There is only a hint of a smile on Bradley’s face in the United States team media guide. His countenance is made more severe by a balding pate and an often furrowed look, as if he is squinting into a bright light or being asked a question whose premise he disagrees with.

But Bradley can also be funny and self-deprecating when he lets down his guard. Asked to describe his days at Princeton, from which he graduated with a history degree in 1980, he said simply, “Not a good student; decent player.”

If he crammed for exams as an undergrad, Bradley’s coaching method is one of full immersion. “He has a DVD player taped to his forehead,” defender Jay DeMerit said, laughing.

Bradley has exhaustively studied the world’s best club teams  Barcelona of today, A.C. Milan of the late 1980s and early ’90s  and from this dogged research, his own style has emerged, built on the belief that the toughest teams to beat are the ones that remain the most organized, compact and disciplined.

Ones that move collectively forward and backward and side to side.

That take advantage of the little moments, when possession is won or lost, when hustle can create an opportunity and sloth can puncture a team’s invulnerability.

By his count, Bradley still keeps boxes of videotapes of the A.C. Milan teams that won European titles in 1989 and ’90 while coached by Arrigo Sacchi. Occasionally, midfielder Stuart Holden said, Bradley still shows them to his players. Meanwhile, his intense research of the Americans’ World Cup opponents  England, Slovenia and Algeria  led him to watch as many as 50 matches a week.

Image Bradley’s son, Michael, is a national team fixture. Credit... Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“We’ve never been better prepared,” midfielder Landon Donovan said.

Apparently no detail is too small to overlook. At a news conference the day before the United States faced the Czech Republic in an exhibition on May 25 in East Hartford, Conn., Donovan went to take a seat on the dais when Bradley instructed him to sit to his right. Bocanegra was positioned to his left.