To Arena, the foundation of building a team — particularly a national team — lies in finding the right mix of predictability from game to game and chemistry.

“We, and countries around the world, have players who are spotty,” he said. “There are too many peaks and valleys of players. We’ve got to level out their performance.”

Arena acknowledged that he faced a difficult challenge. Klinsmann was fired after the United States lost its first two games in the 10-game final round of regional qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. The Americans still have a strong chance of making it to the tournament, to be held in Russia, because the top three teams in the regional qualifying will advance automatically and the fourth will go to an intercontinental playoff. Still, there is no question that the pressure on Arena to produce results immediately is significant.

Arena’s first match in charge will be a home game against Honduras in March, and he has clear feelings on what happened during the United States’ close loss to Mexico and its embarrassing shredding in Costa Rica this month.

“We’re fighting for our lives starting March 24,” he said. “For whatever reason, the game against Mexico — Mexico came out and took control of the game early. I don’t think that should happen at home. The game against Costa Rica was not good from start to finish. In general, in both games, our back line played poorly. And I don’t think they’re poor players. We’ve got to get them organized. We’ve got to get them playing better as a unit.”