Gregg Berhalter hasn’t lost the US locker room. But he should lose his job

You can’t deny they were playing for him, and for each other. This was not a capitulation, not a cowed or inexperienced performance against one of the best teams in the world.

So Gregg Berhalter hasn’t lost the locker room. But after all this, how can he not lose his job? How can anyone trust him to be the man to turn the USMNT into a team good enough to make a big impact at the 2026 World Cup? They’ve stagnated at best since Qatar 2022, and perhaps even regressed.

There were warning signs ahead of this summer’s Copa America, the most useful benchmark before the U.S., Canada and Mexico welcome Fifa’s 48-team, three-ring circus in 2026. The chaotic 5-1 friendly loss to Colombia last month. The Concacaf Nations League in March, which the U.S. won but needed a 96th-minute own goal to avoid a semifinal defeat by Jamaica. The 3-1 home friendly loss to Germany last October, in which Berhalter’s team looked both naïve and outclassed. The trauma-filled 2-1 Concacaf Nations League second-leg loss (though a win on aggregate) to Trinidad & Tobago last November.

This tournament brought new results to the rap sheet. Ten men couldn’t hold a lead against Panama last Thursday, losing 2-1 and barely touching the ball. Consequently, the US knew beyond a reasonable doubt that they had to beat Uruguay in Kansas City on Monday, but lost 1-0. They matched their opponents in intensity, aggression, possession and passing accuracy. But not in know-how. Not in finding a way to somehow get what they needed.

Fans in the stands could only cheer Bolivia on via their mobile phones, hoping the Copa’s worst team would pull off an upset against Panama, and praying for mercy from the merciless VAR gods after Uruguay scored the winning goal in the 66th minute, which was almost offside.

With a 36-year-old centre-back gluing the defence together for the desperate chaos of the final stages, while Berhalter brought on two English second division attackers, the enterprise had echoes of late-era Jürgen Klinsmann. A period when the initial ambitions of turning the US into a star-studded version of Germany had to be scaled back. Ambitious tactics were replaced by the more prosaic reality of driving the ball long to Jozy Altidore; from fancy passing triangles to back to square one. A programme in an identity crisis, and then a results emergency.

At least the football was cleaner and smarter on Monday. But Klinsmann led a far less talented U.S. team to the semifinals of the 2016 Copa, where they were crushed by Argentina. Despite home-field advantage, this is the first time since Copa 2007 that the U.S. has failed to advance to the group stage of a Copa, World Cup or Concacaf Gold Cup. And Berhalter’s original mission statement was no less grandiose than anything Klinsmann could have imagined: “changing the way the world sees American soccer.”

If that has been achieved since he took charge in late 2018, it has been thanks to the individual performances of players like Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie at their clubs, rather than through the national team.

Berhalter did, however, stabilise a wake-up programme after the 2018 World Cup qualifying debacle, introducing and developing talented youngsters. Qatar 2022 lived up to reasonable expectations, with the US playing admirably against England, getting the win they needed against Iran and then losing in the round of 16 to a superior Dutch team. This is a failure, however, finishing third in the group behind Uruguay and Panama. It’s everyone, players and staff, who are lacking.

Berhalter was rehired a year ago after a six-month absence following World Cup elimination and an investigation into a violent incident in 1992. Matt Crocker, the new technical director of US soccer who was taken from English soccer, took a “multi-faceted evaluation mechanism” with “advanced data analytics, advanced statistics and sophisticated recruiting methods to profile and rank each candidate.”

This was an attempt to avoid a choice based on gut feelings. The required qualities ruled out a big, self-centered mercenary who might work for a year or two and get a big paycheck, but probably wouldn’t want to spend too much time smalltalking at the water cooler.

And how many sought-after elite coaches would even accept being asked to undergo psychometric testing? Wherever Jurgen Klopp ends up, for example, it’s hard to imagine the former Liverpool manager being asked an interview: “Are you able to regulate your own behavior by understanding yourself in different situations?”

The process undermined Berhalter with many fans: an exhaustive global search that lasted half a year – and you stay with him when you could have hired him [insert name of unrealistic and probably unsuitable famous person here]?”

The task of hiring a head coach also seemed to be likened to conducting an executive search to appoint a vice president at Ford or General Electric. Berhalter didn’t even coach the team during last summer’s Concacaf Gold Cup because he was busy attending long-term “big picture” strategy meetings.

Despite all the advances in analysis and professionalism, football is still heavily influenced by the power of personality, split-second control and sheer luck. This is especially true at international level, where a manager has limited influence on the available talent pool and players spend most of their time in different countries, being coached by someone else.

Because it was a sport, it was unforeseeable that Tim Weah would lose his mind against Panama and punch an opponent. And it was probably very costly. But that wasn’t just Weah’s fault. It was also his teammates’ failure to overcome the self-inflicted setback in what turned out to be the decisive group match.

After rehiring a long-serving, amiable, MLS-raised tactics wonk through a process seemingly designed to weed out big names, big personalities and mercenaries, the U.S. lost to Uruguay, led superbly by a legendary eccentric in Argentine Marcelo Bielsa. He has held more than a dozen management roles in his long and peripatetic career, including five in the past decade.

It seems clear that Crocker is not the type to make a quick change; he will want to do it in triplicate. The U.S. does not have another game scheduled until Sept. 7 — a friendly against Canada, which coincidentally qualified for the Copa knockout stages under the guidance of Jesse Marsch, an American who was denied the U.S. role last year.

“We’re going to do an evaluation and figure out what went wrong and why it went wrong,” Berhalter told reporters Monday. “Just seeing the faces of the guys in the locker room and the emotions of the staff and players, we’re bitterly disappointed with the results. We know we’re capable of more and in this tournament we didn’t show that, it’s as simple as that.”

Asked if he was still the right man for the job, he replied, “Yes.” But the only quantifiable standard that really matters is results, especially in a scenario where only World Cups — especially one on home soil — can lift the U.S. team out of its niche status and into the broader public consciousness.

In a country with a population of more than 330 million people, Colombia’s punishment was watched by a combined English and Spanish language television channel audience of 1.3 million. Last week’s loss to Panama average 2.5m on Fox. But the goalless draw with England in Qatar 2022 attracted 20 million viewers.

Crocker doesn’t have to deal with PowerPoint presentations, a swamp of statistics and business jargon. This is the verdict that matters: do you still believe this man can lead this team to at least the quarter-finals of the 2026 World Cup? And within that framework, the key data point is: what is the evidence that this team is improving, that it is still on an upward curve?

“Just not enough quality,” Pulisic said Fox Sport after Monday’s defeat. “I felt like we gave it everything, but we just couldn’t find the solution.” The next steps, he added, are “regrouping and finding an identity again.” The early exit means the U.S. will once again enter a World Cup with uncertainty about its global status and everything to prove — but with the “young and emerging” label that doesn’t fit as well as it did in 2022. And with continuity losing its cachet.

On an individual level, when fully fit, the squad is better than it was 18 months ago. The biggest gap, a goalscorer, has been closed in the form of Folarin Balogun. Gio Reyna is now a core member. The boys are maturing; Pulisic, McKennie and Tyler Adams, all 25, and Weah, 24, should be in their prime. They no longer lack experience of major tournaments. But the performances and results don’t reflect that, not consistently enough, and certainly not against benchmark nations such as Uruguay, who Berhalter has failed to beat.

“Our tournament performance fell short of our expectations. We must do better. We will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of our performance in the Copa América and how we can best improve the team and results ahead of the 2026 World Cup,” US Soccer said in a statement. Sounds great. But a quick glance at the standings should tell them all they need to know.