If there's anything I've learned during my time on this earth, it's that things can always get worse.
There's a subreddit called "toprightmessi"... perhaps there should be one called "bottomleftquakes"...
For that particular plot, you are much better off being bottom left than bottom right (hello, Toronto) unless you love to waste a ton of money. And so last year is more data to show lack of correlation between spending and results. If there was any correlation you'd see some kind of gathering around an upwardly slanting line. If anything looks like a negative correlation between spending and results. If you draw an imaginary vertical line between "bottom half spenders" and "top half spenders" the results look better for bottom half.
Have to agree that it looks like a scatterplot with very low R-squared for any correlation between spending and success. I'd be interested in a plot that showed - for each team - the points for a season and the highest paid individual player. That might be interesting to see if there's anything there...
Bottom left literally means we don't spend much money and we suck. Wasting money is not the issue in SJ, our team is risk averse. Philly proves that with stability, great coaching and a smart GM capable of signing impact players for less ("According to information compiled by TransferMarkt, Philadelphia has shelled out a grand total of $6.41 million for the six players on their current roster whose acquisitions necessitated transfer fees. The most expensive fee they’ve ever paid is the $2.8 million they spent to sign striker Mikael Uhre this winter. The notoriously thrifty San Jose Earthquakes are the only team whose record signing came with a smaller fee." - The Athletic), you can succeed, but they're much further along on the player development side, and they've done well with their homegrowns and draft picks. So, if you're going to be a low-end spender, you better have a brilliant GM, an excellent academy, and stability in key positions, like coaching. How Philadelphia Union’s record-setting MLS rampage was built - The Athletic
People also bring up transfer fees, which is a valid point, and so if we add that (assuming it's not already accounted for), what does it look like then. However, I don't think you can just add transfer fees to the guaranteed salary for a given year because in theory those transfer fees are spread across the life of the player's tenure with the club.
I expected someone to respond with this... Bottom shows you suck currently. - BAD Left shows you don't spend money. - BAD Toronto spends a lot of money, and they suck currently. But because they spend a lot of money, they are less likely to suck than the Quakes. We know this because... they have actually spent money and been good a bunch of times in recent years. Just over the last six seasons, Toronto FC has won six trophies (2017 MLS Cup, 2017 Supporters Shield, 2016/17/18/20 Canadian Championship)* and been in three other finals (2016/19 MLS Cup, 2018 Champions League). What have the Quakes done over the last six years? But hey who needs Federico Bernardeschi or Lorenzo Insigne when you have Jan Gregus, right? *making them the first and only MLS club to win the domestic treble in 2017
Canadian championship! Hey the Quakes won the Heritage Cup this year! TFC has had really one good run and many other years they have been a dumpster fire including their “Bloody Big Deal” years with Defoe and Bradley and DeRo and others and they failed to make the playoffs. Philly’s been I think the best MLS club over the past 3 years based on PPG so we can always find stuff to cherry pick. Bottom line - still no correlation between roster spending and results in MLS. We don’t need a Bernardeschi when we have a Jebo, and we don’t need a Defoe when we have a Wondolowski. We continually devalue our own players because they are not our euro fanboy pinup guys.
Jebo puts in a heroic season, overcoming his second serious concussion in 2 years, knowing that a 3rd could end his career, and scores 17 goals, and Quakes euro fanboy fans can't bother to notice because they're too busy swooning over Bernardeschi. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“We came in last place but at least we’re not spending any money “ Who cares if Fisher is saving money when we’re in last place? That’s bizarre. We need better players and our strategy of not spending money hasn’t been working.
If salary expenditure is roughly a proxy for ambition I wish the Quakes were relatively unambitious like Philly or NYRB or even CO from the last few years before this year. Everyone wants to win. Competency is the key. The Quakes made a big bet on Almeyda, brought him in as possibly the highest paid coach and his whole entourage with him, and then let him pick his guys to add to the roster. That was an ambitious risk that failed. It always comes back to competency - the smarts.
Ambition is more than money, as you noted with Almeyda. But Ambition is also finding smart people and removing barriers so they can succeed. We've sucked there too, based on results.
We have sucked mainly in our decisions about who is GM. All the technical decisions stem from that - the GM position. I’m hopeful about CL but neither Doyle or Jesse were good GMs. You can be reasonably ambitious and still make bad decisions. We did give Jesse and Doyle too much leash for failure but at the same time Doyle’s failures had mixes of success so that’s going to delay potential changes in direction. For example if 2012 hadn’t happened where we were one of the best teams in MLS history, Doyle might have been gone by say 2013-2014. And in Jesse’s case he had 5 years which is a little long but I think you need 3-5 years to implement a a durable plan for success. I think this whole "ambition" thing is mostly the invention of euro fanboys who are endlessly pining for their euro star pinups, and can't wait to turn MLS into EPL 2.0. You can have a moderately engaged at best owner who gives some reasonable budget to smart people to work with and gain some success in MLS, e.g. Philly.
Different cast of characters: Wee Man etc. BTW The Wee Man is very positive about the new technical staff (Leechi, Luchi, etc.). Seems that he feels that we're finally headed in the right direction. Anyone who respects him should at least give it a chance for him to be right. I don't understand the folks (not you necessarily) who are Wee Man fans but are completely disparaging about the new technical staff. I mean I suppose you can respect Wee Man but you no longer respect his opinion at all, but it seems weird to me. WeeMan's post that many people seem to want to conveniently ignore: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/the-official-luchi-gonzalez-thread.2122194/page-4#post-40712546