Gregg Berhalter was mostly fine. Firing him is the right decision

Firing the USMNT coach would be slightly unfair, but for the best

Here are some facts about Gregg Berhalter and his time as United States Men’s National Team head coach.

He was hired in the wake of the team’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, one of the more seismic catastrophes in the nation’s soccer history. In his time as head coach, he successfully phased in a new generation of players, won three continental trophies, brought the team back to the World Cup and reached the knockout stages in Qatar.

Here are some other facts about Gregg Berhalter and his time as United States Men’s National Team head coach. 

He has failed to register a win against a non-Mexico top-15 ranked team in the world across ten matches, accrued the same number of World Cup group stage points as Bob Bradley did in 2010, and was eliminated at the same stage of the competition as both Bradley and Jürgen Klinsmann. His USMNT just failed to qualify for the knockout stages in a home international tournament for the first time in 20 competitions.¹Although this is a slightly misleading stat because it counts 17 Gold Cup groups, which the USMNT tend to win easily, a 1994 World Cup where they snuck through in third place at the expense of a Colombia team that was experiencing what you could euphemistically call overly intense off-the-field pressure, and a fairly navigable 2016 Copa America group. So this was really only the third time the USMNT played a non-Gold Cup home group stage. Still not great. 

Somewhere in the balance of these two sets of facts is a somewhat fair analysis of Berhalter’s tenure: He was pretty much fine, but it’s time for him to go. 

That first set of facts represents a genuine accomplishment. You’re welcome to dismiss what the USMNT did at the World Cup in Qatar as the bare minimum. “Most USMNT squads this century have made it to the knockout rounds,” you will say. And fair enough.  But that is a little bit like dismissing Christian Eriksen scoring at Euro 2024 as the bare minimum you can expect for a nation’s best attacking player who had scored at major international tournament before. Technically true, but also eliding some major events that took place between those two goals.

Yes, Berhalter’s  major tournament accomplishment was the same as those of Bradley and Klinnsmann, but he took charge of a program that was on life support. In 2017, a combination of bad luck in player development and a destructively toxic atmosphere in the late Klinnsmann era left the senior men’s at its lowest point post-1990, with nothing but Christian Pulisic and some other teenagers who fans hoped might reach his level. When Gregg Berhalter coached his first match in early 2019, Weston McKennie, Chris Richards, Tim Weah, and Tyler Adams had barely broken through at their clubs in Europe, if at all. Matt Turner had only played one season for the New England Revolution. Gio Reyna hadn’t played a professional soccer game.²Also worth remembering how much work it took to get the squad to where it is now, with around 12-15 clearly very good players. Look at the squads for Berhalter’s first two tournaments in charge for a reminder of the number of other guys who had tryouts while this team was rebuilding and didn’t even end up factoring into World Cup Qualifying: David Ochoa, Daniel Lovitz, Nick Lima, Jackson Yueill, Tyler Boyd, Jonathan Lewis. George Bello and Reggie Cannon played a lot in qualifying. Remember Matthew Hoppe?  

The pool Berhalter had to work with from 2019 to 2022 was good but messy. What Berhalter had to do was substantially different than what most new national team coaches are tasked with: A complete reset, rather than incorporating a few new faces into an established core. Taking a crop of obviously talented but still very young and inexperienced players and rebuilding to the floor of the early 2010s is a legitimate accomplishment. 

Regardless of how good they are or which European corporation pays their paychecks, most of the USMNT’s most important players had never touched the ball in a competitive international match before Berhalter took over. He should get credit for largely successfully navigating that first World Cup cycle. 

 More to the point: Had the USMNT defeated the Netherlands in the Round of 16, and reached a quarterfinal at the World Cup by winning an elimination match against a major European team, Berhalter would have become the most accomplished manager in USMNT history by a comfortable margin.

There is a large gray area between accomplishing the bare minimum and being the greatest of all time. That gray area is called “perfectly fine” and that’s what Berhalter was during his first cycle as USMNT manager.

But the thing with being perfectly fine is that it can quickly veer into not quite good enough, and that’s what happened in Berhalter’s second cycle. 

Take these stats with a grain of salt, because expected goals over the course of just a few games are quite noisy, but the USMNT’s underlying stats in group play at the World Cup and the Copa America illustrate a decline of sorts.

In Qatar, the United States finished the group stage with a just-barely-negative expected goals differential of -0.1. In terms of chance creation, they gave as good as they got, and if you exclude the penalty they gave up against Wales, they gave slightly better than they got in open play. More importantly, they were almost a full expected goal better than Iran, meaning their closest rival would have had to get significantly more lucky over the course of three games to finish ahead of the States. Their luck ran out against the Netherlands, but that is how it goes sometimes.³Even though they actually slightly edged the expected goals battle in that game, generating 1.7 to the Dutch’s 1.5 

At the Copa America, that luck window shifted against the United States. Technically, they finished group play with the actually-very-good expected goals differential of +1.6, but that doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. Excluding the 2.5 expected goals the US generated against Bolivia, who are pretty much the worst team you could ever hope to play at a major tournament, they only actually generated 1.6 expected goals across two matches against Panama and Uruguay, while conceding 2.1 expected goals in that span. That puts their Bolivia-excluded expected goals at -0.5. 

That is still better than Panama’s non-Bolivia expected goals differential of -1.2, but it is still a falloff from their World Cup performance. Being half an expected goal worse than your opponents across 180 minutes is substantively different than being effectively even. And the differential between Panama and the United states was slightly closer than that between the United States and Iran.

The United States underperformed at the Copa America and it brought Panama within the margin of error where they only needed a little bit of luck to make it through. And they got it: An inexplicable Tim Weah red card, a savable daisy cutter squeaking past Matt Turner, a Ricardo Pepi miss. 

Now, lots that went wrong wasn’t coaching. Tim Weah plays for Juventus, and has played against scrappy CONCACAF teams before. He knows that you can’t punch someone in the head. Gregg Berhalter can’t coach the ball into the net at a higher rate, nor can he force CONMEBOL to pay for the advanced technology that possibly would have ruled out Uruguay’s winner in the group stage finale.  

But things have stagnated, or gotten slightly worse in Berhalter’s second cycle as coach. What the expected goals margins indicate is that this team is no longer keeping things even against good teams. And since this is international soccer, and there is no way to go out and find a second attacking right back, or another center back, or a genuine superstar attacker, the only way to confront stagnation is to get rid of the coach. 

And as much as a level-headed analysis of any coach’s tenure should probably ignore international friendlies, international soccer is about the emotions and the spectacle as much as the results — particularly in the United States where the national team is still fighting to grow the game and its fanbase. When the tournament results aren’t coming, it becomes harder to ignore the dispiriting friendly losses to top teams like Germany and Colombia. 

Gregg Berhalter was confronted with the difficult task of creating a competent senior national team from scratch when he became coach of the United States Men’s National Team. He more or less accomplished that.

But in his second cycle the task was to build on that foundation and actually pushing beyond where previous American teams have gone. Instead, the opposite has happened. As he himself said, at this level the margins are small, and as performances decline from perfectly fine to slightly less than that, it becomes easy to cross the line from decent results into outright disaster. 

That’s where the United States are now. A coaching change might be slightly unfair to Gregg Berhalter, but it’s probably the only way forward.