Contrasting approaches for FC Cincinnati, St. Louis City SC show there's no singular route to success
What sometimes is destined to fail does, and sometimes it does not.
FC Cincinnati won the 2023 MLS Supporters’ Shield, the regular season trophy in the American men’s top flight. They kind of ran away with it, too, with the other top contenders all stumbling and the Western Conference in particular being a slog this year.
The headline of Cincy’s Shield win is that they are only two years removed from a run of three straight years with the worst record in MLS. After being a standard bearer in the USL, they assumed MLS glory would come naturally and it did not. Some of the reasons for the futility:
They brought way too many of their USL players to their first MLS roster.
They absolutely botched their expansion draft.
Their first MLS coach, Alan Koch, started with a 2-7-2 record and was fired, because he alienated all of his roster, it seemed.
They then went all-in on a Dutch approach, with a Dutch sporting director and two Dutch head coaches. The first, Ron Jans, was fired because he could not stop saying racist slurs in front of his players (really!) and the second, Jaap Stam, had more name recognition as a former Manchester United player, but knew basically nothing about MLS and it showed.
The rosters routinely looked like a mismatched assemblage of overpriced imports and underwhelming domestic grinders.
I’m not saying a Dutch approach is the reason things went wrong but in hindsight, the fix was easy: Find a sporting director and head coach who know MLS well, and then put a coherent roster together. Easy peasy!
Chris Albright as the GM and Pat Noonan as coach worked perfectly, two guys who were young, played extensively themselves in MLS, and were regarded as rising stars around the league. Noonan in particular had paid his dues as an assistant for a long time, and got his chance. He’s shown he deserved it.
Only two players from the original FCC MLS roster are around to win the Supporters’ Shield four years later, in Alvas Powell and Nick Hagglund. To say the transformation the past two years has been substantial would be an understatement. MLS holds the promise for even the worst teams that a good coach, some sensible signings and a good dose of luck can make them contenders in short order, but it’s one thing to simply wishcast it. We’re seeing more and more clubs in the league run aground for years and years without any traction, so this turnaround has been remarkable by FC Cincinnati. They have a good coach. They have a superstar attacker in Luciano Acosta. They have a midfielder that makes everything tick in Obinna Nwobodo. They have a dominant center back in Matt Miazga. They even have the fullback who’s an attacking dynamo in Alvaro Barreal. They finally have forwards who can reliably score. They have depth players who can actually do a job, too.
It’s striking, then, that St. Louis City SC did many of the same things in their MLS expansion season as FC Cincinnati, and…they have thrived in year one. But, what?
It’s true. St. Louis City are in position to win the Western Conference regular season title in their debut campaign, and very much against the odds, it has to be said. St. Louis played in MLS’ reserve league in 2022, MLS Next Pro, and did well there. They brought a number of those players up to MLS. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Except it wasn’t. They entered 2023 with one name that soccer fans know pretty well, in former Borussia Dortmund goalkeeper Roman Bürki — a huge red flag considering name GKs in MLS generally don’t perform any better than a literal average American ‘keeper. Furthermore, the MLS experience on the roster was truly paltry. Tim Parker was by far the player with the most MLS games under his belt, with Jake Nerwinski really the only other player who had any sustained run as an MLS starter previously. Meanwhile, all the foreign imports brought in aside from Bürki were either playing in smaller European leagues or struggling to break through in Germany’s top two tiers, which didn’t really scream “MLS juggernaut.” The other domestic players were either very, very young, or had bounced around MLS with sparse playing time.
St. Louis City sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel, known when he was a player for being the first to play in all six FIFA confederations across a staggering 25 clubs, proclaimed he didn’t need to worry about Designated Players in MLS, because he had built a Designated Team. It all sounded like famous last words. Pretty much everyone thought they would be horrible. I really thought their roster looked like it was not remotely prepared to play in MLS.
We were all wrong, and so far, Pfannenstiel has been right. While the opening several games, St. Louis saw a great amount of luck, including multiple games in which opposing teams passed them the ball and they did what they must and scored easily as a result, they may have come back down to earth but they have been a good team all year. Credit to Bradley Carnell, for getting the most out of the squad, dealing with long-term injuries to key contributors, and making sensible “line change” substitutions better than any coach in the game. They’re getting remarkable contributions across the roster. The ragtag team is getting the job done.
On paper, it should never have worked, just as it truly didn’t work when FC Cincinnati tried it in 2019. On the margins, St. Louis City did a few things much better than Cincy in MLS Year One: They got four good contributors out of their expansion draft, their coach seems to know what he’s doing right away, and they avoided spending big on their foreign signings. But still, if this roster had been in Cincy in 2019, would it have lit MLS on fire like St. Louis City are doing in 2023? It’s hard to say, there’s so much in common!
The point is, every year we see there are varied ways to find success in MLS. Some teams thrive with good knowledge of MLS. Some thrive with hitting on big ticket signings. Some just need a good academy and the right coach to bring the players through when they’re ready. The stories of FC Cincinnati and St. Louis City SC show the contrasts are ever-present — as one club finally finds its sea legs in MLS and wins the first silverware in the top flight, another new club avoids the freshman year pitfalls altogether, remarkably, while doing many of the same things that were such a disaster previously. I doubt we’ll see these clubs square off directly against each other in the 2023 MLS Cup final…but would it be such a shock if that indeed happened?