One thing I like about Luchi's coaching is that he's trying to get these young kids minutes. There are plenty of coaches that'll have a few subs remaining with the gave over the last 10-20 minutes, and they won't use them or they'll bring on a veteran that doesn't need minutes. Instead, Luchi has been playing these younger kids late in games. I don't think anyone expects them to walk into the team as instant starters their first season of their pro careers, but getting them some minutes, and getting them accustomed to the speed of the game will help for when they are given a bigger role, and asked with providing a real impact. *this was lifted from the Philly thread and ussoccer97531. I just switched out Curtain for Luchi. Fits this week. Your mileage may vary depending on games this year but six is going to be hard to outdo for any team and maybe FCD's high point for the year.
Although there are cases of FCD players that became instant starters. FCD signed Tanner Tessmann, and he started right away. He didn't start every game last year, but he started a lot of them. I think people just have higher standards for FCD. Even when FCD is literally doing the exact same thing as Philly, folks at this point don't give FCD credit for it. FCD WILL have more thread eligible minutes this season than Philly. I'd bet a lot on that. Curtin will be praised. Luchi will be criticized. Its just the way these boards go. They may have the most thread eligible minutes in the league again if they continue giving both Tessmann and Pepi starts, with some others off the bench. Cuz not many teams are going to consistently start two 01s or younger.
on tessmann: i think you watch him and can quickly tell he isnt the finished product, but he has so much upside between his obvious technical skills, mind for the game, and physical gifts that you feed him minutes and see if he takes a huge leap forward in terms of development. he seems like a player willing to use his size who needs more time to find out what he can really get away with playing against other adults.
While people do have high expectations for Dallas, the gap between average age of roster and average age weighted by minutes player is rather large compared to the rest of the league. I posted the data in some thread a while back and I can try to find it. Dallas does HAVE the kids, and often does play the kids, but they have a real tendency to give minutes to older players in a way that limits the effects of their young talent. See Jara vs Pepi.
How many teams are starting a 17 year old CF? Jara has started two games and Pepi one. Now saying that I think it's possible Pepi is better and deserves to start but I can only know for sure if Pepi starts a string of games. Thing is that may happen. If it doesn't Jara sucks and keeps starting then it's completely fair to dump on Luchi.
Shall we do an analysis of the lineup Philly used this past weekend? FCD started more USMNT-eligible players, and started two thread eligible players (while Philly started zero). Philly used 5 subs, 3 of which were USMNT-eligible U23s. FCD used 5 subs, 4 of which were USMNT-eligible U23s. When you stand back and look at it........................... People criticize FCD for using a player like Ricuarte. But where is the criticizm for Philly using some really mediocre veterans in their starting XI. Mbaizo at right back? FCD would be criticized for playing him over Harriel (Who's 20, by the way. Older than Tessmann.).
I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that Dallas has been doing this awhile so everyone was excited at first but over time you start to nit-pick because it's hard to sustain excitement. It's no different than when watching a young player. You see a player that is exciting but the more you watch the more the holes in their game you see and then you start comparing them to other players. Philly will eventually also have this happen to them. The proverbial worm till turn.
Dallas also has much better MLS ready young American players. The best of the Union players are 04’s. No ones clamoring for Dallas to play 04’s. The only ‘03 anyone is clamoring for to play is one of the best 03’s in the country. Philly doesn’t have a top 10 ‘03 in the country. Philly should not be equaling Dallas in the youth department this season. The pressure will be on Philly in 2-3 years once some of these 03’s and 04’s are at an age where they can be expected to get regular minutes.
San Jose. And they have a better record than Dallas with arguably worse talent across the board (better coach, tho). Well, people were complaining when Jara had started 2 games and Pepi Zero. But I've said it before: my bigger complaint isn't youth coming off the bench. I don't mind if a young player has to earn starts or the majority of minutes. My issue is that Pepi is better and contributes more to winning than Jara, and Luchi continues to play him -- and by extension, a terrible style of soccer -- despite the fact that Pepi is better and that the team plays better with Pepi. My ranting has been far more about Luchi's entire crap gameplan -- which went part and parcel with fitting the team to mediocre veterans -- than it is simply about "play the kids."
I haven't seen any criticism around playing Ricuarte here. He's a good player. At some point, it may come down to Ricuarte versus Pomykal, and Paxton is better, but he's not a bad player. He's not the player the pre-season hype had -- did you say that Buzz said that Dallas was "Ricuarte's team" now? My issue is that not is Jara mediocre, he forces Dallas to play a style they aren't at all suited for. And Acosta is not good. He's a veteran fool's gold player - the dude you talk yourself into because he's "solid" until you realize you aren't counting the immeasurable times he absolutely KILLS your attack because some of the worst decision making ever. And then you look and realize that he's not really a good enough defender to be a defensive midfielder ... He's Anibal Godoy in his bad games. I'm not going to complain that Jack McGlynn isn't starting over Jameiro Monteiro because Jameiro Monteiro is better than McGlynn by a country mile. Jara isn't better than Pepi and while I don't think Tessman is as productive as the hype, I don't think he's worse than Acosta. Once Pomykal is healthy, is Bryan Acosta honestly a top 3 midfielder for FC Dallas?
My point is that FCD is NOT an older squad than Philly. In terms of players used, their average age is about the same......... Philly has mediocre foreign players too. Every MLS team does. People seem to obsess over Jara and Acosta for FCD as if other teams don't have similar foreign players. For heaven's sake, Philly only two years ago had one of the worst big-money DP signings in league history. This past weekend they used two mediocre foreign forwards with WORSE career goals/game rates in MLS than Jara had last season. But let's keep up the charade. I think what throws people is the DP designation. Acosta gets paid the same as Pomykal and Ferreira. He's not paid like a DP. He's paid what he is. We don't know Jara's salary, but I can assure you he's not getting paid what Chicharito, Vela, or players of that ilk are. He's probably paid in line with what a player that scores 7 goals in 19 league games should make.
A lot there but yes Pomykal is team's best player if healthy so he starts over Vargas, Ricuarte, Tessmann or Acosta. I'd prefer over Acosta alongside Ricuarte but could see the three of them sort of rotating (or Tessmann) around a three man midfield. I think Pax can play winger but he never touches the ball enough for FCD there. Thing is I'm not sure Vargas is good enough to be a starter so would moving Pomykal to left winger and keeping Tessmann in the midfield mix make a better team?
Vargas has secretly been abysmal over the first three games. If he gets benched, Schoen might get a lot of time early, and maybe Sealy or ElMedkhar gets a start in the interim.
FCD signed that other foreign winger so if Vargas can't hack it, he'll be benched for him or possibly Sealy. As for Acosta, he'll be gone for the Gold Cup and Pax will slide right in. Acosta won't get his spot back permanently and will be sold this winter or perhaps he's kept because Tessmann and/or Pomykal get sold instead. -dammit, @Agent_Orange stole my thunder and even knew the winger's name.
And he quickly lost his job to Brenden Aaronson. That's what I want to see happen! For Jara to lose his job. I'd disagree with this on two levels. One, Philly doesn't have a ton of forward prospects. Fontana is getting minutes -- and pretty decent minutes, including CCL, in this year. Otherwise, who are their forwards keeping on the bench at all? Two, you can probably make an argument that Jara is better than Przybylko and Santos based on pure goal production, etc. But I don't think he's nearly as good as they in contributing to winning. Both press better than Jara. Santos may not be a great finisher, but he provides verticality that Jara does not, and it shows in Philly's spacing. Przybylko is simply better than Jara at basically everything. It's not the pay. It's that the kids are better. And no, I'm not sitting here saying FC Dallas is awful or giving up on the kids or failing. They aren't changing their strategy. But it's an inexplicable, weird, blunder to play old guys who are worse because you apparently got super conservative for no reason. This last game showed it -- more young guys played and FC Dallas was good!
Buzz said it on the last 3rd degree podcast, that if Luchi benches Jara now, he's basically lost him for the season because as a vet he expects a long leash. Two games is not enough sample size, ignoring last season, to make a determination on Jara, especially since they changed formation. Basically Jara acts like he's the alpha in the locker room and the other vets don't mind the kids but expect vet status treatment and if Jara isn't given every chance to succeed, he's going to make the locker room toxic. If that's true Jara needs to go regardless but the Hunts paid a lot of money, from their perspective, for Jara and want him to make it work. Ferreira's injured and Luchi isn't willing to 100% commit to Pepi because he's just 18. All that said, Luchi did go with Pepi and he was better but let's see what he does this week. Generally he's been a don't change a winning lineup guy, but asking Pepi to be the man at 18 puts a ton of pressure on the kid he may want to avoid. That and he needs Jara to buy in which may be difficult to convince if he's just a rotational sub off the bench. It's probably going to be a giant cluster********, because this is FCD and we can't have anything nice but there's the reasoning such as it is.
LOL, what a freaking disaster. Jara's far worse than I've even said! Spend a bunch of money for the aging Dom Dwyer of Mexico (yes, I know he's Argetinian but I only remember him at Pachuca) and watch as he completely destroys your coach's authority and the locker room. I get that Dan Hunt is a big part of the problem, but if I owned the team, I'd have moved Jara out of principle. Ain't nobody in the FC Dallas locker room that should be strutting around, especially not Franco Jara. You've got to kill these cancers fast., and Zanotta/Hunt are completely undermining their own coach. Compare that to when Almeyda came in and he benched a bunch of starters. Put things clear on who's in charge right away. I wouldn't worry about putting pressure on Pepi. He's never shown a lot of nerves, and he's surrounded up top by a bunch of pretty decent vets. Ricuarte is good; Obrian is decent, and while Vargas ain't much, it's enough support that with a really strong potential midfield + Hollingshead I don't know why the focus would just be on Pepi. The bigger issue is that they have no depth there, especially with most of their strikers possibly going to the Gold Cup, etc. But good lord, you've freaking lost the team if Franco Jara is keeping you from coaching correctly. So not only does Jara kill your team on the field with his plodding ass game where you somehow need to slowly funnel the ball to the sheer mediocrity that is him, but he also kills any chance you have of improvement because he's a big swinging dick. Amazing. Meanwhile, Wondo takes a seat on the bench in San Jose and mentors Cade Cowell. Ondrasek wanted to go home for family reasons, right? What a difference in personality -- that dude worked his ass off for his minutes. Also, this is funny: Why would I ignore last season? Why should Jara, at age 32 and not getting any better, be handed playing time when Pepi has been better for a half season plus?
must be said a guy who thinks they deserve a long leash or they effectively quit for the year sounds like someone you move on from asap for the rest of the teams sake
Especially when A) he's probably a league-average striker, nothing better, and B) you have 2 perfectly capable players that count for $0 combined in cap hit behind him (edit - I just realized that Ferreira's raise means this isn't true, but still, you get my point). This is the quintessential example of the issue at Dallas. It's just poor roster construction. If you took the homegrowns and the guys that have been around awhile and then look at places you're missing talent, you immediately see keeper and the wings, and yet, they still have Jimmy Mauer in goal and they bought two cheap young guys as their wingers, hoping that they play as well as Michael Barrios. They do some stuff well. They've figured out how to sell/loan out players quite well, and I think the Ricuarte deal was really well thought out and executed. But the rest of the roster is pretty ugly. If I'm them, I have a list of stuff I do in the summer: 1. Immediately dump Jara for whatever I can get 2. Trade for an MLS vet striker (because there's tons of them) like Will Bruin, Patrick Mullins, CJ Sapong, etc. 3. Trade for a good backup keeper like Zac MacMath 4. Actually spend money on a winger like TFC just did. Matias Pelligrini is playing in USL right now - go trade for him! Suddenly, you're a lot stronger in the areas that you don't have young kids trying to play in, and you aren't forced to play a vet over a kid because of his attitude and salary.
TFC just got Jeferson Soteldo for like $6M. That's insane. The market is super soft right now because of the pandemic and anyone willing to move is going to get a steal.
The other thing I like about Luchi is that players seem to progress under him. He gets a lot of flak for how he coaches the team to success but the individual players he has had seem to progress. That comes in part from playing the kids but not completely. There is something to be said for the ability to coach young players and teach them. He seems to have that knack. Before Luchi was head coach, back when FCD wasn't playing their kids, and the USL partnership wasn't as effective, FCD players were still very well prepared for the next level. He has to get credit for quite a bit of that. (I'm not saying he gets all of the credit....I'm sure he isn't alone but I would be very surprised if he wasn't/isn't responsible for a great deal of it.)
There's all the evidence in the world that Luchi is a strong developer of talent. I don't think anyone is questioning that. But his gameplanning and roster choices have been both ineffective and also strangely counter to his year all last year and the first two games of this year. I think a ton of it is trying to accommodate the veterans management and ownership have bought him. They all seem squeezed in -- Bressan, Acosta and Santos, Jara, and the net sum of them created a plodding, harmless team. Yes, their defense was better and so they were mid table again, but there was no upside to that team. Some of that is Hunt, but some of that is Zanotta as well. I know people like him because he has sold players, and that's great, but I also think he has done the traditional "foreign sporting director into MLS" mistake and overestimated foreign talent relative to players currently in MLS. It happens most of the time -- the sporting director or coach brings in a bunch of guys he is familiar with and they underperform because he just kind of assumed MLS players aren't that good. Obrian and Ricuarte aren't bad, but they also aren't Barrios and Mauro Diaz, either. There's no reason to import MLS mediocrity, especially if you are Dallas.
I still haven't figured out if Agent_Orange is a Dynamo spy or is Dynamo misinformation to aid FCD. There's a really good German coach who inexplicably keeps playing a German forward who has a lot of trouble scoring for apparently this very reason. With FCD it's possible the scoring would be the same but that Pepi presses a ton more so this has to be pressure from the FO channeling Jerry Jones type interference.
Agree, although my point was merely that developing talent and being an effective coach (wins/losses) are not necessarily mutually inclusive. In fact, I believe it is a rather rare condition and why those that have shown that talent are so valuable for MLS and the greater US pool of developing talent. Whether intentional or not, I believe we tend to think of the two as one and the same and the only necessary requirement is to play the kids. Bring over the Mourinho's....it would be good for MLS. There are European teams that have shown the ability to develop talent that don't have Mourinho at the helm. Would Mourinho be good for MLS? perhaps. Would he be good for development in MLS? that is a different question. Sorry...my answer at this point really has nothing to do with FCD....just some general ramblings.
The arrogance of some of these players who aren't that good is incredible to see. You play in MLS. You aren't playing for Real Madrid. Jara (and all FC Dallas players) are relative nobodies in the sport. They should be trying to play well and not cause any issues. I suspect they want to do so to advance their careers. Thinking they've made it, and they can hold up a locker room sounds like a player whose a little too comfortable in his surroundings and sounds like a player who believes he's made it before he has.