A bit more than seven years ago, for the first and only time in my professional life, I openly and directly called for someone’s job.
It was the morning after the United States’ thoroughly embarrassing 3–0 loss to Brazil in the group stage of the 2009 Confederations Cup. The scoreline does not do any justice to how awful the U.S. was in that game, how overmatched they appeared, and how much discord seemed to be spreading through the team after a series of increasingly worrisome efforts in World Cup qualifying leading up to that summer’s test event in South Africa.