Steve Sampson

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Steve Sampson (born January 19, 1957 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is a soccer coach, the former head coach of the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer.

Sampson played college soccer at UCLA, Foothill Community College in Los Altos and San Jose State University, all three colleges located in California. At Foothill Community he earned All-American honors while playing on the 1976 California junior college state championship team. He then transferred to San Jose State where he graduated. He minored in Spanish, which he later put to good use as coach of the Costa Rican national soccer team. He also earned a masters degree in education from Stanford University.

While at Stanford he coached the Awalt High School boys varsity soccer team in Mountain View.

After graduation, he served as an assistant men's soccer coach at Foothill College.

In 1982, UCLA hired Sampson as an assistant men's soccer coach. In 1985, he was on staff when UCLA won the NCAA men's soccer championship.

At the end of the 1985 season, Santa Clara University hired him away from UCLA to serve as their men's soccer head coach. In 1989, he achieved his greatest success as a college coach when he led Santa Clara to the NCAA Men's Soccer Championship. Ironically, Santa Clara's opponent in the final was Virginia, coached by Bruce Arena who would later succeed Sampson as head coach of the United States men's national soccer team. Santa Clara and Virginia played even through regular time and four overtimes before NCAA officials stopped the game, much to the frustration of the players and two coaches, and named Santa Clara and Virginia as co-champions. When he left Santa Clara, he had compiled a 64-19-19 record and was named the 1989 NCAA Men's Soccer Coach of the Year.

After leaving Santa Clara, Sampson became an assistant to Bora Milutinovic on the United States national team in 1993 and was on the staff when the U.S. hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup. In addition to his coaching duties, he served as the Vice President/Competition Management for the World Cup organization.

When Bora resigned from the team after the World Cup, the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) named Sampson as the interim coach in April of 1995. But after leading the US to a surprising fourth-place finish at the Copa América 1995, including a 3-0 romp over Argentina, as well as a victory over arch-rivals Mexico in the quarterfinals, Sampson was promoted to full-time national team coach in August 1995.

Unfortunately for Sampson, he peaked as a U.S. coach in his first year. The U.S. team had developed an amazing cohesion since the 1990 World Cup. The lack of a domestic league had forced the players to play almost entirely for the national team. As a result, they knew each other almost as well as most professional clubs' players do. Sampson's predecessor, Milutinovic, had micro-managed the team. While this led to a high level of tactical awareness, it often stifled the team's creativity. When Sampson became coach, his lack of high level coaching experience led him to relax the controls on the teams tactics. As a result, the U.S. played with spirit, which showed in the 1995 Copa America and qualifiying for the 1998 FIFA World Cup. The U.S. lost only one match in qualifying, but the team began a slow downhill slide from there. This is not to say that Sampson failed completely. He did coach the team to an historic 1-0 victory over Brazil in the 1998 Gold Cup just prior to the World Cup.

Despite this success, it appeared that the stress of the impending World Cup was wearing on Sampson. This made him question the players and formations that had brought success so far. In an effort to meet the high expectations the USSF and U.S. soccer fans had for the team, he began to increasingly micro-manage the team, in the mode of Milutinovic, but without Milutinovic's experience. Furthermore, he eroded team spirit and unity by a number of actions. First, he began searching for players in European leagues who had U.S. parentage. This gave the unmistakable impression that he considered his current players as inferior to European pros.^[1] For example, he brought in Michael Mason, then playing for Hamburg in the Bundesliga. Mason didn't contribute significantly, playing only 5 games and scoring no goals. Then, Sampson dismissed long-time captain John Harkes from the team. Sampson gave a variety of reasons, from Harkes lack of leadership to Harkes wanting a more offensive role.^[2] Outside observers couldn't help but wonder if Sampson saw in Harkes a potential rival for team leadership and moved to eliminate him. Regardless of the reason, it deprived the team of Harkes real leadership and experience (playing in the English Premier League). Sampson also switched to an unfamiliar 3-6-1 formation just before the tournament and inserted inexperienced Chad Deering and Brian Maisonneuve into Harkes former position as defensive midfielders. Working against Sampson were injuries to the U.S.'s primary attacking threat, Eric Wynalda and creative midfielder Tab Ramos. The US flopped in the World Cup, losing all three of its games, and Sampson resigned as coach on June 29, 1998. Later, Harkes noted, "It had been said that the more he coached, the worse we got."^[3]

Sampson re-surfaced on the international scene as the head coach of the Costa Rica national team in 2002. He did not survive the qualifying campaign for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and was fired in 2004 after Costa Rica needed away goals to get past unfancied Cuba.

He was hired as the Galaxy coach, replacing Sigi Schmid, on August 18, 2004. Despite an array of talent, the team flopped the rest of the year and struggled for large stretches of 2005. It appeared Sampson would be fired, but the Galaxy turned it on late, and won the U.S. Open Cup and MLS Cup double, the last as the lowest seed in the playoffs.^[4]

The Galaxy failed to build on their success in the 2005 season and Sampson was relieved of his duties as Galaxy coach on June 6, 2006 with the Galaxy in last place with a record of 2 wins, 8 losses, 1 draw.

Preceded by Bora Milutinovic	United States men's national soccer team Head Coach 1995-1998	Succeeded by Bruce Arena
Preceded by Sigi Schmid	Los Angeles Galaxy Head Coach 2004-2006	Succeeded by Frank Yallop

Persondata
NAME	Sampson, Steve
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Professional soccer coach
DATE OF BIRTH	January 19, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH	Salt Lake City, Utah
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

	United States squad - 1998 FIFA World Cup
1 Friedel | 2 Hejduk | 3 Pope | 4 Burns | 5 Dooley | 6 Regis | 7 Wegerle | 8 Stewart | 9 Moore | 10 Ramos | 11 Wynalda | 12 Agoos | 13 Jones | 14 Preki | 15 Deering | 16 Sommer | 17 Balboa | 18 Keller | 19 Maisonneuve | 20 McBride | 21 Reyna | 22 Lalas | Coach: Sampson