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

You can’t deny they played for him, and for each other. This was no capitulation, no cowed or callow performance against one of the world’s best teams.

So Gregg Berhalter has not lost the locker room. But how, after this, can he not lose his job? How can anyone trust that he is the man to shape the USMNT into a team good enough to make a major impact at the 2026 World Cup? They have at best stagnated since Qatar 2022, and perhaps even regressed.

There were warning signs ahead of this summer’s Copa América, the most useful yardstick before the US, Canada and Mexico welcome the Fifa 48-team, three-ring circus in 2026. The chaotic 5-1 friendly defeat to Colombia last month. The Concacaf Nations League in March, which the US won but needed a 96th-minute own goal to avoid defeat against Jamaica in the semi-final. The 3-1 home friendly loss to Germany last October, in which Berhalter’s side looked naive and outclassed. Last November’s trauma-resurfacing 2-1 Concacaf Nations League second-leg defeat (albeit aggregate win) against Trinidad & Tobago.

Related: USMNT crash out of Copa América after contentious defeat to Uruguay

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

Fans in the stands were reduced to cheering on Bolivia via mobile phone updates in the hope that arguably the Copa’s worst team might spring a shock against Panama, and praying for mercy from the pitiless VAR gods after Uruguay’s borderline-offside 66th minute winner.

As a 36-year-old center back glued the defense together before the desperate mayhem of the final stages, as Berhalter threw on two forwards from the English second tier, the enterprise had an echo of late-era Jürgen Klinsmann. The period when initial ambitions of turning the US into a star-spangled version of Germany had to be scaled back. Ambitious tactics were replaced by the more prosaic reality of banging the ball long to Jozy Altidore; from fancy passing triangles to back to square one. A program in an identity crisis, and then a results emergency.

On Monday at least the football was neater and smarter. But Klinsmann took a much less gifted US squad to the semi-finals of the 2016 Copa, where they were dissected by Argentina. Despite home advantage, this is the first time since the 2007 Copa that the US have failed to advance from 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 might have conjured up: to “change the way that the world sees American soccer.”

If that’s been achieved since he took charge at the end of 2018, it’s through the individual achievements of the likes of Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie at their clubs, not via the national team.

Berhalter did, though, stabilize a keeling program in the wake of the 2018 World Cup qualification debacle, introduce and develop talented youngsters. Qatar 2022 met reasonable expectations, with the US playing admirably against England, getting the win they needed against Iran, then losing in the round of 16 to a superior Netherlands team. This, though, third in the group behind Uruguay and Panama, is failure. It is everyone, players and staff, falling short.

Berhalter was rehired a year ago after a six-month void following the exit from the World Cup and an investigation into a violent incident from 1992. Matt Crocker, the new US soccer technical director lured from English football, adopted a “multifaceted evaluation mechanism” with “advanced data analytics, sophisticated metrics, and cutting-edge hiring methods to profile and rank each candidate.”

This was an attempt to avoid making a choice centered on gut instinct, with the requisite traits essentially ruling out a big-name egomaniac mercenary who might be happy to parachute in for a year or two and collect a generous paycheck, but who probably wouldn’t want to spend much time making small-talk by the water-cooler.

And how many in-demand elite coaches would accept being asked to submit to psychometric testing in the first place? Wherever, say, Jürgen Klopp ends up next, it is hard to imagine the former Liverpool manager sitting for an interview in which he is asked, “are you able to regulate your own behavior by understanding yourself in a variety of situations?”

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

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

For all the advances in analytics and professionalism, soccer remains substantially impacted by force of personality, mastery of split-second moments and sheer dumb luck, especially at international level where a manager has only a limited impact on the available talent pool and players spend the vast majority of their time living in different countries, being coached by somebody else.

This being sports, Tim Weah momentarily losing his mind against Panama and whacking an opponent was not foreseeable. And it was probably hugely costly. But that’s not only because of Weah. It’s also because his teammates failed to overcome the self-inflicted adversity in what proved the pivotal group game.

Having rehired a long-tenured, affable, MLS-reared tactics wonk via a process seemingly designed to exclude big-name, big-personality, hired guns, the US then lost to Uruguay, managed superbly by a legendary eccentric, the Argentinian, Marcelo Bielsa. He’s had more than a dozen managerial roles over his long and peripatetic career, including five in the past decade.

It seems obvious that Crocker is not the kind of man to make a snap change; he’ll want to workshop it, in triplicate. The US don’t have another game scheduled until 7 September – a friendly against Canada, who, as it happens, have qualified for the knockout stages of the Copa under the management of Jesse Marsch, an American who didn’t get the US role last year.

“We’ll do a review and figure out what went wrong and why it went wrong,” Berhalter told reporters on Monday. “Just to see the guys’ faces in the locker room and to see the emotion 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 it, it’s really as simple as that.”

Asked if he was still the right man for the job, he replied: “Yes”. But the sole quantifiable standard that truly counts is results, especially in a scenario where only World Cups – especially one on home soil – hoist the US team out of its niche status into the wider public consciousness.

In a country with a population of over 330m, the Colombia thrashing was watched by a combined English- and Spanish-language television audience of 1.3m. Last week’s loss to Panama averaged 2.5m on Fox. But the goalless draw with England at Qatar 2022 attracted 20m viewers.

Crocker need not bother with the PowerPoint presentations, morass of metrics and blank business jargon. This is the judgment call that matters: do you still believe this man can lead this team at minimum into the quarter-finals of the 2026 World Cup? And within that framing, 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 told Fox Sports after Monday’s defeat. “I felt like we gave it everything but just couldn’t find the solution.” The next steps, he added, are “regrouping and finding an identity again”. The early exit means that, again, the US will go into a World Cup uncertain of its global status and with everything to prove – but with the “young and up-and-coming” label not fitting snugly like it did in 2022. And with continuity losing its cachet.

On an individual basis the squad, when fully fit, is better than it was 18 months ago. The biggest gap, a goalscorer, has been plugged in the shape of Folarin Balogun. Gio Reyna is now a core member. The kids are growing up; Pulisic, McKennie and Tyler Adams, all 25, and Weah, 24, should be in their prime. They no longer lack major tournament experience. But the performances and results don’t reflect that, not consistently enough, and especially not against benchmark nations such as Uruguay that Berhalter has proved unable to beat. In seven years in charge, Berhalter has still not led the US to a win over a team in the top-25 of Fifa’s rankings outside Concacaf.

“Our tournament performance fell short of our expectations. We must do better. We will be conducting a comprehensive review of our performance in Copa América and how best to improve the team and results as we look towards 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.