What Should We Expect of Gregg Berhalter?
A contemplation of what it means to succeed for the head coach in charge of the most talented United States men's national team ever.
I wrote a story about United States men’s national team head coach Gregg Berhalter and his unprecedented project over at The Ringer. In the course of 6 months reporting and writing that piece, I also spent a lot of time thinking about the bizarre spot the U.S. head coach finds himself in and the quasi-impossibility of making good on the promise of his team.
First, a little background.
I started covering the United States men’s national team for ESPN in January of 2010. So I’ve lived through four different head coaches, all in their own distinct eras. First came the tightly-coiled, git-‘er-done Bob Bradley. Then the beaming Jurgen Klinsmann, the man full of lofty ideas. The bemused and jaded Bruce Arena took over for a second spell in charge midway through qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in a failed effort to rescue a sinking campaign. Finally, Berhalter.
Away from the field, Berhalter’s predecessors were all perfectly amiable. Bradley once took me aside in a parking lot and asked me if he’d answered my question properly. He hadn’t, of course, because answering questions just wasn’t his style—his go-to press conference move was to talk in a giant circle around the thing you wanted to know and referring endlessly to “the process” before that was a cliché. Then he gave me something that was almost useful, but off the record.
Klinsmann could be mordantly funny if you caught him in the right mood, but never when the cameras or microphones were on, when he only ever sounded like a Silicon Valley guy promising to change the world. There were no such layers to Arena, who was always just happy-go-luck Bruce and would tell you exactly what he thought, no matter the situation or subject. And if he could figure out how to sneak in a quip at your expense, he wouldn’t hesitate.
Berhalter isn’t so easily defined. He has elements of all his predecessors—Bradley’s preparation and intensity; Klinsmann’s ambition and positivity; Arena’s approachability and bonhomie. But mostly, Berhalter is nice, steady, thoughtful.
And this lack of a persona seems to pose something of a problem for him. A branding problem, rather than a sporting problem. Because on the latter score, with two freshly earned trophies and the best-ever winning percentage and averages for goals scored and conceded per game as a USMNT manager, Berhalter is doing just fine.
It’s just that in the age of the cult manager, you have to be something. You have to fit a template. To be like some other manager more famous and accomplished than you are, so that everyone can modulate expectations for your playing style and behavior. But Berhalter ticks none of the boxes. He doesn’t provoke or cajole or mystify or compel. He isn’t the rakish Jose Mourinho, with his bottomless well of cheek. Or the relentlessly charming, come-party-with-us Jurgen Klopp. He doesn’t have Pep Guardiola’s blazing intensity or gauzy mystique. Or Thomas Tuchel’s studious affect, a physics professor in a tracksuit.
He's just a very professional man who does his job by a clear process. But absent an image for the public to pre-judge him on, Berhalter could be anything. He is a white canvas. Your own private hopes and dreams for the national team are the paint.
That is why, until beating Mexico twice in under 2 months to claim both the new CONCACAF Nations League and the Gold Cup—with a B-team in the latter no less, while El Tri brought its A-team—his critics were so vocal. They were filling in the vacant spaces of his reputation.
If you went onto American Soccer Twitter during any national team game, the Berhalter Questioners would be there waiting for you. They would say that he had picked the wrong lineup, the wrong tactics, the wrong style, the wrong everything. That he wasn’t getting enough out of star forward Christian Pulisic. That he was a fool to force his defense to build out of the back. That his occasional three-man backline gave them terrible flashbacks. That he used too many Major League Soccer players where a Valencia or an RB Leipzig player was available. That his faith in veteran defender Tim Ream showed disqualifyingly bad judgement.
All of it would be wrong in the eyes of at least one person. And this is the point. The national team head coach is there to be questioned. And the embarrassment of riches, talent-wise, that Berhalter came into after taking the job only heightened this tension. With so many young players breaking through at major European clubs, Berhalter is held to a higher standard than any men’s USA manager before him—except that nobody ever bothered to set an exact bar for him to clear. The missed 2018 World Cup, the first in a generation, threw the entire program off its axis and introduced yet more uncertainty over what this team is or ought to be.
Suddenly, the U.S. has a core of bona fide stars or stars-in-the-making. The unprecedented Pulisic, of course, who recoils from his swelling fame but then also let GQ photograph him splayed on a couch in an undershirt, in a fit of “brand-extension.” His career should easily surpass that of co-all-time leading national team goal-scorers Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey, provided Pulisic doesn’t get eaten by a giant fish first.
Tim Weah, like Pulisic, is a quicksilver forward. He’s also a French champion with Lille and the son of the president of Liberia, George Weah—the first and only African to win the Ballon d’Or in 1995.
The midfield revolves around Weston McKennie, a regular for Juventus who thinks nothing of casually trash-talking his perplexed Juventus teammate Cristiano Ronaldo—“I’m just saying, bro. You wish you had my body.”
Gio Reyna, son of Claudio and a playmaker like his dad, is the second-generation national team prodigy who makes a living at Borussia Dortmund. Holding midfielder and joy-dispenser Tyler Adams embodies that classic American soccer tale of long drives to practice and a determined climb up the ranks to RB Leipzig. Barca’s Sergiño Dest, a wing back who gobbles up entire flanks by himself, gave up a likely starting role with the three-time World Cup finalist Dutch national team in favor of playing for a nation he didn’t yet know super well.
The oldest of that core group—which has a deep and equally youthful supporting cast—is McKennie, who turns 23 in late August. Reyna is the youngest at just 18.
Which is all to say that we—the American soccer community—aren’t really sure anymore what to expect or demand. How high can all that talent rise? And where should we set minimum expectations? Both are surely much higher than for any generation before it—the 2002 World Cup team reached the quarterfinals, setting the modern highwater mark—but the precise altitude is undefined.
What’s more, the challenges faced by a USMNT manager haven’t changed. And they remain different and deeper than those of most of Berhalter’s international peers. Because MLS mostly doesn’t follow the global playing calendar, he has to juggle two teams: the domestic and the international, which only occasionally overlap. The realities of playing in CONCACAF, a tangle of travel and tricky conditions and wily opponents and inexplicable referees, add another layer of complication. And Berhalter has to navigate all of it with an unusually inexperienced team.
He has had to rebuild his team more or less from scratch. So he blended program veterans into his young camps, to recapture some of the old U.S. national team feel and to weave the scrappy spirit of past generations into the superior skills of the new one. “We can have both,” he told me for the Ringer story. “Just because I want a clear style of play and to dominate the ball, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have the values of American soccer players.”
“The current national team is just a point on the timeline of the history of U.S. Soccer,” Berhalter continued, getting all philosophical. “It’s all we are. And we have the opportunity to affect those who come after us just as much as those before us affect us. So I thought it was really important understanding the heritage of the U.S. national team and having players around that did understand that and can start teaching the younger players.”
Yet if this team is just a continuation of the teams before it, it will also be held to an entirely different standard. Namely, not just reaching World Cups, but competing to win them. The goalposts have always been movable for U.S. head coaches, the upshot of being a major nation in a minor confederation. Win your regional games and tournaments and you’re only doing what you’re supposed to; don’t and you’re in crisis. Do well at the World Cup and it’s merely what a country of your size and resources ought to be doing. There’s really no clear target to aim for.
This phenomenon is heightened for Berhalter, who has more talent under him and more expectations on him than anyone in program history, and even less clarity about what, exactly, he’s expected to deliver.