Ochoa got terrific reviews for his latest performance with the U20s. The MLS site rated him as MOTM. https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2019...enty-harsh-marks-after-jittery-win-over-qatar
Ochoa not starting against France today, somewhat controversially. He pretty universally got better reviews for his performance than Brady Scott. Soto starting per usual, and Ledezma is starting with the suspension to Mendez.
Opening goal is Ledezma to Soto. *cries* Richy Ledezma slices.Sebastian Soto dices.The #BabyYanks lead France! pic.twitter.com/A7bYZfgY4m— AO (@AmericanOutlaws) June 4, 2019 I legitimately think both players could be starting for our first team right now.
And to rub salt in the wounds, Soto scored again as the US beat France 3-2 and advances to meet Ecuador in the quarterfinals.
It’s better to pay Yura and Pool Boy a total of $3MM annually to be somewhere else than to pay Soto and Ledezma $300K to be here. It’s the first thing they teach you in General Management 1001.
Strategically, RSL will become a sustainable MLS power by investing in high salaried proven veterans like Yura and Pool Boy rather than rolling the dice on unproven low salaried Academy products. Let the European clubs do the gambling. It’s SCIENCE.
Why sign academy players to affordable contracts when you can wait and offer them millions and hope against hope that they will want to return to a team that let them go? Sub par GMing 101.
I still cannot believe he said that just minutes after talking about losing multiple players to Euro teams.
Players with this much upside probably need to be managed like Davies was at Vancouver: signed to the first team and getting minutes at 15. But that may be down to luck more than anything else for the Whitecaps, because their academy has been a shit show. Once they got to age 17 or so, both Soto and Ledezma were unlikely to sign with us at all. They surely knew their own valuations and their families were figuring out Europe by that time. But man, is it galling to watch the success and wonder what might have been.
if only we had like a farm team that we could test these players out on. You know, like a professional team that plays at the same place as the academy. Just spit balling here. I would want to fill that team with a lot of highly thought of youngsters with a few players from the first team that cant find minutes. Not sure why you would want to sign anyone over the age of 21 to the team if they weren't already part of the first team...
Speaking of, there's a post on the Soapbox right now asking what the Monarchs can do to get back to the winning ways of 2017. A suggestion is to fire Martin Vasquez.
******** all of this "winning" bullshit the Monarchs push. I cannot stand this clubs approach to that team.
The FO needs to take classes from NHL/MLB teams on how to manage a farm team. You would think they would have been able to grasp the lesson given the examples that we have here in Utah. Maybe we should draw the FO a diagram. Academy ----> Monarchs ----> RSL
Didn't RSL sign all the good players from the Monarchs, and that's why they are losing? Oops, my bad. I forgot that some other team signed all the good Monarchs players, just they do with the academy players.
That diagram looks too much like a template for a plan. I don’t typically associate planning as a tool of RSL’s management of the relationship between the three listed entities.
So we actually have a new explanation for why Soto didn't sign with us: "'Unfortunately, at the time that we really wanted to sign Sebastian, the rules in MLS didn’t accommodate that the way they were structured in that moment," Waibel admitted. "The rules have since evolved as has the league in many positive ways. Nowadays we would have been able to make an offer to Sebastian much sooner than we were capable [of] then.” The issue wasn't financial, but structural. Their academy had been churning out first-team players and RSL didn't have an open space to put Soto and had to wait. By the time they were able to sign him, it was too late. “Yeah, it was frustrating," Waibel said. "It’s frustrating any time you have a player you want but you can’t figure out the right way to get it done. These were very significant roster selection rules within our league at that time. They were there for a reason, they were positive. But one thing MLS has been great at is evolution. This was not a singular example, but it was one example why the league evolved. It’s a really great thing. ... I think the league very maturely handled the situation in the sense that you have to evolve.”' He's saying that we wanted to sign Sebastian before his big breakout year, so I'm thinking he means 2017. For context, Soto led the entire USSDA in goals 2 seasons in a row - U16 then U19 - and he was signed by Hannover after the second time. Sounds like Waibel wanted to sign him after the first time. Our 2017 supplemental/reserve roster included all of Jose Hernandez, Omar Holness, Reagan Dunk, Justin Schmidt, Nick Besler, and Ricardo Velazco. All of these players had NCAA experience and were probably more MLS-ready than Soto would have been, which is sort of the point. It looks like Waibel was unwilling to invest first-team spots on guys who were years away. He made a call, it didn't work, and now he's saying he did his best but was kept from signing Soto by MLS rules. As a sanity check, Dallas had signed Pomykal and Ferreira in late 2016, who both hadn't contributed much until this season. They're about to sell Pomykal for a lot of money.
I thought that in 2017, we didn't have a reserve roster since the Monarchs started playing in 2015 and that's where our reserve roster went to. However, he could have signed Soto to a Monarchs contract and kept him in our system. Anyway, I don't know if I believe him or not since other teams seem to have gotten around the structure problem. If you look at RSL and the Monarchs as two distinct entities instead of the farm team of the other, then I guess that explanation makes sense.
The reserve roster is just the players in roster spots 21-30 that don't hit your salary cap. It's most commonly where you put Homegrown players. The point is that we had a lot of marginal players on the roster that year taking up spots that Soto could have used. Waibel wanted those spots to go to players who had some chance of contributing that season, while Dallas used them on high-ceiling players who were a couple of years away. The trade-off is that Dallas burned roster spots for about 2 full seasons on 3 guys who barely played. The upside is that they're about to get a ton of money for 1 of them. We could have done the same but went in a different direction.
Interpretation: It’s not my fault we didn’t sign Soto. It’s someone else’s fault. But it wasn’t really their fault because the rules were good rules. We knew he was a star in the making but couldn’t find a way to cut some dead wood from the roster to make room for the kid.
this guy refuses to take ownership on these mistakes and, more alarmingly, STILL continues to believe that there isn't a path through the Monarchs for developing players. They play/train in the same ********ing building and this asshole thinks you have to go Academy -> First Team. Take your roster rules and shove them up your ass. What a worthless GM