The U.S. men’s national team’s head coaching search is continuing through the summer and a former English Premier League legend is reportedly keen on taking the job.
Patrick Vieira has been contacted about the opening and is interested in becoming the next USMNT head coach, ESPN reported Wednesday. An opening discussion was completed between Vieira and U.S. Soccer, but there has not been a second approach from the federation yet, according to the report.
Vieira, 46, was last manager of EPL side Crystal Palace before leaving the South London club in March following a poor run of results. He posted a 22-25-27 record during his close to two-year spell in charge of the Eagles.
He also was manager of Ligue 1 side Nice and MLS club New York City FC.
Vieira, a longtime French international during his playing days, lifted the 1998 FIFA World Cup with Les Bleus.
Vieira made over 400 appearances at club level with Arsenal, being part of the famous 2003-04 “Invincibles” squad. He won 16 major trophies during his playing days, also lifting silverware with Inter Milan, AC Milan, and Manchester City before retiring in 2011.
A move to the USMNT would be Vieira’s first international opportunity after previously only serving as a club manager.
Mr IV,
“low might not have been the greatest club coach ever but he had a league title, 2 cups, and had been to a european tournament final before being hired as a german ASSISTANT. .”
That’s a bar so low you might as well not have it.
“he then served as klinsi’s bench coach basically, like the brains behind the throne”
For the good decisions that Germany made leading up to the 2005 Confederations cup and the 2006 World Cup what percentage was actually JK’s and what percentage was Jogi’s?
And do the same for the bad decisions.
When you have the exact percentages then we can talk about just how valid the concept of “brains behind the throne” is.
Jogi can come up with the greatest plans and schemes and decisions of all time. But if JK does not agree to try and implement them, then it don’t mean shit.
So until you can give me those exact percentages that I asked for, JK and Jogi share equally in the blame and the credit.
For what it is worth, Jogi Loew was pretty mediocre at the club level before he took the Germany job and eventually won the World Cup.
rumor mill is GB removed himself from whatever contention he was for america to fight for our gig, and dolo denied he’s up for the job.
the names we are hearing line up with my pet theory the vast majority of candidates will be either US nationals or have MLS playing or coaching experience. as i pointed out the other day, it’s an odd detour to take this as the pool seems to be in a down ebb cycle on domestics, i think we have 3 MLS on NL. how much MLS do you have to know to pick miles?
personally instead of using such experience as a check box and assuming pool knowledge i’d be probing the candidates who they think should be playing and how they’d array them. including who new would you call. make them do their homework and show their work. far better test of their grasp of the tools and job than just assuming. what we really want is a good answer to that and not a check box. kind of like if tata was better at his job than GB — and has won our league — i am sure we could have sorted out his english. we have become oddly abstracted precisely where one should get concrete.
Fun fact Gregg had a winning record against Tata with the NT. And checks notes… yes advanced the US farther than Mexico at WC. Tata didn’t get Mexico out of the group for the first time since 1990 (when they were banned from the tournament).
fun fact against the totality of the ocho — where the opponents are controlled and schedules identical — tata finished 3 points clear of us in 2nd place while we made it through on a tiebreaker in 3rd. and i think they had worse talent. and as you say H2H we outplayed them. to me it’s a sign of a crap coach when you own the team above you in the table but can’t execute across the same common schedule well enough to convert your apparent superiority into actual superior table position. kind of like when ramos owned dallas two years ago but we still finished last behind them.
also bears noting folks on here fetishize herdman and tata ultimately finished even with canada on points just second by tiebreaker.
i also understand your world cup argument to be that the team that went 1-1-1 is obviously better than the team that went 1-2-1 and stuck around precisely one more game. ok, whatever. you’re apparently not aware how thin the margins are in a world cup or how much goes down to the draw. saudi arabia beat the champions first game and were last in their group. serbia who beat us in january were last in their group. canada beat us in WCQ and were last in their group. we tied costa rice in WCQ on points and they were last in their group. germany were eliminated and while they didn’t look so hot “for germany” i struggle to believe they’re worse than us. ditto eliminated belgium.
to be fair, i think we have the most pool talent in concacaf but that goes precisely to the ability of the coach to extract it. i think what you’re confused you saw was a team that should have dominated the region playing even a semblance like they should have. to make that into some sort of tata superiority is funny. to me he dragged an ageing team we rightfully beat and tied kicking and screaming into a world cup qualifying ahead of our far superior talent set. we did own his team but he better owned the whole fixture list and table which to soccer people matters more.
If you tank with a team that should finish in a top five team then yeah you may not be the guy but even the best managers in the world could struggle without top tier talent. Anyone that really follows the game knows a mid to bottom of the table manager can get canned before the team even fully gets what the coach is trying to do if a few results go the wrong way. His record is right there with crystal palace over the last decade. Would he be an amazing hire? Nah but he does have potential.
Interesting candidate, he does check a lot of boxes. World Cup winner, guys will always listen up to someone who has won as much as he did as a player. No international managing experience but pretty broad experiences at club level, and familiar with MLS. Younger manager and former player would help him relate to a really young team.
A lot of fans are saying he’d be a great coach and much better than Greg. Based off of what? He had a losing record in the EPL and has very little head coaching experience. I’d be ok with him as the coach because I think the coach matters very little. But to say he’s better than the previous coach is not backed by any objective evidence.
You’re talking a very low bar with Gregg.
Tell me, this may be the most important hire they ever make. does Gregg float your boat as the perfect candidate for it?
Viera could do worse or do better. No one really knows. Gregg went into this job with pre-loaded baggage, a very heavy nepotism thing and an undistinguished club record and a none existent national team record.
But, as I predicted, it seems like the USSF was just waiting for the noise to die down to slip their boy back in.
The Good Old Boys appear to be back in town.
https://deadspin.com/gregg-berhalter-usmnt-soccer-marsch-henry-viera-reyna-1850544070
Vac, Iam still standing by my prediction that he will not be rehired. I usually lose money when I go to Vegas though.
Like a responded to IV, virtually none of these stories are true. It’s all agents leaking info to prop up or bring down candidates. We’ve heard at least 3 times in the last 5 months that Marsch had finalized different jobs including the USMNT nothing materialized. Certain agents drop these stories to push interest from other jobs (Tata and USA/Mexico). Crocker working full time now I think we’ll have a manager soon.
Tele57- Everyone loses to the house there. The key is to have the loser be one of your relatives and to have them collect a lot of comps.
JR- Well. I hope you’re right. On the other hand I would love to hear those clowns explain why they would do it. Then again considering the current political climate in this country they probably figure people will believe anything they are told.
Has he been successful at any club that he has coached? I say no thanks.
i’d rate him about even with GB. mediocre coach abroad, slightly above average here, no hardware. maybe curtin about same level since he’s never actually won league despite their progress. i’d rate him above his teammate henry who has had 2 losing stints as a head manager. i’d rate him above matarazzo or wagner whose claim to fame is crashing whatever big plane they get, as in, no proven success at all. to be fair, vieria did have NYC competitive and left for bigger things and not for losing. he then didn’t do much at those bigger things. meh.
relative to him i’d take luis enrique.
the pool makes me very uncomfortable. this is not the bunch to go chase world trophies with. this is a boy’s club. it’s like we’re not just on a tactical project but also going to try and farm managers from the soil too. if the idea is to win can we hire a winner, please?
i continue to believe the error of these ways is as long as it is an actual “application pool” you will get second or third rate candidates who actually apply for gigs. the sort of coach we want is the one you target and go straight to their agent with a number. you did not get them running some american corporate HR playbook. did they sign the paperwork for the credit check? have we verified their university attendance? called their references? pfffft
you know why a normal flunky HR process is you verify their presentation, read the resumes, and then talk with candidates? because you often don’t know who you are dealing with. our process should be more like hiring a CEO. the most obvious candidates their background, management style, and reputation should precede them. you sit down with them not for a formal interview but rather to pick their brains about your organization and take their temperature whether you like them. you then make an offer. they would see insufficient faith or ambition in pitting them against other candidates. nor will they be leveraged down by competitors. they have a salary demand you either meet or not. if you want x you make at least that offer. if you’re not willing the guy down the street will pay it.
the way we are trying to go about this, the strange dogmatic “national style” tactical crap, the MLS-level application pile, the corporate HR process — all wrong for where we want this to go. the suits should not be setting style like they coach. the coach should be picked for winning and in part for being able to adjust tactics. and the process should result in a better hire than what we get. the results we get themselves suggest the process is ineffective.
All of these names are rumors or guesses. Agents and suits spreading truths, half truths, and straight up misinformation. I couldn’t find one article where Enrique is even listed as being interested. I did find several where he’s said to be wanting to head back to club managing. All we really know is Henry said publicly he was interested, Dolo said he’s not, Curtin said he’d even be an assistant, and Marsch says he’d like to be sometime. Other than that it’s all been “sources say”. Even Dolo’s response has to be taken with a grain of salt. Coaches say all the time, that rumor isn’t true then are at an introductory presser 2 days later.
JR: fair enough that sometimes they deny they are leaving then make the choice to do so tomorrow. however cutting the other direction, if luis enrique has other ideas that makes the pool far worse. it’s then a bunch of never was’es. i mean it says something when from the names i have seen dolo or marsch are second and third best behind enrique, and if he’s not interested…….and dolo’s not interested……dear god do you see where this quickly heads.
i get that — as i discussed above — “in the abstract” it might be true we are knocking on other doors. my experience watching this last time, it was roughly what it seemed to be. GB and tata were both identified candidates. GB was not some surprise guest. the press might have had a name or two wrong but they weren’t dramatically out to lunch. which is ok reporting work. the process we are following this time is similar, applications, interviews, decisions. to me such a process will be fairly transparent. we have deliberately not taken the smoke filled room approach where some suit gets handed a checkbook and meets with an agent. that to me is where any potential for surprise lies. and to be real we weren’t even that surprised on klinsi or bradley. we knew while it was being negotiated.
get down to it my issue is this. the value of a process is it comes out better at the end. better product. less breakage. cheaper production costs. something. i feel like the coaches since arena are lower quality, not improved. the only difference i see is we have removed the power to choose from the executives to a soccer person. but the soccer guys seem to be looking through a lower quality pool that looks like what LAFC or seattle might consider if their job came available — not like a NT effort.
worse, i sometimes felt like such leaks of mediocre coaching names or underwhelming transfer targets were a way of a GM “performing” they are in fact busy and hoping the gullible accept it. see how many people we are looking at? recognize some names? i am hard at work, aren’t i. to which i respond, quality over quantity. yeah, those are the names, but that’s not a good thing. “that” doesn’t help us. work smarter not harder. etc.
For what it is worth, Jogi Loew was pretty mediocre at the club level before he took the Germany job and eventually won the World Cup.
low might not have been the greatest club coach ever but he had a league title, 2 cups, and had been to a european tournament final before being hired as a german ASSISTANT. he then served as klinsi’s bench coach basically, like the brains behind the throne. if enrique isn’t “in” then dolo is one of the few who has ever won anything. some of them not only haven’t lifted hardware they have career losing records in club. or never had a winning season even.
i actually said at some point i see a lot of their resumes as assistant fodder. i would like to see a better quality of assistants getting hired. i wouldn’t mind if we set up a succession plan where we hire someone serious for 2026 and a few american candidates sit at his feet as his assistants, and if this goes well, maybe one of them follows the serious guy. but to me if you want to win the world cup you don’t hire a midtable MLS coach. hire someone who had to churn a whole season or tournament and bring back first place. world cup is that sort of task and then some.
Mr IV,
“low might not have been the greatest club coach ever but he had a league title, 2 cups, and had been to a european tournament final before being hired as a german ASSISTANT. .”
That’s a bar so low you might as well not have it.
“he then served as klinsi’s bench coach basically, like the brains behind the throne”
For the good decisions that Germany made leading up to the 2005 Confederations cup and the 2006 World Cup what percentage was actually JK’s and what percentage was Jogi’s?
And do the same for the bad decisions.
When you have the exact percentages then we can talk about just how valid the concept of “brains behind the throne” is.
Jogi can come up with the greatest plans and schemes and decisions of all time. But if JK does not agree to try and implement them, then it don’t mean shit.
So until you can give me those exact percentages that I asked for, JK and Jogi share equally in the blame and the credit.