Solo and Klinsmann were among the necessary changes for U.S. Soccer in 2016. (Getty Images)

This was not a banner year for the United States Soccer Federation.

[ FC Yahoo’s 2016 review: Story of the Year | Person of the Year ]

It fired its men’s national team coach after a half decade of treading water. The women’s national team, in the midst of an increasingly adversarial collective bargaining negotiation and federal equal pay discrimination grievance, had its worst performance at a major tournament ever, followed by yet more Hope Solo-related drama. The men’s under-23 team wasn’t at the Olympics for a third time in four cycles. The under-20 women had an underwhelming World Cup, scraping out a fourth-place finish.

Oh, and the second-tier North American Soccer League is on its deathbed.

Yet 2016, in a lot of ways, was the year U.S. Soccer needed to have.

View photos Klinsmann’s last game as USMNT head coach was a 4-0 World Cup qualifying loss at Costa Rica. (AP Photo) More

It had been apparent for a while that on the senior men’s national team side, the Jurgen Klinsmann Era was quickly turning into the Klinsmann Debacle. There was hardly anything redeeming about the five years he’d been in charge – save for a solid World Cup performance – when almost no tangible progress of note was recorded. There was, and is, very little to show at the senior team level for the $15 million or so Klinsmann had earned as senior team head coach and technical director – a dual role that seemed to conflict with itself.

When the USA imploded completely in its final World Cup qualifier of the year in Costa Rica, a 4-0 drubbing in which the players looked, to put it charitably, disinterested, it was as apparent as ever that Klinsmann wasn’t going to make a success of the job. It was widely speculated that he might be allowed to hang on through the 2018 World Cup, but the Americans were clearly not going to get anywhere close to the semifinal place Klinsmann had set as their target. Reaching Russia at all was now in peril, after losses in the first two games of the final round of qualifiers – an unforgivable transgression in what is surely the most forgiving qualifying region in the world.

It was time to move on. Klinsmann’s replacement – and predecessor from 1998 through 2006 – Bruce Arena can’t be expected to reach that final four, but at the very least the program will be injected with some fresh energy. And gone is the pretense that the same players who once performed best as an athletic, counter-punching team can somehow be transformed into Spain or Germany overnight.

In the grand scheme of things, cutting this experiment short was a good thing, even though it meant conceding that half a decade was practically wasted. U.S. Soccer took a step back so that it might enable progress.

This was also true on the women’s side, to an extent.

It’s tricky and largely unfair to affix too much meaning to a tournament elimination on penalties in a knockout game, but the facts are that the USA hadn’t exactly set the Rio Olympics alight before Sweden knocked the Americans out in a quarterfinal shootout. They had made a slow start at the 2015 Women’s World Cup as well, before roaring to the title. But this time around, the U.S. couldn’t shake off its slow start.

View photos A year after winning the World Cup, Ellis’ USWNT had its worst Olympics ever. (AP Photo) More

It was the first time in 13 Women’s World Cups and Olympic tournaments – which is to say, all of them ever played – that the Americans weren’t in the semifinals. Indeed, it was the first time that they didn’t place third or better. But this historic failure has also been oddly productive.

Head coach Jill Ellis was in no danger of losing her job, on account of her long contract extension and a first world title in 16 years. And in more than two years since succeeding Tom Sermanni, she clearly hadn’t been able to remake the team as she had wished. Like every other U.S. women’s coach, she ran into the traditional hierarchy and the considerable power it wields over the team’s own fate with the federation. As a rule, the senior players don’t allow for a lot of changes, because those almost always come at the expense of, well, the senior players. A failure to recognize this had gotten Sermanni fired.

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