How American does Jürgen Klinsmann, the German-born coach of the United States soccer team, want his players’ game to be? That has been the subject of some debate. In the team’s opening win, against Ghana, the answer was not apparent, at least not in terms of tactics. But a clue appeared on the sidelines, where Klinsmann stood, issuing orders and celebrating goals while decked out in that most American of fashions, a pair of khakis.
There are three basic fashion templates for coaches in this World Cup: suits, business casual, and logo-emblazoned tracksuits. Klinsmann seems to be navigating a fourth way—suburban-dad casual.
The business suit is a familiar look at American basketball or hockey games, where coaches stand apart from their players by dressing, in effect, like their bosses. (This is in contrast to baseball, where managers blend in by wearing an actual uniform.) The suit is the default soccer look, and at their best—when the shape of the wearer has afforded it—those worn in Brazil have been sharply, slimly tailored: Croatia’s coach, Niko Kovač, earned comparisons to the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt with the black suit he wore in his team’s match against Brazil. James Kwesi Appiah, the coach of Ghana, looked similarly well turned out in a navy suit, paired with immaculately shined black shoes, in his team’s match with the United States. (The high-style effect is a bit marred by the lanyards and photo I.D.s that coaches wear around their necks, like roadies.) Both men looked good in defeat. The entire coaching staff of the Netherlands wore blue suits, with orange ties, on Wednesday, in a win against the Aussies; assembled, they looked like J. Crew groomsmen.
Some managers have sought a middle ground. Kovač ditched the suit for his team’s second match, a win against Cameroon, opting for trousers and a tight dress shirt, open at the collar. Germany’s Joachim Löw has dressed similarly, but in darker colors, as if he were headed out for drinks after the game. This might be called smart casual—or else Bond-villain chic.
Then there is the tracksuit, which is functional for scampering around and celebrating wildly, but makes the coach resemble a lucky fan who has managed to rumble onto the pitch, or else a retired player who is ready, in a pinch, to join the game. There have been mercifully few tracksuits on display during the group stage; the highest-profile perpetrator has been Brazil’s coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari, whose entire wardrobe is stamped with Nike’s swoosh, and who, in his long blue track jacket, looks more like a traffic cop than a guardian of futebol glory. Scolari and Kovač, standing near each other in the Brazil-Croatia match, looked like two men waiting for the same train, yet bound for very different jobs.
Klinsmann’s clothing choices have always skewed casual—if not quite this casual. During his stint at the head of F.C. Bayern Munich, in the German professional league, he’d put on a suit from time to time but mostly wore blue dress shirts or team-issued polos. Since taking over the U.S. team, in 2011, it has been all sportswear. Klinsmann’s Nike team polo and sneakers are part of the official branded uniform. The pants are Nike, too, part of the company’s skateboarding line. Nike began its sponsorship of the U.S. team in 1994; ever since, its coaches have mostly worn polos and track pants, modelling the merchandise available at the team store. (Steve Sampson did put on a sport coat during the 1998 World Cup, in France.) And American coaches haven’t always lacked flair. Robert Millar, the U.S. coach in the first World Cup, in 1930, looked jauntily Continental in his tweed overcoat, suit, and what sure looks like a beret.
Before the tournament, when asked about his team’s chances, Klinsmann drew controversy when he said, quite sensibly, “For us now talking about winning a World Cup, it is just not realistic. If it is American or not, you can correct me.” People claimed that a real American wouldn’t talk like that. Klinsmann has lived in Southern California with his wife and children for years, but if he was looking to enhance his American bona fides a bit more with his opening-match outfit, he made a wise choice. Khakis were invented by the British but perfected by the Americans, an expression of postwar Greatest Generation male comfort tinged with the dark, untold stories of a military past.
Khakis are also a staple of the coaching wardrobes for America’s most popular sport, football, where even bothering to put on a pair of proper pants is recognized as the high-water mark of game-day fashion. Nick Saban, the football coach for the University of Alabama, has had his preferred (pleated!) khakis immortalized in a statue on campus. Meanwhile, San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh’s khakis (also pleated) were much discussed online, and seem to have come from Walmart.
In 2006, the N.F.L. coaches Mike Nolan and Jack Del Rio complained that the league’s dress code, which requires coaches to wear branded clothes, prevented them from looking their best. Reebok stepped in to make them custom business suits. When their teams failed to win games, however, both men were mocked as clotheshorses, and suits never took hold in the league. N.F.L. coaches mostly dress like fans (or like American soccer coaches), in windbreakers and polos, or the odd hoodie. As Wesley Morris wrote at Grantland, in 2012, about the sorry state of football fashion, “These clothes foster the sense that American males are more comfortable with being guys than being men.”
At the start of each World Cup, we ask if this is the year that Americans will finally embrace soccer both as a game played by our children and as a viable spectator sport. In the first match, Klinsmann’s khakis may have finally unified the two notions: he looked like a father coaching his kid’s under-twelve travel team, but on the world’s biggest stage. Against Ghana, Klinsmann left his shirt untucked—unlike his counterparts in American football, who tuck their polos tightly into their pants, affecting a martial formality in a decidedly informal look. This may be the way Americans want their soccer coach to look—like a slightly cooler version of Jim Harbaugh.
But if the U.S. team makes it out of the group stage, it may be time for Klinsmann to up his game, and put on a proper suit. Soccer is discomfiting to some American fans because we’re clearly not that great at it yet. It’s odd to be in the aspirant. Maybe we need our coach to, as the saying goes, dress for the job he wants, and not the one he has—to look less like an American football coach and more like a world-class soccer manager. Nike, make the man a suit.
Photograph by Lars Baron/FIFA via Getty Images.