If MA shot a man on San Fernando in broad daylight, Quakes05 would be blaming it on Fisher/Fioranelli/Leitch...
I simply don't get all the scapegoating. Matias is an accomplished coach who was placed in an impossible situation in SJ, and dared to complain about it. Fans love to pile hate on the guy even though he had to deal with the same impossible, insurmountable odds as all the many coaches who’ve tried and failed in SJ, since 2008. Apparently folks tend to forget that the problem in SJ isn’t coaching.
That’s 100% on him. Unless he was given assurances that were not fulfilled, even a cursory attempt at due diligence should have set off alarm bells - just Google ‘John J. Fisher’. Almeyda has only himself to blame. And, after his infamous “stars belong in the sky” speech, it’s pretty nervy of him to pout about not getting all the toys he wanted. He’s an adult of seemingly normal intellects, so he doesn’t get a pass, my friend.
His mistake may have been that he thought he could make it work. Maybe he didn’t do his due diligence before signing here, who knows? Also, fish being fish, he used the pandemic to go full-austerity and doomed Matias from above. Matias was set up to fail and, as a fierce competitor, he resented that and had the audacity to say so. Matias is a hero in my book for that, truth seeing the light of day = so refreshing!
No argument here. Anybody publicly calling Fisher out as the cheapassmother********er he is gets points in my book.
For the 8000th time. He was a mediocre coach at the division 1 level except in a few tournaments. And he choose to play JY at defense, even when it was brutally obvious that gamble wouldn't work. And it's likely he intentionally threw the season just so he would be fired. If he was a scapegoat for Fish, he was a willing scapegoat.
For the 8001st time, he was a great coach before coming to SJ, and I expect him to do well in Greece. His first two gigs, he got his team promoted (literally the best possible outcome) and at Chivas, do you really need me to post pics of all the trophies he won, again? He played JY at defense because his boss, CL, said he thought that was a great idea and it’s completely stupid to suggest that he intentionally threw games. Nathan got injured, Jebo was struggling to regain his form, all from the first game... ...he is a scapegoat because of the nonsense you’re spreading here about him being at fault for our failures since 2019. Your really ought to know better.
Won tons of stuff and voted coach of the year for all of North America. Nah that doesn't matter - he was a mediocre coach. Meanwhile Ian Russel makes the playoffs in USL and we can't heap enough praise on him.
For what it's worth, my prediction is that Almeyda will succeed at Athens and continue on to have a nice career, with San Jose a mere blip. Meanwhile, we competed for the wooden spoon before he arrived and will continue to do so now that he's gone. Of course barring the unlikely scenario that Fisher decides he gives a damn.
This club used to be completely dependent on Wondo to score goals for us - nobody else was scoring. It was hard to imagine how the Quakes would let Wondo retire and not digress in our attack. Matias Almeyda navigated Wondo's retirement beautifully. He respected Wondo, gave him appropriate minutes. The story goes that Wondo was a little sick before the infamous Chicago game. Matias needed to play him anyway and before the game Matias told Wondo he believed he would score 4 goals. Wondo scored 4 goals breaking the all time goal scoring record in MLS. One of the best moments in our clubs history. That story is truly unbelievable but it has been confirmed by Wondo himself. Wondo has since retired and in large part thanks to Almeyda the Quakes are scoring MORE goals now and we aren't reliant on any single person to score goals. He made us a MUCH better attacking team while our legendary attacking player retired. Our defense on the other hand stinks but we rarely get the proper upgrades for that position. We started doing much better when Jesse signed Nathan, but Nathan alone hasn't been enough. Hopefully that will change soon.
Every coach succeeds at AEK - they’re a top or 4 team every year. Getting good results with a good team is table stakes. Getting mediocre results with a mediocre team is table stakes. A great coach is one that can get results that exceed the talent level of the team. Matias was unable to do that here except for a stretch in the middle of his 1st year. After that, no progress until it finally ran aground completely. We need a coach who can coach up a team, who can use “blue collar” as a motivator, not as a source for whining in Argentine media, and who will utilize at least reasonable tactics.
Ah yes, the old coach 'em up myth. You keep wishing on that star Jazzy. I'm familiar with it, and it does not end well.
You are not describing Luchi Gonzalez my friend. He was a big winner with the Dallas academy when they had by far the best youth players on one team in the county. With FC Dallas, total mediocre record with a plus eight goal differential in 86 games. If Leitch goes with him I don’t expect much.
We were told that Robin Fraser was 'coaching up' a mediocre Colorado team. Then the following offseason Colorado sold many of the so called 'mediocre' players for many millions of dollars. Now Fraser is getting mediocre results. What happened? Did Fraser suddenly get worse as a coach, or did he lose his star players?
It's not a myth that a coach can get better than "exactly as expected" results for a given roster. You don't think Kinnear coached up the 2005 Quakes? Yallop the 2010 and 2012 Quakes? Essentially you are saying that all coaches are the same, i.e. mediocre or worse because no coach can "coach up" a team because it's a "myth". If Almeyda is a great coach but never "coached anyone up" because that's a myth, then why is he a "great coach"?
@JazzyJ, he coached Banfield and River Plate up, got them both promoted! And Chivas hadn’t won anything for like a decade before Matias showed up, then it was trophies galore! A win fest! It was only once he got to SJ that his success tanked for reasons that are all too familiar, even for the casual Quakes fan.
The myth is that a team can continually have subpar rosters, but there is a wizard (a great man, as you like to say) out there that can stir the pot in just the right way to make it competitive. If such a wizard is out there, you don't know who he is until after the fact, and it is usually not repeatable. More often, the team catches lightening in a bottle for other reasons (form, health, bounces going your way) and this gets projected onto the manager. Then everyone wonders why the team sucks the next year. Yallop -- apparently forgot to coach them up in 2008, 09, 11, and 13. I guess Kinnear forgot to coach them up in 2015-2017? That '05 team was good by the way: Rico Clark, DeRosario, Ching, plus a number of club legends. Oh and 2010? You mean when we were sixth in the conference and had a goal difference of +1 on the season?
Don Shula went to the Super Bowl with David Woodley as QB two years prior to doing so with Dan Marino. Shula also has the most career wins in league history. Good coaches don’t need star players to win. #nflexplainstheworld
You're moving the goalposts and describing something very specific now. "Great man coach" is a strawman. That's not my argument, and it wasn't yours either until you moved the goalposts. You said that "coach them up" is a myth. "Up" is any direction beyond horizontal. If no coach could "coach up" a team beyond just they're innate talent level, then no coach would be any better than average / mediocre. So how again do we claim that any coach, including Almeyda, is a "great coach", as some here are still claiming, if no coach can "coach a team up", i.e. all coaches are mediocre or worse? MLS is a league of extreme parity. There are a few very truly good teams, a few very bad, and then a bunch in the middle separated by something like 5 points. A good coach can make the difference between a team in the middle pack not making the playoffs vs. finishing say 5th. How? By being good at motivating the team and by being smart about tactics and roster management. This is not rocket science. I don't like him much because he's a whiner, and SKC is usually in the upper half in spending, but since 2009, when Vermes took over at SKC, they have finished lower than 6th one time (and probably a 2nd time this year). Maybe his run is over, but that's a great run. How did he do it? He defined a game model that they stuck to year after year and got players to fit. Good tactics, at least on a macro level, good roster management, etc.
He should have been fired in 2020 when he became a worse coach than Blank Stahre. You are correct he certainly should have been fired at the end of 2021. This article describes his ineptitude before most of us were talking about it (he was successful with massive spending relative to his competitors among other things): https://quakesepicenter.com/2020/09/27/is-the-problem-matias-almeyda// But that doesn't even talk about his overall record in Division 1 play. Even with all that spending he was mediocre (and I'll leave off 2022 since I think he was throwing each game): 2012/2013 - River Plate - 7W 9D 4L. win rate = 35% 2014->2015 - Banfield - 19W 13D 17L. win rate = 39% 2015->2018 - Chivas - 17W 20D 15L. win rate = 33% 2019->2021 - SJE - 31W 22D 38L. win rate = 34% He's remarkably consistent and mediocre. General pattern is that he gets worse results over time as other teams learn the man marking style.