Austin FC breaks ground on their new $242 million stadium https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2019/09/09/austin-fc-breaks-ground-242-million-stadium-set-open-2021
Miami CF will not begin play till next season in 2020 but their hinchas went out for their Academy youth matches. https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2019...come-out-full-force-academys-first-home-games
The Fire are under new ownership. Hallelujah. Maybe they'll finally get straightened out. How long until our turn?
Gotta love those unemployed Oregon losers http://www.oregonlive.com/portland-thorns/2019/09/portland-thorns-fans-boo-donald-trump-during-halftime-military-swearing-in-ceremony.html
With Hauptman out I think we have an argument to worst ownership remaining in the league. Hopefully we sell in the near future. The valuation here is an interesting because I guess it proves that Harden might not have been insane with his buy-in.
FC Cincinnati has won only 6 games this year - in 2 of their wins they beat teams coached by Wilmer Cabrera. Not good
If it was the Thorns, then there were far more people than for a Dynamo game. They average 19,000 (a real 19,000, not a Dynamo 19,000).
I’m sure you will find a way to defend it but booing during an enlistment ceremony is about as classless of a thing to do. But then again @DynamoManiac feels his family probably has suffered so much it’s justified to boo. Everyone’s a victim
Seattle losers getting in on the silly anti-fascist stuff and getting kicked out or leaving in protest or something they think is super important but no one else cares. Thats Portland, Atlanta, and Seattle now and the impact is, what? nothing. 1173376674773139456 is not a valid tweet id
Man, RSL is a mess - read this about Petke’s lawsuit http://www.rslsoapbox.com/platform/amp/2019/9/17/20871147/mike-petke-lawsuit-real-salt-lake-explained?utm_campaign=rslsoapbox&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&__twitter_impression=true
Pitti is Panamanian... and ******** doesn’t mean coward down there... I mean, been a ******** means you put horns on your wife, or that you dress like a pimp. Depending on intonation it may mean gay. But doesn’t mean coward.
Check! Correct! Does an MLS club even need a GM? Is this "Americanizing" soccer once again? Someone on our boards mentioned about have a coach be the shot caller on all player acquisitions. What he specifically needs to bolster his Starting XI and bench is what he has to find. Then just have some numbers nerd that can crunch the salary bill season after season, lets our coach know what money is there to spend moving forward. Then the coach can sign new talent accordingly.Perhaps Juve mentioned having this numbers cruncher and no GM concept. The GM figure is so prominent in our sports culture in the U.S., certainly for the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL pro sports leagues. But professional soccer around the world has the coach and his staff, the owner and his purse, no GM right.
Having a GM is a great boon to a team. There are only so many hours in the day and I'd rather have my coach focus as many as possible on tactics and development while the GM handles contracts, scouting, acquisition, etc. The coach should be able to go to the GM and say, "I need a RB with these qualities to make my tactics work. They'll be a backup/starter/etc" and the GM should be able to execute that. Ours doesn't have the first clue how to handle his duties.
Coach/GM versus GM and Coach: TLR: Having a strong GM might be better but the history of MLS does not support that conclusion. First, I'll propose the premise that short-term success in MLS can always be explained by random chance rather than actual virtuous qualities of a club. For the same reasons, sustained success can only be explained by virtuous qualities. All of the teams in MLS history that have been great for five or more years, the ones we would describe as a dynasty, have all had a head coach who was unquestionably in charge. Most the time they wore the combined Coach/GM hat. - Arena at DCU in MLS 1.0. - Kinnear for the Quakes/Dynamo from 04 thru 09. - Arena for LAG for 09-15. - Vermes for SKC from 2011 thru 2018. (1 MLS cup, 3 USOCups, always playoffs). - Sigi Schmid in SEA 2009-2015 (Yes, Adrian Hanauer held the GM role but he is the majority owner, not a soccer guy, and I'm not convinced at all he was calling the shots but signing off on them) with 4 USOCups, 1 MLS Cup and always playoffs. The strongest counterfactual would be NYRB from 2013-2018 with 3 Shields, 4 1st place finishes in their conference. Red Bull soccer is such a complete different animal being part of a 5-club 4-continent soccer operation that I don't think it is relevant. That is a global soccer machine with vision and coaching/player moves controlled from one central office. The second strongest counter fact would be the NER during the Steve Nicol era with 4 MLS Cup runner-ups. They had GMs. I'm under the impression that Nicol was large and in-charge but I don't have much to base that on. If you want to argue that Atlanta and LAFC are showing the way forward in MLS today with their GM and Coach structure you very well may be right. But it will take a few more years to see. Further, you have to deal with the fact that almost all the unsuccessful teams use the GM & coach structure. One very successful GM & Coach would not be a strong fact against the clear history of Coach/GM having greater success. Kinnear's diminution in Houston post-2009 is not evidence for the Coach/GM system starting to fail because it was in 2009 that a more active ownership made for a more powerful club President in Canetti vis-a-vis Kinnear and the decline of the Dynamo started as Canetti gained power each year. With Vermes missing the playoffs this year I don't consider that a strong fact. If he keeps the reins (which I suspect he will) the question will be can he rebuild successfully. With the growth of the league I don't think he has to attain the same level of results as before to support the Coach/GM concept. If he maintains even moderate success going forward then it will be a clear fact in support. As a note, it is impossible to overstate how horrendous SKC's injury plague was this year. Failure to rotate the squad early in the season with CCL is something we have seen lead to that before. i.e.. TFC in 2018. Of course, any structure can fail for any number of reasons including who the personnel are, ownership involvement and financial support, etc. Also, I want to note that it is much much harder to be dynastic in MLS now with 24 teams and growing than with 10 teams back in the day. I think that makes things cloudy. I recognize that there are good arguments for the GM and coach structure. Intellectually it makes sense. However, I can't find any history in MLS to really support it. Rather the opposite.
while all the above is true, we're are no at MLS 8.3. it's way too much work to run the day to day coaching duties AND scour the globe for the next Adam Lundqvist.
First, That is not the issue. The issue is who do the scout's report to? Who does the person handling contracts etc report to? Who has authority in the org. Arena at LAG didn't scour the globe -- he had it scoured. But he was the GM. Vermes has folks who report to him who look for talent. Second, we can say that all we want and it makes sense but I can't find any history -- you know, facts -- that support that statement.
Given where we are I'd rather just plow extra-money into the coaching position. Either that or fund and get me a GM and people under him that know what they're doing and mandate a system. If you want to build something like that fine, but again, I don't think we're putting the funds or staff to actually make it successful. My other comment is that the Dynamo seem to mostly use the division of duties/titles as a convenient deflection/shield. See, you can trot out Walker all you want and through up the wall when someone tries to talk about on-field performance because "Walker doesn't handle soccer operations!" Same thing. GM can dive behind the head coach and vice versa. Fanbase gets stuck arguing who's responsible and it diverts attention. Again, same issue I have with the academy. We can talk it up about how we're changing it, but we still look like we're on a shoestring budget. We doubled the budget, but you don't see a culture that wants to use homegrowns here. You don't see them investing huge amounts of money on facilities like RSL, or establishing residency programs like Philly, or even staffing comparable to a team like Dallas. Paul Holocher might be a great guy for all I know, but again, I think it's telling that you go out and get a relative no-name guy from another team that has historically not had a great academy and install him. That by the way is what we did with the GM. We didn't poach someone from a successful team or someone from an organization that has institutional knowledge, we went out and got Jordan from a bad Montreal team.
One of the challenges from a Dynamo standpoint is.... what scouts? Kowba, supposedly some part-time guy in South America and Jordan does a lot of the scouting himself.
Jordan said in one of his interviews that they have three scouts. https://houston.sportsmap.com/dynamo-gm-addresses-fan-questions-on-soccer-matters-with-glenn-davis Kowba in Houston, guy in South America, and guy in Europe. He also mentioned "regional contacts" separate from scouts and agents, though I'm not sure who those guys are other than Cabrera's rolodex (kiss that one goodbye!) and some guys we have established relationships with (Olimpia in Honduras). Jordan and Cabrera would also, as you say, do annual tours of Europe/South America, but he insists they'd typically only hit those countries where we were close to finalizing deals. The scouting thing, to be fair, is probably similar across a lot of MLS teams. I don't think most of them outside of the guys inside a big network (RBNY/NYCFC) have big sophisticated scouting departments. Whoever your headcoach and GM knows and happens to have connections to, which varies. SKC nabs a lot of Barcelona B/Barcelona academy grads because Vermes played in Catalonia with Figueres and something like six of his teammates went on to get jobs with Barca.