The Ulysse Nardin Marine Chronograph UN-150 is a luxury watch by a Swiss manufacturer from a tiny town in the canton of Neuchatel. It has Arabic numerals, sapphire crystals, 322 components, a thermally stabilized silicium core and an enamel dial specially kiln-fired at 900 degrees Celsius in Donze Cadrans workshops. It costs about $12,000.

This is what led to the resignation of Reinhard Grindel as president of Germany’s soccer federation last April.

This is what we need in U.S. Soccer.

Grindel received a watch, later identified as a blue Ulysse Nardin Marine Chronograph, as a birthday gift from a Ukrainian oligarch who also happened to be vice president of the sport’s highly politicized European governing body. The ensuing conflict of interest served as a convenient excuse to end Grindel’s unpopular three-year tenure that included the home-before-the-postcards exit from the 2018 World Cup by the defending champions.


We need a Ulysse Nardin. We need a Ukrainian oligarch. We need a scandal.

We need something.

Because nothing else has provoked change in American soccer as it spirals deeper toward irrelevance and irreverence. Losses haven’t. Lawsuits haven’t. A New York Times story outlining a toxic work environment at the federation’s Chicago headquarters hasn’t.

The latest humiliation was a 2-0 loss Tuesday to Canada by the men’s national team, its first since 1985 against one of the few countries that might care even less about the sport. Even Michael Bradley, who somehow keeps popping up on rosters and whose clumsy turnover in midfield (again) led to one of the goals, wasn’t born then.


The good news: It wasn’t 4-0.

It came almost two years to the day since the 2-1 loss against a Caribbean island nation with 328.5 million fewer people that kept the Yanks out of the World Cup for the first time since 1986 and was supposed to be a transformational moment of salvation. Instead, the federation elected former vice president Carlos Cordeiro to operate a puppet regime for Major League Soccer and spent a year – a year – hiring a new men’s national coach who happens to be the brother of the federation executive expected to become its next CEO.

Blame Gregg Berhalter, the coach, if you must. Or Jay Berhalter, the executive.

But blame us, more than anything.


The problem is simple: We’re a soccer-playing nation, not a soccer nation. There’s a difference.

We play the game every weekend on every patch of grass or artificial turf in America, to the cacophony of parents screaming from their lawn chairs to “booooot it.” But we don’t live the game. We don’t breathe it, digest it, feel it, think it, love it. We don’t consume it and let it consume us. Grandma doesn’t scream, “Refereeeee,” (or worse) at the TV.

Soccer practice is like piano lessons. Tuesdays and Thursday, 4 to 5:30. Then we close the piano cover and go home, and the music stops.

Earlier this month I wrote about Miguel Berry, the star forward at the University of San Diego, and how he grew up in Barcelona before moving to Poway. How, at age 6, his coach once instructed the team to pass only side to side, never forward, to teach the value of possession and playing out of the back. How they lost 14-0. How it would never happen in the States because “the parents would go crazy.”


Now we have a national coach trying to play out of the back with chess pieces ill-suited for the sophisticated strategy, soulless robots churned out by a youth system that is predicated on winning U-9 State Cups and ignores immigrant communities imbibed with a true soccer culture.

And we have the federation execs who hired him facing no consequences from a mainstream public that doesn’t care enough, doesn’t hitch its emotional welfare to the beautiful game enough, to demand their immediate removal.

Outside of a few snarky tweets or angry web posts, there’s no mass outrage. No moral indignation. No bricks tossed through windows at federation headquarters. No mob of mini-cams staking out the president as he walks to his car and asking when – not if – he’ll resign.

Instead, they blunder on. General Manager Earnie Stewart, hired with the primary job of hiring a national coach, was promoted over the summer to the federation’s sporting director overseeing all men’s and women’s programs. Jay Berhalter is the favorite to be promoted to replace retiring CEO Dan Flynn.


A few weeks ago, Mexico’s federation hired former San Diego Sockers great Hugo Perez as a scout to run evaluation camps on this side of the border and recruit promising youth players with dual citizenship. That’s the same Perez who is from El Salvador and has deep ties to the Hispanic soccer community, who was a former U.S. youth national coach, who was instrumental in the identification and development of players like Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie and Christian Pulisic.

Who was fired.

This is the federation where, for the last few years, the web page for its Diversity Task Force had a title and was otherwise blank. Now it links to one that says: “Red card. This page is out of the game.”

This is the federation that unilaterally split its oldest Development Academy boys teams into “Top” and “Lower” Tiers, and Crossfire Premier from the Seattle area was put in the latter … despite winning its division two straight years and regularly beating up on the academy teams of MLS clubs. Oh, and all the MLS teams, even badly underperforming ones, were placed in the Top Tier.


This is the federation that oversees a youth empire rapidly bleeding players. A recent study by the respected Aspen Institute estimated that soccer has lost 474,000 kids between ages 6 and 12 over the past five years. It also found that the average age they quit soccer is 9.1 years; among the 21 sports surveyed, only gymnastics was younger at 8.7.

Another study found that households with $100,000-plus in annual income account for 35 percent of youth soccer participants in its pay-to-play culture, and only 11 percent come from the poorest demographic – numbers echoing Hope Solo’s claim that, in this country, it’s “a rich, white kid sport.”

Meanwhile, federation attorneys are fending off federal lawsuits that are diverting attention and resources from its fundamental mission to grow the game. Its beloved women’s national team is suing for equal pay. The U.S. Soccer Foundation, the sport’s major charitable arm created by a former federation president from 1994 World Cup revenues, is suing over a logo flap. There are two antitrust suits, one by a second-division league the federation drove out of business to protect MLS and another by a promoter blocked from staging foreign league games in the States.

Sensing a pattern here?


It’s been going on for years, for decades, unchecked. The solution isn’t another coat of paint, as Cordeiro tried to apply when MLS used its clout to get him elected in 2018 as a palatable replacement for longtime president Sunil Gulati (who once worked for MLS). This isn’t new carpet or blinds. This is a demo job. A complete scrape.

A reboot.

We need a new federation president not beholden to MLS, a new management team that its employees don’t hate, a new national coach who doesn’t try to play out of the back, a new, inclusive youth development system that doesn’t burn out players at age 9 or bankrupt their parents, a new everything.

We need a Ulysse Nardin Marine Chronograph UN-150 and a Ukrainian oligarch.


We need a red card.