Last summer, the United States Soccer Federation released what, at the time, was a remarkable document -- and has become even more extraordinary with another year gone by. It was titled, "A BREAKDOWN OF THE RIGOROUS PROCESS IN THE SEARCH FOR THE USMNT HEAD COACH."
"When the U.S. Soccer Federation hired Matt Crocker after years of service with English Football Association and Southampton in the English Premier League," the federation wrote, "he entered the soccer landscape in the United States with a fresh pair of eyes and a rigorous set of criteria for his primary responsibility at the outset of his tenure: identifying the best coach to lead the U.S. men's national team."
After what was described as "a global search for candidates" and a process that utilized "advanced data analytics, sophisticated metrics, and cutting-edge hiring methods," Crocker hired ... no one. Instead, he just renewed the contract of the previous USMNT manager, Gregg Berhalter.
No matter how you look at it, this supposedly rigorous and data-driven dog and pony show was an utter disaster. The reasoning for the hire, at the time, was an absurd McKinsey-ification of something quite simple: just tell us that he did a decent job over the previous World Cup cycle and the players liked him.
But let's say that you (A) believe in this jargoning of work as a marketing tool, (B) think hiring processes should be data-driven and incredibly complex, and (C) accept that such a process could, coincidentally, lead Crocker to hire the same manager who was already there. Even if you buy into all of that, the result was still a complete failure.
After the USMNT's early ouster in the group stage of the 2024 Copa América, Berhalter was fired last week. In a conference call, Crocker suggested his next attempt at finding the right manager won't be much different than the first one -- just that he's better positioned to do it right: "I think [I'm] now in a better place to have much more of a targeted search where I'll be more inclined to go hard and go early with specific candidates that I feel meet the criteria that we're looking for," he said.
So, what should the criteria be? And how should it differ from whatever it was that led the federation to land on Berhalter? Let's take a look back at how U.S. Soccer got the USMNT hire so wrong to assess how it ought to move forward.