USMNT and Tyler Adams: Resisting Gregg Berhalter’s temptation
Gregg Berhalter has a temptation to overthink and ovetinker. Now, the USMNT head coach must get out his own way, resist the urge, and just let Tyler Adams do the talking.
When the U.S. Soccer Federation turned to Gregg Berhalter to lead the U.S. Men’s National Team into a new era, they did so for a very specific reason. Berhalter is the very definition of a man with a plan.
For all of the thinkpieces, investigations and debates into what went wrong during the previous World Cup cycle, there was one clear problem undermining everything the USMNT attempted: there was no clearly identified, strongly defined, and completely unified and supported plan.
Berhalter is renowned for his tactical acumen and precise management style. His success at the Columbus Crew, which led him to lead the race for the USMNT head coaching job last winter, was founded on a comprehensively taught and executed system, one that every single player innately understood. And that is precisely what those in the places of power wanted for the future of the USMNT.
There is, however, a slight catch. Berhalter can overtinker. Sometimes, he is too smart, too detailed, too pedantic and too precise for his own good. Rather than providing players with the freedom they require to express themselves on the pitch, he hamstrings them with an inexorable list of instructions of what to do for every conceivable circumstance. There is no stone left unturned for the potential situations that players may find themselves, so much so that they feel weighed down by that very stone.
This came to prominence during his first few months in charge of the USMNT. Berhalter surveyed the talent he had available to him and drew up the key players who he wanted to build the team around: Weston McKennie, Christian Pulisic and Tyler Adams, looking for a system that both blended his intricate possession-based style and the skill sets of these three individuals. What he came up with was a variation on a 4-3-3 that included a hybrid right-back role that was filled by Adams.
Adams would play as an orthodox right-back, a position he has the ability to play but is somewhat wasted in. As an acknowledgement of that wasted potential, Berhalter instructed him to move into a central midfield position when the U.S. had safe possession, the left-back then sliding across to make a back three. It was a complicated and convoluted system that had mixed success.
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However, when Adams was forced to withdraw from the Gold Cup through injury and Berhalter turned to other right-back options, he reverted to a more traditional 4-3-3, the right-back now instructed to overlap the winger ahead of him when his team is in possession. If you were to now insert Adams back into the fold, but instead play him in his more natural central midfield position, supporting the box-to-box McKennie and free-roaming, creative pivot Pulisic, suddenly you have a very strong midfield trio.
The problem with the hybrid position is that it wastes one of the USMNT’s best players, and someone who is only going to get better. But you get this dreading feeling that Berhalter just cannot help himself, and that the man with the plan so desperately wants his plan to work that he will go to any lengths to install it.
The best set-up for the USMNT maximises the three key players. And Berhalter, to his credit, ostensibly recognises this fact. But how he uses them, in accordance with an obsession with his tinkering and chess playing, is questionable.
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Sometimes, the best thing a manager can do is get out of the way and let the best players play in their best positions. For the USMNT and Berhalter, in regards to Adams, that time has come. Whether Berhalter will recognise as much, though, only time will tell.