New U.S. Soccer sporting director Matt Crocker shows what he knows — and what he doesn’t

New U.S. Soccer Federation’s sporting director Matt Crocker clearly knows a lot about how to build good soccer teams over a long term. He did it in the club realm with the English Premier League’s Southampton, and in the national team realm with English men’s and women’s youth squads.

“Matt has great experience in developing talent, implementing a clear and consistent playing philosophy from youth to senior teams, and implementing coaching programming,” federation president Cindy Cone said Tuesday as she introduced him to the media. “After spending some time with Matt, it quickly became clear that he excels in communication as well as being a team builder. He is driven, he’s creative, and committed to building relationships at every level of the game.”

Crocker, who succeeds Earnie Stewart in the role, also isn’t entirely new to America. Seated between Cone and CEO JT Batson, the Welshman noted that back in the day, he spent summers coaching kids in Kansas and Arkansas.

And he was honest about having “no illusions of what I need to learn, and I need to learn quickly.”

But in one especially important area, it seems he has a lot of learning to do.

» READ MORE: Matt Crocker, executive from Premier League’s Southampton, will be U.S. Soccer’s new sporting director

U.S. Soccer has long been accused of failing to marshal the full scale of the sport’s diversity in the country. Crocker will have a big role in doing something about that, since he’ll oversee all U.S. national teams — men’s and women’s, superstars and youth teams, paralympians, and teams that play on grass, beaches, and indoor futsal courts.

Of particular interest is his role in recruiting multinational athletes with ties to America and other countries. The U.S. program has gotten good at that in recent years, earning commitments from Yunus Musah, Sergiño Dest, Sofia Huerta, Ricardo Pepi, and more. One of the biggest candidates yet, English-Nigerian-American striker Folarin Balogun, is on the horizon now.

Will Crocker take the lead on recruiting or delegate it to someone else, perhaps another new hire?

“We are in such a diverse country, and we have such a unique opportunity to make sure that we tap into that as a significant resource,” he said. “First of all, I need to understand what we’ve already got in place from those processes, because I know Anthony [Hudson, the interim U.S. men’s team manager] in particular has done a great job on that side. … The international landscape has almost become like a club environment where there is an opportunity to sell a pathway to a player and to really build those emotional connections with the country — and we’re really determined behind the scenes to grow that and to continue to develop that.”

» READ MORE: The Union’s Nathan Harriel played with star USMNT prospect Folarin Balogun, and remembers it well

Later in the call, a reporter presented Crocker with statistics on the Latino population’s representation on U.S. youth national teams. At times over the years it’s been good, and at times it’s been bad.

“As I mentioned, there’s a lot of things about U.S. Soccer that I need to learn and I need to understand, and that would be one of the significant landscapes,” he said. “You’ve given me a statistic that I hadn’t researched yet. … What I want to make sure that we’ve got is real diversity across our teams — it’s about the best players being picked for the best teams out there at the right moment in time.”

That answer fell pretty flat with the audience, and with fans following along on social media.

On other subjects, Crocker definitely hit the right notes. He went into deep detail about the U.S. men’s team’s performance at last fall’s World Cup, and discussed how he’ll lead hiring the next U.S. men’s national team manager. Though he won’t officially start with U.S. Soccer until Aug. 2, Southampton has given Crocker permission to start that task now, and to assist the U.S. women’s team as it prepares for the World Cup.

Crocker already knows one of the leading candidates for the U.S. men’s job, Jesse Marsch. He interviewed Marsch when Southampton nearly hired the former Leeds manager in February. But Crocker made it clear he’s approaching the task with an open mind.

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“What I see from the current team is an aggressive, a forward-thinking, a fearless team that went to the World Cup and did some great stuff,” he said. “And I’m really, really keen to make sure that we produce a coach that can replicate and continue to drive forward some of those some of those behavior.”

Crocker placed an even higher value on a manager’s character.

“For me, the most important thing is around leadership,” he said. “We need the right leader, we need the right head coach to come in and give the players ownership and responsibility to build a really, really strong culture — or to continue to develop that really, really strong culture. And coaching internationally is very, very different to work in every day on the field [from] with a club team.”

Those factors and others Crocker mentioned over the course of his remarks, he said, matter “irrespective of where somebody is born.”

And if that somebody was born in Racine, Wisc., went to college at Princeton, and coached in MLS, Austria, Germany and England? Marsch was a leading candidate for the U.S. men’s job before Crocker was hired, but he’s clearly No. 1 now.

“My biggest focus right now is not thinking about any individuals, it’s about thinking about the behaviors that we need, the style of play that we want to promote going forward, the type of leader that we want to bring in,” Crocker said. “It would be unprofessional of me right now to talk about individual names.”

Perhaps that’s true right now, but the clock is ticking — on this subject, and many others.

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