Bruce Arena has always been loyal to American players and coaches, and particularly his American players coaches. It is one of the reasons so many of his colleagues would run through a wall for him. Over the past 10 years, it has also been his fundamental flaw.
And in his recent appearance on the "Unfiltered Soccer" podcast hosted by two of those former players, Landon Donovan and Tim Howard, Arena showed those colors yet again in his criticism of the hiring of current U.S. men's national team manager Mauricio Pochettino, one that he based on recent results in the Concacaf Nations League semifinals and third-place match.
"You know if you look at every national team in the world, the coach is usually a domestic coach," Arena said. "And I think when you have coaches that don't know our culture, our environment, our players, it's hard. I'm sure our coach is a very good coach, but coaching international football is different than club football, it's a completely different job.
"And I think when you're a national team coach, you need to know your environment, you need to know the animals you coach, and we're lacking that. If you're an American coaching the U.S. team, you know the culture, you know the pride and how important the national team is. I think when you bring in somebody from the outside, they don't understand it, especially in our country, because we're so different."
There's a lot to unpack here. Even if there is some truth to the idea that hiring a domestic coach makes understanding the culture easier, the last three years of USMNT history have clearly shown the dangers of a national team culture being too insular.
There's also the growing evidence that being an American coach isn't particularly helpful at the MLS level these days, given the recent success of Wilfried Nancy, Ronny Deila, Tata Martino and others at winning the league's top honor.
But all the angles through which to view Arena's comments, the most maddening one is the complete inability to recognize how similar Pochettino's current situation is to the one Arena most recently inherited as a USMNT coach in 2016 and 2017.
Arena's 2018 failure
Like Pochettino, Arena took over the program in a tough spot at the end of 2016, after the Americans absorbed a home loss to Mexico and an away defeat to Costa Rica in the first two matches of the 10-game Hexagonal to determine Concacaf's three automatic World Cup qualifiers.
At the time, Arena insisted he was more qualified than at any previous moment in his career, given his previous two World Cup cycles of experience and his extended MLS success with D.C. United and then the LA Galaxy.
Less than a year later, it was Arena in charge as the United States lost on home soil -- admittedly in what felt like a road environment -- in a crucial qualifier against Costa Rica on Matchday 7. And it was Arena in charge on that infamous night in Couva on Matchday 10, fielding the exact same XI that had played four days earlier in a qualifying victory.
In that 2-1 defeat to Trinidad and Tobago that killed off U.S. World Cup hopes, the overwhelming response was shock and dismay not just at the score, but at the apparent listless attitude of the American players on the pitch.
It was feedback eerily similar to Arena's assessment of the USMNT's recent Nations League performance last month.
"You ask me if we lacked pride, I'm watching and I'm shocked. I'm shocked that we can't beat Panama and Canada," Arena said of those games in Southern California. "It was shocking to me.
"I don't want to be disrespectful. I want them to do great in the World Cup, there's no question about it. But we only have a year left now. Time is running out, and they got to get going."
Arena's words carry credibility because he is still almost universally recognized as the best American coach of all time, as the all-time MLS wins leader and the man who guided the Americans to their best modern-era World Cup showing, a 2002 quarterfinal appearance.
Addtionally, that previous success allowed him mostly to escape culpability for the failure to reach Russia in 2018, given a consensus that most of the issues stemmed from residue left by previous manager Jurgen Klinsmann.
Arena's Korean luck
Conventiently, in the present Arena chooses to ignore that the same listlessness on display in Nations League under Pochettino had been seen previously under manager Gregg Berhalter at the 2024 Copa America. Of course, Berhalter was once one of Arena's USMNT players.
And if you look more closely at his USMNT legacy, you might argue he was merely the most fortunate coach in program history.
After a shock 3-2 win over Portugal and 1-1 draw against co-host South Korea, Arena's USMNT entered Matchday 3 requiring only a point against already-eliminated Poland to advance.
Instead, the Americans trailed 2-0 by the fifth minute en route to a 3-1 loss. That opened the door a mile wide for Portugal and South Korea to settle for a bland draw in the other group match that would see both advance.
But Portugal one-upped the USMNT's penchant for self-destruction by getting two men sent off, emboldening South Korea to find a 70th-minute winner through Park Ji-Sung in a 1-0 win that gave the U.S. a backdoor into a round-of-16 clash against Mexico. And the rest is history.
Showing his own doubts
Arena has famously advocated for American players and coaches before, once telling the late Grant Wahl that he didn't agree that the top American players needed to head to Europe to reach their peak. As much as anyone, Arena should know how thin the margins between success and failure are at the international level.
Perhaps deep down he also knows he enjoyed a considerable bit of good fortune to reach his lofty status in the American soccer hierarchy, and is insecure about seeing it challenged.
It's already happening on the club level, where the exploits of Wilfried Nancy with Columbus are causing some to wonder if he will eventually be considered the best MLS head coach of all time. And across MLS, the value of having an American coach is becoming increasingly questionable. Since 2018, four foreign managers have won MLS Cup against three American coaches.
Now the national team has among the most respected managers in the world game at the helm, who is experiencing his first ugly moment in the aftermath of the Concacaf Nations League. And that's exactly when Arena has chosen to pour gasoline on the fire of a program he supposedly cares about.