“There is no doubt in my mind about it. This notion that you need a foreign coach — I’ll be very honest, our coaching staff prepared our team as well as it can be prepared. There is no foreign coach that could have done it any better. I know [U.S. Soccer president] Sunil [Gulati] likes those quick-fix, fancy type of things, but there’s not a foreign coach that will do any better than an American coach, or what I did.”
— Former U.S. coach Bruce Arena, who was fired by Sunil Gulati after the USA’s first-round exit at the 2006 World Cup and now heads the New York Red Bulls. Arena also said he didn’t believe U.S. Soccer could attract a “big-time coach” because if it could, “he would have been here already.”
(New York Times)