An excerpt from Leander Schaerlaeckens' "The Long Game"

From THE LONG GAME by Leander Schaerlaeckens, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Leander Schaerlaeckens.

Eleven fit and well-groomed men sat around a long table in the meeting room of a swanky hotel. They all wore the same bright-red polo shirt under a gray zip-up hoodie, both emblazoned with the U.S. Soccer crest. The table was littered with laptops, water bottles, and espresso cups, and all around them stood whiteboards scribbled with schedules, tactical formations, meeting agendas, principles, objectives. Gregg Berhalter and his staff of nine coaches and data analysts had assembled to analyze the video footage from the morning’s practice session. The eleventh man was Jason Lee, the team’s leadership coach, a middle-aged Englishman whose job was effectively to coach the other coaches on coaching. This was the second of the three meetings the coaches would hold on a Friday in the middle of the men’s national team’s annual January camp in 2024. 

It was 4 p.m. when the meeting started, the sun slowly setting while the wind whipped up the palm trees outside the second-floor windows, the outer bands of a storm approaching Orlando. To this point in the day, the players, coaches and staffers had adhered closely to a detailed schedule. But there was no clock on this meeting. They had all night if they needed it. 

Twenty-five players started this two-week camp and essentially constituted a national B-team. With a few exceptions, they sat somewhere towards the bottom of the depth chart in their positions. These were marginal national team prospects. Historically, the point of the January camp was to give the domestically based national team players some extra practice during the long Major League Soccer off-season, while their colleagues playing overseas slogged through the middle months of their club campaigns. It was a casual affair back then, dubbed “Camp Cupcake” by the players. Every now and again, a player will use the January camp to vault into the A-team, but it’s rare. Just one player in camp had been on the twenty-six-man roster at the 2022 World Cup fourteen months earlier. If even two or three here in Orlando made it onto the 2026 World Cup team, this endeavor would have been a great success. A series of glorified off-season workouts for long-shot talent is what this really was. In the context of the national team, the stakes couldn’t be lower. 

But Berhalter wanted every camp to be run at the same speed, which is to say, all out. No matter who the opponent was, or what players were available, every squad would be treated like the A-team. The men’s national team would travel with all thirty-two full-time staffers, toting around all two hundred and fifty trunks of gear, set up their recovery lab, equipment room, coaches’ room, and communications room, taking over much of a hotel. 

So here they were, the coaches and the analysts, poring over every little detail, frame by frame, from a practice session they had just run. To an outsider—even one with a lifelong love for soccer—the repetitiveness of the video analysis over a few hours was crushingly boring. But Berhalter had a terrific time. He loved this stuff. 

That morning in January 2024, the coaches assembled in a small theater at Orlando City Soccer Club’s practice facility, going over the video they picked out to show the players. When the team, mostly players in their early twenties, walked in, the coaches snapped to attention. The players filed by the coaches and gave them all a fist bump or a hand clasp, even though the entire group had breakfast together not that long ago. The greetings were mandatory, after all. 

The subject of the day’s video session was the team’s pressing scheme. Berhalter and his staff wanted the players to charge at their opponents as a unit in an effort to win the ball or, at a minimum, disrupt the other team’s buildup play. Berhalter paced the front of the room in shorts and a tight, red quarter-zip, same as all the other staffers, pointing out mistakes in three quick video sequences but cloaking them in a series of compliments on all the things the players had done well. He called on most of them to analyze the footage, smiling as he asked questions. They answered like young men anywhere when called on by their teacher: apprehensively, lacking authority, with answers that sounded like questions. Berhalter gave encouraging responses, even when the answers were very wrong. Then assistant B.J. Callaghan took over and broke the team into small groups to discuss defensive principles and report back. The energy and dynamic felt a lot like that of a college class. Which passes from the opponent trigger the USA’s press? Who springs the trap? To which opponent does every player move? Who rotates where on the second pass? How do they shift when the opponent manages to move the ball through their press? In slow-motion replay, it all looks a bit like a high-society dance in 18^th century England, with partners shuffling through an intricate pattern, joining and twirling and separating again.

The team practiced in what used to be the Houston Astros’ spring training facility, now converted into a soccer field—a metaphor for the trajectory of the two sports, maybe. High overhead, a giant eagle’s nest sat perched on a light stanchion. A bald eagle atop another stanchion presided over practice, sometimes peering over, unimpressed, at the drone a coach had sent up to record the action. 

On the field, every line and cone and dummy and ball had been placed in exact accordance with a document sent around that morning with a detailed rundown of practice: staff assignments, drills, objectives, tactical shapes, player groupings, and so on. The coaches warmed up separately with a game of pig-in-the-middle. Berhalter showed off, doing tricks. As the players laced up, the head coach hyped everyone up. But they all knew what he expected from them. Total intensity from the players for the length of a short, well-orchestrated session. Attention from the staffers, too—no phones, face the field. No sunglasses. No ankle-socks. Anybody whose feet touch the grass must be in soccer cleats, even the videographers. It rained in squalls of warm drops but nobody broke stride as the silent, stone-faced players moved through the drills, running like hell for a few minutes until a shrill whistle released them for some rest.

***

Now, around the long table, there was no escaping it: Berhalter and his staff were having a meeting about a meeting, discussing how the morning’s video session with the players had gone. Berhalter fretted that, at half an hour, the session ran too long, stretching the attention spans of young men. 

The coaches then analyzed practice, drill by drill, with each coach assessing the exercise he had been responsible for. Berhalter challenged them constantly. Were the turnaround points for a running drill in their optimal position? Did the coaches demand too much deceleration of the players, increasing the risk of injury? Was the spacing of the playing area ideal, creating enough congestion while still leaving open passing lanes? Of a ball exercise in which players quickly clipped the ball around in a complicated pattern and then moved on to the next station, Berhalter wanted to know whether the passing asked of them was “psychologically safe.” Was the drill too hard, in other words, and did it present a danger of demoralizing the players? His staff had to show Berhalter their work, to explain their thinking—because it all must reflect deep thought. Did they think they stopped practice too often to instruct and correct? Or not enough? Should they acquire a pricey portable big screen that could be wheeled out onto the field to give the players feedback in real time? They decided against it—too disruptive. A debate broke out on the ideal dimensions for the pressing drill, the main event of practice 

Satisfied that the format of practice had been well covered, they moved on to watching the actual practice footage. On a big screen at the end of the room, the coaches played, paused, discussed, rewound, replayed, discussed, rewound again, discussed some more, and on and on, for each sequence. Each touch and every step was noted and considered. “That’s interesting,” Berhalter said every now and again. Sometimes, the coaches disagreed and debated, bringing in a whiteboard with the outline of a soccer field and magnets acting as players, just to make their points. 

They looked for patterns and behaviors. On the screen, Duncan McGuire, a young striker for Orlando’s MLS team, struggled to execute the press, amusing the coaches at first. He looked lost, drifting far from his tight banks of teammates—made all the more obvious by the drone’s bird’s eye angle. There was no hiding in the film session. The coaches grew exasperated by him. The lab rat was not moving through the maze as he was supposed to. 

“I have a crazy idea,” Berhalter announced at one point, his signature Air Jordans resting on the meeting table. “Anybody see AZ as a fullback?” AZ was Aziel Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old midfielder for St. Louis City, who had impressed the room with his ball recoveries. 

They wouldn’t need all night after all. Picking through every last frame of the hour-ish practice session would take them three hours, although they planned to show footage to the players after dinner. But there was always the next day, when they would scrimmage Argentinian powerhouse River Plate, producing more footage to pick through. And every day of camp after that, each presenting more chances to talk for hours and hours about tactics and process and performance.

Less than six months later, Berhalter and his staff would be gone.

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