The US men’s national soccer team, currently in its annual January training camp before a friendly against Serbia on Sunday, once again finds itself at the dawn of a new era. Jürgen Klinsmann – who one suspects would have been willing to take credit for the sun rising at dawn each day – is no longer the national team coach; Bruce Arena is. Klinsmann’s claim that he had fundamentally revolutionized American soccer makes it harder to move on from his tenure. His legacy, in large part, is that every issue is now a even more fraught.
Nowhere is that more than the case than with the deployment of so-called dual nationals. The basic facts here haven’t changed since Arena’s last managerial stint: international teams can cap-tie players with limited ancestral ties to that nation; America’s political and military history has produced a large pool of such eligible players; and American managers continue to use some of these players. The only change, really, was discursive. Klinsmann elevated the dual national to a fetishistic ideal.
“Jurgen Klinsmann had a project to unearth talent around the world that had American roots,” goalkeeper Tim Howard recently told USA Today. Howard’s claim that these players were insufficiently committed was tendentious at best, but his understanding of the basic Klinsmann project is correct. A soccer federation does not hire a manager known for his interest in youth development and knowledge of German youngsters then give him the role of technical director if they are interested in any other outcome.
Yet these developments were not really different from the history of American soccer. For example, Joe Gaetjens, who scored the solitary goal in USA’s shock win over England at the 1950 World Cup, was not an American citizen. (He was born in Haiti.) Gaetjens was eligible because of his stated interest in becoming a naturalized citizen. He died in 1964 under “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s regime; he remained a Haitian citizen and had most represented them in a World Cup qualifier in 1953.
Yugoslavian-born midfielder and cult icon Predrag Radosavljević, better known as Preki, made his debut for USA in 1996 aged 33, just months after his citizenship had been confirmed. During his last term as US national team manager, Bruce Arena included foreign-born players Earnie Stewart (Netherlands), Pablo Mastroeni (Argentina), David Regis (Martinique), and Carlos Llamosa (Colombia) in his squad for the 2002 World Cup.
Klinsmann, then, did not invent the idea of dual-national soccer players. So what changed? Whereas previous generations of dual nationals fell into US Soccer’s lap –Mastroeni’s family, for instance, came to America when he was a child – the Klinsmann regime actively tried to secure the loyalties of young players eligible to play for multiple countries.
By illustration, the finer points of Gedion Zelalem’s citizenship were endlessly rehashed by American soccer publications. The progress of players in Germany’s second tier became part of the national soccer conversation; Julian Green’s every minute with Bayern Munich – of which there were, in the end, quite few – was covered as a matter of national interest. More than anything else, this was a stylistic change – one that struck some American fans as unseemly.
The precise nature of foreignness is a constantly moving target. Irish- and Italian-Americans, once very much the other, have generally expanded the idea of what it means to be an American. But the same does not hold true for many other groups. Soccer federations face the added challenge that their conceptions of national identity, as enshrined in Fifa’s rules, don’t always line up with popular discourse.
This, to be clear, does not mean that US Soccer under Klinsmann erred in its openness to dual nationals – if anything, America could use more of it – but this asymmetry produces a challenge. International soccer is supposed to embody the spirit of national identity, but the term has a different meaning in this context.
In that respect, one of the major challenges facing US Soccer now is that discourse around national identity can turn on a dime. Bruce Arena can clumsily signal that the national team has entered a new era, but in practice very little has actually changed. The Amsterdam-born Thomas Rongen, who discovered and recruited Norwegian American Mix Diskerud while managing America’s under-20 team, was named US Soccer’s chief scout in late December. In interviews since re-assuming his old job, Arena has confirmed that he will not be making major changes for the rest of World Cup qualification. The dual national debate in US Soccer is all talk.
Klinsmann, in spite of his many managerial limitations, was good at that kind of talk; Arena is not. “Players on the [national] team should be American,” he told ESPN in 2013. “If they’re born in other countries, we aren’t making progress.” In the dying days of the Klinsmann era, Arena tried to clarify this position in an interview with Alexi Lalas: “If you play for the national team, regardless of your background and how you got that passport, it’s gotta be important to you. You care about your country. You care about how your team is represented on the field.”
Since regaining his position with the national team, Arena has further clarified this position, telling the Washington Post: “I was simply saying if our senior national team program consists of a large minority of players, large majority of players that were born elsewhere, where are we going with our development?”
The most generous interpretation of Arena’s logorrhoea on this subject – unlike the nativism previously espoused by players like Abby Wambach and Landon Donovan – is that he has no real problem with deploying dual nationals, but struggles to discuss their use in the context of US Soccer’s limited developmental infrastructure. That is no excuse: managers need to be able to explain their positions, and poorly thought-out talk about the limits of national identity can be seriously damaging. Arena’s oratory struggles, however, do symbolize US Soccer’s inability to be frank about identity issues.
None of these struggles are unique to American soccer. Brazilian-born Diego Costa now plays for Spain. In 2010, Mikel Arteta’s eligibility to play for England became a subject of national interest. Players change international allegiances with considerable regularity. If anything, US Soccer’s struggles are representative of the changing balancing of power in international football. Players don’t just choose anymore; nations seek them out. Sussex-born FC Kansas City forward Dom Dwyer will soon be eligible for US citizenship, and has spoken of his eagerness to represent his adopted country. This is a more traditional realignment of allegiances. It harkens back to players like Preki or Mastroeni rather than Klinsmann’s band of scouted youngsters. The latter approach may have appeared unseemly, but it was only superficially different. Klinsmann may not have known precisely how to talk about the role of dual nationals, but American soccer culture’s long-term problem is that it also has no clue.
