He says himself in his statement that he was waiting for the news for Earnie Stewart to be announced.
I see it now. Sounds like he got the news that the new position wasn’t gonna happen and the Earnie news last week. Solid dude.
at some point we are gonna wildly speculate what this mystery position was, right? my early money is on sporting manager- directly between sd and gm- but i want to let some of the dust settle before moving on to that
so McHead and Stewart both are on to their next challenge and Cone and Batson get to make the next decisions. Good luck to Earnie and Brian!
McBride’s statement reads like an excerpt from George HW Bush’s memoirs on the Simpsons: “…and since I’d achieved all of my goals as General Manager in one term, there was no need for a second.”
Yeah, Tenorio and Stejskal are reporting similarly, that some sources are questioning whether the USMNT side needs a general manager position at all if there is an active Technical Director and an involved Head Coach. They also suggest that the USWNT will likely retain their GM (Kate Markgraf). I get the reasoning, as the club game is weaker and the USWNT and national teams in general fill a larger role in the women's game. I interpret this as McBride basically saying that he didn't have enough to do as General Manager for the USMNT.
I can just picture McBride meeting with the Sportsology Group: “I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
I think the Sporting Director also took a far greater hand in the men's side of things, creating less of a space for a GM. I assume Markgraf does a lot of the women's specific youth work, etc. The issue is that the task(s) they gave to McBride is fairly time consuming and if you take their comments at face value, there's a benefit of even a need in a higher ranking or well respected person to negotiate releases with clubs, etc. It may be that this isn't necessarily something you can tag onto an assistant or low level admin. I think it is highly likely that we fill the head coaching job and basically fill the GM as needed. Some coaches will want the help; some coaches won't want the layer; some coaches ... we may need the money to pay the coach.
if theres not enough to do for a gm why would there be some new mystery position he was waiting for? (not directed at you, @schrutebuck, just thinking out loud)
Cone said something like once they learned Earnie was leaving they decided to do a complete review of their whole structure. So it seems the new mystery position was one Earnie proposed but disappeared when he left.
right, but what im wondering is this- earnie did whatever he did as sd. mcbride did whatever he did as gm, right? so if mcbride felt he didnt have enough to do as gm then how/what would the theoretical new position be/offer? (bad analogy time) if you and me buy a taco truck, i work open and close every day, do the books, decide on the menu and you dont have a lot to do other than working the window with me and maybe designing flyers every now and then you feeling you dont have enough to do makes sense. so how can there be some new position thats more appealing to you if you didnt even have enough to do before? its a pretty sad conspiracy theory i know, but i cant get my head around this mystery position. why on earth would anyone make that up (that there was one considered), but more curious is what it possibly could have been that couldnt just be some new responsibility mcbride could have just taken on?
with the way us soccer works I can't help but wonder if that mcbride was semi told that he would be next in line for earnie's job when he left or this new top secret job thats now disappeared. then when everything happened with reyna and GGG they realized how bad it would look to 'promote' mcbride and only express interest in a couple coaches that had zero interest in the job to only announce GGG's return.
We may see it at some point once they have a sporting director in place. My sense is everything else is frozen until that happens. We aren’t getting a U23 coach anytime soon for instance. Though at this point I’m sort of expecting that it may end up being Anthony Hudson.
I'm thinking Varas as a lot of the players will be those U20's he coaching. He used them for U23 qualifying and will just need to supplement with a few more that are a bit older. He will have a lot more experience coaching that age group than anyone else. Have to add that he looked great at U20/U23 qualifying but he still needs to keep it up at U20 WC. If he bombs then he's out.
I don't think Hudson should be the U23 coach. But I could see US Soccer giving it to him if he does a good job as interim. There's no chance he's getting the USMNT coaching job, but the U23 coaching job seems super gettable for him. We already hired him to coach the U20s in the past as it is. I would be very happy with Varas as U23 coach. I just think it's likely he takes an MLS job post U20 World Cup.
I expect we won't have any U23 program until the U20WC is completed in June. But its certainly possible that if the U20s do well at that event, we'll promote Varas to the U23s.
I wonder if the Olympic coaching job intrigues him? I don't think he's ready for a MLS head coaching job but I'm not sure where a promising coach not quite ready yet should go. USL? Second tier Europe? I thought Luchi was too early for FCD and Varas is in a similar spot and also see what happened to Tab Ramos. Youth coach for the US or youth coach for academies doesn't translate directly to good MLS coach.
The last few youth coach to MLS coaching pathways were not successful -- though two of them were the Chicago Fire, so YMMV. But Wicky, Ramos, Paunovic (Serbia), hell, toss Hudson in who did a lot of youth coaching ... I'd bet MLS teams are shying away here. The U23 job is just one additional year with a lot of the same players. I think it would be a good way to to highlight that you can coach a little older player with more pro experience. Motivating and coaching youth teams is different than club, but also because adults are different.
Maybe, but I do think Varas is highly regarded and we know he’s already been interviewing for MLS jobs. If we have a good U20 World Cup run I imagine he’ll get offers. If I were him I’d want to be very particular about where I went. But if letting him coach the Olympics keeps him with US Soccer I’d for sure offer it to him if it were up to me.