In 1986 Lothar Osiander, head coach of the US National Team, the most important person in the US Soccer Federation, was a part-time employee. He supplemented his income by working days at a restaurant near San Francisco. He also coached a semi-professional team, the San Francisco Greek-Americans. In short, Osiander was a hustler. In 1985 both the North American Soccer League and the second-tier United Soccer League folded, leaving the country without a nationwide, professional outdoor league. Osiander was forced to recruit indoor and college players to fill his lineup.
Today head coach Bob Bradley makes close to $500,000 a year. The USSF has a nation-wide network of youth academies. The country's professional league, Major League Soccer, is scheduled to expand to 20 teams in 2012. It's no wonder you can't have a conversation about U.S. soccer without hearing the word "progress."
While progress has become a buzzword, you rarely hear about where U.S. soccer progressed from. Before 1990, the sport was in still in the dark ages. The 1990 Italian World Cup was the first for the US Men's team in 40 years. As important as that experience was, in many ways the 1994 American World Cup was even more important to the growth of American soccer. It introduced professional soccer to an entire generation of children. Americans born in the 80s, who played youth soccer in staggering numbers, didn't see a firsthand example of what was possible in the sport until 1994. Both Landon Donovan and Michael Bradley, for example, often speak about the importance the 1994 tournament played in their decisions to pursue soccer. Before that tournament, baseball and football, while still more popular today, had completely eclipsed soccer in the eyes of the youth of the early 90s. Every kid knew Joe Montana, Bo Jackson, and Ken Griffey Jr. When the US team played in Italy in 1990 America rediscovered Aristotle; the 1994 World Cup final, played at the Rose Bowl in front of more than 100 thousand spectators, was the beginning of our soccer enlightenment.
But how did US soccer get out of the dark ages? To find out, I tracked down the man who guided US soccer through a time of transition and turmoil, Lothar Osiander.
Lothar Osiander moved to California from Germany in 1958 at the age of eighteen. He still speaks with a faint German accent and the slightly defensive pride of a man who accomplished a great deal in a bygone era. To Osiander, the 80s were a successful period. In addition to coaching the National Team, he won the US Open Cup and coached the Olympic team at the 1988 and 1992 games. Despite his success during this era, one of America's premier coaches paid his bills waiting tables. Waiting allowed him to schedule scouting assignments and coaching commitments into his work schedule. Osiander described the situation as "perfect for me."
What wasn't perfect during this time was the health of high-level soccer, which was overwhelmingly amateur. Compared to the late 70s, when the NASL boasted players like Pele, and teams like the New York Cosmos, a star franchise that set a club-soccer attendance records, the 80s were far from glamorous. Upstart, outdoor professional leagues struggled, failing to draw even the most modest numbers of fans. These small leagues popped up and then collapsed in financial ruin across the country without even a blip on the radar of the American sports psyche. College teams also struggled with attendance. The NCAA Division I championship game drew more than 10,000 fans at any time during the 80s.
As a way to put this low ebb in US soccer into perspective, consider this: Lothar Osiander coached the semi-pro Greek-Americans to the US Open Cup championship twice, in 1985 and again in 1994, in the period after the NASL and before the MLS. The US Open is an annual competition founded in 1914. All teams affiliated with the USSF, amateur or professional, are eligible to participate. Since the inaugural 1996 MLS season, only one non-league team has won the Open Cup.
The name, Greek-Americans, is a bit misleading. "I had four National Team players: one Iranian, one Scottish guy and two Nigerians." They played in a regional league, and dominated. "We won the league championship, I think, six years in a row, and we were always a top-notch team. It was fun to be with that team." For a while the Greek-Americans were one of the bigger teams on the West Coast, if not the whole United States; so big that they would play friendlies with touring international squads. "We tied Mexico... it was always a game. We always gave them a game. And we were regular guys, we all worked and we all had jobs and we trained twice a week." On game day the Greek-Americans earned $100 a piece.
The one professional league that had anything close to success during this period was the Major Indoor Soccer League. Formed in 1978, the MISL was in many ways closer to hockey than outdoor soccer. Played in a small arena with Plexiglas walls, the ball rarely went out of bounds. While it was faster paced and higher scoring than outdoor soccer the game lacked the nuance of its outdoor counterpart. David Wangerin described the MISL game in his 2006 history of American soccer, Soccer in a Football World: "Errant shooting could produce a goal on the rebound; hammering the ball against the dasher board made for an effective pass. Even the poorest player could endear himself to the crowd by charging an opponent into the wall." MISL players often had difficulty transitioning to the outdoor game let alone high-level international competition. But, as Osiander put it, "In those days indoor was big." USSF didn't have any better options and they fielded a mix of indoor players and college kids. Imagine the president of the United States asking for a team of crack soldiers, the best-of-the-best, but instead getting a bunch of professional paintballers and some ROTC cadets.
Nevertheless, players from the Division I college system and those playing in the MISL formed the backbone of both the full National Team and the Olympic Teams for much of the 80s. Though the USSF depended on these players in order to compete internationally they were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. Coaches around the country didn't even respect the National Team enough to regularly release their players. College and club play was more important than World Cup qualifiers. "It was a big problem to work the team because you never got the players you wanted because people didn't release them when you needed them. College [coaches] didn't even release the players when you needed them to... now all our National Team players play professionally. Nobody is going to say that they wouldn't release them now."
This wasn't the only problem facing the USSF, an organization that had long suffered from what Sports Illustrated columnist Clive Gammon called "chronic amateurism." For example, when Osiander first began work for the USSF in the late 70s he operated as the Western Region "Federation Staff Coach." During this time Federation coaches were responsible for coaching regional teams in addition to their duties supporting the head coach Walter Chyzowych. "When [Chyzowych] traveled with the team he'd pick one of [the regional coaches] to help and so I went with the National Team as an assistant coach various times." This revolving door of players and staff didn't lend itself to team stability or on-field flow.
After his time spent as a Staff Coach, Osiander took on a larger leadership role in the USSF. "The time came when I got my own team... I got the Olympic team." The rules for the 1988 Olympic competition were different than they are today. Players from the National Team were eligible for Olympic competition. Today it is an under-23 competition with a separate coaching staff. For about two years, Osiander was in charge of both the National and Olympic teams.
The Olympic team had a good showing in the 1988 Games. Their first game ended in a 1-1 draw with Argentina. It was a near miss for the spirited Americans who had been in the lead until the final two minutes of the game. Had they won, it would have been an upset for the ages. Argentina was a team to be feared even though it had not been allowed to field players from the 1986 World Cup winning team. After tying South Korea in their next game the United States were on the verge of qualification of the knockout rounds. Their final group game, against the Soviet Union, was their toughest of all. They were sent home after losing 2-4. The Soviets went on to win the gold medal. Years later, veteran American midfielder Tab Ramos remarked that the 1988 Games were "...the first time US Men's soccer competed strongly at a high international event."
In the wake of his Olympic success, Osiander got off to a rocky start in the first two qualifying games for the 1990 World Cup. With FIFA's decision to give the 1994 World Cup to the United States came increased pressure for the Americans to qualify for the 1990 Cup. The USSF decided it needed a change.
Even though he brought the team's greatest results in a generation or two, Osiander spoke about this "realignment" without a hint of bitterness. He was pulled between his two part-time commitments: the USSF and the restaurant. With the USSF opting for a fundamentally different National Team setup, one in which the players were contracted to the Federation itself, the coach became a full-time position. Osiander was no longer the man for the job. He went on to coach the new under-23 team at the 1992 Barcelona games where they again crashed out in the group stage.
Today Osiander is retired but still active as a youth coach in the Bay Area. While he is impressed by the amount of youth players in the United States he sees room for improvement.
"What we need now is quality. We have too many clubs now. In my neighborhood we have four or five soccer clubs. Everybody's got two or three good players. We all take the good players away from the other clubs. We have to condense the clubs so there are at least 8 to 10 good players. Then you can work on those good players."
In fact, this is exactly what the USSF has done with its creation of regional soccer academies across the country. These academies are not nearly as ruthless as the Ajax Academy, detailed recently in the New York Times Magazine. Like the Ajax Academy, however, they do exist with an overt purpose in mind: to create elite soccer players. The academies gives talented Americans something they have never had before, a place where the best compete against the best. Beating up on weaker kids may be fun way to build confidence but it isn't how a player reaches his potential. There is no challenge. Tiger Woods didn't get to be the best by playing the local 9-hole week after week. Yet as recently as 2006 hotshot American soccer players had to play beneath their ability if they wanted to play at all.
The new academy system, which Osiander described as "excellent," also provides scholarship opportunities to underprivileged youth. While money is an issue, Osiander offered an interesting perspective on why more immigrant youth aren't already included in the USSF system: passports. Getting a passport for a teenager can be a problem even for kids born in the United States whose parents may not have the proficiency in English (or the paperwork) to feel comfortable seeking a passport for a child. According to Osiander, when it comes to kids without passports, "[teams] circumvent the whole thing from the beginning."
With the demographic changes taking shape in the United States - Latin immigration and the legions of youth playing soccer every day - it is hard to see the US team going anywhere but up from here. When the organization and professionalism of the contemporary USSF is compared to that of the 80s, it's clear that vast progress can be made in relatively short periods of time. When Osiander watches the US Men's National Team today, he is most proud of the "great cohesion" that he sees in the current crop of players. The cohesion and the never-say-die attitude embodied by players like Clint Dempsey and Steve Cherundolo seem to be a holdover from the squads of Coach Osiander's era.
When asked about the US's recent 1-1 draw with England he remarked, "On paper [England] should win by five but they're never going to win by five. Never... our strength is team unity and team play."
It is this team unity, this sense of bunkered-down, back-to-the-wall defending-at-all-costs team spirit that Osiander remembers with fondness. "In 92 when we played Italy in the [Olympic] opener and we lost 2-1... in the second half we were the better team and Italy had all but one Serie A players on the pitch and I had all college kids on the pitch. Now that - that’s fun."
Judging by the trajectory of the last 20 years, the future of American soccer is bright. When Osiander was a kid he had to watch the 1966 World Cup on a closed circuit in a San Francisco movie theatre. "We paid 10 bucks to get in - we were in heaven, you know? And now you see it on TV and you see every game. It started slow and it just snowballed, all at once, and I think after this World Cup it's going to get even worse and it can't get much worse."
Or maybe it can. Maybe, one day, it will get so bad that the Americans win it all.
[Brian is a writer and geographer whose pursuit of knowledge and a girl has taken him from California to Wisconsin to the Deep South. You can read about his passion for soccer at Touch and Tactics. To read more by Brian, check out his profile.]
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