't going to try to impose a "European style of play" (read: German) on the US game. This is probably a good thing, since the U.S. side doesn't have the talent to dependably profit off of counter-attacks the way Germany does. But it is less clear what Klinsmann thinks the U.S.-style is/will be; he sort of punts on that follow up question and says that he'll spend the next few months talking to MLS and other U.S. coaches to get a sense of this.
"No immediate decision on coaching staff": One major marker of Klinsmann's run as German Men's National Team head coach was to immediately clean house and surround himself with coaches he trusted. It looks like that won't be happening quite the same way with the USMNT; Klinsmann says he'll take some time to work with different folks and see who meshes. Since he's starting a new cycle and won't have a major tournament (I think?) to deal with until CONCACAF Gold Cup in 2013, he has some breathing room before settling on the staff that will guide the Yanks into Brazil 2014.
"American youth" don't focus enough on soccer: In perhaps a hopeful nod to the fact that the U.S. soccer talent pipeline is broken, Klinsmann made two important comments about the development of U.S. youth players. First, he notes that, unlike European youth talent who go pro at 18, U.S. soccer players usually got to college. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying people shouldn't go to college. But in the U.S., the only college-to-pro pipelines are in football and basketball, because in those two sports, college ball is professional sports. The players don't get paid, but they get full scholarships, and the rest of the business is just as massive as the NFL or NBA. Compare that to the other Big Three sport in the States, baseball, where really talented players go into the minors at 18, sometimes with deals with MLB for scholarships to go to college after their playing career ends. This may actually end up being a better deal for players, who get paid to train and play in the D-league even while knowing that their odds of ending up pro is slim, and getting to the highest level of the sport is slimmer. I have no idea how hockey works. In any case, it seems much more likely that youth development will succeed if soccer follows more closely to baseball, rather than football/basketball. We will see if Klinsmann's appointment will pair well with MLS moves toward a D-league (USL's PDL).
Klinsmann's second comment about youth development was that American youth talent don't spend enough time playing. He used the example of Mexican kids who will train in an organized way for maybe 4 hours a day, but then play pick-up ball or just mess around with ball skills for another 5 hours, so that they're spending pretty much every waking moment playing soccer. As I alluded to in my last post (Bradley Out, Klinsmann In), the U.S. youth development pipeline is over-reliant on organized play, on expensive traveling club soccer and college ball that excludes a lot of undiscovered talent out there. Discovering the "U.S. Style" may in large part be a matter of figuring out who we are missing; in finding that, we may discover we are much more a soccer country than we ever knew.
