If you talk with Germans about Jürgen Klinsmann’s ill-fated stint as the coach of F.C. Bayern Munich, it’s only a matter of time until they bring up the matter of the Buddha statues. After arriving in July of 2008 at Bayern—the free-spending New York Yankees-style hegemon of the German soccer league—Klinsmann’s first intervention was to personally oversee an overhaul of the team’s training center. The local press openly wondered whether the movie theatre, the so-called “quiet room,” and the high-end d.j. console that he installed had much, if anything, to do with soccer, but they seemed willing to give Klinsmann the benefit of the doubt.

But when a number of Buddha figures appeared around the training campus, Bavarians took it as an affront. In a region where crucifixes still hang from classroom walls, and the Catholic Church remains a powerful political force, the statues quickly attracted controversy. Catholic interest groups, local politicians, and, eventually, players quoted anonymously began to criticize the relics’ allegedly implicit proselytism. One prominent Bavarian politician questioned whether Klinsmann, who was raised in Germany but moved to California after the conclusion of his playing career, in 1998, was too “American” to properly coach Germany’s most prominent club team. (It didn’t help matters that the team was struggling on the field.) Midway through his first season, Klinsmann was fired. The statues were quickly taken down after Klinsmann’s departure, but, in Germany, they remain a symbol of his penchant for pushing change in sweeping, sometimes reckless fashion.

Klinsmann has been the coach of U.S. men’s national soccer team since 2011. And, as American fans learned recently, his management style has stayed more or less the same. On May 22nd, Klinsmann announced that Landon Donovan, the most accomplished player in the history of American soccer, would not be joining the national team at the World Cup in Brazil. Klinsmann has again refused to allow traditional pieties to interfere with his personal judgment of the team’s needs. And, once again, this has proved to be a public-relations problem. Just as some Bavarians believed that Klinsmann’s Buddhas were the expression of a nefarious social agenda, many American fans now believe that Klinsmann was motivated by personal animus when he cut Donovan. In his own defense, Klinsmann offered only the curt explanation that “soccer is about what you do today, and what you hopefully do tomorrow.” Left unsaid was what Klinsmann believes soccer isn’t about―namely, dealing with the past.

Klinsmann clearly believes that he has a mandate to try to transform the state of soccer in the United States. “The transition is happening now and step-by-step, over the years, we want to play with the bigger nations, to attack the bigger nations, and to possess more than them,” Klinsmann recently told me after we watched a training session of youth teams in Sarasota, Florida. Whether the transformation succeeds, of course, is still to be determined. Klinsmann’s first major test will be this summer’s World Cup tournament, including the United States’ match against Germany, on June 26th. But Klinsmann’s greater challenge will be off the field, as he tries to change how Americans think about soccer in the first place. As he sees it, if Americans are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable, that probably means that he’s beginning to do his job.

One of Klinsmann’s qualifications to Europeanize American soccer is that, for most of his career, he seemed to be trying to Americanize German soccer. Klinsmann was always a natural at the game. (In his first season in Germany’s junior soccer division, at the age of nine, he scored a hundred and sixteen goals.) But he never fit comfortably in Germany’s rigid, bureaucratic soccer culture.

Where Germany prized stoic discipline on the field, Klinsmann was extravagantly emotional. Where the tabloid press insisted on access to players’ lives, Klinsmann insisted on privacy. (He successfully sued Bild, Europe’s most widely circulated newspaper.) Where the German soccer league’s functionaries insisted that they knew best, Klinsmann fought bitterly for more favorable contracts. (Klinsmann signed with teams in Munich, Milan, Monaco, and London, earning a reputation as a goal-scoring mercenary.)

Although he remained a mainstay of the German national team, leading it to victory in the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 European Cup, he moved to California with his wife, an American, shortly after his retirement, in 1998. In the United States, Klinsmann started a sports consulting firm called SoccerSolutions, which allowed him to observe the rigorously empirical approach that American sports teams took to evaluating player performance and fitness (a stark contrast to the methods in place at the time in Europe). It only deepened his conviction that German soccer had indulged tradition at the expense of innovation.

In 2004, Klinsmann accepted an offer from the German soccer federation’s Trainerfindungskommission—a coach-finding-commission, an unintentional self-parody of German bureaucracy—to take over the national team. Klinsmann brought in new coaches and shook up player rotations. But he also sought more fundamental changes. He wanted to develop a group of strong individual personalities, not the collective of relentless drones that had become Germany’s reputation; the team’s instinct should be aggressive attack, not risk-averse defense. He hired a sports psychologist and a nutritionist to focus on the team’s diet. He brought in motivational speakers to help the team envision winning the World Cup. Klinsmann also defied precedent by hiring non-German coaches, including an American personal trainer dedicated to improving the team’s conditioning. On certain practice days, Klinsmann nixed the team’s standard wind sprints for less conventional drills, with names like “rubber twist” and “blind cow,” which were purportedly designed to help the players experience “psychological breakthroughs.” Klinsmann sometimes spoke through pseudo-philosophical koans that were easily mistaken for mystique. (“The killer can only kill things if he’s a giver to the whole group that gets him into that position,” he told me at one point. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I believed him.)

Michael Ballack, Germany’s captain, said that he had never known anyone “with such a gift for making people so enthusiastic about something.” But the German public, and the team’s upper management, bristled at Klinsmann’s unorthodox approach. They were already suspicious at Klinsmann’s refusal to move back to Germany for the job. Except for practice and game days, he telecommuted from California, beginning at 6 A.M. each day. When Germans heard of his emphasis on positive psychology and his reliance on outside experts, they tended to dismiss it as a touchy-feely threat to Germany’s macho resolve. “I did some things they weren’t used to. I said, ‘I saw this in America and it works,’” he told me. “And they said, ‘You’re crazy.’” Laced through the public criticism was a subtle, but unmistakable, streak of xenophobia. A 2005 article in Der Spiegel dismissed Klinsmann as a glorified American cheerleader. “A strained team spirit rules,” the magazine wrote, “similar to what American supermarket employees display after attending a team-building seminar.”