The Klinsmann Era is over.

Jurgen Klinsmann was fired by U.S. Soccer on Monday as both its men’s national team head coach and technical director after five years, three months and 21 days.

[ Arena takes over | Klinsmann out | Lessons learned | MLS star’s last laugh ]

“He took pride in having the responsibility of steering the program, and there were considerable achievements along the way,” U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati said in a statement. “Many are aware of the historic victories, including leading us out of the group of death to the round of 16 in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, but there were also lesser publicized efforts behind the scenes. He challenged everyone in the U.S. Soccer community to think about things in new ways, and thanks to his efforts we have grown as an organization and expect there will be benefits from his work for years to come.”

Klinsmann had once again made a difficult start to World Cup qualifying, however, dropping both of the first two games in the final round of matches to Mexico and Costa Rica. Particularly in the second game, a 4-0 loss last Tuesday, his team came apart as an average opponent ran rampant through the American lines. “While we remain confident that we have quality players to help us advance to Russia 2018,” Gulati said, “the form and growth of the team up to this point left us convinced that we need to go in a different direction.”

The Klinsmann Era was marked by ambition and optimism. Following four decades without a World Cup appearance, U.S. Soccer spent the next two, from 1990 through 2010, growing from a marginal federation to a respected one. It reemerged on the global stage and then became a fixture there, alternating perfectly between getting bounced from the group stage and reaching the World Cup’s knockout stages – although winning just one elimination game to get to the quarterfinals in 2002.

But then the USA sort of plateaued.

It was hardly a secret that Gulati saw in Klinsmann his ideal men’s national team head coach when he finally hired him following a five-year pursuit. The charismatic former striker combined the cachet of a superstar and World Cup winner as a player and the experience of a manager who had been to the big tournament and done well there – both with (West) Germany. But most of all, he was those things while also being a quasi-American, after years of living in California, raising an American family and getting to know the many quirks and complications of the stateside soccer scene.

Bob Bradley faltered in the summer of 2011, when his increasingly flat team stumbled to a bad 4-2 come-from-ahead loss to Mexico in the Gold Cup final, and Gulati saw his opportunity. He finally convinced Klinsmann to take the job – or perhaps caved in their wrangle over control, which apparently caused their talks to break down in 2006 when the job fell to Bradley. (As an ironic aside: Bradley reaching the final of a full-squad Gold Cup is still better than Klinsmann ever did. Although Klinsmann won the off-year, B-team Gold Cup in 2013, his only A-team edition, in 2015, ended in humiliating failure when the U.S. was beaten by Jamaica in the semifinals.) Now Gulati had his man. His perfect coach. His ladder to the next level that had long eluded the men’s national team program.

Klinsmann was introduced at a Nike megastore in midtown Manhattan on Aug. 1, 2011. He wore a suit for the first and last time in his U.S. Soccer tenure. With sneakers, of course. And no tie. He faced dozens of cameras and perhaps a hundred reporters and spoke of his plans. Proactive soccer – that was a big part of it. A team that reflected the American population and culture and mindset. He said the right things, perhaps pandering to all those USA fans who hoped he’d finally make the team competitive on the global stage. Or maybe he believed all the stuff he said.

He certainly changed some things, implementing sweeping reforms as soon as he took over. The idea, of course, was to replicate more or less what he had done in charge of Germany, modernizing a stale program with new ideas that, if nothing else, shook things up. Out went the culture of meritocracy and the team’s ossified hierarchy – captain Carlos Bocanegra was dumped hours before a World Cup qualifier; Landon Donovan was cut just before the 2014 World Cup – and in came systematic omissions of star players, yoga, blood testing, three-a-day practice sessions, a ban of soda and all manner of other changes.

If Bradley was famously clipped and curt when he spoke to the press, Klinsmann talked and talked. He didn’t necessarily say a whole lot more, but he did so with a disarming smile, the occasional and charming giggle and a European accent. And in the absence of concrete results, that sated most people for a good few years.

Wins didn’t always follow, though. Klinsmann said the same things over and over, but he often did entirely differently from what he promised, from what he claimed to be trying to achieve. He performed well enough to hold onto his job and earn a contract extension in late 2013. At the 2014 World Cup, the U.S. survived a dastardly group and took Belgium to extra time in the round of 16, in spite of being resoundingly outplayed and obviously overmatched in three of four games. The result was good, even if the play was largely not.

The aforementioned 2015 Gold Cup was a disaster. And when World Cup qualifying once again got off to a rocky start, as it had in 2011, serious questions were asked about where, exactly, Klinsmann had brought the program in a full cycle in charge – if anywhere at all. A playoff for a spot in the 2017 Confederations Cup was lost to Mexico as well. But Klinsmann was redeemed by a deep run at the 2016 Copa America Centenario, when an increasingly impatient Gulati publicly announced his expectation that the U.S. make it out of a tricky group. The Americans did and then beat Ecuador to make the final four. Never mind that they were hammered by Argentina 4-0 there and lost to Colombia a second time in the third-place game. The tournament was a success, and Klinsmann was secure in his position once more.

That lasted until Nov. 11, when the U.S. lost to Mexico for the first time ever in a World Cup qualifier in Columbus, Ohio. Four days later, it posted its-worst ever start to the final qualifying round by losing in Costa Rica as well. That defeat with the unsightly score line of 4-0 actually belied how bad things were, actually flattering a game that had gotten so far out of hand as to pose pressing questions over the team’s commitment to its coach – a sure kiss of death.

Before the Mexico game, Gulati had declared publicly that he expected Klinsmann to see the job through to the 2018 World Cup, as per his contract. In Costa Rica, however, he conceded that nothing was certain. Klinsmann had set a semifinal place at the tournament in Russia, the culmination of the cycle, as his objective. It was now looking possible that the USA wouldn’t reach a World Cup for the first time since 1989, in spite of the region’s absurdly forgiving qualifying mechanism – Mexico reached the 2014 World Cup despite winning just two of 10 qualifiers in the final round. And that’s to say nothing of how the Yanks might be embarrassed in Russia, if they even made it that far. On the evidence of the display in San Jose, not losing all three group stage games at the World Cup looked like success.

When the pressure on his position swelled to fever pitch last week, Klinsmann doubled down in a pair of interviews over the weekend, and once again spoke condescendingly to his critics and, read a certain way, the U.S. fans. This, too, was a staple of his time with the U.S. Klinsmann demanded more accountability for his team and public scrutiny of his players, but when he was criticized, he would lash out and suggest his critics didn’t know soccer.

His departure represents a messy exit out of this arrangement to all. Klinsmann, just months after delivering a fourth place at the Copa, is damaged goods, just as he was when he was fired by Bayern Munich in 2009, his last job before his USA gig. The national team, meanwhile, will now live through its first coaching change in the middle of the World Cup qualifying process since 1988. And that’s to say nothing of an inevitable identity crisis of a team molded for years into a shape that was never fully formed and that will now have to be broken down and reshaped into something else.

Because the road Klinsmann had taken the national team down on was leading nowhere significant anytime soon. Yes, the U.S. made real strides at the Copa – in three of its six games, anyway – when it finally played cohesive and speedy soccer against strong teams and competed well, although plenty of bunker-and-counter soccer remained. But then things fell apart again as Klinsmann incomprehensibly toyed with a 3-5-2 formation against Mexico and was savagely punished by a smarter counterpart. In what was supposed to be a clever ruse, he betrayed his own tactical ignorance once again.

On the whole, there was no marked or even noticeable improvement under Klinsmann from Bradley’s time in charge, or his predecessor Bruce Arena – the favorite to take over for a second spell. You could make a sound argument that no U.S. manager ever had so much talent at his disposal as Klinsmann and, aesthetically at least, did so little with it. His beautiful visions remained just that: dreams. The soccer never got better, or prettier.

And, in fact, the youth national teams, which also fell under Klinsmann’s purview in his dual role as technical director, inarguably regressed, failing to qualify for one major tournament and developmental opportunity after another. In that sense, the Klinsmann era was a failure.

For now, anyway. Perhaps his efforts in recruiting dual nationals, which has stocked the pipeline, will deliver. It might be that the groundwork he quietly laid – and he certainly did do a lot in effort to begin streamlining and mucking out the ragged wild west of youth soccer – pays dividends a decade or so down the line. The way they did with Germany when a World Cup title was claimed in 2014, 10 years after Klinsmann’s hiring there.

But even if that proves so, the central error of his time with the U.S. national team was Klinsmann’s unwillingness or lack of self-awareness to admit and explain that this was always a long-range project. He said as much in a biography published about him earlier this year. Real and tangible results were to follow in the future. In the present, however, he raised expectations far beyond what he proved capable of delivering. And he didn’t help himself any with his many dubious tactical decisions, endless lineup switches and insistence on pushing players out of position for no apparent reason.

Yet, truthfully, the opposite argument could also be made. You might well posit that the expectations on Klinsmann were such, after years of yearning from a loyal but increasingly cynical fan base, that he couldn’t possibly deliver on them. That the quality of players available to him, while improved, was never going to be adequate to counter-punch with the heavyweights of the international game. There’s no making champagne out of lemons.

So maybe the Klinsmann Era faltered because of a lack of communication. A hyper-verbal manager wasn’t actually very good at articulating a plan. He could seem obstinate in that way, or clueless, or unable to express himself properly in his second language. He never quite put it in so many words that no miracles could or should be expected of him anytime soon. But this, of course, isn’t the language spoken in soccer, the famous results business. Perhaps he was always better suited to be technical director than head coach, or indeed to wearing both hats as he did for the last three years.

His view was on the horizon more so than the ground to be covered right in front of him. But then such a public mindset would never have justified his enormous $3 million salary or the expectations that had built up in the half-decade that he was head-coach-in-waiting.

Whereas Bradley was ultimately done in by his inability to see the benefit of playing to the crowd and making fans among the wider public, Klinsmann did the opposite, overpromising and underdelivering.

On paper at least, he was hardly a bad manager. Klinsmann’s 55 wins – for 28 losses and 15 ties – are second all time in U.S. men’s national team history, behind Arena. He beat teams that had never been beaten before: Mexico on its home soil, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy.

But he was never the manager he was supposed to be. The one who moved everything onward and upward, here and now. History might look kinder on his legacy with hindsight, if the foundations he laid prove sturdy enough to build something better atop them. But as things stand today, in the current rickety structure, Klinsmann didn’t leave the United States men’s national team program in much better shape than he found it.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.