At least whoever does press for Tulsa FC seem at least somewhat literate. Often in American lower-levels of football they are not.
Winning the Championship is more impressive to me than avoiding relegation when it comes to finding a new head coach for DCU. The philosophy/tactics of avoiding relegation that Huddersfield Town used are exactly what got DCU where it is now.
No, our budgetary situation is what got us in this place. And that's almost certainly what the next coach is going to have to deal with. People like to point to teams like Philly, Columbus and Minnesota who are "winning" on a similar budget, but if you look at their last 5 years (or 4) worth of finishes, the positions in the table look an awful lot like our last 5 years. Technically we're not a bottom third spender at the moment, by like 2-300k in payroll, but you have to think that with Charlotte, Austin, St Louis and Sacramento coming into the league, those new owners are going to be spending to attract and keep the fan bases in the stadiums where these teams derive the bulk of their operational funding from. The new stadium was supposed to fix everything, seems like all its done is keep us from slipping from a sub-mediocre position even further behind. I've got to think these next teams coming are going to put more financial pressure on the log jam of teams with $10-12M payrolls to keep up or sink.
Take too many laxatives and you get the drizzling shits. Or, put another digestive way, Chicharito is a giant bowel obstruction that no amount of laxatives will fix.
https://www.sportekz.com/football/mls-players-2020-salaries/ I'm not sure how accurate this turned out to be for this year (it's from March), but DC is 13th on this list with a salary budget of $10.91M. They are essentially the median team. However, the lowest salary is 8.5M and the highest is $24.5M, so half of MLS is crammed in just under our budget amount and the other half is strung out between us and Toronto. Right now, two of the top eight teams in the league have sub-median budgets, and the team with the league median budget is dead last. Toronto is in first, and has the highest budget in the league. Philadelphia has the second lowest budget in the league and they're in second. That's a good indication of the range of possibilities. Although it's not very ambitious, our budget isn't keeping us from winning MLS. Yes, the potential of a larger budget is always greater than the potential of a smaller budget. But if you want to compete for championships, you'll need a good technical staff, the talent to fit the coach's system, a deep bench, and some luck. If you can get all those things for free you don't need a budget, and having a big budget guarantees none of those things. How close you get to maxing out the potential of the budget depends on the performance of the staff making decisions with it and the performance of the people paid under it. As Philly is showing, the potential of a small budget is very high, if you have a good technical staff, the talent to fit the coach's system, a deep bench and some luck. You don't need a cheat code like Zlatan to win the league. DC's not getting value for their budget because their player signings haven't turned out to be good ones and/or the coaching has been subpar and/or they've had bad luck with injuries and suspensions.
the article may not be accurate but the fact that DC United is not getting the bang for their buck is undisputed!
but at least half of all teams (not just MLS but all leagues) don't get bang for their buck. So, the point is...what? Rather than total payroll, I think a better way to measure is to view payroll in the way the MLSPA does - do not include amounts over the salary cap. This will give a much better indication of how a team is making use of their budget resources (i.e., % of budget / points).
Here's the thing with that and the budget. Yes Philly is doing well with the team they have. Let's look at their last 5 years for us and a couple of teams with similar budgets over that period. I have no idea what the payrolls were for PHL & CLB over this period, but my guess is that they're close enough to DCUs for comparison sake. Only the 2 years Rooney was on the roster were we truly above and clear of cluster of teams around the median. PHL CLB DCU 2020 2nd 3rd 14th 2019 3rd 10th 5th 2018 6th 5th 4th 2017 8th 5th 11th 2016 6th 9th 4th Philly has been a bit more consistent, but the general theme of those 5 year runs is rather similar from one team to another. Worth noting, no bottom half payroll has won the MLS Cup in the last decade and only once made the final. If you really want to win in this league you need to be a top half spender and not a top half spender who is within 2-300k in payroll from being in the bottom half. There's a real logjam within 500k of the median line. I don't expect the team to be out there signing one aging Euro star after another, year after year, but I do want to see the team spending to win, developing players with a winning attitude, and holding everyone in the organization accountable. It's not lost on me that Chris Hull left before last year and our head of conditioning or whatever his title is, left this year. I don't know if those guys were good, bad, great or so so at their jobs, but this is not a place where winning is prioritized by ownership. Jason Levien comes to the stadium and wants to see the team win, but when it comes to where the rubber meets the road, he and the ownership group don't have the cash reserves to be hanging big dogs in the league and only more big dogs are coming in over the next couple of years. Maybe Jim Curtain is some kind of genius and is getting blood from a stone, unlike Benny. As a coach, he's 83-50-82 for a 38.60% winning percentage. Sound familiar? Olsen had a 36% winning percentage. Perhaps it's their academy or maybe it's their GM. I don't know, but I'd wager my mortgage they aren't winning MLS Cup this year and this is probably their best shot with Atlanta and NYC off their typical pace. Columbus might be more interesting with Caleb Porter, but that's a smaller sample at 20-12-20 since the start of Porter's tenure. They're also not likely to win the MLS Cup either, but I like their odds better than Philly's with Porter having unlocked the hardest substance known to man, Gyasi Zardes' feet.
My take on Chris Hull is that he was the fireman at DCU. He would respond even to a casual email in just a few minutes. I'm not sure he planned to stay here a long time anyway, but he may have just burned out. As for Jonny Northeast, I wonder if the pandemic made him want to return close to family. Don't know. However, you're larger point about culture is very important. The DCU FO has seemed rudderless since KP left many moons ago. Not that KP didn't have his faults and foibles, but he did have a clear idea of where he wanted to go.
Having said all that, player budget is not the only budget. The talent pipeline is a big deal for a club that doesn't have a big player budget. In the last 3 years, we've gotten two stadiums, a training facility, a USL team and a reorganized academy system. We're putting _some_ money there, but we haven't seen dividends yet - not really. The Paredes and Yows are not truly the product of that improved network. Ideally, we'd have laid that groundwork in 2015, and at this point, we'd be hitting on all cylinders. In 3 years, if we make good decisions, we might be Philly, but with a bigger player budget. That's not a terrible place to be. What concerns me more than anything, if you can believe it, is how small the front office is. And the fact that it appears so... marketing centric, to such little effect. Too much work for too few people always leads to bad decision making, high turnover and missed opportunities. Maybe someone who has more contact with DC's FO can speak into this and calm my fears.
Goff's latest: DC United meets with Jill Ellis... Here are the candidates Goff mentions in the article. Not all are sourced to DCU: Jill Ellis Chris Armas Jason Kreis Steve Cherundolo Richie Williams Ezra Hendrickson John Harkes Michael Nsien Tyrone Marshall Patrice Bernier Chad Ashton "several coaches abroad, mostly from Latin America"
We should get GBS from the Galaxy - I think he is a good coach but that situation isn't working. He had great success in South America.