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Reports: Klinsmann in discussions with FA over England vacancy

Jurgen Klinsmann USMNT Guatemala 70

It seemed unlikely when reports recently surfaced linking U.S. Men’s National Team head coach Jurgen Klinsmann to England’s vacant coaching position. However, the German could now be a candidate for the job after all.

Germany general manager Oliver Bierhoff is making claims that Klinsmann is in discussions with England’s Football Association over the job left open by outgoing coach Roy Hodgson.

Bierhoff, a close friend of Klinsmann, believes the 51-year-old should be considered by the FA given his decorated career as both a player and now a coach.

“He would be a good fit,” Bierhoff said. “We started in 2004 together and he’s not always, how can I say, nice to handle because he wants to change [things]. But he brings motivation. He has the courage to make difficult decisions and, perhaps, you need something like this.”

Klinsmann is currently under contract with the U.S. until after the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and recently helped the USMNT finish fourth at the Copa America Centenario.

Before taking over the U.S. in July 2011, Klinsmann was credited with reviving Germany’s national team set up. The Germans finished third at the 2006 World Cup under Klinsmann.

The U.S. coach had his own personal success in his playing days with Germany, which has reportedly earned him high marks with the English, after winning both the World Cup and European Championship in 1990 and 1996, respectively.

“It’s not like putting a hand on the shoulder and everything happens,” said Bierhoff. “A lot of things need to come together. When we failed at Euro 2000 we invested a lot in the infrastructure and the education of young players and coaches, so now we have a lot of talented players and the Bundesliga is investing in young players.

“Perhaps it is an advantage that good players go to England and other countries, so our clubs have to bring other players through. But since the arrival of Jürgen Klinsmann – who I think is in discussions with England – we have also given the national team a certain pride, atmosphere and organisation. The success of the story is the high quality but also the good organisation and good atmosphere we have in the group.”

What do you make of the latest news? Do you believe Klinsmann will see out his contract with the U.S.?

Share your thoughts below.

Comments

  1. you can add JK to the list of like minded coaches and sadly failures, which include Wilmots, Hodgson, Deschamps and the Russian and Austrian coach. They all thrived in the day of man-marking and collective defense. Things have changed. The day of total football has come and gone. These guys are still coaching like it was the good old days. Dont tell me Iceland has better individual players than the USA. Iceland has better coaching. As Conte has said, ” Ideas beat talent”

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    • They do have more players playing in Top 5 Leagues, but Iceland is not a fair comparison anyway since the US can’t replicate a training system like Iceland’s. Pretty easy to get every youth coach in a room and get them on the same page when there are only 320,000 people in the whole country which is roughly the size of West Virginia and half the people live in one city. If you have a youth coach not doing something right, Lagerback could just drive to his house and fix the problem.

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  2. After five years of on-the-job training, Jurgen has improved to the point that he is an average professional coach, able to do the basics — pick a consistent lineup, play folks in their natural positions and so on — nothing than any coach in MLS can’t do.
    The problems are (1) he is paid as if he were a much better than average coach; (2) he was brought in to do much more than assembling a decent squad etc etc; allegedly he was going to “transform” US soccer and (3) he is an annoying, condescending, garrulous, self-obsessed jerk. To be fair no one, especially not the national team coach or the director of development (whatever that might be) could transform US soccer. but Jurgen has been content to play along with Gulati’s delusions. So he gets the stick he deserves.

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    • “So he gets the stick he deserves.” <—(Crickets chirping and absolute dead silence) a. Refer to quozzel's post. b. Avoid reading DailyMail Football/British tabloids for a month or two.

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  3. I seriously doubt England would hire Klinsmann. On a short cycle before the ’18 WC, one of the most important factors is the coach’s familiarity and selection of players. from the player pool

    With less than 24 months before the WC, I doubt JK could have enough time to select a suitable team for England given that he is still working on one 5 years after being appointed for the coaching position here. It will be a domestic or foreign coach with previous coaching experience in the EPL and Championship. The English public and press are always more deferential to an former English coach with a pedigree, giving him more latitude when things do not go right.

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    • so… was JK unable to put together a good US squad for the 14 WC with only 24 months? god, why does everyone lose their minds when it comes to Klinsmann? No, he isn’t going to England. Yes, he is a good coach. No, he can’t singlehandedly transform our player pool into Argentina’s in 6 years. Yes, he can and has made us a better team.

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      • The amount of posters able to comprehend this has diminished so significantly that SBI has become a cesspool of echo-chamber babble that renders the website incapable of having any kind of reasonable discussion or ability to debate from a sensible mind frame.

        Hell, even some of the amateur “writers” from this site (that haven’t abandoned ship for other websites) stir the pot with troll-like posts.

      • Well no, the statistics say otherwise. He has not progressed us or achieved anything better than the previous USMNT coaches. In fact we have regressed overall in the FIFA standings. We have failed TWICE to make the Olympics under his direction. In the 2014 WC, we did not beat a team ranked above us, In recent WC qualifying we got beat by a team who we have not lost to in 35 years, and most recently in the Copa we still were only 3-3, losing to Columbia twice, and only beating a Concacaf team and a SA team ranked below us. We beat Ecuador, ranked above us, but barely.
        The player pool for the Copa was replete with players who will probably not be around in ’18 or be very old.
        Klinsmann has not been a very bad coach, but by no means is he a good one, and even a worse Technical Director. His recent attempt to blame the US as “disconnected” was an attempt to ward off blame for his own lack of ability or will to make any substantive changes in USSF youth development while in charge.
        We will not progress any further while he is in charge and will not have an easy time in the Hexagonal by any means.
        We lose our minds over Klinsmann because he takes no blame for his inadequacies, is paid a fortune and we have NOTHING to show for his years in charge.
        He needs to go and I pray every nite that the FA will be so dumb as to bring this parasite to England. where they will give him more money, bu fire his ass for losing to San Marino or Malta.

      • “No, he can’t singlehandedly transform our player pool into Argentina’s in 6 years.”

        yep, that’s why people don’t like klinsmann. *eye-roll*

        “Yes, he can and has made us a better team.”

        says who? i do happen to think we have better players than we did before, but i think that would’ve happened even if we had ben f***ing olsen as manager. even so, i’m not sure we’re that much better as a team — the results are almost exactly the same as his predecessors.

        and it’s funny how old school’s incessant “echo-chamber” comments only come up when people are being critical of klinsmann. i guess that also counts as people “losing their minds” over klinsmann?

      • bottlecaps is right about the stats. you can’t really use any objective measurements to say that Klinsmann did better than the predecessors. Results in major competitions has been basically even with the Arena/Bradley era.

        But I’m gonna give you 2 subjective reasons we are better now. One, we are in a serious lull in terms of talent. I would argue that the overall talent we have now is worse than it was under both Arena and Bradley. Not gonna get into comparing players. But despite this, we have basically stayed even from the past years, and have gained respect in the eyes of the rest of the world.

        The second reason is the way we played in the Copa. I get that for most of JK’s tenure, the team didn’t deliver on his promise of playing pro-active soccer, but finally at this last tourney we did. We passed out of the back, had some nice buildups and created goal-scoring chances from the run of play. That is serious improvement.

        If JK leaves, I just hope that whomever US Soccer hires to replace him will continue this trend of playing attacking soccer that emphasizes skill and technique and we don’t revert to playing defensive counterattacking, stick guys who can run fast and kick hard out there to try and bunker down and steal one on a set piece. Barf.

      • A couple of thoughts
        1) To people outside the US progressing out of the group we were in in Brazil is a big accomplishment and so is the Copa semifinal, even if to us it might just be status quo

        2) He was able to beat Ghana which Bradley and Arena couldn’t so I guess that’s progress. Yes, I know there were issue behind the scenes, but the black stars still were a good side until they had been eliminated after two games.

        3) Capello was retained after his team failed to advance in the knockout stages of WC 2010 and only managed 1 victory losing the group to the Yanks, Capello resigned after the John Terry FA issues not because of results wasn’t fired.

        Hodgson didn’t win a knockout stage match in the Euro 2012, and failed to get out of the group in the WC and was retained. Erickson certainly reached expectations, but couldn’t ascend any higher, but left on his terms.

        Hoodle was released because of controversial statements about the disabled,

        Venables resigned because he wanted to clear his name in some off the field business dealings.

        Graham Taylor was allowed to resign after failing to qualify for the WC in 94 and before that every English manager got at least 5 years and usually much longer except Revie and Mercer in the mid 70s who were awful.

        The only quick hooks were Keegan who win only 39% of his matches and McClaren who only needed a draw at home to qualify for Euro 2008 and lost 3-2 to Croatia.

        The FA isn’t Mexico they don’t cut managers at the drop of a hat.

      • JB, I am not relying on objective measures when it comes to saying JK has made the US national team better. I use the porno vs. art test: I’ll know it when I see it.

        bottlecaps, JK has a gold cup… which is just as much as any other USMNT coach has ever achieved. JK has certainly taken responsibility for failures, sometimes people focus on other words, or are delusional and expect a coach not being fired to cry on national television and apologize (see Dunga, Dunga’s predecessor, and whomever the dutch coach that couldn’t qualify them in an expanded tournament). The rest of your statement relies on objective meaningless metrics, see below. finally, really? You want JK to leave because he hasn’t PM’d you a personal apology letter on facebook for losing the Gold Cup and to MX in November? Because if he wins either of those games we are not having this conversation based on the results before and after.

        Nate Dollars: ” i’m not sure we’re that much better as a team — the results are almost exactly the same as his predecessors.” — My response to this is that objective win loss metrics and rankings are all basically useless when there are 2, maybe 3, important tournaments every 4 years. ooh… Bradley was 65-45-23… oooh, JK was only 64-40-35. JK isn’t better… haha. no, that is a BS argument. You look at how the team played: Bunker Bob… well its in his name right? Arena… also bunker and counter. Multinovic (and please let’s all pretend that Sampson didn’t exist at all) is and was the dictionary definition of organized tactical anti-football developed and implemented for piss poor countries needing some results. Now, you compare results… the only person in that group who achieved results like Jurgen is Mulatinovic (and mostly because even with bunker-counter system no one expected us to get out of our group or to show up at all). Arena had a good team in 02 and got the luxury of playing Mexico in the rd. of 16. If US had played Italy… we would have been dropped there… as it was, we got dropped by the next top class team we played. Better than what we did in 14? No. Bradley got 1 good result against Spain in the confederations cup (again, bunker-counter, I will note that the first half against Brazil the US did not bunker… and it so surprised Brazil that we put 2 in the net… then they woke up and put us in our place) and got us out of one group at a world cup (by no means a group of death. England was insipid and Algeria and Slovakia… god. The fact that we were ever in danger of not exiting from that group shows how we didn’t really play well (everyone remember’s Landon’s goal, but that doesn’t matter unless England’s goalie doesn’t horribly flub Dempsey’s piss poor shot 2 games earlier) until that Ghana game. And the only game where we actually attacked without being behind was against Algeria.

        Now on to JK. 1 expected gold cup, 1 group of death (Portugal, in case you saw this weekend’s action is good, Ghana… well lets talk about their golden generation’s results. They are good. Germany… speaks for itself), 1 piss poor gold cup, 1 poor game at the rose bowl against Mexico, which still took an amazing 119th minute shot to beat us… and this Copa America Semi-final.

        Now, on top of simple results layer on style. During our group of death run, we bunkered only against Germany and Belgium. Need I remind you that Italy also bunkers against those teams. We played proactively against Portugal and Ghana and, but for a Bradley brain fart/Ronaldo being amazing, we win both games. Need I also remind you about the positive impact of each and every JK substitution during those games? Shit, taking Belgium to 120 minutes was about as big of a performance as the US men’s team has ever had. As for gold cup… it was a disappointment, as was that game in November. Those certainly were not positive displays. However, I will note that the team was not trying to bunker. They were failing at playing proactive soccer. Then at Copa America the US played proactive soccer every game but for a loss to Argentina… whence my comment that you can’t give JK 6 years and say now go beat Argentina… doesn’t work like that. Yeah, I think the team could have played better against Argentina… but even lining up 10 guys on the goal line I think we lose that game.

        Finally, there is another big difference between Bradley, Arena, Mulatinovic results and JK’s… we are no longer Iceland. We aren’t coming by suprise. Every other US coach had the benefit of getting some wins by squeaking them out against teams that took us for granted (Spain 09 comes to mind). No more. JK got each win he got against a team that was awake and challenging us every step of the way.

        Not only that, but people in Europe and Latin America who know a thing or two are actually complementing us on playing well and looking like a soccer team! I personally never thought we looked good, like we really belonged, for a full game, against top class opposition, in a real tournament, until this Copa America. I honestly want to see how good JK can make us over the next 2 years. Can he get us up another level? I don’t know, but I would like to see it. Much more so than I would like to see Caleb f’ing Porter… or whomever the Dynamo got to replace the brit who brexited Houston.

        Again, if you think playing like Greece did in ’04 is belonging… or what Iceland did… is belonging, or is what we should aim for… then fine. We can agree to disagree and move on with our lives. But if you really can’t see, like using your eyes, that we are playing soccer better than we ever have before… then I call you a blind moron.

        All this to say, people lose their minds when it comes to Jurgen.

  4. Not related to this story, but after posting a couple of times here, I gotta say, boy the ads on this site are getting way too annoying. I am getting tired of wading through some of these pop-ups, posting something and then have another ad pop up so that it is more trouble to get back to where I was in the comments section. I hope SBI is making a lot of money, because they are getting close to losing this reader and perhaps others with what has become an over commercialized site. This web site has become the most ad ridden site I regularly visit; it’s almost as bad as those click bait sites that have intriguing come-ons and then it takes 10 minutes to get to the actual story.

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    • I use NoScript and Ublocker on my firefox browser and have zero problems with pop-ups, although on some pages you have to decide where the pop-up, pop-under originate from before you block them. It even controls the bad,bad,bad pop ups you can get on streaming sites. Some sites fight back by trying to block your ad blocker by covering content when the admakers discover you have an adblocker, and there is even a blocker/workaround for that, lol.

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    • couldn’t agree more, and I was starting to think it was just me. Definitely a negative when visiting the site but other than I like the content and dialogue SBI provides

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  5. Please not England. They are intolerable even when they lose. Don’t care to imagine how a few wins under Jurgen will turn those anxiety ridden hordes into intolerable little smugs.

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  6. These stories leave me conflicted. On the one hand, I would fly to California and help Jurgen pack if he were take another job.I have long since stopped watching his interviews or reading about them, but word about them inevitably leaks out to ruin my day. Moving his verbal diarhea a few thousands miles further away would be worth the airfare to LA.

    On the other hand, to imagine that the English FA would even consider Jurgen simply shatters all sorts of images. My word, did they not watch any of his interviews? Did they not watch any of the Gold Cup games? Could they really be serious about this? What has the world come to? For years, I had assumed that the constant complaints from English fans about their FA were just sour grapes, but I guess we know now that they were on the money. They are a bunch of knuckleheads.

    And, my word, what will this do for Anglo-American relations? Will this be the end of the special relationship? Are we about to undo “hands across the sea” and the great Anglo-American partnership? Will this undo the legacy of Lend-Lease? Will the Brits ever forgive us if Jurgen becomes theri coach? it boggles the mind.

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    • I know it may be difficult for you to comprehend this, but maybe, just maybe, other people who know a lot about the sport have a totally different opinion of Klinsmann’s ability.

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      • People fear change and having an outside voice come in with ideas and statements that question the foundation of our sport and system freak people out. Anything after that people tune out and condemn anything outside the comfort zone and ignore anything positive accomplished.

  7. PLEASE let this be true. Anything to get this underachieving know-nothing off of the USMNT sideline would be grand.

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  8. He’s not going anywhere. This is just hearsay.

    Here’s the reality of coaching England:
    1) you have a year tops to appease the public or you’re out
    2) nein helicopter
    3) nein California dreamin’
    4) all those German-Americans who he brought with him promptly hate him for eternity.

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    • …and the fact remains, nobody will ever appease the English public.

      They’re even more vicious and entitled than the American soccer public, which is saying something. I mean, we try to emulate England, we try to be uber-sophisticant and utterly impossible to please…but when we get a run going – which is shockingly often, because at the end of the day, for all our inferiority complexes, our team really has been pretty durn competitive the last 4 cycles or so – we all pull up the chairs and start screaming like the American Outlaws.

      In contrast, nothing short of absolute perfection will do in England…and even then, they’ll give it a “9”, because, well, they’re English. And they invented the game. And they have an elitism that makes Brazilian machismo look minor league.

      Klinsmann would be out of his gourd to take the England job. There’s a cultural problem there that probably transcends any single manager’s ability to fix.

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      • “There’s a cultural problem there that probably transcends any single manager’s ability to fix.”

        interesting; that’s exactly what people say about american soccer. sounds like a job for klinsmann!

      • Add to all that another important aspect posters are overlooking–Mrs. Klinsmann who is a native of Southern California. Plus there is the son who is now playing for the US youth teams and a young daughter. Do they go with him or does he leave them behind? He has the dream situation right now, being able to spend most of his time in Southern California in a job that is much less stress than any big job in Europe and pays very well. Why would he want to leave?

      • Gary, why would he want to leave? Ambition. You and others always talk about the limitations of the U.S. player pool. It is possible that Klinsmann could look at the English player pool and feel that there is more talent there and a possibility to do something special.

      • “There’s a cultural problem there that probably transcends any single manager’s ability to fix.”

        Culture has never been an issue for an American side. We don’t quit after going down, unlike Mexico, no matter the manager. Talent, on the other hand, is a problem we’ve been facing for decades.

      • Ha. Imagine all the little Keyboard Coaches running around out there trying to be cool with the players and having girlish arguments about player selection, formations, and whether or not anyone over 20 will ever be called in to camp.

      • We have different definitions of “upgrade” but this was the expected cookie-cutter answer.

      • Wow. So, when you “upgrade” your house, do you just rip out the glass windows and replace them with plastic bags?

      • I’m not a Kreis fan but all of the other guys have accomplished at least as much as JK has in his managerial career. What has JK done? Gotten worse results than BB with better players, failed to last a season at Bayern before his players revolted and taken Germany to a WC semi which is basically the minimum they have achieved in most world cups the past 50 years.

      • Interesting. Obviously we are speculating from our sofa’s but the second portion of that question is: “would consider the USMNT post?

        Do you think he’d consider the post?

      • It’s a clear step down from the Netherlands and Man U, but then again you could say the same thing about Klinsmann after Germany and then Bayern. Klinsmann had some clear ties to the US that LVG doesn’t but I can’t see many other big clubs giving him a call after the “disaster” Man U was last season. He’d be the tactician USA fans have been screaming for.

      • He’d be the tactician USA fans have been screaming for

        While they may scream for it you have to have the necessary talent, too.

        LVG talked a great game and has the arrogance down pat. Then, he looked/sounded ridiculous at United (stubbornly) implementing the 3-man back line and failing – eventually reverting to playing long ball and conforming to boring a-typical formations unable to utilize the expensive talent already on the roster. That and spending in excess of £250m to still miss Champions League.

        Tacticians need talent and even then that doesn’t equate to success. With that said, I doubt LVG even blinks at the possibility of taking the US position. However, at least it’s a more interesting consideration than the names mentioned above that are, absolutely, not upgrades.

      • If the USSF will pay enough anyone will consider it. Hard to imagine anyone wanting Van Gaal after watching Man U the past few seasons. Man that team was hard to watch.

    • looks like bielsa’s available again. he’s a massive upgrade in the tactical department, and he’s been known to take on “projects” — but rumor is that argentina’s interested.

      in any case, i’m pretty sure you’ve already decided that there’s no valid answer to your question, so whatever.

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