Germany vs. USA pits Klinsmann against his old protégé

Few of the World Cup’s notable subplots are quite as intriguing as the one that sets two old friends on a collision course when the USA plays Germany in Recife on Thursday.

Team USA is coached by Jürgen Klinsmann, once Germany’s finest striker and a World Cup winner with Die Mannschaft, as the German side is known. He is also the former head coach of Germany, a side now managed by Joachim “Jogi” Löw — a man Klinsmann once mentored out of relative obscurity into the German coaching setup, but whose achievements after taking over as national team coach threaten to eclipse and even undermine Klinsmann’s own. 

Earlier results mean that a draw on Thursday would see both countries advance to the knockout stages, which might prompt some to expect a gentle stalemate to play out in Recife. In 1982 a World Cup game involving the then West Germany and Austria became known ironically as the “nonaggression pact of Gijón," as both sides played suspiciously tamely to a mutually satisfactory conclusion at the expense of Algeria. Some commentators have asked whether old friends Klinsmann and Löw might contrive to produce a draw on Thursday, prompting both men to publicly disavow the idea.

And the attacking mindset both men cultivated in the German team, which Klinsmann then adapted for the USA — not to mention the backstory of both men’s competitiveness and reputations — renders any collaboration unlikely.

For some in Germany — and even the more skeptical reaches of U.S. soccer — the years since the 2006 World Cup, in which the pair coached Germany together, have enhanced Löw’s reputation as a tactical thinker. But they have exposed the limitations of Klinsmann the motivator and fitness guru — never more so than in a short-lived tenure as Bayern Munich coach in 2008–09, where he clashed with senior management and was later infamously damned for his coaching methods in the autobiography of his former player and captain, Philipp Lahm.

The narrative casting the two men as polar opposites rather than complementary leaders is a seductive one, but it’s also a caricature of Klinsmann that glosses over the very real dynamic structural change he authored in Germany against a backdrop of parochial cronyism that had stagnated the game there. It was a situation that arguably required a figure of Klinsmann’s stature and dynamism to reform — even if success came at some personal cost to his reputation. 

Klinsmann was named German coach in 2004, days before his 40th birthday and with no experience coaching at club level, and charged with preparing a slumping national team to host the 2006 World Cup. From the start he was a polarizing appointment. For all that he was a national team icon who had scored goals at the highest level and won a World Cup in 1990, the baker’s son from Stuttgart had always had the kind of wanderlust that sat uneasily in German footballing circles, where even many top-flight players still spend their entire careers in the Bundesliga. 

Ever the maverick, Klinsmann left Stuttgart for Inter Milan, then Monaco and Tottenham Hotspur. And while he would return to Germany with Bayern Munich, there was still time for more stints in Italy and England to round out a peripatetic playing career in which he soaked up influences from around the continent. After retiring, he promptly moved to his wife’s home state of California, compounding his reputation as the antithesis of the European footballer, let alone a German one.

So Klinsmann began as German coach as an established iconoclast, with firm ideas on what was best about the systems of clubs around Europe and where Germany was lacking. He immediately began not just building a team, but also clearing out those he deemed deadwood conservatives in the German football association, while also insisting that Bundesliga teams get on board with the national team’s fitness ethos by instituting standardized testing and youth development programs.

Klinsmann also brought in Löw, freely acknowledging the tactical credentials of his much less heralded assistant. Löw had been, at best, a middling player before he turned to management. (The same is true, of course, for many of the game’s top coaches.) After an initial successful period at Stuttgart, where he graduated from being an assistant to head coach and won a German Cup and took his team to a European Cup–Winners Cup final, Löw’s managerial career seemed adrift in the years before Klinsmann raised eyebrows by bringing him into the national coaching setup. 

The pair had met at a coaching school years earlier, and Löw’s thinking about the game had impressed Klinsmann. Some saw the appointment of the unheralded but capable Löw as epitomizing Klinsmann’s humility, and recognition of the lucky breaks in his own career. Skeptics wondered whether it might reflect a fragile ego and Klinsmann’s desire to be the unchallenged No. 1. That idea got another airing recently when the sainted Landon Donovan was cut from the USA World Cup squad.

But for the likes of Löw — and perhaps also for John Brooks, the young German-American defender who scored a surprise winner against Ghana last week — Klinsmann’s motives matter less than the life-changing opportunities they provide. And Löw seized his chance.

It’s important to remember the relative low point of German soccer ahead of the 2006 World Cup. The Germans, perennial World Cup quarterfinalists at the very least, had crashed out of consecutive European championships at the group stages — unprecedented ignominy for them. Yet as the nature and scale of Klinsmann’s revolution became clear, it produced a crescendo of anxiety before the tournament as the youthful German side struggled in warmup games.

But, against popular expectations, the German team clicked, surprising and delighting the neutrals and taking the home team to an honorable semifinal defeat to eventual champions Italy. Out went the efficient but dour, defensive German house style; in came an open game built on attacking flair and speed. Germany’s performance put Klinsmann in demand throughout Europe, but he chose to return to his life in California to consider his next move. Löw, meanwhile, was promoted to the senior job and saw his reputation blossom as he continued to build the team based on youth and attacking flair that continues to win plaudits — most recently in the 4–0 dismantling of Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal in their opening game in Brazil.

The Klinsmann legend, however, took a dent. Having spent two years fielding and rejecting various offers in the wake of the World Cup, including a first approach by the U.S. Soccer Federation, he was lured back to Europe to coach Bundesliga powerhouse Bayern Munich. At the club widely considered the epicenter of Germany’s soccer establishment, Klinsmann quickly discovered that it was a lot easier to tear up old scripts when running the national team. 

The young reformer quickly bumped up against the inertia of a footballing dynasty. His fitness methods were portrayed as California fads, while whispers of tactics being neglected grew louder as the season went on. During this period, Philipp Lahm later wrote, “We practically only practiced fitness”; he and other senior players, Lahm claimed, were left to figure out tactics among themselves before games. In an intriguing side note, Klinsmann brought in Donovan on loan from the LA Galaxy to help out, only for the player to fail to make an impact and reinforce critics’ claims that the coach had lost the plot.

After defeat in the Champions League quarterfinal, albeit against a Barcelona team that went on to win the title, Klinsmann was fired only months into his reign. With the Bayern hierarchy undermining him, Klinsmann’s tenure had been impossible.

Along with the sacking came an added insult in the emerging view that his World Cup success had been largely due to Löw’s tactical nous — a narrative that gained traction despite its gross oversimplification of events, or the fact that Klinsmann’s vision and stature had been preconditions for the institutional revolution that had remade German football.

So when U.S. Soccer came calling again in 2011, Klinsmann was more receptive, though hardly humbled. Given the logistical challenges and lowly status of U.S. soccer in the global game, the root-and-branch revolution he is attempting here is almost more ambitious than what he did in Germany. He’s even plundered German football for eligible young German-American players such as Brooks, World Cup standouts Fabian Johnson and Jermaine Jones, even the Bayern Munich player Julian Green. And for what it’s worth, the fitness regimes Klinsmann instituted at Germany and Bayern, for all they were mocked at the time, remain in force.

And as Klinsmann told this writer a couple of months ago, it’s Löw who’ll be under more pressure when the two teams meet in Recife on Thursday.

“At the end of the day,” he said, speaking of the German squad, “that generation has to put the dot on the i to make the final step to win a competition like that — otherwise you go down as an amazing generation without winning a big tournament.”

And Klinsmann was sure to emphasize his own part in shaping that generation.

“It’s most fascinating if you see their path going in the right direction — if you see players reaching their highest potential and living that way,” he said. “When you get that kind of feedback later on, like I got from many players I had in the 2004–2006 period, who came back later and said, ‘Coach, you really helped me to understand, to get most out of myself.’”

Klinsmann will be hoping Löw gets a little less out of those German players on Thursday. But would he be calling his old friend before Thursday’s game?

“There is no time to have friendship calls.”