Inside the head of U.S. national-team maestro Arena

	U.S. head coach Bruce Arena has been on the job for eight years in what might be the longest tenure in all of world soccer. Simon Bruty/SI
	Tenure track In his eighth year on the job, U.S. manager Bruce Arena now has the longest tenure of the 32 national-team coaches who will be at the 2006 World Cup. Here are the 10 longest-serving coaches on World Cup teams. Team Coach Date of Hire United States Bruce Arena October 1998 Sweden Lars Lagerbäck January 2000 England Sven-Göran Eriksson January 2001 Switzerland Jakob Kuhn June 2001 Czech Republic Karel Brückner December 2001 Iran Branko Ivankovic January 2002 Japan Zico July 2002 Paraguay Aníbal Ruiz July 2002 Tunisia Roger Lemerre October 2002 Mexico Ricardo La Volpe October 2002

He is, quite possibly, the world's most famous Arena, Homo sapiens division. Eight years into the Bruce Arena Era of American men's soccer, the U.S. manager is the longest-serving national-team coach in the 32-team field of the 2006 World Cup -- and perhaps the dean of all 207 national-team coaches worldwide.

That's no small feat, especially when you consider that the outspoken Arena has a habit of saying things that cause soccer honchos to turn as red as a Sam's Army T-shirt. By Arena's own reckoning, most federations would have fired him on two separate occasions: after the U.S.'s three-game losing streak during World Cup qualifying in 2001 and after his stinging remarks about MLS and U.S. Soccer officials in a 2004 New York Times article.

Yet Arena has kept his job for a reason: He wins. Since taking over the U.S. team after its 32nd-place finish at World Cup '98, Arena has won a U.S.-record 69 games while leading the Yanks to the World Cup quarterfinals in '02, easy qualification for Germany '06 and a No. 4 world ranking that (though it may be eight places too high) represents the strides his team has made. Barring a disaster (or a final-four run) in Germany, Arena will likely sign on for a third U.S. term through 2010, setting a U.S. standard (12 years in power) that may never be broken.

Back in January I began reporting the profile of Arena that appears in this week's Sports Illustrated. I spoke at length with Arena as well as his players, friends, staff, family members, competitors, fellow coaches and American soccer officials. The idea was to shed new light on a guy I have written about before and have covered since 1993, when he was still coaching at the University of Virginia.

As you might expect, a lot of good stuff didn't make the four-page story in SI, which is why I now give you: 11 More Things About Bruce Arena.

1. Arena nearly missed out on the job. If outgoing U.S. Soccer prez Alan Rothenberg had made the call on a new coach after the '98 World Cup, he almost surely would have hired Carlos Queiroz, the well-traveled former coach of Portugal's world champion youth teams. (Queiroz had been on the USSF's payroll putting together the Project 2010 report.) At France '98, USSF officials spoke with Gérard Houllier, Ruud Gullit, Johan Cruyff and Andy Roxburgh about the job, but Rothenberg's serious candidates in the end were Arena, Queiroz, Bora Milutinovic and Carlos Alberto Parreira.

After some prodding, however, Rothenberg reluctantly ceded the task of hiring a coach to his replacement. That turned out to be Bob Contiguglia, a Denver kidney specialist known as Dr. Bob, who ultimately decided that he didn't want any slick foreign coaches.

"They expect to be treated like royalty, and that doesn't work in this country," Dr. Bob says. "American players aren't used to their authoritative styles."

Viewed at first as a lightweight, Dr. Bob dissolved his first search committee (including Rothenberg) after it had voted to pursue a foreign coach, and he lit out on his own, surveying nearly two dozen MLS sources.

"The line about Bruce was always that his players will die for him, and he wins," he recalls. "So I hired him."

It was Dr. Bob who gave Arena a four-year contract in '98, affording Arena the time to rebuild the national team. It was Dr. Bob who re-pledged his support to Arena after those three straight losses in 2001. And it was Dr. Bob who refused to sack Arena after the infamous Times story -- as long as Arena apologized in a media teleconference.

"Bob Contiguglia has a value system which is pretty unique in this sport," says Arena. "Very rarely do you run into guys who are pretty honest. None of us are 100 percent honest. We all have our little white lies in life. But this guy is a pretty honest man with a lot of integrity."

Fun trivia: During the first round of interviews under Rothenberg, Arena was asked if he would consider coaching the Olympic team (again) to gain more international experience while serving as an assistant on the senior team to Milutinovic or Parreira. Not surprisingly, Arena said no, depriving us of the surefire comedy that would have ensued.

(Bora and Arena aren't exactly fans of each other, and Arena calls Queiroz's Project 2010 "a marketing ploy with no substance to maybe try and lure a sponsor. We spent about a million dollars to have people who know nothing about our soccer culture create a plan that's in a lot of garbage cans today.")