U.S. soccer Coach Juergen Klinsmann gets a conditional vote of confidence

Juergen Klinsmann’s face was a combination of shock and horror.

His U.S. national soccer team, which rode a historic winless streak into Friday’s first qualifier of the 2018 World Cup cycle, had just fallen behind St. Vincent and the Grenadines — the 129th-best team in the world — after five minutes. A team that could seemingly go no lower had just reached a new depth: no American squad had ever given up the first goal in a game to a country ranked that low.

The U.S. would quickly rally, riding two goals from Jozy Altidore and another from the Galaxy’s Gyasi Zardes to a 6-1 win, snapping a three-game losing streak and giving Klinsmann his first win over a CONCACAF opponent since early summer.

What the result didn’t do was save Klinsmann’s job, because shortly before the game U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati met with reporters and insisted the embattled coach was safe.

Sort of.

“We expect to qualify. We expect Juergen to be the coach. But I don’t think anyone can honestly say, ‘Regardless of what happens, this is what we’re going to do.’ It’s unrealistic,” said Gulati, who has met three times with Klinsmann over the last four weeks, the final meeting last month in Washington lasting more than two hours.

“No one has got that kind of job security. Not me … not the players.”

As votes of confidence go, it was a tentative one heading into Tuesday’s second qualifier against Trinidad and Tobago, a much more dangerous opponent. But it was better than the three months of public silence that preceded it.

“It’s pretty well understood qualifying for the World Cup is the specific target and many of our agreements with coaches, not just in the senior team, there are clauses in terms of continued employment if X, Y or Z doesn’t happen, in terms of our desire to make a change,” Gulati said, according to reporters who attended Friday’s briefing.

“We have had some results which didn’t go our way, both in terms of wins and losses and play. Of course that raises concerns. The more of those you have, the more concerns are raised, and they compound very quickly. But it’s not about individual games — wins or losses.”

Read between the lines and the message is losing didn’t condemn Klinsmann and winning alone won’t save him.

Gulati, who has run the U.S. Soccer Federation since 2006 and wanted Klinsmann for his coach almost from the first day, will be patient, he seemed to be saying. But there are limits to that patience, and while those limits have been pushed, they haven’t been breached.

Klinsmann has been here before. A former World Cup champion, he faced harsh criticism during his two years as coach of the national team in his native Germany. However, the path he stubbornly followed led to a World Cup championship last summer.

He had similar grand designs for the American program when he took over in 2011. And Gulati became so convinced he could make it happen he soon extended the coach’s contract, making him technical director for all of men’s soccer as well.

The remake of U.S. Soccer is not going according to plan, though. On the field, Klinsmann’s team is a mediocre 11-8-5 since being eliminated in the knockout round of the 2014 World Cup. And the promised overhaul of the youth program is lagging as well.

The U-23 team failed to earn an automatic berth into next summer’s Olympics and must beat Colombia in a two-leg playoff to avoid the embarrassment of missing the Games for the third time in four tournaments. The U-20 team reached the quarterfinals of last summer’s World Cup but then lost to Germany and France by a combined score of 14-2 in the fall. And the U-17 team failed to win a game in its World Cup, getting eliminated in group play.

Meanwhile, Mexico, the U.S.’ chief rival, is the defending Olympic champion and has reached the semifinals of the last three U-17 World Cups. On the senior level, Mexico is the reigning Gold Cup champion and when it beat the U.S. in a playoff last month, it earned the right to represent CONCACAF in the 2017 Confederations Cup.

And now come signs Klinsmann’s supreme powers are being eroded. Last month, Sports Illustrated said Jay Berhalter, U.S. Soccer’s chief commercial director, had assumed some of Klinsmann’s day-to-day duties, going so far as to exclude the coach from an important August meeting in Chicago.

That was followed by the October departure of Sue Falsone, Klinsmann’s hand-picked head trainer. U.S. Soccer said that was a mutual decision and not a firing, something Falsone, who previously worked for the Dodgers, backed on social media.

Gulati insisted Friday those were not signs of a power struggle. Klinsmann’s responsibilities, he said, remain the same.

“There has been no change,” he said.

Nor, arguably, has there been much perspective behind the recent calls for the coach’s head.

The U.S. is less than two years removed from the most successful year in national team history — one in which it won 16 times — and just four months removed from a six-game winning streak that included consecutive victories over Mexico, Germany and the Netherlands.

Whether Friday’s win marked the start of another winning streak or just a temporary break from disaster won’t be known until Tuesday in Port of Spain, when the U.S. plays Trinidad and Tobago in a track stadium. Either way, Gulati insists he is staying the course — for now.

“Every time you don’t win a game, you think differently about everything,” he said. “Every time you win a game, the same. But you have to balance those peaks and valleys.”

Follow Kevin Baxter on Twitter @kbaxter11