Diego Simeone is being seduced by Jurgen Klinsmann.
Don’t pull your young ones away from the computer screen just yet, folks. The Atletico Madrid manager was discussing the way his United States men’s national team counterpart sets up his team.
[ Related: Pep Guardiola praises Jurgen Klinsmann’s work for USMNT ]
Serving as “Sony Coaching Ambassador” for the 2014 World Cup, Simeone laid out his best XI for the tournament and also honored two coaches for their work in Brazil. One of those was Klinsmann.
From Sony:Coaches: Joachim Low (Germany) and Jurgen Klinsmann (USA)
Klinsmann has revolutionised football in the United States. He has been able to get a whole country behind the team and that’s very difficult in the USA. But above all, he got the team working together and for each other – and they competed at an excellent level in the World Cup. It was a great collective effort – and that’s what seduces us as coaches.
Low culminated at the World Cup everything he had been creating in the last six or seven years with Germany. It’s no coincidence that Germany won the World Cup; it was a question of growth, hard work, patience, building a strong project, advancing along the right road and ending up where great projects end – as world champions.
Klinsmann and Low started off working together and today, Germany are not only a hard-working team with a strong aerial threat, but a side with many attacking variants, great collective play and an attack with excellent positioning and movement. It’s an attractive style of football and what we saw at the World Cup was a reflection of what Germany has produced in the Champions League in recent seasons – a mix between what we have seen from Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in Europe.
Klinsmann and Simeone were never teammates, but the pair were Serie A rivals of sorts when the German played for Inter Milan and the Argentine for Pisa.
The World Cup praise has been flowing for Klinsmann in international circles, though American analysts like Alexi Lalas, Eric Wynalda and others have condemned the manager’s approach as too cautious.
Simeone didn’t take too many chances with his XI, picking 10 of his 11 players from finalists Germany and Argentina. The lone outlier? Chilean bulldog Gary Medel, who made headlines today by reportedly claiming he only wanted to play for Inter Milan (Medel is currently a member of Cardiff City).