To the powers that be in U.S. Soccer, Klinsmann was a loudmouth agitator who kept jabbing at their cash cow with a steady barrage of critiques of how soccer in America works and how he’d like to improve things. When said powers got fed up with Klinsmann’s pestering, and when the on-pitch performances of the team he led faltered enough to make the once-popular manager vulnerable, they axed him.
In his place they brought in a U.S. soccer lifer who owed everything to The Way Things Are and had no designs on even insinuating that the path the sport was on might be the wrong one. Arena was supposed to possess a pair of steadying hands to right the listing U.S. ship at the time he took over, but because his brand of media dust-ups involved him taking shots at those who questioned the wisdom of U.S. Soccer’s unjustifiably pompous and isolationist worldview, he wasn’t unceremoniously tossed to the sharks the way his actual job performance called for. And even now, when his career-defining failure has crystallized to any sane observer that there are indeed deep fissures in American soccer’s foundation that must be repaired if we are to progress, he’s still out here giving the same lame, “Everything’s fine, we’re doing things just right, we just happened to **** the bed on a fluke, no need for any big drastic changes to the brilliant plan those in charge have charted out for us—though if you should blame anyone, blame the foreigners” routine that does nothing but protect those with a vested interest in profiting from the system as it currently exists, while scapegoating those who bear the least fault for the state of things.
(Let me get this straight: MLS is amazing and run so intelligently and is practically perfect, but if there is a teeny tiny problem it’s that the teams incorporate too many non-Americans—you know, the ones that came up in countries with real soccer development traditions which made them into, like, actually good players—to give minutes to subpar American guys from the college system? And not the fact that, as a sad Pulisic pointed out in an article he wrote earlier this week, the entire American system under-prepares young talents—and, yes, loses them through the cracks, which is an inevitable consequence of the pay-to-play model—at the most crucial developmental ages, thereby making it all but impossible for world-class or even top-European-league-class players to emerge from this environment? If you say so ...)