ZURICH -- Former World Cup winner and newly named U.S. national team technical adviser Berti Vogts says the responsibility belongs to young American players DeAndre Yedlin and Julian Green to raise their games if they want to get on the field for their clubs.
Both players made bright appearances as substitutes at the World Cup last summer but neither has made an impact at their clubs in 2015.
Yedlin, 21, moved from Major League Soccer to Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League in January, but he has yet to make the Spurs bench.
"Yedlin has to learn the lesson," Vogts said in an interview this week with ESPN FC. "OK, he was on the World Cup team, but now he goes down [in level]. That's not good. You can go down maybe for five, six months, but then you have to step up. He has to train more than all the other players."
Green, 19, has made just five appearances for Hamburg since joining the Bundesliga club in August on a season-long loan from Bayern Munich, and none since a well-publicized falling out with HSV bosses in February.
Vogts, who won the 1974 World Cup as a midfielder with West Germany and coached the Germans to the Euro 1996 title, had an even sterner warning for the German-American.
"He cannot go the journalists and say, 'The coach doesn't like me,'" Vogts said. "You have to tell them, 'You made the mistake.' It's not professional thinking."