Vlatko Andonovski has resigned as head coach of the U.S. women’s national team, less than two weeks after a Round of 16 loss to Sweden condemned his team to the worst World Cup result in program history, according to Wednesday reports from 90min and The Athletic.
Andonovski succeeded Jill Ellis in the fall of 2019, and took over a team fresh off back-to-back World Cup titles. Over four subsequent years, he became the first USWNT coach to enter multiple major tournaments and win none of them.
In many ways, initially, he picked up right where Ellis left off, implementing new ideas but riding with veteran players. Some of those players endorsed him during the coaching search, and gushed about his early influence on the team. They rolled through his first year-and-a-half on the job, winning uninterrupted.
But warning signs appeared in the spring of 2021, and intensified at the Tokyo Olympics that summer. A 3-0 loss to Sweden in the Olympic opener was startling. And in retrospect, Andonovski’s USWNT never really recovered.
The runaway pre-tournament favorites settled for bronze in Tokyo. Andonovski then attempted to engineer an overdue changing of the guard. But as he welcomed young stars like Sophia Smith, and helped reinvigorate others like Mallory Swanson, he never quite melded them into a humming unit. They lost three consecutive games last fall for the first time in three decades. Even in wins, they underwhelmed, and often looked tactically deficient.
Injuries and developmental defects were confounding factors. But Andonovski entered the 2023 World Cup as a central concern to many committed fans. He’d later say that he never felt like he was coaching to save his job, but the assumption was that he’d lose it if he fell short of the World Cup final.
And over the past few weeks, he fell way short.
No U.S. team had ever finished worse than third at the Women’s World Cup; his finished around 11th.
No U.S. team had ever scored fewer than 12 goals at a Women’s World Cup; his bagged only four.
Andonovski is, by all accounts, a good man whom players spoke highly of. He centered those players at his post-match news conference last Sunday, with the remnants of emotion staining his face.
“We didn’t expect to go out the way we did,” he said. “It is emotional. It is hard. So, I haven’t really had a chance to think about me. I don’t even wanna think about me. … I think it’s selfish to think about me, my future, what I’m gonna do, when we have 20-year-old players going through this situation. So, I wanna be there for them. I love them, I love them all. And, they’re my players, but they’re my friends.”
But this, as they say, is a business. Andonovski’s contract ran through the end of the calendar year, a U.S. Soccer spokesman confirmed to Yahoo Sports. There was virtually zero chance that it would be renewed. So, with the end in sight, Andonovski and U.S. Soccer parted ways four months early.
Sporting director Matt Crocker is now leading a standard post-tournament review, plus a coaching search. And if his first search at U.S. Soccer is any indication, it will be a thorough one. After rehiring Gregg Berhalter as U.S. men’s national team boss in June, Crocker and the federation boasted about “multifaceted evaluation mechanisms” and “cutting-edge hiring methods” within a “rigorous process.”
His USWNT process will presumably be similar.
There is some urgency — because the Paris Olympics are less than 12 months away — but finding the right person for the job will be paramount.
In the more immediate future, U.S. Soccer will also have to find a coach — perhaps a permanent coach, but more likely an interim — to take charge of the team in September, for a brief training camp and two friendlies against South Africa.
