How does Bruce Arena keep doing it? (Hint: He’s been telling us all along)

Bruce Arena exists in an odd place inside American soccer. For about 30 years we’ve puzzled over how Arena does it? How does he keep winning, at pretty much every stop, when tactical innovation has never been his thing?

Well, players keep telling us how. And Arena himself has provided some pretty solid answers all along, continually advising (sometimes even lampooning) media types that a focus on tactics is almost always misplaced.

And yet, even hearing the answer, the same answer, over and over, still we keep asking: how does Bruce Arena do it?

It’s an oddity of the human condition, this occasional and curious propensity to deny the obvious. Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation is usually the best one, but the hunt for complexity where it may not exist is sometimes, somehow, irresistible.

So we should finally settle on this: he’s a master at managing player relationships, and he doesn’t over complicate the game. He cares about players and treats them with respect, assigning them to positions where they are most likely to find success.

Simple? Yep. But that stuff goes a long, long way. Further than most of us seem to understand.

Which is why we search forth for a more complicated answer. Even as Arena is doing it again, this time with the San Jose Earthquakes. Yes, it’s early. But signs indicate that he has wisely rebuilt the Earthquakes roster around players he trusts, and is now managing those relationships so smoothly that it is reversing years of organizational disorder.

‘Bruce has a way of connecting …’

Dax McCarty, the longtime MLS midfielder and now AppleTV studio analyst, admitted on a recent wrapup show that everyone is still asking about Arena’s secret sauce. But he did explain that modern coaches, eschewing older methodologies, now make better efforts to understand and connect more personally with their players. McCarty suggests Arena was way ahead of the game on that one.

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