With J Hutcherson -- Are we agreed that it's safe to presume that most Major League Soccer clubs would prefer a coach in place by the time the combine starts in January? After all, not having that coach in place pushes whoever takes the job back a draft cycle.
Here's why that's important. Nobody in MLS is going to come right out and use the term 'rebuilding year.' You wouldn't either. Instead, you'd talk about needing a couple of players to fit a system. When that doesn't work, you'll talk about a couple more, and so on.
Parity aside, MLS is not setup to be a single-season run. The kind of league where you bring in players and even coaches with the idea that it gets reshuffled at the end of the year regardless. Player development within a club is still stressed, compounded by the lack of free agency.
What this creates is closer to the college coaching model than the pros. The coach as building a program and recruiting along specific lines. Consider who most people look to as the top MLS coaches, you can see how that fits.
Again, the key to that style of system is time. Bruce Arena's LA needed two SuperDrafts for him to fill out the role players on his squad. Seattle was willing to lose a regular starter in the expansion draft as they continue to build.
Making those moves minus a head coach is entering dangerous territory. Aside from a successful coach opting for a different job, most coaches go in needing to make changes to a squad. If the guy before you got fired, most coaches aren't thinking that they can turn around a team as it stands.
Returning to Arena, he's always gotten the backhanded compliment that he's more motivator than tactician. If that's true, it doesn't account for his ability to judge talent. More to the point, it's an ability to judge talent relative to his situation. His version of the Galaxy win the "best draft" category 10 months later.
It's how you build around a designated player. It's what you've already got in place when you're at the top of the allocation chart when a National Team player joins the League. It's construction in the big picture sense, practiced at the entry level.
Even in the era of the technical director, director of soccer, or sporting director, it doesn't work as well as it should without a coach in place.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
