In Firing Gregg Berhalter, the USMNT Chose Vibes Over Process

Gregg Berhalter will no longer coach the United States men’s national team because it was starting to feel unimaginable for him to stay on. The clamor simply grew too loud. The team’s two leading supporter groups, the American Outlaws and Barra 76, put out statements calling for a new manager in the wake of the U.S.’s ignominious group stage exit from a Copa América played on home soil. In the 1-0 loss to Uruguay that ultimately doomed the campaign, American fans could clearly be heard chanting “Fire Gregg!”

This well-organized effort by the fans to oust the coach was as unprecedented as it was effective, powered by concern over the team’s trajectory less than two years before the U.S. will cohost the men’s World Cup with Mexico and Canada. Looked at one way, this was a sign of growth in the American game: an awful lot of hard-core fans cared loudly enough, and plenty of casuals took note and asked tough questions. U.S. Soccer had to listen and act. We haven’t really seen this level of concerted engagement in the national team before.

On Wednesday, the news that had begun to seem inevitable finally became official. “Gregg has earned the respect of everyone within our organization and has played a pivotal role in bringing together a young team and moving the program forward,” U.S. Soccer’s sporting director, Matt Crocker, said in a statement. “Our immediate focus is on finding a coach who can maximize our potential as we continue to prepare for the 2026 World Cup, and we have already begun our search process.”

Yet something about the timing and reasoning of this decision rankles.

First, let’s spare a thought for Berhalter here. He is an accomplished coach who put enormous toil and energy into a job he clearly adored. I’ve spent the past two years speaking to more than 100 people in and around U.S. Soccer for a book tracing the history of the USMNT. Along the way, I got to witness Berhalter at work up close, in meetings with players and coaches alike. And it isn’t hard to see why people within the federation put so much trust in him. He rebuilt a broken culture in the wake of a disastrous 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign and created an uncommon cohesion in a young team he constructed almost entirely from the ground up. He went 44-17-13 overall and 29-9-7 in official competitions since taking over in late 2018. He won the CONCACAF Nations League twice—while his assistant B.J. Callaghan, following Berhalter’s playbook, won it a third time. Berhalter also won the 2021 Gold Cup. More importantly, he guided a green group of players through the 2022 World Cup, delivering a series of impressive performances and reaching the round of 16.

In the end, his tenure came undone thanks to a combination of bad breaks. His starting right winger, Tim Weah, punched an opponent during the USMNT’s second Copa match and got sent off before his teammates lost on a late goal. And a suspect, offside-ish goal in the final match of the group stage sealed Berhalter’s fate. But then the animosity toward Berhalter had been building for several years, and the last few weeks only served to confirm the misgivings that were already out there. He did an awful lot of things right, but never quite convinced some of the louder portions of the fan base he was the right person for the job.

Crocker, who made the final decision to fire Berhalter, gave him credit on a conference call with reporters, according to ESPN, but agreed with a widely held opinion that the team had stopped improving. “I think five years is a long time, and there’s been a lot of building blocks that have been put in place,” he said. “It was a very, very young group, originally, and there has been progress made, but now is the time to turn that progress into winning. There’s been progress in the group, but that progress hasn’t translated into enough wins in [the Copa].”

During that same call, Crocker indicated that, a year into his current role, he feels more confident in his decision-making when it comes to hiring a new coach. And that the federation will have the budget to spend on a first-rate manager, who may cost a multiple of the roughly $2 million plus bonuses Berhalter was making. Crocker won’t be limiting himself to domestic options—the U.S. has not appointed a men’s senior national team head coach without an American passport since Bora Milutinovic in 1991—but he was noncommittal on whether a candidate needs to speak fluent English, a mandate that previously ruled out highly-qualified options.

As Crocker sets out to hire a men’s head coach for a second time during his tenure, it’s worth pondering what will happen to the rigor he promised to bring to the process the first time around.

The thing is, that first hire was Berhalter himself, and Crocker hasn’t explained how the reasoning for bringing back the coach for a second go-around collapsed so quickly in the face of the results. After the 2022 World Cup, Berhalter was out of the job for six months while U.S. Soccer investigated a domestic violence incident from his freshman year of college, sparked by a falling-out with the Reyna family. By the time Berhalter was cleared of further wrongdoing, Crocker had replaced Earnie Stewart as the man in control of hiring and made the decision to stay the course with Berhalter.

That decision had hardly been made on a hunch. The federation touted its “rigorous process,” consisting of a laundry list of responsibilities and competencies the new head coach should meet before candidates identified by “advanced data analytics, sophisticated metrics, and cutting-edge hiring methods” were put through “a battery of practical and psychological testing.” Berhalter was the clear winner of this process, Crocker reported.

Yet just a year on, Berhalter was fired largely on account of vibes.

The time to move on from Berhalter was after the 2022 World Cup. There was ample pretext to find a new coach. The last four permanent U.S. men’s head coaches were all granted a new contract following their first World Cup cycle. None were successful in their second stint. Only Bruce Arena even made it to a second World Cup in 2006, and he flamed out in the group stage. Besides, Berhalter now had baggage.

By bringing Berhalter back for another turn, only to ditch him after a year, the team suddenly finds itself in a time crunch.

Now, the new man, whoever it winds up being, not only must replace a coach who remained beloved by his key players until the very end, but also must do so without any major tournaments to forge his team in the cauldron of competition before the 2026 World Cup. Besides another CONCACAF Gold Cup—not exactly the most prestigious or challenging contest—next summer, there will be no real tests. As hosts, the Americans will qualify for the World Cup automatically. Truly elite opponents will be hard to book for friendly matches, tied up as they will be by qualifiers and other competitions.

All the same, expectations will tower over this team, which may be a golden generation but has also provoked a discussion about whether we’ve actually just overhyped it. The current USMNT is a team that seems to have the talent to ascend to some mythical Next Level but has yet to deliver a seminal performance on the biggest stage. Oh, and it probably has a discipline issue—four red cards in key games in just over 12 months!

Two years may seem like an ocean of time, but it isn’t in international soccer. At most, the new head coach will have about a dozen camps to fashion something coherent out of his team. And this assumes that Crocker will have appointed a new manager by the September international window—when the U.S. hosts friendlies with Canada and New Zealand—as is his stated objective.

There was a perfectly coherent argument to be made to fire Berhalter after the Copa. Results were mixed. The attack was often inefficient; the defense prone to mistakes. Berhalter long held firm with playing tactics that didn’t suit enough of his players. But those things were all true a year ago, too.

Yet there was also a case to be made for keeping Berhalter. Plainly, his team was unlucky at Copa América. There isn’t enough time for a replacement to properly prepare for the World Cup. It isn’t even clear who that replacement will be—is there any guarantee the U.S. will actually snag a better coach?

And more pertinently, what happened to all those analytics and tests and “psychometrics”—whatever those are—that anointed Berhalter as the best man for the job? Are they no longer valid because of an ill-timed cluster of unfortunate breaks? That conclusion doesn’t stand up to logic.

You either go on vibes or you abide by a process. You can’t do both. Crocker signaled that he would let rational analysis guide him, bringing science to his coaching searches. But now that the vibes are bad, Berhalter is gone, the ballyhooed rigor abandoned at the first sign of resistance.

Certainly, the negativity that surrounded Berhalter had become a problem. Had he been retained, the narrative around this team would likely have grown apocalyptic over the next two years. When you put on a World Cup in the hopes of riding its momentum to a higher plane for your sport, you’re in the business of harnessing enthusiasm. That’s tough to accomplish when your coach has lost popular support.

This much is clear: Regardless of what Crocker does, or how he claims to reach that decision, U.S. Soccer has gotten no better at deciding who to hire. Or when to move on.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a regular contributor on soccer to The Ringer. The Long Game, his book on the United States men’s national team, will be published by Viking Books ahead of the 2026 World Cup. He teaches at Marist College.