Let's say USMNT fans get their wish and Liverpool legend Jurgen Klopp takes over as coach. What would it look like? Would the U.S. win the 2026 World Cup?
Ryan O'Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He's also the author of"Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game's Analytics Revolution."
Now, you wouldn't necessarily be wrong to think that this process was right in theory, but wrong in practice. As the succession of post-USMNT failures suggests, Klinsmann is simply just not a good coach. And with the USMNT's disastrous group stage exit under Gregg Berhalter, plenty of U.S. fans and former players are now telling themselves that the team hired the wrong Jurgen.
"At Liverpool, I only had to turn a city from doubters to believers. Now, I must do it with an entire country," he says. He pinches both hands together on either side of his head and makes an exploding motion with both hands."Phwoah! But I know, if we trust each other, we can do it." This summer's Copa America for the USMNT was a perfect example of both problems. The team played only three games, which means that things like poor goalkeeping, inaccurate finishing, great finishing from your opponent, bad refereeing, a one-off bad game or an out-of-nowhere red card can have an outsized effect on your results. And well, pretty much all of that happened for the USMNT.attempted seven shots worth 2.27 xG at the Copa America ... and he scored zero goals.
Across his first three matches as USMNT manager, Klopp experiments with a number of different lineups and player configurations. There's one wherein September and then features against New Zealand a few days later. Thanks to Klopp's constant tinkering and heavy rotation, the USMNT loses to Canada and draws with New Zealand. Then, with USMNT fans desperate for revenge against Panama in an October friendly, the U.S.
A few months later, the U.S. does what it always does: wins the Nations League, for the fourth time in a row. By winning the thing that they've never lost, Klopp's USMNT has American soccer fans dreaming bigger than ever before ahead of the World Cup.The dirty little secret of international soccer is that managers can only do so much. That's also the dirty little secret of club soccer -- or any sport, really.
The quality of managers in international soccer is way lower than in the club game -- mainly because it doesn't pay as well and the best coaches want to be training every day and signing new players -- so maybe a great coach has a bigger marginal impact internationally than he does in the club game. But from a pure managing perspective, international managers have less of an influence on team performance than club managers.
Were Klopp able to have the same kind of impact with the USMNT, it wouldn't even be perceptible in the same way. Although he's been the coach since 2018, Berhalter has only managed 45 competitive matches for the U.S. -- just slightly more than a full Premier League season. If Klopp added, say, five points to the USMNT's performance over a 38-game sample when compared to Berhalter, that'd be less than two-tenths of a point per match.
Klopp knows that his organization and motivation can only take his players so far. When he took over in 2024, various estimates put the talent level of the team at somewhere. The overall estimated market value of American players is the 16th highest in the world, while the consultancy Twenty First Group ranks the 25 best American players as the 30th-best group in the world.Jurgen Klinsmann discusses the importance of U.S.
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