US men’s soccer team to start Olympic qualifying with renewed purpose – Los Angeles Times

Juergen Klinsmann was only eight months into his job as coach of the national soccer team when the U.S. was eliminated in the group stage of the last Olympic qualifying tournament.

In men’s soccer, the Olympic competition is an under-23 tournament lagging so far behind the World Cup in importance that many European countries no longer take it seriously.

But for Klinsmann, who scored four goals to help West Germany win a bronze medal in the 1988 Games, the U.S. failure to qualify for the last Olympics was an embarrassment.

“I was furious,” he would say later. “It was not a lack of talent. It was a lack of understanding how important, actually, Olympic Games are. So now we want to learn [from] that mistake.”

He’ll get a chance to see Thursday how well that education process is going when the U.S. opens qualifying play for next summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The U.S. will meet Canada, Cuba and Panama in group play, beginning in Kansas City, Kan.