Coach opens door with Red Bulls, slams U.S. soccer

	Bruce Arena has returned to MLS as head coach of the New York Red Bulls, a daunting challenge for the former U.S. manager. David Bergman/SI
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Former U.S. national-team coach Bruce Arena makes his official return to MLS on Wednesday night with a doozy of a debut for the New York Red Bulls: at home against first-place D.C. United, the team he led to two MLS Cups in 1996 and '97.

Yet no matter how the Red Bulls perform for the rest of the season, having Arena back in the fold is one of the best things that could have happened to MLS. In a league that needs more buzz, Arena will no doubt provide plenty, filling reporters' notebooks with his Long Island wiseguy routine as he tackles what may be the biggest challenge of his career: making the Red Bulls matter in the Big Apple.

He's certainly off to a vocal start. For a short piece in this week's Sports Illustrated, I sat down with Arena in his Giants Stadium office last Friday before his unofficial debut, a 4-1 friendly loss to FC Barcelona. A few clear themes emerged. For starters, Arena is highly motivated (and heavily financed) to produce the real thing soccer-wise, a club that has its own credible youth-development system that feeds the senior team. You can't help but note in our interview below how often Arena uses the word real to describe his efforts with the Red Bulls.

Second, Arena isn't happy at all about the way U.S. Soccer handled his departure following the Americans' first-round exit at the World Cup. Among other things, Arena calls U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati, the longtime friend who showed him the door, a "superfan" and a "micromanager"; Arena criticizes the national training center in Carson, Calif., as "an amusement park"; and argues (passionately if not very persuasively) that his motivation to succeed in New York has nothing to do with his former employers.

"Do you think I want to show them something?" Arena says. "What am I going to show them? I've probably showed them the finest eight years of the national team they're going to see for a long time. I don't need to prove anything to them."

It makes for great copy, of course, and yet it's also important to remember that Arena's biting sarcasm (at its best) is delivered with something close to a smile. If he keeps this up, the next few years in MLS are going to be a lot of fun.

SI.com: You could have finished out your contract with U.S. Soccer over the next five months and stayed out of coaching, but you decided to come back to MLS now. Why did you want this job?

Arena: I didn't think I had the patience to sit around and collect paychecks for five months. Then this opportunity came, and [the Red Bulls] were pretty adamant about pursuing me. I got back to saying, well, s---, this is what I do, and why not get back into it? I wasn't sure if I was ready to throw myself into it right away because I spent a lot of time and energy over the last eight years with the national team. In the end I said the hell with it, I don't want anything handed to me. I don't want to be around U.S. Soccer anymore. Really, it was that simple. They helped me make up my mind.

SI.com: Why have so many good coaches had so much trouble in the job you've just taken?

Arena: I don't know, and I don't even see that as being anything I need to think about. It's just me saying, I've got this group of players, I'm in this league, what's the standard of play and how do we build a team that can be successful? Past history is immaterial to me. If that was the case then the U.S. team never would have gotten any good, because there's so many negatives coaching the U.S. team. If you dwelled on the negatives then you'd never be successful.