The Galaxy coach will replace Jürgen Klinsmann . But if he is a stop gap until 2018, who are the long-term candidates?

Let’s get the obvious out of the way — Bruce Arena is the USA coach until at least the 2018 World Cup.

In Arena’s favor, he’s done the job before, knows the US set up, and has also taken them to a World Cup quarter-final in 2002. Though if you’re going to consider that a success, you also have to consider the failure to get out of the group in 2006.

Leaving the national team job on that note left Arena with a feeling of unfinished business that’s remained despite his success in MLS. In the intervening years he’s won three MLS Cups with LA Galaxy, and has consolidated his reputation as the country’s best domestic coach. And if Arena never took the Bob Bradley path by working his way through lower European leagues to a shot in the Premier League, he’s mirrored Landon Donovan in making a kind of political statement by staying loyal to MLS.

US Soccer confirm Bruce Arena will replace Jürgen Klinsmann Read more

When Arena arrived at the Galaxy at the end of 2008, it was to a club in danger of capsizing under the weight of David Beckham’s presence. Beckham’s first club coach in LA, Frank Yallop, seemed relieved to get away from the circus, while his replacement, Ruud Gullit, was rumored to have been ushered in at the insistence of Beckham’s management team. His tenure was disastrous, and Arena was brought in as perhaps the only domestic coach who would have had the natural authority and manner to combat player power run wild.

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And just as Klinsmann has functioned as both head coach and technical director of the national team, Arena consolidated the head coach and sporting director roles at the Galaxy. And as the club became pioneers in the Designated Player era that started with Beckham, he kept the technical ambitions of the team firmly in focus. Where other clubs signed name players with more regard for shirt sales than technical fit, Arena used his knowledge (critics say manipulation) of MLS rules to build formidably effective teams to make the most of Beckham, Robbie Keane, Landon Donovan et al, without ever giving the impression he had to tiptoe round any egos.

Arena leaves Galaxy on the back of benching an under par Keane at the end of this season, without it becoming the kind of battle of wills that marked Montreal coach Mauro Biello’s decision to drop Didier Drogba.

Arena is a pragmatic coach who knows the strengths of his players, and who deploys them in natural positions to succeed. No Klinsmann-esque experimental formations, or playing players out of position to see how they cope — though as his gradual reinvention of Robbie Rogers as a full-back in LA shows, he does have the vision to see qualities in players that they or their other coaches may not have imagined for themselves.

As for man motivation, Arena is not the enthusiast Klinsmann is — biting Brooklyn sarcasm is more his style — but his players speak of his ability to know when and how to motivate them, and also of his quality of treating them as adults. On that note, senior players who’d returned to MLS from Europe, only to be publicly criticized by Klinsmann for doing so, would see a stark contrast in Arena.

And if anything, one of the reported sticking points in offering Arena the job was his vocal insistence on the virtues of American born players and coaches. Where Klinsmann developed a pipeline of German-American players in particular, Arena has a different perspective that he can expect to be pushed on when he returns to the national team in a new era: “I believe an American should be coaching the national team. I think the majority of the national team should come out of Major League Soccer,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “The people that run our governing body think we need to copy what everyone else does, when in reality, our solutions will ultimately come from our culture.”

In fairness, Arena used five foreign-born players in his 2002 squad, and has qualified his comments with more nuanced takes at times, but if every potential coach comes with baggage, this is his.

And if Arena isn’t a long-term coach? Who else would be in the frame in the future?

Miguel Herrera

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Miguel Herrera has excelled since taking charge of Club Tijuana. Photograph: Dominic Ebenbichler/Reuters

If we’re assuming that Big Sam is off the menu, how about Herrera as the iconoclast’s choice? After Mexico went through their own embarrassing Hex qualifying round for the 2014 tournament, the ebullient Herrera stormed his way into a million gifs in Brazil — kicking every ball from the sidelines as the team outdid themselves.

Never the most polished politician away from the field, Herrera lost the national team job the day after winning the Gold Cup last year, when he punched a reporter at Philadelphia Airport. He’s now back in Mexican soccer and after 17 games has the upstart Club Tijuana at the top of Liga MX. Press conferences would never be dull, and, whisper it … the team would win.

Peter Vermes

Along with Arena, the Sporting KC coach has been discreetly sounded out by US Soccer in recent months, and it wouldn’t be a surprise for him to be considered for the longer term.



Vermes started as one of the so-called “lost generation” of players who came of age between the demise of NASL and the founding of MLS. Although his career extended into the latter it started on a precarious route through the lower echelons of European soccer (much more precarious than the type of tailored apprenticeships later encouraged by Klinsmann for promising young US players).

Vermes has never forgotten that time, and while his ownership group at Sporting Kansas City have had plenty to do with the club’s remarkable turnaround from abject laughing stock of the league, Vermes brand of soccer sets the tone for the club. His teams play hard-running soccer, built on players consistently punching above their weight and exhausting opposition. And it works — so far, Vermes has won two US Open Cups and an MLS Cup, and even in a transitional year such as this one, the team made the playoffs.

Would he fit the US right now? Well if the truism of the US style of play is that they “run fast and try hard”, Vermes fits the bill. He’s not as crude a coach as that suggests, but he’s also not a coach to worry about style when a result is needed: Vermes gets the US. And right now, the US are bottom of their World Cup qualifying group.

Jason Kreis

It’s been a bumpy few years for Jason Kreis, yet his reputation as one of the brightest young US coaches in the game remains largely undiminished after his misadventures with NYC FC. Now back in MLS, at Orlando City, Kreis will be looking to replicate the stability he found when in charge of Real Salt Lake, where he put together perennial teams of contenders playing ambitious, possession-based, soccer. Unafraid to give young players a chance, and favoring technical talents over brute force, Kreis has long been marked as a future national team manager, and was recently part of the national team set up under Klinsmann before taking the Orlando job.

Intense, intelligent, and driven by a desire to prove those who underestimate him wrong, Kreis also feels a strong sense of “ownership” of the MLS project.

Whether or not that suggests he’d favor US born players, as Arena might, could turn out to be less important than his time at NYC FC. There’s a lot of sympathy for how the club blamed him for mistakes they’d made in their expansion season. But equally, Patrick Vieira has found success with the same roster, and there’s been some suggestion that Kreis didn’t command the respect of the senior players. At international level that could be a real concern.

Oscar Pareja/Jesse Marsch

The coaches of this year’s Western and Eastern Conference regular season champions have both won plenty of admirers over the last few seasons. Both played in the league before becoming coaches and both have built formidable teams on modest budgets. Both have done so amid organizations that are at the cutting edge from the transition from the hit-and-miss Designated Player era to teams trying to develop an academy pipeline.

Pareja in particular has built a fearless, if occasionally naive young team in Dallas, who won this year’s US Open Cup and Supporters Shield, but were undone by concentration lapses in the playoffs. Marsch, meanwhile, won a Supporters Shield in his first season with the Red Bulls and took his team on a 20 game unbeaten streak to qualify for a second successive Champions League appearance this year, before also stumbling in the playoffs. He was also an assistant to Bob Bradley in the 2010 World Cup, and studied coaching around the world in a year long sabbatical before taking the Red Bulls job.

And if the luster is somewhat off Vermes and Kreis given the coaching miles they’ve already acquired, Pareja and Marsch are both on the initial upswing stages of promising careers. The timing could work out well for them, whether now or in 2018.