Good Monday morning Caps fans, hope you all had a lovely weekend and are gearing up for the fact that we’re in the final week of 2024.
MLS Cup 2k24 is set with an old timey MLS duel between the LA Galaxy and the New York Red Bulls.
Everyone else is kicking back on a beach, waiting for 2025.
Hopefully Axel Schuster and Co. isn’t on vacation and instead is hard at work finding the next gaffer. There doesn’t seem to be too much urgency, however, with Schuster saying that they had a comfortable buffer before preseason started to get their holiday shopping done.
Be that as it may, the roster decisions last week indicate the Caps will have a number of moves to make and doing so without a manager in place is borderline irresponsible or, at the very least, setting yourself up for disappointment and wasted money.
The bigger concern, in my view, is that Axel is talking about not requiring MLS experience for the role.
In theory I have no issue with this. Plenty of successful managers have come from outside the league, though having MLS experience has clearly been a benefit as of lately.
But we return to the window that is confronting this Caps team. Next season is the last best chance for Vancouver to win something beyond a Voyageurs Cup.
An MLS newcomer might help in this! But outside managers take time to adjust to the league, learn the limitations of its roster mechanisms and build a tactical approach that works here. Take Eric Ramsay, who struggled for a period when he arrived. His is a best case scenario — he got things turned around by the end of the season. Others might take longer and exacerbate the typical Whitecaps slow start.
This leads back to the central truth with this move to dismiss Vanni Sartini. It might work out but it is a high risk, high reward decision that flies somewhat in the face of where things have been heading in MLS. Hires like Ben Olson and Chris Armas have paid dividends in recent years for the Caps’ peers. Let’s hope Axel Schuster is tapping into his rolodex to make sure that any outside hire pans out at least as well.
Best of the Rest
In a possible case of jumping before you get pushed, John Herdman resigned as manager of Toronto FC amid Drone-gate.
When LA Galaxy takes the field for MLS Cup, they will do so without their star Riqui Puig, who has torn his ACL.
Is Levonte Johnson (and others) a viable MLS veteran for CPL teams to sign?
Alphonso Davies was alleged to have been pulled over for drunk driving.
Sad to see Fafa not extended. He delivered.
other ex-MLS coaches available- Bradley Carnell (St Louis) and Josh Wolffe (Austin)
personally, i think Axel will go to Europe for a head coach (possibly Germany) – its probably done and an announcement will come before Xmas
The first part of the “player recruitment/retention” don’t really require a manager. A new manager wasn’t going to tell the club not to sign Takaoka or Boehmer, or to pick up the option on Schopf. These are the types of moves I’d expect the technical director to be handling.
Schuster has already said the new manager is going to be expected to mostly work with what they have, and I don’t have a problem with that. I am not convinced Vanni got the best out of all the players, and I suspect we’ll see some perform better now that he’s gone.
As for “a new manager getting off to a slow start”, you’re not wrong but this also wouldn’t be much of a change from how things were under Vanni. The club notoriously has had slow starts, so I don’t view the new hire as being that big of a problem here.
I’ll be interested to see who the new hire is, there’s also a reasonable deadline that should be hit, but this site does seem to be panicking on it a bit too much right now.
a new head coach will be a Xmas gift- if Axel announced our new head coach right after firing Vanni, it would be poor optics- 5 MLS Teams have vacancies and i am surprised that Portland hasnt –
recent available MLS ex-head coaches- Rob Valentino (Atlanta), Nick Cushing (NYCFC), Tata Martino (InterMiami), Jim Curtin (Philadelphia), Vanni Sartini (Vancouver), Carl Robinson (assistant coach at Atlanta), Marc Dos Santos (assistant coach at LAFC)
more out-of-a-job head coaches- transfermarkt.com/trainer/verfuegbaretrainer/statistik