How Bora Milutinovic molded an inexperienced USA team for World Cup in 1994?

• Bora Milutinovic molded an inexperienced USA team for World Cup in 1994.
• Serb didn’t want to be passed over because he was on the short list to lead the United States.
• Bora Milutinovic was developing a reputation for making the most of underdog international teams.

Bora Milutinovic would not accept “no” as an answer. The Serb didn’t want to be passed over because he was on the short list to lead the United States at the 1994 World Cup.

Aged 47 at the time, Milutinovic was developing a reputation for making the most of underdog international teams. He had led Costa Rica to the World Cup knockout rounds in 1990. Later on, he shown his usefulness as a private detective.

President of the US Soccer Federation Alan Rothenburg enlisted Steve Sampson’s assistance in 1991 to get ready for the competition.

Sampson remembers, “One of my responsibilities was to bring up candidates for the position of national team coach, and Bora was one of those.

At the time, I was residing in the Bay Area, and Bora really located me. He questioned several spectators during a game I was watching in a San Jose stadium: “I understand Steve Sampson is here. Can you pick him out?”

“My friend, you must hire me,” he said as he approached and sat down next to me. When I told him I wasn’t handling the hiring, he responded, “You should recommend me since money is no object and my only concern is assisting the United States in reaching the World Cup’s second round.

Carlos Queiroz and Rinus Michels, two other hopefuls, had little chance. One of the most unconventional host nation preparations in World Cup history began when Sampson put Milutinovic forward for the post.

There wasn’t much hope for the USA team with three years left before the competition began. Although the Americans were widely celebrated for qualifying for Italia ’90, there being no professional league in the nation, most of the players were amateurs, and the Americans came home empty-handed.

The possibility of humiliation in front of a wide international audience when the tournament began loomed large because no host nation had ever failed to go past the group stage of a World Cup before.

The success of past hosts had never been in doubt, but for us, there was a genuine concern, according to defender Alexi Lalas, who made his international debut under Milutinovic.

“That was the goal, internally and externally; do that, and the rest will fall into place.”

The good news was that the US had a coach in Milutinovic who was already familiar with a proven formula for defying the odds. Despite starting his new position only 90 days prior to the event, he managed to guide hosts Mexico to the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup and debutants Costa Rica to the round of 16 four years later.

He got to work right away.

In order to give his freshly gathered team a crash course in international football, Milutinovic combed through the US collegiate system, extended central contracts to 30 players, and established residence in Southern California. He then created a program of 91 friendlies.

In the newly released book How to Win the World Cup: Secrets and Insights from International Football’s Top Managers, he writes that “the players needed to feel what it meant to play at the highest level.”

We performed in Sweden, Russia, North and South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay on our global tour. The players had a wonderful attitude and were really mentally tough.

“Playing so many games against other nations was crucial for teaching us what to do and how to accomplish it. Playing against such teams can educate you far more than spending hours instructing the players, in my opinion.

“During practice, we would learn how to play both with and without the ball, and after that, it was only friendlies and travel. It was easy to do, but the consequences were incredible.

Milutinovic effectively transformed the US squad into a club team. Only four professionals were playing abroad at the time, so they had a competitive edge that no other World Cup-bound team could match.

Many of us had never been on a club’s books before, so Lalas says, “our careers were absolutely backwards.”

Bora understood that in order to gain our favor, he needed to use this peculiar silver lining he had discovered.

Since the core of the team was based in residency and essentially played seasons of games, international football was just something we did when we took the field to compete at the World Cup. As we all know, one of the biggest challenges for national team coaches is the limited time they have together.

However, life in the training camp was anything but typical. In that setting, Milutinovic’s idiosyncrasies were more obvious, and Lalas called him the “most amazing and most difficult coach I ever played for” due to his coaching style.

Sampson, who had been chosen to serve as Milutinovic’s assistant in order to offer some variety as a native coach, quickly discovered that flexibility would be a useful quality while working beneath the Serb.

According to Sampson, who later led the US to the 1998 Globe Cup, “in today’s football and the previous generation in most of the world, the head coach would sit down with his assistant and go through training, but Bora never did that.”

How come you never tell us what you’re going to do for training, I questioned him one day. My friend, I have to smell the grass every single day to know exactly what the requirement is, he remarked.

As part of the pre-training socialization phase, he would play soccer tennis with the players for 40 minutes while also assessing their needs for the day.

If you’re a good enough assistant coach, he continued, all I have to do is tell you that you need x, y, and z, and you go over and take care of it. You ought to be able to come up with a strategy in your thoughts in 30 seconds and get the job done right then.

A recurring aspect of the training camp was Milutinovic’s soccer tennis sessions, during which important selections for players were made based only on their performances.

On one of the final days before cuts, I watched a teammate make the World Cup team by the manner he played a game of soccer tennis, Lalas chuckles.

“Because he also played soccer tennis, we knew Bora took it seriously. His evaluation of that soccer tennis focused more on the way the player or players approached the game collectively. What exactly are they doing? How fiercely do they compete? How did they respond to losing? How did you decide someone to date?

Many of us found it to be frustrating. He could try your patience like no other; some folks just didn’t get it. However, there was a method to the chaos.

I used to think of him as a cross between Yogi Bear and Yoda, but with respect and, in my case, a genuine affection for the trials he put me through because he was testing.

One of Lalas’ major tests was his hair. The 96-cap defender’s long beard and flowing golden locks would come to be associated with the US team during the 1994 World Cup, but Milutinovic was drawn to him when he was first planning the team.

I recalled that while we were in Phoenix, Arizona, Bora’s assistant grabbed me aside and said, “Bora wants you to cut your hair.” At the time, I had quite long hair. says Lalas.

“I became enraged and began yelling and raving about individuality, ‘this is America,’ and ‘this isn’t right. However, the truth is that I would have done everything to make that team. I can still picture myself going to the neighborhood barbershop and getting my hair cut.

“That evening, during a meeting, Bora saw me for the first time since getting a haircut. He entered and simply nodded his head in my direction before moving on. He never mentioned my hair or how I looked again since, at that point, I had passed the exam. That was a year and a half prior to the World Cup.

He was curious because he knew how significant my hair was to me. I started growing my hair out and growing a goatee after that. I was going to return with a vengeance if I had to make that sacrifice back then.

Milutinovic’s final roster selection for the competition, which left out a number of well-liked homegrown players, almost inevitably sparked debate.

Even though the 24-nation tournament meant that there would be spots in the last 16 for four third-place teams, a group that included highly regarded Colombia, a promising Romania team, and Roy Hodgson’s Switzerland wasn’t to be taken lightly.

According to Sampson, “Bora decided that defensively, we needed to be extremely well organized and that the approach would be to play not to lose rather than to win.

Instead of playing to get in behind us, we made our opponents play in front of us. That was successful, and we then had sufficient talent on the team, as seen by Eric Wynalda’s direct free-kick in our opening match against Switzerland or Earnie Stewart, Cobi Jones, and Marcelo Balboa’s outstanding performance against Colombia.

A 1-1 draw with Switzerland and a 2-1 victory over Colombia—the match in which Andres Escobar scored the infamous own goal that resulted in his murder—meant the US had accumulated enough points to advance before their final group play. Romania lost 1-0, but that didn’t stop them from qualifying for the following round.

Milutinovic and his motley crew of college athletes from the US had succeeded in their mission. Their reward was a free hit to promote their sport to the American people in the form of a last-16 match against potential champions Brazil on July 4. The game was decided by Bebeto’s goal in the 72nd minute, but the US had already proven they could compete with the best.

If you’re going to lose in a World Cup, lose to the reigning champions, and that Brazil team was unquestionably a very good one, advises Lalas.

“And with that, it was over. Everything halted, you took a deep breath, and you realized you had a hand in altering how people perceived the game. We undoubtedly felt proud that we had accomplished something and met some standards.

“Over the course of the year, I burned the candle at both ends and milked it for all it was worth; I have no regrets whatsoever. I relished every second and am still immensely proud of what transpired.

For Milutinovic, his goal had been reached. He later managed China and Nigeria at the World Cups in 1998 and 2006, respectively, giving him a record-tying five different countries to manage at the finals, tied with Carlos Alberto Parreira, another iconic figure in the coaching community.

But he wouldn’t go through anything like to what he did with the 1994 US vintage again.

Also Read

Puerto Rico reaches quarterfinals of women’s World Cup basketball

Mya Hollingshed had a game-high 29 points and 12 rebounds for Puerto...