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In Mexico, the coach's seat is always hot

PASADENA, Calif. — A few weeks ago, Juan Carlos Osorio, the coach of the Mexican national soccer team, sat in the sunny courtyard of a Beverly Hills hotel.

It was the sort of loss that gets a coach fired, especially in Mexico — provided Osorio didn’t quit first.

“I went into the locker room, splashed cold water on my face, loosened my tie and told my team, ‘If there is no trust in our work then I will go out there right now and tell everyone I resign,'” he recalled.

Osorio’s players stood behind him, and to the surprise and dismay of the Mexican fans and news media, so did the country’s soccer federation. Twelve full-time and interim coaches in 12 years were apparently enough, at least for the moment.

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The decision may be vindicated in the coming weeks, as El Tri, which opens play Sunday against Germany at the 2018 World Cup, tries to advance beyond the round of 16 for the first time since 1986. Or it may not be. In which case, there’s no mystery about whom the nation will blame for another underachieving performance: their Colombian-born, U.S.-educated coach.

Osorio has been under more or less sustained attack from the moment he was awarded the Mexico job in fall 2015. El Tri legends came forward like a Greek chorus to denounce the choice, mocking him as a physical trainer (which he was early in his career), putting air quotes around his “titles” and insisting that there were dozens of better options in Mexico alone.

In the 2 1/2 years since then, Osorio has won more than two-thirds of the games he has coached, and yet the chants for his ouster — “Fuera Osorio!” — have only grown louder.

“If Osorio is such a good coach, why isn’t he managing the Colombian team?” said Hugo Sánchez, a former national team coach and Mexican soccer star.

Fans complain that he is too analytical. “Professor” they call him, not entirely out of respect. They wave off the many teams Osorio has beaten as second rate and fixate on the handful of games he has lost. Most of all, they complain that he is not Mexican.

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“It’s a matter of identity,” Sánchez said. The relentlessly negative Mexican news media, which is given very little access to Osorio and the national team, only amplifies these complaints.

“El Tri Leaves Doubts on Its Way to Russia,” was a typical headline assessing the team after it tied Wales here, 0-0, in a warmup match recently before the Cup.

Osorio has clearly reached his limit. During an interview in May and one last year in New York, he was remarkably candid about the untenability of his position.

“They’re not happy with us winning,” he said. “We have to win and humiliate the opposition. There is no country in the world that keeps so much pressure on a national team coach. There is none.”

As much as anything, this is a function of Mexico’s modern World Cup history.

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Since 1994, the team has never failed to advance out of its group. It has also never managed to win a knockout game, losing six consecutive times in the round of 16 in a highlight reel of soccer heartbreak: Mexico has gone down on penalty kicks (Bulgaria, 1994), on a botched offside call (Argentina, 2010) and on a penalty that wasn’t (the Netherlands, 2014).

It is a record of failure that in most other nations would produce a certain kind of fatalism, if only as a form of self-protection. But to Mexico’s fans, each World Cup disappointment has increased the size of the debt they feel is owed to them and ratcheted up the heat on the team’s coach to finally collect it — to right this cosmic wrong and validate a nation’s unwavering faith.

In Mexico, the blending of fantasy and reality is not just a literary tradition. “To coach Mexico you have to be sort of a magician, you have to sell illusions,” the Mexican novelist and soccer columnist Juan Villoro said.

Going into this World Cup, Mexico’s fantasies may be more vivid than ever. With more than a dozen of its members playing in top leagues around Europe, the Mexico team is considered one of its best.

At the same time, the quadrennial curse looms. Mexico had a punishing draw: It shares a group with the defending champion, Germany, and strong teams from Sweden and South Korea. If Mexico finishes second, a likely outcome, it will probably play Brazil, one of the most heavily favored teams to win the tournament, in the round of 16.

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The glare will also be unusually intense. El Tri has long been America’s Other Team: It plays most of its friendlies on American soil, selling out stadiums, such as the Rose Bowl, that the U.S. national team could never hope to fill.

The Mexican top level league, Liga MX, routinely draws larger American TV audiences than Major League Soccer or England’s Premier League. With the U.S. team failing to qualify for the World Cup, Fox and ESPN are pouring resources into exhaustive coverage of Mexico in both English and Spanish.

On top of all this, Osorio knows he is auditioning for his next job. He will almost certainly leave Mexico after the World Cup, whether by his own choice or the federation’s.

“It’s not that I’m not happy with the players — I’m very happy with the players — but the environment is just unbelievable,” he said.

Osorio makes no secret about his desire to coach the U.S. team — “that’s a job that any manager would like to have,” he said — and he is, in some respects, the perfect candidate for it.

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He has the international pedigree, having coached in Colombia, Mexico and even England, as an assistant at Manchester City. As a native Spanish speaker steeped in Latin America’s soccer culture, he might give the United States an edge it badly needs in the competition for young stars of Mexican descent who live in the United States and can choose to play for either national team.

But Osorio also has a deep personal connection to the United States. That’s where he met his wife and where both of his teenage sons were born.

He first came to the United States at age 26, after an injury cut short his playing career in Colombia and Brazil. He attended a small college in Dubuque, Iowa, but dropped out after a semester and moved to New York City. An unauthorized immigrant, he cobbled together a living in construction and food service.

Osorio went back to school and regained his legal status, finishing his degree in exercise science and playing soccer at Southern Connecticut State University, before returning to New York to work as a personal trainer in Queens.

In 1998, at age 37, he landed his first soccer job, as a conditioning coach for the now-defunct Staten Island Vipers in the United Soccer League. Over the next two decades, he bounced from country to country and from club to club, always seeking the next opportunity to coach at a higher level.

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As a coach, Osorio is as much a product of the United States as he is of Latin America. His high-intensity, situation-centric training sessions are modeled after a Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls practice that he managed to talk his way into during his time in Iowa. And he has tried to import some of the physicality and competitiveness of American sports culture to Mexico.

He is always changing his lineup, often benching stars, both to better exploit his competition and so that his players won’t become complacent. This is another source of his unpopularity among a Mexican public that sees his refusal to commit to a single group of players as a lack of confidence in the team. Osorio has little patience for the criticism, which he considers emblematic of Mexico’s problematic attitude toward soccer.

“We think we can win by just being talented, we don’t like really the competition,” Osorio says. “We are more into diving, faking and talking bad about other people, creating animosities and creating problems.”

Stylistically, Osorio is everything his beloved predecessor, Miguel Herrera — last seen rolling around on the grass of the 2014 World Cup in fits of operatic fury and elation, before being fired for punching a broadcaster — was not. He takes extensive notes on the sideline in color-coded pens, quotes Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and is prone to lengthy digressions about the chemistry of the human brain.

Without the pedigree of a successful playing career, the calling card for most professional soccer coaches, Osorio’s rise has been fueled by an obsessive quest to master the tactical aspects of the game.

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He persuaded Manchester United to allow him to observe its practices when Sir Alex Ferguson was still in charge there; and he not only befriended a Liverpool family whose home overlooked the team’s training ground, he moved in with them.

Osorio’s players, at least, appreciate his hard-won expertise. “I call him, in a way, like a genius because they live in a completely different world than ourselves,” said Javier Hernández, the Mexican star known as Chicharito, or Little Pea. “Even if you can speak five minutes with him about one game or one player, he gives you the way he sees football and the way he sees that player, and it’s knowledge that you can learn if you want.”

(Osorio stood by the players after photos and videos leaked of a party several of them attended with escorts hours after the team beat Scotland, 1-0, in its final appearance in Mexico before heading to the Cup.)

After the Chile defeat, with a traumatized nation baying for his firing, Osorio went on something of an intellectual and emotional journey, consuming books about failure and humility, while seeking out other coaches who had endured devastating losses. He had his players study a video of Chile’s goals and hired a mental coach from Spain to help them recover and prepare for this World Cup.

Now, Osorio will finally have the chance to erase the loss from his and Mexico’s collective memory and maybe even break the nation’s World Cup curse.

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“If he can get through to the fifth game, all will be forgiven,” said Hérculez Gómez, a Mexican-American broadcaster for ESPN who played professionally in the United States and Mexico. “That’s what they’ve long yearned for.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

JONATHAN MAHLER © 2018 The New York Times

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