No one is qualified to be U.S. Soccer president
There’s one big problem with the race to become U.S. Soccer president. No one, including the incumbent, is qualified for the job.
The defining feature of the race to become the next president of U.S. Soccer is the same as the defining feature of the race to become the next president of anything: vagueness. Seven different people have announced their candidacy so far, and there is nary a specific recommendation among them.
Every candidate — Kyle Martino, Eric Wynalda, Paul Lapointe, Steve Gans, Carlos Cordeiro, Michael Winograd and Paul Caligura — has offered us vague platitudes about our current approach to talent identification and development, the equal treatment of women, on the pitch and in the administration, and the scourge of corruption within FIFA.
To be sure, these are exactly the problems the president of U.S. Soccer should be concerned with, and it’s a good signed they’ve dominated the conversation surrounding the race so far. What’s been lacking is any specific examples of how to address these problems, what each candidate will actually do once they get into office.
Take, for example, Kyle Martino, whose campaign is comfortably the most flashily-marketed of all the candidates. On his website, he boldly declares that “we need a change, not just of direction, but of leadership and ambition,” and informs us that his team has begun work on a “Progress Plan to put U.S. Soccer back where it should be.”
He has yet to release the Progress Plan, but offered an indication of what we might expect in a recent Q&A with George Quraishi of Howler magazine. When asked about how he’d invest the USSF’s nine-figure budget surplus, he gave as specific an answer as we’ve seen from any of the candidates during the campaign so far:
"The 3 areas I would want to make substantial investment from our surplus are: 1. Staffing. We are understaffed and this has been stressed internally for years. We need to promote/hire more experts in core areas of development as well as promote/hire more women to executive positions. 2. Subsides youth “elite soccer” we must make our sport more inclusive by first making it more affordable. 3. Build 4 Centers of Excellence where our most promising young players can get the best possible soccer education, for free. Obviously we don’t have enough surplus for all these initiatives so it would mean asking our strategic partners to match our investments for the mutual benefit of growing our game."
This answer seems good enough on the surface but breaks down quickly upon further examination. For example, what are “experts in core areas of development”? Presumably he’s talking about coaches and scouts and the like — raising, among other things, the question of why he didn’t just say that — but since, as Martino acknowledges elsewhere in the same Q&A, one of the biggest problems facing U.S. Soccer is a lack of high quality coaches, who is going to train these experts, and how?
His second point is a simple re-statement of a problem everyone relevant to this debate has already acknowledged, namely, too many children from low-income backgrounds have been priced out of the game. The important question is how “we make our sport more inclusive by making it more affordable.” As others have pointed out, if we use the budget surplus simply to pay for children from low-income background to play club soccer, the surplus is going to run out very quickly.
In his third point, Martino makes an actual, specific suggestion, but like in his first, it is so vague as to render itself meaningless. What exactly is a Center of Excellence, where do the coaches who will presumably be running this center come from and, if we don’t address the pay-to-play issue, won’t the mission of such a project be undermined by our continued failure to ensure the best young players from around the country arrive at a Center of Excellence to begin with?
We can pick apart the candidate’s comments as long as we want. And to be clear, Martino isn’t the only guilty party. I won’t go through the other candidate’s responses (you can read them all here), but suffice it to say their answers are no more, and often less, substantive than Martino’s. At a certain point, however, we must ask a deeper question: is all this vagueness a product of the lack of quality of the candidates, or an unavoidable byproduct of the fact they’re running to take charge of a bureaucracy so byzantine we don’t even know who votes to decide who holds its most powerful office?
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it’s the latter. The current president, Sunil Gulati, who has yet to announce whether he will run for a third term, seems to have taken U.S. Soccer as far as he can, but while he’s made several big errors, it’s not as if he’s blind to the failures the candidates running to replace him have positioned at the center of their campaigns. In fact, if Gulati does run, this will be the most compelling argument for reelecting him: not only is he aware of the problems, but he understands the bureaucracy, and is therefore best placed to start moving it where it needs to go.
In the absence of any clear picture of how a structure as large and unwieldy as the USSF functions on a specific practical level, then, we’re left with only half a debate. On one side, the outsiders, including six of our seven candidates, identify problems and only gesture vaguely in the direction of specific solutions. On the other, the insiders, including our incumbent, suggest their critics don’t understand the intricacies of the bureaucracy well enough to address the problems they have correctly identified. Neither side presents a way forward.
Next: Sam Allardyce, the USMNT and the price of boredom
They might all learn a thing or two from Landon Donovan, who, in explaining his decision not to run, succinctly captured the problem with this entire election process. “I think like most people, your initial reaction is, well, I can help. I can do the job,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl. “And I quickly walked back from that to considering the realities, which were 1) I’m not remotely qualified for that job; 2) I would have no idea how to even begin that job; 3) I don’t want to do that job; and 4) there are better ways for me to be involved and impactful.”
Donovan might well have stopped after point No. 1. He’s not qualified. Neither is anyone else — that’s the nature of the job. And so while the wait for specifics will surely go on, it might be productive for these candidates to stop emphasizing their credentials, and start emphasizing some awareness of their lack of credentials. What’s needed is someone with the enthusiasm to mobilize people, the humility to delegate to others who are smarter and more informed and the confidence to admit no one really knows what the hell is going on. In other words, exactly the sort of person who would never think to run for president in the first place.