After nearly every game by the US national team, the Guardian runs an analysis on what we learned from them. Presumably the well paid coaching team headed by Jürgen Klinsmann performs a similar exercise – though at times since the World Cup it’s been hard to see those insights adding up into any sort of cumulative institutional knowledge. Instead we get line-up changes, formation switches, reversions, and general emphasis on “the process” rather than the results. Each game feels like a fresh hot take on what is to be done – team history written as a sequence of blog posts.

It is only 15 months since the USA lost to Belgium in the World Cup, but it feels like a lifetime. A month or so before that match the team were playing their penultimate World Cup warm up game against Turkey at Red Bull Arena, with Fabian Johnson, soon to be one of the team’s most potent weapons at the World Cup, scoring a sublime goal to complete a perfect assist from Michael Bradley.

More pain for Jürgen Klinsmann as listless USA slump to another loss Read more

Klinsmann’s been sliding Bradley up and down the spine of the team ever since, searching for the perfect point of balance to take advantage of his particular playmaking skills, while Johnson has just found himself to be the latest player to be made an example of by the coach. There was no return to Red Bull Arena for him on Tuesday night, after he pulled out of the Mexico game at the weekend worried about a calf injury. At that point he’d played 111 minutes in the extreme heat, not long after returning from another calf injury, but in robbing Klinsmann of the chance to bring in Nick Rimando for penalties as his final substitute, he’d earned the wrath of his coach.

By Monday afternoon Klinsmann was briefing press at US training that Johnson had been sent home so that “he can rethink his approach about his team” and inferring that the “normal” muscle tightness that made Johnson withdraw from the game was perhaps part of what lost the game (“In a situation like that, it’s little things that often make a difference”). Rather than making an example of an individual in service of the greater good, however, it felt like a petty act of misdirection from a coach who’d lost a game his side should never have been in.

Johnson is not alone in being hung out to dry by his coach – after the recent game against Brazil Alejandro Bedoya was singled out for failing to “find his rhythm” in a defensive midfield position he’d never played before, let alone against an elite international team. The predictable chasing Bedoya endured before Klinsmann withdrew him at half-time felt like a pointless exercise, and even more so when he was left carrying the blame for his coach exposing him in this way.

For a long period at the start of his reign it was perhaps possible for Klinsmann to use his reputation in the global game and his achievements at the highest level to awe his players into compliance, and perhaps in those moments his insistence on “benchmarking” players at the highest possible standards might have justified a barbed comment or two to make clear what he expected from players.

If there was unease about him not going further than predecessor Bob Bradley in the World Cup it was perhaps eased by the team getting out of a notional group of death to experience their extended battering by Belgium, but the last 15 months, or the first 15 months of the next World Cup cycle, have stretched his credibility to breaking point, and at this point it looks very much as if Klinsmann is holding players to a standard he does not demand of himself.

Some of this may be down to Klinsmann’s dual remit as head coach and technical director of US Soccer. For most of the time since the World Cup he has appeared fixated on “the process” that might be associated with the latter job while discounting the significance of the “results business” most coaches live or die by. Individual players shine in individual games only to be paired with new partners in the next one; mass substitutions fatally weaken the team in balanced games; there is no coherent sense of a first choice team; and the pattern of poor results begins to build.

And now the team is in “the process” of its first three game losing streak at home since 1997 and contemplating the start of its 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign in its next match.

Another forgettable performance against Costa Rica on Tuesday night saw more of the same – the Ticos ran rampant through a US backline that spent much of the evening sitting deep learning each others names and setting a tone of timidity that ran through the entire team. It’s one thing to bunker, but the sluggishness with which the USA counter these days speaks of an uncertainty that starts at the top.

After Tuesday’s game Klinsmann spoke of the Mexico disappointment being “still heavy in the air” in the Costa Rica performance, and claimed that the players’ “heads were full”. Maybe so – watching the players troop to the bus past waiting media on Saturday night it was clear how much the Rose Bowl loss hurt.

But there’s a growing sense that Klinsmann is happy to appeal to cumulative lessons when it suits him (“We had a lot of sunshine 2012, 2013, 2014 … and now it’s raining a little bit. And you’ve got to go through that”) and less inclined to accept that it is his own extended post World Cup tinkering that has left his side in its current malaise.

The road to the World Cup has already got more difficult with the Olympic team’s struggles (after losing to Honduras on Saturday the side now face a playoff against Colombia in Rio to qualify), and missing out on a Confederations Cup spot. The tainted centenary Copa America next summer is still on the table for now – though who knows what further ripples from the Fifa scandal might do to that. Add in the tricky Concacaf World Cup qualifying grind and this is what Klinsmann now has to rally his team for, with diminishing evidence they’re listening to him.

And yet Klinsmann’s job appears to be secure – it’s frankly too expensive to replace him – though Landon Donovan was right that the loss to Mexico and the circumstances of the team being in such a play-off in the first place might have seen other coaches around the world lose their jobs. But right now it’s hard to remember why he was considered such an inspiring appointment, and there’s too much to forget about his team’s performances.