Summer of Soccer Thinking - Berhalter and US failure edition

Strong organizations know when it's time to part ways with popular and successful managers who have taken their teams as far as they can.

Last night the US men's national soccer team lost a game it had to win. The loss wasn't surprising - the reason the US had to win it was.

As the Washington Post's Steven Goff points out, national team soccer players don't swap in and out like they do at pro teams, but coaches do. It is time for US coach Gregg Berhalter to go. Not because he's a bad coach, but because he may have taken the team as far as he can. As Jonathan Wilson put it in the Guardian, "...Berhalter hasn't lost the US locker room. But he should lose his job."

Even the best managers aren't the best at everything. We all have limits. The best organizations know when a manager has hit those limits, and then they bring in someone new.

By all accounts the US players are fully behind Berhalter. Even Gio Reyna, who was at the center of the worst kind of soccer parent drama during the last World Cup, backs Berhalter. Only a missed handball call against Germany in the 2002 World Cup prevented Berhalter from scoring what would have been one of the most famous goals in US soccer history. He's smart, committed, well liked, and has been a vital part of US soccer for decades. And yet...

The best managers are very good at a handful of things, pretty good at others, and miss other things entirely. This is true of me as the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, just as it was when I was in other leadership roles. It was true of my predecessors in those roles, and of those who followed. At some point, we max out on our strengths. We use up our ideas. Our teams and organizations get as good as they are going to get under our leadership. Then new leaders are needed. New leaders have different strengths and weaknesses than old leaders. Hopefully their strengths fill gaps the old leaders left, they build and adjust rather than scrap and start over.

This US men's soccer team is individually the most talented team the US has ever fielded. Most play - and some star - in the top leagues in the world. This is not a group of guys who should be watching the Copa America from a barstool (given their paychecks, it's likely a very nice bar, but still).

It is time for US Soccer to do what the best organizations outside of soccer do: Decide that the popular and successful manager has done all he can, and move on.

In addition to this being a good way for me to think out loud and attempt to justify the absurd amount of time I'm spending watching soccer, it's a way to plug my 2018 book, Soccer Thinking for Management Success: Lessons for organizations from the worlds game. Some of the people I quote have moved on - Ben Olsen now coaches the Houston Dynamo and not DC United, Michael Williamson went from Inter Milan, to Miami FC, to Wrexham (seriously). But I think the lessons hold up.