From the perspective of a Quakes fan, nothing would be more fun than destroying the LA Galaxy with that team’s former coach.
From a journalist’s view, the San Jose Earthquakes just finished their most embarrassing season ever, so they need the help of someone with direct experience at transforming a broken-in-pieces operation into a winning side.
As a fan and a journalist, I will ensure those two views overlap as much as possible, so I will say that Bruce Arena just might be that person. The Quakes hired him a few weeks ago as head coach and sporting director.
At age 73, Arena arrives with quite a history and serious name recognition, much of which is still in living memory, at least for me. He goes way back.
The entire history of Major League Soccer (MLS), from 1996 until now, is inseparable from the history of Bruce Arena himself. The inaugural MLS match took place at Spartan Stadium in San Jose. At the time, Arena coached the other team, D.C. United. It was the first pro game he ever coached. San Jose won on a late Eric Wynalda goal. Not yet a journalist, I was a fan in the stands that day.
Arena went on to win the first two MLS championships with that D.C. squad and then lost the third final, in 1998, to Chicago. He thus became the first coach ever to make the finals three years in a row.
Soon thereafter, Arena coached the United States Men’s National Team, who needed a new direction following a horrific performance at the 1998 World Cup in France. Arena’s first game in charge was a friendly match versus Australia, which, coincidentally, also took place at Spartan Stadium in November of 1998. I was at that game too.
Arena would eventually lead the USA to its best-ever showing at the 2002 World Cup, which took place in Japan and Korea. Surprising everyone, the USA reached the quarterfinals before barely losing to Germany.
After the team was eliminated in that game, Quakes star Landon Donovan, then 20 years old, flew right back to San Jose and came onto the field just 37 hours after he walked off the pitch in Korea. Yours truly was among those attending a huge press conference for Donovan when he returned to Spartan. Later, when he entered the game as a sub, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.
The very next season, in one of the most remarkable playoff comeback victories anyone had seen in any sport, the Quakes overturned a four-goal deficit and defeated Los Angeles in what was then, at the time, widely viewed as the best game in the league’s short history. In a match now referred to as “The Great Comeback,” San Jose ended the Galaxy’s 2003 season at Spartan Stadium.
After the historic match, Arena was among many holding court in the Quakes locker room afterward.
“That was the best game this league’s ever seen,” he told us.
Arena later returned to MLS and achieved what is now probably his best-known series of successes, as coach of the Quakes’ despised rival, Los Angeles Galaxy. He arrived partly through a disastrous 2008 season in which LA was in complete shambles. After turning around a team that included David Beckham, Arena then went on to win three more championships and several accolades with LA, resulting in Beckham calling him “the Alex Ferguson of MLS.”
Most recently, Arena repeated a similar transformation at New England, where he took a horrific side and led them to the best record in the league, all within a couple of seasons.
These are just the successes, of course. There were failures too. And resignations. Both at the league level and also following a second return to the men’s national team.
Nevertheless, I would suggest Arena is actually the Jose Mourinho of MLS. Mourinho coached Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Rome, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea twice, all within a span of 20 years. Currently, he’s at Fenerbahçe in Istanbul.
After tenures in D.C., Los Angeles, New York and Boston, Arena has already brought national attention to a perpetually dismal San Jose squad. Now he begins what just might be his last major project.
