US Soccer Sporting Director

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U.S. Soccer Matt Crocker: USMNT coach interviews won’t start with, ‘What do you offer us’

U.S. Soccer sporting director Matt Crocker’s career has taken him to some enviable locales. With the English Football Association, Crocker watched Under-17 and Under-20 teams hoist World Cup titles in India in 2017. More recently, the 48-year-old was tasked with plotting the sporting direction of Premier League side Southampton. He has spent years working at the very highest level of the game.
But he started his career as a coach in a decidedly quainter place: Little Rock, Arkansas. At the time, Crocker was a 17-year-old apprentice player with Cardiff City and keen to start working towards his coaching licenses. A friend, as Crocker shared, had moved to the United States to start an indoor soccer center, dubbed “Soccer USA.” These were the halcyon days of the American soccer camp when the country’s developmental landscape was much more reliant on the “Soccer USAs” of the country than on complex, expensive academy systems.

“Six of us would jump in a van and we’d drive wherever they told us to on Monday,” Crocker said Tuesday during a roundtable discussion in Washington D.C., where he was introduced as U.S. Soccer’s new sporting director. “(We’d) coach all week, come back on a Friday night and play an indoor showcase game, then play an 11-v-11 game on Saturday and travel again on Sunday. What a perfect life, as a 17 or 18-year-old to be able to do that in a country like America.”  Crocker did this for a few summers before eventually landing in Kansas City, where he coached for a local club, Louisburg Legends. His wife, who was then his girlfriend, joined him for the adventure. The two were like “aliens,” Crocker said, and it took a bit of time to get used to the local wildlife. “(The children on our street) had never really seen or heard our accent before,” Crocker said. “There were a couple of kids on the deck with my wife and I and there were a couple of, what are they called, lightning bugs? They flew past. My wife asked the kids, ‘What’s that?’ They said ‘That’s a lightning bug!’ and then the kid went ‘And that’s a dog! And that’s a cat!’”

Now, Crocker has returned to the United States to take a decidedly bigger job than his first coaching gig in Arkansas. He is charged with overseeing U.S. Soccer’s sporting operations just three years out from the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup, which the U.S. will co-host. It is a massive opportunity to make an outsized impression on the sport in this country. His first tasks, even before he officially starts in the position on Aug. 2, are substantial: hire a coach for the men’s team and oversee the women’s team as they seek a third consecutive World Cup trophy.  “I’m really excited,” Crocker said. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared in some other ways as well, because I already know there’s some great work going on, but I already know I need to come in and have an impact and I need to show my worth. I’m excited and a tad bit scared at the same time.”

In January, the federation contracted consulting group Sportsology to conduct a thorough search for coaching and sporting director candidates, domestically and internationally. After that search concluded, the federation looked at how the sporting director candidates ranked in four “buckets,” as U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone said on Tuesday. “This position is a huge position and nobody will be an expert in all of them,” Parlow Cone said. “So we looked at different expertise in the different buckets. We started contacting them and having initial conversations and then moved a number of people forward to Zoom interviews. Our group decided on who to move forward to the in-person interviews.” Parlow Cone said the federation eventually narrowed the field down to 10 candidates, then seven, and then three final candidates. Two of those finalists were diverse candidates, Parlow Cone said. From the beginning, though, Crocker stood out.  “(I had a) gut feeling after the first interview,” said Parlow Cone.

Crocker’s role will be narrower than previous sporting director Earnie Stewart’s was. In March, the federation posted a job listing for a “chief soccer growth officer,” who will oversee the growth of the game at the amateur and youth levels. Oversight of referee and coaching education will also fall under the purview of other officials at the federation, leaving Crocker free to focus on the national team programs alone, from the youth levels through to the senior team.

To Crocker, it was a golden opportunity. He filled a similar role at the FA, helping craft the “England DNA” coaching and playing philosophy that has helped England’s men’s and women’s programs ascend to challenge for, and win, trophies. He did so alongside current England men’s national team manager Gareth Southgate and current Newcastle sporting director Dan Ashworth.  In his six years at the FA, Crocker also oversaw England’s national teams (under-15s to under-20s) on the men’s and women’s sides, including the men’s wins at the Under-17 and Under-20 World Cup in 2017, and their European Championship at under-19s level the same year.

He returned to Southampton in 2020 — in a previous stint he oversaw an academy that produced the likes of former Welsh winger Gareth Bale, Liverpool’s Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Manchester United’s Luke Shaw and England international and Southampton captain James Ward-Prowse — and helped establish the “SFC Playbook,” which focused on streamlining style of play from the youth levels through to the first team. Crocker was less involved in player transfers at Southampton and more focused on modernizing the academy, recruiting domestic players and building out the philosophy and organization within the club.

Crocker’s role reduced some when Sport Republic bought the team at the start of 2022, and he eventually decided to leave at the end of this current campaign, one which sees Southampton on the brink of relegation. When asked whether he’d learned any lessons from a trying campaign, Crocker pointed to the club’s injury woes and turnover before focusing on what he considered Southampton’s positives and how they might translate to the U.S. job.

“One of the things that I’d say is we’re a club that has a great business model,” Crocker said. “We’re a club that has a clear identity and a style of play and there’s definitely things that I’ve learned at Southampton that I believe I can transition into my role here. But without any context, I need to come in, listen, learn and understand and then see where there’s some potential to add some value. But I already know there’s some great work going on. My job is to identify that, nourish, support and grow it but maybe try and identify where there are some opportunities. That will take some time.”

When Sportsology reached out about the U.S. sporting director job, Crocker immediately understood the magnitude of the opportunity. “I had to pinch myself,” said Crocker, who will remain at Southampton through the end of the season. “When you think of the size and scope of the (U.S.) program and the opportunities that are coming up both on the men’s and women’s programs, it’s been my sole focus outside of trying to help Southampton fight their way out of the position that we’re in now. It was the only thing I was interested in.”

In many ways, his strengths — at both the FA and Southampton — appear to fit perfectly with what U.S. Soccer said it was looking for: someone who can help organize and manage the sporting department and also maximize the success and development pipeline of youth national teams. “I just think I’ve got a skillset that enables people to come together,” Crocker said. “We always talk about this ‘85/15’ rule. So, 85% of the time we agree, 15% of the time we may not, but when we leave the room we’re all aligned. … My job is to make sure in that 15% that I can make a decisive decision that everybody understands why we’re making it and also (be) the first one to hold my hand up if it goes wrong.”

Crocker’s first hire will be a crucial one not just because of the stage upon which that coach must succeed, but also because of the current state of the program. The U.S. men’s team is coming off of a strong performance at the Qatar World Cup but has also had to navigate significant off-field drama involving one of its young stars, Gio Reyna, and former coach Gregg Berhalter. Crocker declined to speak about individual candidates on Tuesday, but his comments painted a clear picture. He seemed optimistic about the performances of the team under Berhalter, especially at the World Cup. He spoke about wanting the U.S. to be an aggressive team, one that can control games at moments and also play on the front foot. He said he also wants a team that is willing to play higher up the field and to defend in one-on-one moments. Crocker indicated that the hire would be charged with continuing the progress the team made in this last cycle, not tearing it down and restarting.

Berhalter remains a candidate to continue as coach, but the federation no doubt is considering others. That likely includes American manager Jesse Marsch, who had a successful stint with Red Bull Salzburg in Austria’s Bundesliga before a short stint with RB Leipzig and then mixed results in the Premier League with Leeds. “The identity that Gregg has helped to build and obviously (interim manager Anthony Hudson) has taken forward, as well, we want to grow and build on that,” Crocker said. “Because we’ve got some players with huge potential and huge levels of creativity to be able to identify and then deliver those key moments in games.”

Crocker, and the federation as a whole, are not searching for a candidate who is looking to instill his own philosophical approach to the position. Crocker, along with Parlow Cone and CEO JT Batson, spoke frequently on Tuesday about establishing and installing processes and roles. When it comes to the coaching hire, Crocker seemed to leave that hierarchy pretty clear. “I don’t see the interview process starting with, ‘What do you offer us,’” Crocker said. “For me it’s, ‘This is our program, this is our vision, this is where we’re gonna be going.’ “I want to make sure the coaches understand that and they get excited about what they’re adding to that program rather than ripping it up and starting again and just bringing their own philosophy and their own ideas.”

Crocker, who will have the final say on the coaching hire, mirrored Parlow Cone’s sentiments regarding the timeline for a new coach. “For us right now, it’s about making sure we nail the process,” he said. “What exactly it is we want to find out — and making sure that we’ve got the right data modules to give us the information, making sure we’ve got the right background checks that give us the leadership style and then to make sure that we provide the right opportunities for the coaches to come in and show their best selves through the process of what they can offer.”

In some ways, Crocker stepping into the federation from the outside brings a fresh set of eyes to a landscape that needs it. While he acknowledged Crocker has a lot of work to do to better understand the scope of the job and the many areas that need help, he also was quick to point out that he is now overseeing a program that has shown plenty of progress on the men’s side and that sets the standard on the women’s side. “During my time (with the English national teams) when I looked at the U.S. (men’s) teams that were coming through, they were unbelievably competitive,” Crocker said. “And I mentioned the group of (birth year) 2000 that have gone through and gone on to be great players currently and are even still developing. I actually don’t think they’ve underachieved. We still have to remember that the academy ecosystem in the MLS is still very much in its infancy. There’s still going to be time to grow”

The hope is that the men can continue to climb in relevancy and competitiveness and that the women’s national team will be able to hold off a number of teams that are closing the gap as investment in the game grows globally. “I think it’s about continuing to harvest and grow that mentality,” Crocker said. “We should breed fear into the opposition again.” Crocker sees the significant progress the country has made since he first showed up in Little Rock coaching at Soccer USA. And while it may not need a complete reset, he’ll now be tasked with overseeing the greatest chance the program has to leap forward since the 1994 and 1999 tournaments propelled the professional levels of the game in the U.S.