Bob Bradley says he wishes he had never been offered the chance to coach Swansea City, even if he never would have turned down the job.
Bradley became the first American coach to manage in the Premier League when Swansea hired him October 2016, but he lasted just 11 games before being fired two days after Christmas.
And as he prepares to take the field on Sunday in his first game in charge of new MLS club LAFC, Bradley lamented taking the Swansea job because he felt not everyone involved in the Welsh club were behind him.
"When Swansea came, I knew the pluses and the minuses," Bradley told ESPN FC. "Do I have regrets? I wish they hadn't come and called, quite honestly, in that respect because the situation required real work and some time, and if they didn't think I was the right guy, and everybody wasn't on board -- and 'everybody' needed to not just be the two American owners, but the chairman, the supporters' trust and more of the supporters -- look, if they didn't think I was the right guy, they shouldn't have called.
"Now, when they called, and I spoke to them and I told them how I felt, when the moment came to go for it? Yeah, I said, 'Look, the hell, man, I'm going!'
"If you have second thoughts and doubts you don't go anywhere. I wouldn't have gone to Egypt, I wouldn't have gone to Norway, I'd still be in college soccer."
Asked if he was set up to fail at Swansea, Bradley said: "Probably. But even if you're set up to fail, you know how football works? You can do everything wrong and a few balls bounce your way and in 11 games you manage 20 points and nobody's talking that way. That's how football works.
"For all the big mouths that criticize, in almost anybody's coaching career, you can find 10-, 11-, 12-game stretches where the points just don't come. That's just the way it works. Not just in our game but in any game.
"So you either go somewhere where people recognize what you're all about, and know that to get it right it's going to take some time, or you go places where at the end, when the wind starts blowing, everybody gets nervous, everybody's shaking, everybody's covering their own heads, and you know what happens at that moment."