In August 2011, Jurgen Klinsmann faced the cameras for his first press conference as coach of the US men’s national team. Dressed in a navy jacket and crisp sky blue shirt, hair cropped short, the lights shining off his tan, fender-like forehead, Klinsmann bore the look of a man eager to prove his credentials as a New Californian. His answers were styled in a similarly sunny manner, carrying a mix of optimism, confidence and outreach. It wasn’t long before he was asked about the style of play he would try to promote with the national team – an inevitability for any coach on his first appointment with the press.

“I deeply believe soccer in a way reflects the culture of a country,” Klinsmann began. “One of my challenges will be to define how a US team should represent the country. What should be the style of play? Is it a more proactive and aggressive, forward-thinking style of play, or a more reactive style of play? That comes from the players you have at your disposal, but also the people you’re surrounded with – there are people that have an opinion in this country, the media, the coaches, there’s a wealth of knowledge in this country that’s unheard of. I think it is important that over the next three years, and especially at the beginning, that I have a lot of conversations with people involved in the game here to find a way to define that style. What suits us best? What would you like to see? It should reflect your mentality and your culture.”

Listen back over these words today, and they verge dangerously close to parody, as if Klinsmann was punking us all by playing the part of an over-sensitive school counselor on his first day in the job: “Forget about what I want,” you can almost hear him saying, hands pressed forward in the prayer position, “what do you guys want?” Essentially, the coach began his tenure by opening up his team’s style of play – the core of its very identity, its id – for public consultation. Offering to outsource stylistic identity in this manner, via a kind of football aesthetics national listening tour, would have been enough to make Klinsmann a figure of ridicule in any other country, but in the America of Klinsmann’s imagining, it probably made perfect sense. He planned to coach the team the way a Silicon Valley startup might develop a product: by building, testing, consulting, iterating, and scaling to greatness via a series of incremental, customer-vetted tweaks. Eventually, the American public would come to love its national men’s team, secure in the knowledge that the style of play it produced was entirely the product of user testing, the world’s first national football culture to have been developed via customer satisfaction survey.

It’s easy to understand why a guy like Klinsmann, eager as he was at the time to prove that he, as the first non-American at the helm of the national team since Bora Milutinovic, “got” America, chose this approach. But five years on, what has it yielded? What, exactly, is the style that Klinsmann has given the national team? Thankfully, we can answer that question with some clarity. The US men’s national team is tactically chaotic, inconsistent, frequently embarrassing, and lumbers along as if borne by the force of America’s size and the public’s expectations alone, constantly threatening to fall apart at the seams, flirting with disgrace on a semi-annual basis, its heavily conditional successes a pure function of demographics and scale. In this sense, Klinsmann is right: the style of the US team is a reflection of messy America itself. The USA is the DMV of national football teams: it’s functional in spite of itself, and stays alive because there’s nothing else to take its place. But this, it’s fair to assume, was not Klinsmann’s plan when he accepted the job and spoke, in full New World mythopoetic mode, of “building an American style of football” five years ago.

The last few months have provided a neat capsule summary of all the tactical criticisms leveled at Klinsmann during his time at the helm of the national side. He’s been inconsistent in his selections, played players out of position – most calamitously in the US’s 2-0 defeat to Guatemala in March – and alienated the few footballers of real quality and experience the US can call on. He’s promoted youth, but done so in a haphazard way, with no real plan for the future. Above all, though, it’s the sense of stylistic drift that most rankles US soccer fans, who have graduated from the stall of modest expectations two decades ago to occupy, today, a state of near-perpetual dissatisfaction. Under the collection of tracksuit journeymen and weekend hope-for-the-besters who managed the men’s national team before Klinsmann, the US played a defensive, counter-attacking game centered around its main forward talents (Landon Donovan, Brian McBride). Klinsmann promised to change all that, but a solitary Gold Cup win and the heroics of the round of 16 loss to Belgium at the 2014 World Cup aside, there’s been little to cheer.

In Klinsmann’s defense, the results at major tournaments have not been catastrophic. On the contrary, getting to the second round at the World Cup feels like a par score or slightly above it for a country of the US’s footballing talents. But results are not the issue. The issue is that after five years under Jurgen, the national team still has no sense of itself and how it should play. Klinsmann’s US is neither a plucky, counter-punching outfit in the Bruce Arena/Bob Bradley tradition, nor a possession-based attacking ensemble. It doesn’t press with any particular urgency, and the starting XI is not consistent enough for us to be able to say it’s a team built to support the strengths of its brightest talents. It’s an in-between team, and therefore a nothing team – and it says everything about the US’s enduring lack of identity as a footballing unit that the hopes of a nation are now pinned on a 17-year-old who’s just scored his first goal on the international stage.

To this day, even after five years, it’s impossible to know how, from match to match, Klinsmann’s US will play. A lot of the time it seems as if Klinsmann simply picks 11 players that look pretty good to him, then figures out the tactical plan and how everything will fit together afterwards. In the worst possible sense of the cliche, he takes it one game at a time – and never any further. Once an energetic and prowling presence on the sideline during matches, Klinsmann now bears something of a Roger Lemerre-like lifelessness about him. Even his choice of clothing suggests he’s become a little too comfortable. At most games these days Klinsmann turns out in beige cargo pants and a dinky little navy blue US Soccer polo shirt. (As a dress code, what would we call that, exactly – “sports casual”? “Athletic cocktail”? “Haute Gap”?) Neither properly suited nor truly tracksuited, Klinsmann inhabits an uncomfortable sartorial middle ground, unconsciously mirroring the interstitial mediocrity of his charges on the field of play. The manager in beige produces a team that plays beige; perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

There are clues to the German’s own drift as a manager in the way he approached the game as a player. Klinsmann was a classic gun for hire, a goalscoring mercenary who played for seven different clubs during his decade-plus at the top in Europe. His whole approach to the game was non-systematic: he was spontaneous, not disciplined, and got by on the strength of his individual skill and virtuosity, rather than playing for the collective according to a rigorously defined plan. His signatures were the spectacular overhead kick and the long-range strike, not the astute combination play or the tap-in produced by clever movement off the ball. A born natural can never turn himself into the type of tactician a successful manager needs to be, probably; planning runs against the grain of Klinsmann the footballer’s innate improvisational intelligence. It’s arguable, in a sense, that the US never should have expected more, and that Klinsmann’s success with a talented and young Germany squad in 2006 was a fig leaf for other, more durable failures (such as at Bayern Munich 2008-09).

Klinsmann himself has made much of the obstacles he faces as coach. The public isn’t educated about football, he has claimed; the collective football intelligence of the nation is not yet at a level to expect better results; there are too many players happy to stay and play domestically rather than challenge themselves in the European leagues; the talent pool is simply not deep enough. There is, of course, some merit to these arguments. Can a team that actively identifies itself by an acronym ever truly aspire to anything other than bureaucratic mediocrity? France has Les Bleus, Brazil has the Seleção, Germany has Die Mannschaft; America has the USMNT. If your team is named with all the panache of a federal agency, it’s perhaps no surprise that it produces little to inspire the public on the field.

Undoubtedly there is also much to be said about the lack of true quality at Klinsmann’s disposal. But the national coach should not be the person to talk his own team’s potential down – and surely the history of tournament football illustrates nothing more dramatically than the ability of teams of modest individual talent to achieve wondrous things together. Besides, there’s really no excuse for the team to be drifting along, stylistically bereft, after five years of Klinnsmania. Style does not have to be left to the whim of the individual coach; it can be forced through at a federation-wide level.

Australia is one national team that can serve as a useful point of comparison for the US: football there, as here, struggles for exposure amid a crowded field of more popular domestic sports; the pool of top-class talent is similarly shallow, and the expectations of a sports-mad public similarly outsized. Fifteen years ago Australia’s footballing culture had no stylistic identity – to the extent there was any national style at all, Australia played the game in the naive “run fast, work hard” manner of the Bruce Arena era. But in the early 2000s, the local federation made a decision to forge a national playing style in the Dutch mold. At all levels of the game, from youth development to coaching, skills, and tactics, Australia set out to build for itself a style that would mirror the mobile, attacking play of the post-Rinus Michels Dutch school. Dutchmen – real, living Dutch people – were brought in to facilitate this approach. The results, as Australia’s performances at the 2014 World Cup and the 2015 Asian Cup show, have been quietly encouraging. The US need not blindly follow this example, of course – and the Australian experiment has had its own share of false starts and pratfalls.

On paper, the US has been better at the last two World Cups than Australia. But the Socceroos have a much stronger sense of who they are as a team, and how they want to develop over the next generation; their example shows that stylistic consistency can easily form the basis of a systematic national plan. Klinsmann took on the personal responsibility of forging such a plan when he took the reins as national technical director in 2013. It hasn’t worked. America can, and should, expect better.

“You think that what’s said about you in the press is important,” Klinsmann told Der Spiegel in 2008, shortly after taking up the job as head coach at Bayern Munich. “But in reality the only important thing is what you make of yourself.” After five years at the helm of the US men’s national team, here is what Klinsmann has made of himself: a plodding technocrat in dad pants, bereft of tactical skill and passionate only in the defense of his own incompetence. At least at the beginning of his tenure he aspired to something greater: there was an idea, a project, the ambition to create a style. Now all Klinsmann seems motivated by is the desire to move on to the next disappointment. There’s movement, but the momentum died long ago. In five years, Klinsmann has taken the team from a figurative California to literal catatonia. If the US performs well at the Copa, it will be in spite of, not thanks to, its once promising, now listless manager.