I’ve been on the job here full-time since August, and I have yet to pull on the rubber gloves for a good, old fashioned Fisking. Well, the time has come. Behold, Der Spiegel features Marc Hujer’s moronic puff-piece on Jurgen Klinsmann’s time in charge of the United States of America (cheers or boos to Jason Davis for the link). Where to begin? With our beginnings. The article is too long to include in its entirely, so I’ve tried to stick to the most offensive bits. Feel free to read in full for context.

First, the headline: “Jürgen Klinsmann Tries to Teach Football to America” Oh hell no.

He could easily lean back in his seat, relax and let the film speak for itself. It is a documentary about the Panama Canal, its history and construction — a project the Americans completed after the French had given up. It is a hymn to America, his country. But Jürgen Klinsmann, the new coach of the US national soccer team, is sitting bolt upright in his seat. When the lights go on and the question-and-answer session begins, he immediately asks the first question.

“How many ships pass through the Panama Canal every day?”

[INANE FILLER]

“Thirty-nine ships pass through here every day,” the tour guide replies. “Wow,” the German coach exclaims.

First of all, for a two-page article, this introduction is incredibly long on nothing, and short on anything. The author attempts to bank off Klinsmann’s single question to a tour guide as some sort of metaphor for his Socratic approach to the US national team. And since when is the Panama canal a “hymn to America?” A marvelous feat of engineering and diplomacy, sure. But hardly the stuff of American dreams…

Klinsmann is sitting at the pool at his hotel in Panama City. Three American journalists who write for news websites have come to interview him. There is no camera team, and there are no photographers. The tone of the conversation is polite and respectful. The journalists don’t address him as Mr. Klinsmann, and certainly not as Jürgen, but simply as “Coach.”

This is the first of several attempts to hammer home to the reader that the US is not Germany, or indeed, most Western European nations, in that we do not send a massive press scrum to follow around a national team coach on tour with the team. Surprise! The author however repeatedly insinuates this means the press “doesn’t care” whether the US team wins or not, which is guff.

Klinsmann has found his dream job in the United States. The American national team is a perfect test laboratory. For Klinsmann, everything in America is different from the way it was in Germany. When he was the coach of the German national team, he had to spend two weeks dealing with an out-of-control debate over his use of rubber exercise bands in training. And it’s also different from his stint as coach at Bayern Munich, where he was let go after 10 months because the team’s chances of qualifying for the Champions League were in jeopardy.

The author conveniently forgets to mention Klinsmann has yet to helm the US national team in World Cup qualifier. So the comparison to Bayern is moot.

When it comes to soccer, the United States is considered a developing country. Conditions there are “like in the Wild West,” says Klinsmann. College soccer has been separate from professional soccer and the US Soccer Federation for years. A soccer academy has only been promoting new talent for the last four years. Everything is proceeding very slowly. But this is precisely what provides Klinsmann the opportunity to make a big splash as a reformer.

“A soccer academy”? Which one? And in what sense is professional soccer “separated” from NCAA? No mention made of Generation Adidas (a German company), nor the fact active MLS academies are making college selection a thing of the past. And few in the US regard Klinsmann as a “reformer.” Not even Ted Westervelt.

He wants to build a team that corresponds to his image of America: an open-minded, multicultural country. He wants it to be a team that also reflects his own story, namely that of a soccer player who played in Stuttgart, Milan, Monaco, Munich and London, and who speaks English, French and Italian in addition to his native German.

Klinsmann believes that the American national soccer team should be more American than every baseball team, in which most of the players are white. “In America, no one is completely American,” says Klinsmann. “Everyone somehow has ancestors in Europe, in Africa or in South America. A national team always represents a little bit of the character of a country.”

Klinsmann was not hired to play racial politics with the national team, nor does he need to. Both the United States and Canada have long reflected the diversity within our soccer communities, long before Klinsmann showed up. While these remarks imply the team was white bread before he took over, they’re really a Smiley Face cover for picking players with only a tangential relationship to the US.

He sounds a little like President Barack Obama, who promised to unite the United States, including its political adversaries, races and cultures. Obama also said that America has to learn from others — a remark his political rivals used as an excuse to call him a traitor.

Yup, Klinsmann is Barack Obama, and his critics are the Republican Party. That’s not incredibly simplistic at all. Incidentally, Obama’s political rivals would call him a traitor no matter what he did.

Klinsmann knows that his new freedom has a lot to do with the relative unimportance of soccer in America. There are Americans who say that soccer isn’t a sport for men, but for girls and pansies who don’t have what it takes to play American football. In this sense, America isn’t too weak for soccer; rather, soccer is too weak for America. These attitudes have helped American soccer, especially the national team, carve out a comfortable niche for itself. The team has never been under the unconditional pressure to win. “In this sense, the environment is different in the United States,” says Klinsmann. “If you lose a match here, nobody cares. Then people say: ‘Oh, you lost yesterday. No problem.’”

Ah, the old “Americans think soccer is gay” line. Fine. But since when does “nobody care” in America if the national team sucks? Again, he’s yet to do anything meaningful with the team. If Klinsmann fails to do well in Round Three of CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, a great many Americans—including sports journalists—will care. A lot.

He needs a lot of optimism to maintain such hopes. Klinsmann’s advisor, Roland Eitel, says that if players from the United States were ever hired to play for clubs like Everton or Hannover 96, they would think to themselves: “Wow, we’ve really made it.” But then, says Eitel, Jürgen tells them Everton isn’t the future, nor is Hanover, but that the future is Liverpool and German powerhouse FC Bayern.

Did this person do any research, at all? Any player of any nationality would regard an opportunity in the Premier League as ‘making it.’ It’s also not the case that Americans have yet to break into the top four clubs. It’s the goal of any red-blooded American soccer player to play for the best clubs in the world. Also, calling Liverpool the “future” isn’t doing much for Klinsmann’s street cred.

Now Klinsmann’s biggest objective will be to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The first elimination matches are scheduled for this summer. He recently said that he hopes to discover America’s Messi. It made some players on his team cringe, because they feared that the expectations were getting too high. And yet the things that count for Klinsmann’s team are still relatively minor, like its recent 1:0 win over Venezuela or the friendly match against Panama, a country with less than half as many people as New York City.

Hey, Hujer. Look up USA v. Spain, Confederations Cup 2009.

The final two paragraphs don’t really make much sense, so I won’t bother. This sort of thing wouldn’t normally bother me so much except Der Spiegel has a lot of readers, and so Germans will continue to snicker at US soccer because it’s being filtered through someone who doesn’t know how to use the Internet.