Bruce Arena (born September 21, 1951) is an American soccer coach who most recently served as the head coach and sporting director of the New England Revolution.
He is a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame and the NJCAA Lacrosse Hall of Fame. Arena has had a long and distinguished coaching career and is considered to be one of the most successful coaches in North American soccer history, having won five College Cup titles and five MLS Cup titles. He was the United States national team head coach at the 1996 Summer Olympics, the 2002 FIFA World Cup and the 2006 FIFA World Cup, head coach of the New York Red Bulls, D.C. United, LA Galaxy, and the New England Revolution in Major League Soccer, and coached Virginia Cavaliers men's soccer to several college soccer championships. He is the U.S. soccer team's longest-serving head coach with the highest number of wins, and the only coach to lead the team to win two World Cups.
Before beginning his coaching career, Arena was a goalkeeper for Cornell University, and earned one cap with the United States men's national soccer team.
Playing career
High school and college
Arena was born in Brooklyn, New York to Vincent and Adeline Arena, Italian immigrants (from Alicudi, Sicily). He grew up in the Long Island town of Franklin Square, New York, where he attended Carey High School. His father was a butcher while his mother was a school bus driver. Adeline was diagnosed with breast cancer when Bruce Arena was a child and had to undergo a mastectomy.
While he excelled at several sports, he was too small for American football, so he joined his high school's soccer team as a defender. He moved into the goal when the starting goalkeeper was suspended after hitting another school's player during a game. While in high school, he also played a single season with local club Hota S.C. of New York City's Cosmopolitan Soccer League.
After graduation, he began his collegiate athletic career playing both lacrosse and soccer at Nassau Community College, a two-year college near his home. Arena was a 1970 and 1971 Honorable Mention All-American lacrosse player and an All-American soccer player. He was inducted into the National Junior College Hall of Fame in 2008. While at Nassau, he played soccer for head coach Bill Stevenson and goalkeeper coach Shep Messing, a future New York Cosmos goalkeeper. At the end of his two years with Nassau, Arena transferred to Cornell University in upstate New York where he was a 1972 Honorable Mention All American and a 1973 Second Team All American in lacrosse. He did not originally intend to play soccer, but injuries to the school's first and second string goalkeepers led the men's soccer coach, Dan Wood, to recruit Arena into the team as its goalkeeper. Arena backstopped the Cornell Big Red soccer team to the 1972 NCAA Soccer Championship Final Four and earned Most Valuable Defensive Player honors for the tournament.
Professional
After Arena's graduation from Cornell, New York Cosmos drafted him in the fifth round of the North American Soccer League college draft. The Cosmos released him before the season. Arena then signed to play professional lacrosse for the Montreal Quebecois, spending a single season with the team in 1975. The National Lacrosse League folded at the end of the 1975 season, leaving Arena unemployed. At the same time, Dan Wood, who had recruited Arena to play for the Cornell soccer team, had been named the new head coach of the expansion Tacoma Tides which played in the American Soccer League. Wood contacted Arena and convinced him to move to the Pacific Northwest in 1976 to play for him. While Arena was the second string goalkeeper behind starter Jamil Canal, the move to Tacoma was significant in that it introduced Arena to coaching. That year, in addition to playing for the Tides, Arena coached the men's soccer team at the University of Puget Sound, where he compiled a 5–7 record.
International
In 1973, he earned his only national team cap as a second-half substitute for Bob Rigby in a 2–0 loss to Israel. National team coach, Gordon Bradley, had called Arena into the national team for an earlier game against Haiti, but Arena could not get time off from his job teaching at a local junior high school. In addition to his single cap with the U.S. soccer team, Arena also played for the national lacrosse team which won the 1974 World Lacrosse Championship and finished runner up in 1978.