After being an observer and participant in professional soccer for thirty-five years or more, I’ve learned that you have to filter the information you get from players, coaches and administrators. You have to try to find the truth, or find the honest opinions, despite what you may hear in answer to your questions.
You have to understand that soccer is not like politics, where you know that you can believe every word that a politician utters. No, most players want to put on a brave face when they are playing badly, most coaches want you to believe that the team is about to turn the corner, and the team administrators can always blame a referee for their troubles. So how do you get at the truth?
That’s where the filter comes in. Or a good memory. Take some recent interviews of Bruce Arena, World Cup coach fired by the United States Soccer Federation after eight years and the failure of “..bumbling Team USA..” in Germany, as one journalist for The Guardian put it.
Bumbling or not, Bruce Arena did well out of it, being hired almost immediately to coach Red Bull New York in Major League Soccer at a reported salary of $1.4 million. The name of New York and soccer attract a lot of interest, because newspapers remember the glory days of the New York Cosmos. (For a tongue-in-cheek classic about that star-studded international team, read Sue Mott’s column in the Daily Telegraph.
Arena has a reputation for speaking bluntly, but in several interviews (New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Daily Telegraph) in September, he was particularly blunt. The problem is to determine whether he is being honest when he is being blunt. Here are some of the things he said during those interviews.
“One of the weaknesses in the whole system . . . not enough people who understand the technical side (of the game).”
We are “..very naïve . .” about the international game. “We finished like we should have finished . . “ in the World Cup. “And when you look at international soccer, we are among the top 30-40 countries in the world. If you think we’re in the top 10, you’re nuts.”
MLS “. . has got to get better.” “The league hasn’t gotten any better since I was at D.C.” “They need to get better players.” “They’ve got to get away from that fantasy-land professional sports league where there’s parity and nobody has competitive advantages.”
“There are too many people in decision-making positions who believe that they are the key to making it happen.”
Officials at U.S. Soccer “. . apparently don’t think that my knowledge is worth anything.”
About a foreign coach for the national team, “I don’t think (Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer) knows. He has no idea. He’s never been involved at soccer at that level to understand that.”
“We don’t have world-class players in the United States.”
Arena expressed the opinion that Gulati is a “superfan” who is now president, adding “. . another micromanager to an organization that’s already micromanaged. .”, that the national training center is “an amusement park”, and “I don’t want to be around U.S. Soccer any more.”
Is he bitter or what?
But let’s take a look at some of those opinions and try to figure out if Arena has some genuine beefs with the system. Tomorrow: “Arena’s Remorse.”