When Sporting Kansas City midfielder Benny Feilhaber publicly criticized US national team coach Jürgen Klinsmann for not calling him up, it was remarkable for two reasons.

The first is that players don’t normally air those kinds of grievances so bluntly for the world to hear. The second is that many American fans agreed with him – if not about Feilhaber specifically, then about Klinsmann’s roster selection.

“I don’t think that Jürgen calls in the best players that are available to him,” Feilhaber said earlier this year. “That, for me, is a problem.”

After a difficult 2015 that saw the Americans crash out of the Gold Cup and fail to qualify for the Confederations Cup, a growing segment of fans and media raised concerns that Klinsmann’s roster selection has played a role in recent struggles. But is it fair for outsiders to make that judgment?

“He’s our national team coach – he has a vision of how he wants to play and how he goes about his business,” Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes told the Guardian. “At the end of the day, everybody can have an opinion if they want, but he’s the one who’s got the picture in his mind of how he wants to play and if a player doesn’t fit that mode, that’s his prerogative.

“At the same time, he has to live and die by his results in making those decisions.”

Roster selection

The results, at least looking back to last year, haven’t been very convincing, and the national team’s struggles have only emboldened Klinsmann’s detractors. Klinsmann, who has been labeled by some critics as anti-MLS, hasn’t called up MLS players who would fill key needs for the team, some say.

Now, he faces a crucial double-header on Friday and Tuesday – home-and-away World Cup qualifying against Guatemala and a last chance for his Under-23s to qualify for Rio. It’s a sure bet that pundits will be ready to amplify the longstanding roster selection argument if those tests don’t go well.

But there may be a counter-argument: building a roster is just not that simple. National team coaches have a restricted player pool and a lot of ever-changing factors outside their ability to manage, like injuries, club form and chemistry. Roster selection may be as much an art as it is a science.

Seattle Sounders coach Sigi Schmid, who served as assistant national team coach under Bora Milutinović during the 1994 World Cup, said the national team is like any other workplace: some colleagues work better together than others and coaches have the difficult task of managing that on top of the other complicated factors at play.

“What the good coaches are able to do is find combinations that work well with each other and fit together,” Schmid told the Guardian. “So sometimes it not always about picking the best players, it’s about picking key players and combinations that complement those key players.”

Feilhaber is not the first player to feel snubbed by the national team, and he won’t be the last. But as an older central midfielder, of which Klinsmann has plenty, he may not be the best player to make a larger point about Klinsmann’s roster selection. But there are others for the Klinsmann critics who are looking.

The young center-back pairing of John Brooks and Ventura Alvarado looked woefully inadequate at last year’s Gold Cup and both return to the roster to face Guatemala on Friday – yet there are MLS defenders Klinsmann could call upon but hasn’t. One of them often cited, including by Feilhaber, is Matt Hedges, the 25-year-old center-back and finalist for 2015 MLS defender of the year.

John Brooks (centre) has struggled alongside Ventura Alvarado. Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

As Klinsmann doesn’t call in new players for high-need positions, he instead opts to use the players he already has for those positions. The result has been a constant rotation of players in various roles that has been blamed for poor team chemistry and uncertainty from each player about his duties.

“There is the continued practice of putting players in positions they don’t play regularly or if they do, they don’t look comfortable,” Fox Sports analyst Alexi Lalas told the Guardian. “He talks about getting players out of their comfort zone, and I can respect that can be beneficial at times. But I also recognize that it can be beneficial for the development of a team to put players in positions where they can succeed.”

There is no part of the pitch that has seen more unrest recently than the back line. In one of his more heavily criticized decisions, Klinsmann has attempted multiple times to use midfielder Jermaine Jones as a center-back. The experiments failed and detractors of Klinsmann say it shows he isn’t willing to call in worthwhile MLS players, like Hedges.

“Just pick a back four and go with it,” Lalas added. “Recognize that they are going to make mistakes, but they will have the benefit of the consistency in playing together. Instead we see a constant rotation of players and not just that, players who don’t even play defense going back there. It drives me nuts sometimes.”

Taking accountability

It’s not just that Klinsmann has a habit of playing his men out of position, but his unwillingness to accept responsibility when his decisions don’t pan out. The most apparent example came against Brazil last year, when Klinsmann threw winger Alejandro Bedoya into a defensive midfield role he had never played before.

Klinsmann yanked Bedoya after 36 minutes in a non-injury substitution – a move that should be tantamount to an admission of a coaching mistake – but Klinsmann’s explanation seemed to put the blame on his player.

“Alejandro had a little bit of a problem getting into his rhythm, into his game,” Klinsmann said. “There’s only so much time you can give him.”

That was after a disastrous Gold Cup that saw the worst US finish in 15 years. There, Klinsmann also played several players out of position throughout the tournament and the US struggled in the final rounds against Jamaica and Panama, opponents widely considerable beatable any day for the Americans.

Some players were pushed into less common but familiar roles, like Tim Ream and Brad Evans, who both had been regularly playing as center-backs for their clubs but Klinsmann slotted as full-backs to make room for Brooks and Alvarado. But others played in positions they almost never play, like Alfredo Morales, who is normally a central midfielder and sometimes plays on the right but was deployed on the left wing, and Gyasi Zardes, who moved all throughout the midfield over the tournament.

The team looked out of sorts, but Klinsmann seemed to blame the refereeing, even as he insisted otherwise.

“I am not blaming the referees, but I’m just telling you, the referees had a huge influence on the outcome of the Gold Cup,” Klinsmann said. “This was a Gold Cup settled by decisions that were very, very questionable.”

The incidents fit into a larger pattern where Klinsmann seemed unable accept any accountability for the national team’s shortcomings or acknowledge the work he needs to do as coach.

“The accountability thing is something that has always rubbed people the wrong way,” ESPN analyst Taylor Twellman told the Guardian. “But why, I have no idea, because I don’t think Jürgen Klinsmann is the first coach who has never publicly had accountability. I find the criticisms of Klinsmann at times not very consistent with other coaches.”

Whatever it was, the way Klinsmann’s comments were coming across to not just the media but soccer fans was apparently enough for US Soccer president Sunil Gulati to address it with Klinsmann directly. Asked about Klinsmann’s tendency to deflect responsibility, Gulati told reporters: “Noticed and discussed. Everyone has their own style. In the end, he’s the coach, but we’ve talked about some of those issues, for sure.”

For Klinsmann, how his comments have been interpreted may be a public relations problem more than anything to do with his coaching ability or his roster selection. But the best possible public relations move for Klinsmann is turning the national team around and winning in a key year of contests that will also include Copa America.

With high-stakes games over the next week, Klinsmann has ample opportunity to make everyone forget last year’s failures. As is always the case, Klinsmann is in control.