If you talk with Germans about Jürgen Klinsmann’s ill-fated stint as the coach of F.C. Bayern Munich, it’s only a matter of time until they bring up the matter of the Buddha statues. After arriving in July of 2008 at Bayern—the free-spending New York Yankees-style hegemon of the German soccer league—Klinsmann’s first intervention was to personally oversee an overhaul of the team’s training center. The local press openly wondered whether the movie theatre, the so-called “quiet room,” and the high-end d.j. console that he installed had much, if anything, to do with soccer, but they seemed willing to give Klinsmann the benefit of the doubt.
But when a number of Buddha figures appeared around the training campus, Bavarians took it as an affront. In a region where crucifixes still hang from classroom walls, and the Catholic Church remains a powerful political force, the statues quickly attracted controversy. Catholic interest groups, local politicians, and, eventually, players quoted anonymously began to criticize the relics’ allegedly implicit proselytism. One prominent Bavarian politician questioned whether Klinsmann, who was raised in Germany but moved to California after the conclusion of his playing career, in 1998, was too “American” to properly coach Germany’s most prominent club team. (It didn’t help matters that the team was struggling on the field.) Midway through his first season, Klinsmann was fired. The statues were quickly taken down after Klinsmann’s departure, but, in Germany, they remain a symbol of his penchant for pushing change in sweeping, sometimes reckless fashion.
Klinsmann has been the coach of U.S. men’s national soccer team since 2011. And, as American fans learned recently, his management style has stayed more or less the same. On May 22nd, Klinsmann announced that Landon Donovan, the most accomplished player in the history of American soccer, would not be joining the national team at the World Cup in Brazil. Klinsmann has again refused to allow traditional pieties to interfere with his personal judgment of the team’s needs. And, once again, this has proved to be a public-relations problem. Just as some Bavarians believed that Klinsmann’s Buddhas were the expression of a nefarious social agenda, many American fans now believe that Klinsmann was motivated by personal animus when he cut Donovan. In his own defense, Klinsmann offered only the curt explanation that “soccer is about what you do today, and what you hopefully do tomorrow.” Left unsaid was what Klinsmann believes soccer isn’t about―namely, dealing with the past.
Klinsmann clearly believes that he has a mandate to try to transform the state of soccer in the United States. “The transition is happening now and step-by-step, over the years, we want to play with the bigger nations, to attack the bigger nations, and to possess more than them,” Klinsmann recently told me after we watched a training session of youth teams in Sarasota, Florida. Whether the transformation succeeds, of course, is still to be determined. Klinsmann’s first major test will be this summer’s World Cup tournament, including the United States’ match against Germany, on June 26th. But Klinsmann’s greater challenge will be off the field, as he tries to change how Americans think about soccer in the first place. As he sees it, if Americans are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable, that probably means that he’s beginning to do his job.
One of Klinsmann’s qualifications to Europeanize American soccer is that, for most of his career, he seemed to be trying to Americanize German soccer. Klinsmann was always a natural at the game. (In his first season in Germany’s junior soccer division, at the age of nine, he scored a hundred and sixteen goals.) But he never fit comfortably in Germany’s rigid, bureaucratic soccer culture.
Where Germany prized stoic discipline on the field, Klinsmann was extravagantly emotional. Where the tabloid press insisted on access to players’ lives, Klinsmann insisted on privacy. (He successfully sued Bild, Europe’s most widely circulated newspaper.) Where the German soccer league’s functionaries insisted that they knew best, Klinsmann fought bitterly for more favorable contracts. (Klinsmann signed with teams in Munich, Milan, Monaco, and London, earning a reputation as a goal-scoring mercenary.)
Although he remained a mainstay of the German national team, leading it to victory in the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 European Cup, he moved to California with his wife, an American, shortly after his retirement, in 1998. In the United States, Klinsmann started a sports consulting firm called SoccerSolutions, which allowed him to observe the rigorously empirical approach that American sports teams took to evaluating player performance and fitness (a stark contrast to the methods in place at the time in Europe). It only deepened his conviction that German soccer had indulged tradition at the expense of innovation.
In 2004, Klinsmann accepted an offer from the German soccer federation’s Trainerfindungskommission—a coach-finding-commission, an unintentional self-parody of German bureaucracy—to take over the national team. Klinsmann brought in new coaches and shook up player rotations. But he also sought more fundamental changes. He wanted to develop a group of strong individual personalities, not the collective of relentless drones that had become Germany’s reputation; the team’s instinct should be aggressive attack, not risk-averse defense. He hired a sports psychologist and a nutritionist to focus on the team’s diet. He brought in motivational speakers to help the team envision winning the World Cup. Klinsmann also defied precedent by hiring non-German coaches, including an American personal trainer dedicated to improving the team’s conditioning. On certain practice days, Klinsmann nixed the team’s standard wind sprints for less conventional drills, with names like “rubber twist” and “blind cow,” which were purportedly designed to help the players experience “psychological breakthroughs.” Klinsmann sometimes spoke through pseudo-philosophical koans that were easily mistaken for mystique. (“The killer can only kill things if he’s a giver to the whole group that gets him into that position,” he told me at one point. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I believed him.)
Michael Ballack, Germany’s captain, said that he had never known anyone “with such a gift for making people so enthusiastic about something.” But the German public, and the team’s upper management, bristled at Klinsmann’s unorthodox approach. They were already suspicious at Klinsmann’s refusal to move back to Germany for the job. Except for practice and game days, he telecommuted from California, beginning at 6 A.M. each day. When Germans heard of his emphasis on positive psychology and his reliance on outside experts, they tended to dismiss it as a touchy-feely threat to Germany’s macho resolve. “I did some things they weren’t used to. I said, ‘I saw this in America and it works,’” he told me. “And they said, ‘You’re crazy.’” Laced through the public criticism was a subtle, but unmistakable, streak of xenophobia. A 2005 article in Der Spiegel dismissed Klinsmann as a glorified American cheerleader. “A strained team spirit rules,” the magazine wrote, “similar to what American supermarket employees display after attending a team-building seminar.”
The doubts mostly dissolved once the 2006 World Cup, hosted by Germany, got under way. Klinsmann’s team played stylishly and aggressively, and they ultimately finished in third place. The public responded ecstatically, even indulging in the sort of flag-waving that’s generally frowned upon in Germany. But Klinsmann resigned after the tournament, citing “burn out.”
Two years later, Klinsmann began his brief stint with F.C. Bayern Munich. He was fired in April, 2009, and soon returned to California.
For Klinsmann, it was fitting that the U.S. Soccer Federation approached him after his high-profile setback in Germany. “Americans don’t give up. If they fall, they dust themselves off and get back up,” he says. “Germans might say that I failed with F.C. Bayern. But that’s not how Americans think.” In Germany, personal disappointments are often treated as signs of stubborn underlying weaknesses rather than a necessary part of future success. Where Germans see failures, Americans see challenges somewhere in the process of being overcome.
The impact of Klinsmann’s arrival with the U.S. team was felt immediately. Imagine if Michael Jordan were to show up to coach the German national basketball team. Suddenly, the U.S. team had a glamour it previously lacked.
The U.S. federation’s higher-ups have welcomed, and even encouraged, Klinsmann’s experimental streak. Mix yoga into the practice routines? No problem. Bring in a motivational speaker or two? Great. No one second-guesses Klinsmann’s decisions about hotel accommodations for the team; members of Congress haven’t demanded to review his strategies for the World Cup, as members of the Bundestag once did.
Far from having too much bureaucracy, U.S. soccer probably doesn’t have enough. Klinsmann has admitted that the administrative conditions resemble “the Wild West.” Last year, when he determined that the team needed to play more games together, he had to personally call the coach of Germany to set up an exhibition match.
Klinsmann is also responsible for “connecting the dots,” as he puts it, between American soccer’s grassroots and the national team. In Germany, professional club teams assume responsibility for developing young players. In the United States, Klinsmann has had to help build such a system, and without the financial assistance of a profitable professional league. Last year, Klinsmann was named the technical director of U.S. Soccer. In addition to his role as the coach of the men’s national team, he is now responsible for supervising and expanding the country’s infrastructure for developing élite soccer talent: selecting coaches for the national teams, helping design the curricula for the coaches of travelling youth clubs, and overseeing the scouting of amateur matches for potential talent.
It would be incorrect to say that player development had been entirely neglected in the United States prior to Klinsmann’s arrival. The American Youth Soccer Organization (A.Y.S.O.) has been the country’s largest youth-sports organization for several decades. But the A.Y.S.O. made soccer a fixture of American suburbia by explicitly promoting it as an alternative to overly competitive mainstream sports. If the rules weren’t egalitarian enough, Americans simply changed them—allowing, for instance, unlimited substitutions, whereas a maximum of three substitutions is permitted in international competition.
The more that Americans bent soccer to fit their ideas of fair play, the less they thought of the sport as a serious professional pursuit. According to Klinsmann, that’s taken a toll on the field. America’s élite players, he says, are more complacent than their international peers. “American culture says that soccer is just a team sport. So many players just think it’s O.K. to just do whatever the teams demands,” he says. “But top athletes always need to be doing more than the other guys. We are always telling the players that professional soccer is a twenty-four-hour job.” U.S. players have also learned to accept soccer’s reputation for being a soft, non-contact sport. “When we work with the players, I say, ‘If you want to succeed in international competition, you’ve got to toughen up,’” he says. “Of course, I’m not saying they should hurt somebody.” But he’s also not saying that they shouldn’t hurt somebody.
Of course, Klinsmann’s approach, both as a coach and as a training director, will take a long time to sink in among players and parents, if it ever does. In the meantime, soccer will remain a niche pursuit, if the World Cup qualifying match late last year between the United States and Jamaica is any indication. Although the game took place on a weekend afternoon in Kansas City, hardly anyone in town seemed to be aware of it. The clerk at the airport’s car-rental desk simply assumed that I’d come to watch that weekend’s Kansas City Chiefs game. A security guard at the stadium entrance admitted that Kansas City would always be more of a “football town.” “The Chiefs and NASCAR are up here,” she said, holding her hand at eye level. “Baseball’s over here,” she said, lowering her hand to her chest. Finally, lowering her hand, palm-down, to her waist, she said, “And soccer’s somewhere down here.”
Klinsmann thinks that the U.S. team can help to shake the country out of its apathy. But he says that winning won’t be enough; the team will have to win in a recognizably American style. “It has to be our goal to develop a style in which Americans will recognize themselves,” he says. “They have to be in front of the television and say, ‘Yes, that’s my team.’” Klinsmann admits that this is a bit of a challenge in such a diverse country where “no one is completely American.” But Klinsmann believes that the team’s playing style will eventually resemble something like the country’s assertive entrepreneurial culture. “Americans are proactive,” he tells me. “You want to be world leaders in everything you do. So, on the field, you shouldn’t just sit back and wait.” Although American teams have traditionally depended on counter-attacking—a type of strategy that involves exploiting an opponent’s aggression—Klinsmann hopes that his players will soon be more assertive and creative on offense.
The ambitions for this summer’s World Cup are much more modest: Klinsmann hopes to simply qualify for the second round of the tournament. As Klinsmann continues to push the U.S. team out of its comfort zone, he expects some setbacks. He only asks for patience from the public. Of course, he recognizes that this is where the relative anonymity of American soccer will be of some benefit. “It’s easier to make changes in the U.S.A. [than in Germany], because the constant noise isn’t there,” he told me.
But Klinsmann knows that anonymity is also one of the U.S. team’s biggest problems. It’s hard for a team to feel accountable if its performance isn’t being scrutinized. “Pressure is definitely a good thing. It keeps you on your toes,” he said. “In Germany, you understood that you were here to get a job done. Because if you didn’t, you would hear about it all over the place the next day.” As much of a relief as it was for Klinsmann to escape the circus surrounding German soccer, recreating that circus will be a necessary part of his job in the United States. Indeed, that might be why Klinsmann’s snubbing of Donovan may prove to be a critical inflection point: it has already focussed more scrutiny on the team than ever before.
When Klinsmann first arrived at Bayern Munich, in 2008, he announced that his guiding philosophy for the club would be a popular expression in the local Bavarian dialect that roughly translates to “We will be ourselves.” At first, it seemed to be a sign of respect for the team’s history and traditions. But it soon became clear that, for Klinsmann, the motto was not so much declarative as aspirational: in order to “be themselves,” Bayern players would have to always be prepared to change. Klinsmann sees the American team in much the same way: “If the players think they’re already higher up than they actually are, then it’s very easy for me to explain to them that they are not anywhere yet.”
Photograph by Alex Silva/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP.
