US Soccer spent decades searching for coherence. It found something better

I n 1993, the United States Soccer Federation handed a contract to Rinus Michels. But the Dutch godfather of Total Football, operationalized through his on-field avatar Johan Cruyff, was not hired to coach the national team, or to coach anybody, really. By this time, Michels, who managed the Los Angeles Aztecs of the North American Soccer League in 1979 and 1980, had already turned down the chance to manage the US men’s national team twice. Once, in 1983, when it would be entered, disastrously, into the NASL as Team America. And once more in 1991, when Bora Milutinović was appointed instead. The federation’s general secretary Hank Steinbrecher had something else in mind now. He dispatched Michels, accompanied by his wife, on a three-month-long tour of the United States. Then, one of the sport’s leading minds was to report back on what he found. “He said, ‘Well, Hank, you have a problem. You are a continent; you are not a country,’” the late Steinbrecher recalled when I spoke to him for my book on the USMNT’s history . “‘The football you play in Los Angeles is very different from the football you have to play in Maine, because of your climatic conditions. …