The will to compete in this league has to come from the top. The FishBudget is the main obstacle. That guy is way too busy counting beans and the competitive side of sports doesn't appeal to him. That's never going to change. We've watched the same story play out every year in SJ for 16 years now. There's no desire to improve and the people running the show are incapable and ineffective. Nothing changes in SJ until our team goes the way of the A's, sadly.
If this team moves, folds, haults opperations and rebrands with new owners and history isnt retained, I will be devstatingly sad, but elated at the same time.
We all had to deal with moving once. I think the Fisher strategy is to be so poor for so long that very few people will actually care when he moves our team a second time.
Ive discovered sports gambling... lol And the odds say Quakes are +10000 to move or fold within the next 5 years. A 5 dollar bet today on that would make you very big money if they move.
You didn’t answer my question in terms of specifics. If we’re going into the fantasyland where the FishBudget suddenly opens up another $10-20M we could possibly make some U22 signings because they have minimal cap impact. Those are the kinds of details I’m trying to get to. Not just generalized “whinery”.
there you go again, criticizing Quakes fans for having the audacity to complain about the eternal shitshow that we're hopelessly stuck with. I'm not interested in excuses at this point.
I’m not “criticizing Quakes fans”. I’m asking, assuming limited cap space and some kind of “greater than” Fish budget, how would you go about improving the team in a significant way? Analysis is not “criticism”.
Why are you "assuming limited cap space"? What is this based on?? Also we know the Quakes have at least one offer for Gruezo, that was reported like a week ago. We also know the Quakes can buy down one player, those are the MLS rules. So even if they currently had "limited cap space" which there is no evidence that is the case, they could free up the space to make some big moves, if they wanted to.
I'm assuming "limited cap space" because Colin Etnire, who follows the Quakes roster as closely as anyone, thought that was the case. And because we had very limited cap space last year (that's why we made 2 U22 moves) and our salary expenditure even pre-Hernán is pretty similar to last year. Sure there are ways to make moves, but they require significant spending. U22 is the most obvious move when have limited cap space and you're willing to spend. But therein lies the rub. Is Fish willing to spend another $5-10M on say a couple of U22 players who could make an impact when he just spent ~$10M on Hernán and the Quakes got worse? It's interesting that Gruezo seems to have kicked it up a notch now that there are rumors of a transfer. Maybe he wants to stay.
True, but how come the bigger more ambitious clubs buy gam, tam and whatever mechanism exists to buy down their dp's so they can add better players? The other question would be how bad is leitch as a GM that he's cap tied us with this horrible players(contracts) outside of maybe 3-4 players that we can't maneuver any new signings!?
The real question is, what has Chris Leitch done to justify keeping the GM job and not being replaced in whatever offseason housecleaning is about to happen? He should have one window, and that is right now. This offseason bring in a GM who will bring in a new coach and new players.
It could be a lot worse, but a sale is unlikely to happen. Comparing ourselves to the Chivas (I do it sarcastically a lot), is very different situations. Our situation is different then the Chivas USA, when they halted operations and forced a sale. A lot of bad things happened that started to lead to the Chivas demise besides terrible attendance, and abysmal results. MLS veterans Ted Chronopolous and Dan Calichman sued them for racial discrimination and wrongful termination and HBO Real Sports exposed the case and highlighted the demise of the Chivas USA. The League bought the club from Vegera and sold the parts to LAFC's ownership group, stats and historical data was not retained. The league has 0 reason to buy the Quakes from John Fisher, nor do they have a reason to force a sale. John Fisher has checked off all the boxes on the MLS Checklist as an owner and got a stadium before John Kraft and the Revolution. The never had a stadium of their own, we do, Vergera never intended to build a stadium for Chivas. Very bad business decisions doomed the as well, Chivas lost its shirt sponsors, struggled and failed to get on local TV, they had to buy time on Spanish Radio when the Galaxy were paid to have their games etc. We don't have any of those problems. Quakes aren't going to be sold and they're not going to be moving. They're invested into the bay area regardless of results. AppleTV did all the ownership favors and the Leagues Cup Money Grab also contributes to that. Quakes could suck the next 10 years and John Fisher will still be the owner. Every league sadly has its suckers and mother f*ckers.
We've already used significant GAM / TAM to buy down salaries. I think we have at least 7 guys above max MLS salary. At least 4 have been bought down so that they're not DP's. Fair question, but we could probably manage to sign some impact U22's if the FishBudget is there to pay the transfers + salary over the $150K(?) that counts against the cap.
Oh well. We need smarter management. I think an overhaul and fresh front office all the way down is very important. Replacing 1 guy here, 1 guy there isn't fixing anything. There isn't anything wrong with Russell, Wondolowski, Ralston, Brown and Fusco as coaching staff. We have a new coach. We need a new everything else. Everyone of these people contribute to the failures of this club along with the board of directors. They should all be replaced and held accountable for their failures. The Front Office Leadership per department. Chris Leitch - GM John Wolyneic - TD Bret Karleen - Director of Soccer Ops Alex Covelo - Director of Methodology Sean Mearns - Team Admin Shane Mecham - Video Analyst Jed Mettee - COO Jared Shawlee - President Michael Beaubien - Marketing Ian Anderson - CSO Grnat Wenzinger - Analytics Ben Wong - Data
He'd have to be hunting and pec'ing for goals, that's for sure. I think if you put Puig on our team, all of our attacking players would have 3-4 more goals.