When the club mandated he attend anger management and the suspension I bet Petke thought agreeing to that ment he and the club reached an agreement he was still coaching. It may have even been that but Petke actions did not age well.
On point #3 the actual word in the statement is “hoped”, not “hopes”. It’s a significant difference. Edit- user @Ivensor already noted this. Sorry.
Kreis made more than $350K before DLH took over, which was thought to be on the low end of what coaches were making at the time. Kreis was reportedly making around $1M with NYCFC. I'm not sure where $500K stands these days, but my guess is it's not high on the list. I would be very interested in knowing the answer to this - in fact these details could be explosive in nature. He seems to allude to signing an agreement for his continued employment. If this truly happened after he had completed some conditions outlined by the team and then they fired him, I would think this could have huge legal ramifications. I work in an area where I deal with employment law quite a bit although I'm not a lawyer, and I would guess millions could be on the line here. No real evidence this is the case, but if what he's alluding to has substance to it, this could likely be really big. Agreed. Although from a devils advocate perspective - if he was truly banned from speaking publicly until now and had just been fired after seemingly being reassured of his continued employed and then given some lowball offer to go quietly, I'm not sure most peoples primary thoughts would be apology related even if it had been a week ago. This whole situation doesn't square with the Mike Petke that we've known throughout his time as a player and as a coach. I'm still struggling to rationalize it. It feels like he's become unhinged. Yes, he's always been passionate, but I wouldn't have predicted this in a million years. yes, it does
If Petke can demonstrate that RSL erred in the termination and that the public nature of the error substantially harms his opportunities for similar employment he will take RSL and, possibly DLH, to the cleaners. In his tweet he specifically singled out “ownership”, which means he’s going after the deep pockets personally.
I think he will probably file a wrongful termination lawsuit and then it will be quietly settled out of court.
The irony will be that, after all the legal fees and such, it'll be less of a payout for Petke than this supposed resignation and pay offer
so it's petty, kind of immature, and a general waste of money? That doesn't sound like Petke (or a lot of the US legal system) at all
There were several fans on Twitter who offered to help with his case. I doubt he'll be out of pocket much for the legal fees.
The damages dude of this can actually be very sizeable if he has proof they erred. Even a settlement has the potential to be lucrative.
Unless he signed something where the team promised he would be able to coach for x period of time regardless of any other circumstances, or if the team specifically committed to waive the "for cause" clause(s) in his contract in regards to the entirety of this incident if he apologized and went to classes, then I don't know what the issue is. It would make more sense that he promised to do X and Y in order to be able to coach further, not that he was "promised" he could keep going. In almost any scenario I can imagine, an owner could still fire an employee for cause. Or because they felt like it, though in such cases the payout would be larger.
I highly recommend you listen to the interview with DLH that played during the pregame broadcast. He explained some things in ways I hadn't previously considered.
https://kutv.com/sports/real-salt-l...-talks-with-rsl-owner-after-mike-petke-firing I guess it's from two days ago. May be old news here. [emoji2368]
I watched it. Thank you for the link! But I came away with more questions than I had before watching it. Basically he said: 1) We live by our values at RSL. 2) We value being in control at all times. We teach that principle to several hundred youth soccer officials that we train. So, that’s IT? Really? That’s the value upon which all of this was decided? David James tried, but failed, to steer DLH into invoking other values as part of the decision. I’m literally scratching my head as I type this (which isn’t easy). The only rationale I can come up with is the scenario where RSL has warned Petke in the past about being out of control, and they are hanging their legal hats on that track record.
I was also perplexed by DLH's answer to the question. I have never heard 'being in control' being listed as a critical value upon which an organization is based. I've heard of it being part of a constellation of values that include dedication to personal improvement, commitment to a cause, etc. But, DLH made it sound like it was the only thing that mattered and that's more than a little bizarre.
I understood it as the prime value that mattered in making this decision. And I appreciated his comments tying the decision back to the community outreach the team does with at-risk youth in referee training. That outreach effort is obviously tied to a different organizational value (other than maintaining control) that would be in conflict with an organization that allowed its head coach to target a ref with the most offensive slur he could imagine during and following a meaningless game.
I kept waiting for him to say that, but he didn’t. He worded it to maybe lead us into thinking the two are tied together, but that’s pretty weak. It seemed more like a deflection. He never said “and Mike’s behavior set a bad example for those kids” or anything like that. David James asked if Petke’s history of fines and suspensions for criticizing referees was folded into the decision and DLH didn’t really directly answer that either. Which begs the question: if the league had not made a high profile public deal out of this, would RSL have fired Petke? RSL didn’t add extended suspensions or fines to Petke’s previous MLS sanctions. Yet, there was in place this major RSL value of being in control. And certainly Petke’s previous antics toward officials did not set good examples for those youth referees in training. I mean, in this most recent incident RSL had the opportunity to fine and suspend him before MLS did. But they didn’t, did they? No. They waited. Call me skeptical. If past actions are an indicator of future actions, then I very much doubt RSL would have fired him in the absence of MLS’ making it a high profile incident. I will go further and claim they wouldn’t have done anything at all.
I see what you’re saying and agree to a small extent, but it’s hard to extricate Petke’s actions from the major bad press it triggered (which I don’t think necessarily even equates to the league making a big deal out of it). I think that, given what happened, as long as it wasn’t somehow done without anyone’s knowledge (impossible), it was going to blow up. It was a big deal and people started treating it that way more and more as the details emerged. Whether DLH was responding to the black eye of the press coverage (and sponsors backing out) or reacted to having the full story available I suppose could be up for debate. Also, I don’t think it’s fair to even compare this episode to his press conference tirades. To me they are not even close to the same thing. I think many of us thought that we might be getting another story of Petke standing up for his players and “telling it like it is / just saying what everyone else is thinking,” but instead we got a story of someone showing a complete lack of self-control and respect to fellow humans. Maybe even some ignorance.
Both points are fair. Regarding the last one, it’s also fair to point out that DLH’s interview focused on 2 things: 1) Being in control, and 2) we teach this in our youth referee training. He hardly referenced the homophobic slur. I’m just pointing out that if Being in control, and Respecting the referees are such big values to RSL and to DLH, then maybe the organization should have taken steps supporting those values immediately following the earlier incidents. It would have communicated to the world (and to Petke) that “Beyond what MLS has done, we are doing this because these are important values to us”. Also, had they done that at the time, then I doubt this latest escalation of Petke’s behavior would have happened as it did. Since RSL did nothing in the earlier tantrums (and even seemed to support them) he probably felt that publicly disrespecting officials was not off limits as far as RSL was concerned. Again, I’m not considering the homophobic slur aspect of this. I’m just focusing on the revelation that Being in control and Respecting referees are important values to RSL, and comparing that revelation to their track record with Petke’s past incidents.