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For U.S. Soccer, a Coach Who Fit the Profile

Gregg Berhalter, who played 44 times for the U.S. national team, will now coach it.Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

U.S. Soccer took 14 months to pick a new men’s national team coach, but Earnie Stewart knew whom he wanted even before he placed a phone call to the man who would eventually get the job.

After starting in his new post as national team general manager on Aug. 1, Stewart began making calls — to coaches, sporting directors and respected former United States players — to solicit their advice in creating a literal bullet-pointed list of the qualities required in the new coach. The final profile included résumé basics like coaching licenses and top-flight experience; management-speak qualities like “open-minded and innovative” and “excellent communication skills”; and curiously specific ones, like an openness and understanding of data analytics and a “calm and confident sideline demeanor.”

Stewart’s list of candidates — more than 30 at first — was scored against the profile and then cut to about a dozen. And then, in late August, he picked up the phone.

“He called me on my cellphone,” said Gregg Berhalter, who was introduced as the national team’s new coach on Tuesday in New York. Stewart, Berhalter said, began with a simple question: “What do you think about discussing this?”

The final stages of the coaching search, which began after the team’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup and was by then nearly a year old, progressed quickly from there. Berhalter, a teammate of Stewart’s on the 2002 World Cup team, met with Stewart for more substantive conversations in Columbus, Ohio — where Berhalter coached the Columbus Crew of M.L.S. — and in Chicago, where U.S. Soccer is based. In October, Berhalter flew to Miami, where he gave a four-hour presentation on his vision for the team to U.S. Soccer’s president, Carlos Cordeiro, and its chief executive, Dan Flynn.

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Berhalter tackling Germany’s Miroslav Klose at the 2002 World Cup. U.S. Soccer said he was the first U.S. World Cup veteran to coach the national team.Credit...Christof Stache/Associated Press

In persuading them and Stewart that he was the man for the job, Berhalter said he also quelled his own doubts.

Berhalter had heard the speculation that he might be a candidate, he said, “but you never really think it’s going to come, to know that this could be a potential opportunity.”

He added, “When I got that call, it’s still very exciting.”

As he went through his interviews, he said, he decided, “I’m ready for this.”

In the end, the process to fill the position took 14 months, delayed first by the aftermath of the World Cup fail — which prompted a contentious fight for the U.S. Soccer presidency — and then by the federation’s laser-focused (and ultimately successful) effort to bring the 2026 World Cup to North America.

As the search dragged on, though, other coaching moves and U.S. Soccer disinterest ruled out one potential candidate after another. The former Red Bulls coach Jesse Marsch, another former teammate of Stewart’s, accepted an assistant’s job in Germany, and the former Mexico coach Juan Carlos Osorio — who had expressed strong interest in the United States job in an interview with The New York Times before the World Cup — was by August deep into negotiations to become Paraguay’s coach.

But there were others in the mix — and then out of it — as well: M.L.S. coaches like Tata Martino, Peter Vermes and Oscar Pareja; U.S. Soccer insiders like Tab Ramos and the interim coach who had run the team during the search, Dave Sarachan; and coaches with international pedigrees, like Osorio and Julien Lopetegui, the former Spain and Real Madrid coach, who reportedly tossed his hat in the ring last month only to be told he was too late.

Stewart acknowledged Tuesday that one of the three candidates he identified for a formal interview never got the chance for a hearing — “He had already made a different choice” — but he dismissed missing out on potential candidates as secondary to landing the one he considered the right fit.

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Earnie Stewart, the first general manager of the national team, led the search to hire Berhalter.Credit...Sarah Stier/Getty Images

Cordeiro praised the process — widely derided as ponderously slow by frustrated American fans — as thorough and as fulfilling a pledge he had made in his presidential campaign to ensure “soccer operations are run by soccer experts.”

“We have no regrets, at all,” Cordeiro said of the length of the search. “We got our best guy.”

“We haven’t sacrificed our candidates to any deadline,” he added, “because we didn’t have a deadline.”

By October, about the time Cordeiro and Flynn were meeting Berhalter in Miami, his hiring began to look like a foregone conclusion. Stewart said Tuesday that he interviewed only two candidates — Yahoo Sports reported Pareja, a Colombian who had won wide praise for his development of young players in Dallas, was the other — before picking Berhalter.

U.S. Soccer’s board of directors approved Berhalter’s hiring in a conference call on Saturday.

Berhalter’s first training camp will be in early January, though it will probably take place without many of the team’s top players, whose European clubs are under no obligation to release them that week. U.S. Soccer announced Tuesday that Berhalter’s first game would be an exhibition against Panama on Jan. 27 in Glendale, Ariz. The team will face Costa Rica in San Jose, Calif., six days later.

Until then, Berhalter, accustomed to the week-to-week access to players a club coach has, will transition to the more detached existence that international coaches use to keep tabs on their players.

He said he would try to meet with as many players as he could before they arrived in camp, starting with those in M.L.S., and then head to Europe for one-on-one sessions with those playing abroad. He vowed to create a team whose identity would be built around initiative, an attacking unit that would “disorganize” opponents through pressure and ball circulation.

“The head’s already going,” Berhalter said. “I’m already thinking of what we’re going to do.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Men’s National Team ‘Got Our Best Guy’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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