Jurgen Klinsmann is not just the head coach of the senior national team—he is also the technical director for U.S. Soccer. Accordingly, the U-20 World Cup will give us all a chance to evaluate his leadership.

BY Leander Schaerlaeckens Posted

May 29, 2015

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THERE IS, USUALLY, LITTLE OF SIGNIFICANCE to be gleaned from youth national team tournaments. Not even the under-20 World Cup, which kicks off its 2015 edition in New Zealand today and features the United States squaring off against Myanmar late Friday (midnight ET, Fox Sports 1).

Typically, this tournament has no more use to even the most engaged viewers other than to offer a glimpse of how a promising young player stacks up against the best peers of his age category around the world. In that sense, it can help confirm suspicions. Three of the last five Golden Ball winners as the tournament’s best player, after all, were named Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, and Paul Pogba.

But then the other two were Henrique, who now warms a bench in Brazil’s second tier, and Dominic Adiyiah, who plays in Thailand. So make of all that what you will.

For the Americans, however, this edition of the tournament will not be usual or typical. And that has very little to do with the players themselves—although they will bear the brunt of it. Nor does it land squarely on head coach Tab Ramos. Rather, this tournament will likely act as something of a harbinger for the health, direction, and progress of the United States men’s national team program as a whole.

Which is to say that it’s a barometer of the federation's technical director and senior team head coach, the man given more rope, leeway, money, and resources than any other in U.S. Soccer history: Jurgen Klinsmann.

It’s been almost four years since he was appointed. At the risk of boring you with this old trope, he promised “proactive” soccer and possession and style and a nice ethnic mix of players reflecting the American cultural quilt. He promised innovation and progress. He promised more.

We haven’t gotten more. We’ve gotten the same.

At the senior team level, that is, where the United States has kept bobbing along in the middle of the international pack. Good enough to make World Cups, to squeak out of the group stage, but not to do anything else, or make much of an impression. An important-seeming friendly win here and there, won off good old American bunkerin’-and-counterin’.

On the youth national team level, meanwhile, we’ve gotten less.

It was clear from Klinsmann’s appointment on that he would hold an unusual amount of sway over the lower age groups as well. And since his contract renewal in December 2013, those teams officially fall under his purview as technical director. But in that department, the trend both during and before Klinsmann’s time has been fairly alarming when taken as an aggregate—rather than looking at performances of single teams.

The under-17s failed to qualify for a World Cup for the first time ever in 2013. The under-20s didn’t qualify in 2011 and haven’t reached the knockout stages of the biennial tournament since 2007. The under-23s didn’t qualify for the London Olympics, the second time in three tries they didn’t make it to the Games at all. None of those outcomes were one-off flukes or aberrations. None of those teams were hard done by, the victims of a bad call or a tough bounce. They were eliminated because they didn’t deserve to be there.

Part of Klinsmann pushing the program to the next level was supposed to be a steady progress in the youth program. They would be integrated into the senior team from a young age, if only in practice. They would learn the culture and identity of the program; what’s expected of them. A slew of younger players has been called up to senior camps of late, to then take that exposure and experience back with them to their under-something teams.

As such, it isn’t entirely unfair to view this American team in New Zealand as a bellwether of sorts for what we might expect from the senior national team down the line. After all, all the elements are there.

Ramos, while not perfect, has shown himself capable of getting a team of young Americans to play that ball-hogging and zippy kind of soccer that eludes Klinsmann’s own team. Not consistenly, but still. This U.S. U-20 team is as deep as any in recent memory. Central defenders Cameron Carter-Vickers and Erik Palmer-Brown; midfielders Emerson Hyndman, Gedion Zelalem and Paul Arriola; and striker Rubio Rubin are legitimate prospects. Not just American prospects. Prospects. Representing clubs such as Arsenal and Tottenham. All team members but the third-string goalie are professionals. Many have made serious inroads into their senior team careers. These are all significant changes and improvements from the past.

And they were handed a soft draw, sharing Group A with hosts New Zealand, Myanmar, and Ukraine.

There are, in short, no excuses.

Unless, of course, the entire program is stagnating. Or even regressing. Looked at in a certain light, there’s as much evidence to be found for that theory as there is for the notion that any sort of growth is occurring. You can only explain away bad results and premature tournament ousters as one-offs for so long.

If this generation of prospects is the real deal, if Klinsmann’s grand design has any real merit in practice, this team will have to demonstrate it by winning more than two games at this World Cup for the first time in four cycles. But if we witness another underwhelming youth national team performance, it is no longer just a failure of 21 players and the coach. It’s a failure of an entire program. Because by that point, the issues are endemic, rather than sporadic.

Serious questions would need to be asked not just of them, but of Klinsmann’s plan for American soccer.

If, four years into this aspirational experiment, the much-ballyhooed youth coming through can’t get it done, then, well, that’s rather a concern for the future.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a freelance soccer writer. Follow him on Twitter.