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Episode 342: YachtCon - Garth Lagerwey
66 Plays3 years ago
Garth Lagerwey joined us for Part 2 of YachtCon 22.5. We discussed what the new training center means for the Sounders, how that search evolved and what the Sounders must do in order to remain competitive.
This week's music: Perry Como - "Seattle", "RVIVR - "Ocean Song", Woody Guthrie - "Roll On Columbia", "Your Journey Begins" - OurMusicBox (Jay Man) (CC BY 4.0)
Thanks to James Woollard, Sounders Public Address Announcer, for doing our sponsor reads. You can follow him on Twitter at @BritVoxUS - if you’re looking for a British Voice to advertise your business or non-profit, please reach out to him.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of No Sadietes is sponsored by Full Pool Wines, a Seattle-based wine seller who recently released their first book, 36 Bottles of Wine. The ethos of the book, a highly curated look at wine categories that provide exceptional value right now, should be familiar to full pool readers. But there's loads of fresh content, and since it's not trying to sell any wine through the book, there's a bit more of a sass factor.
00:00:21
Speaker
And there's food. Lots of it. Fulpel's unique writing style is applied to recipes like leftover Thanksgiving turkey, schmaltz-a-ball soup, and pregnancy nachos. This book can be purchased through Sasquatch Books.
Introduction to Yacht-Con 22.5
00:00:32
Speaker
Hey, this is Christian Roldan. And Jordan Morris from the Seattle Sounders Football Club. And you're listening to... There's no study at this. What? Hey, Ocean! Let's go! Jordan Morris getting in behind Florian Youngford. Jordan Morris! Scores!
00:00:50
Speaker
And how's this for a save from Steph and Fry? Here comes Roy Deers from the middle to crowd it to Seattle. What do the Tigers dream of? They take a little Tigers in. It's the Sounders and an S-Com. I feel a lot better than Bob.
00:01:34
Speaker
I didn't know what it was. Is that what you young people call twerking? I have no idea. I don't know.
00:01:46
Speaker
Welcome back to Yacht-Con 22.5. This is part two. Joining me now is the Sounders president of soccer and general manager, Garth Loggway. Welcome back to Yacht-Con. This is an annual tradition for you.
00:02:03
Speaker
Thank you, thank you. So is there half a yacht this year? If it's 22.5, half the number of people get on the yacht, how do we do this?
Sounders Franchise State Overview
00:02:11
Speaker
So it's 22.5 because our hope is that we thought we're close enough to this pandemic being something like over, that it would be a shame to shoot our entire, our content, all of it at pre-season and our hope is to do something in real life in the summer.
00:02:32
Speaker
So maybe maybe you'll be back for part two or for the formal icon. But anyway, thank you for doing this. I think our listeners and viewers appreciate you checking in with us every year because it's a great way to do a sort of state of the franchise and
00:02:52
Speaker
I know this question was asked you already because I listened to you on the radio, but it does seem like the state of the franchise is good right now. This seems like a good time to be a sounder, especially after yesterday's win. It's a voting year, Jeremiah, so we got to be attuned to that. This is the time for pandering. It's right now. Yeah, I didn't realize that this was another election year for you.
00:03:20
Speaker
is that what a luxury of you to not even have to worry about things like whether or not I know, right? Well, I guess this is, you know, I guess that explains why you didn't just sit on your hands and not sign anyone this summer or this winter. I like to think I would try to do my job well. Right. But yes, we got the, I mean, you've heard me talk about it, you know, we got a deal that we couldn't refuse under us. And that put us in a position where we had to do, we knew we had to do another deal.
00:03:49
Speaker
to undo the financial complications of it. But we've been fortunate and we got Albert and a huge thanks to Craig Weibull, which certainly would not have happened without him. And then we took care of the financial stuff with the deal we could refuse in DC United on Brad Smith.
Preseason Challenges: COVID and World Cup
00:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, well, I have to imagine that given all that, given all the sort of on paper exploits of the team and how excited everyone is looking at this team before they played a single game, it must have been a big relief when Christian's goal hit the back of the net and you guys got that second goal yesterday. At least you don't have to worry about falling flat on your face in round 16, right?
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, there's that. And, you know, it's it's it's just it was such a strange preseason Jeremiah, because, yeah, you had everyone's like, oh, you guys been together a month, like they've been playing games for six weeks. Like it's not like, wait a second. But because of COVID, the World Cup qualifiers were all pushed back into January and February. You had this three game window again.
00:04:58
Speaker
Right. And normally you would only have friendlies in that space. And so you'd have your national team players that were kind of gradually building up and then joining you. And instead they had to, you know, didn't really have much of an off season. And so then they came in. I think we literally had three practices before the first game work for our guys to even see each other. So like, it wasn't like, oh, you had like, we didn't have any time together. And then we went to Honduras and
00:05:22
Speaker
So like by the second game, we doubled the amount of team minutes back together. Like it's crazy, but like, you know, when you're that early days, unfortunately for us, we had a lot of continuity, right? A lot of the same guys back. So it wasn't strangers, but it's just not, I think it's the most, single most under estimated part of Champions League is that first round is always going to be challenging and it really doesn't get more challenging than
00:05:47
Speaker
in less than a week trying to throw a team together where you're not even fully fit and playing on the road and it's a long trip and all those things. So we had to, you know, this one was always going to be kind of survive in advance and the second leg honestly probably came together more quickly than even maybe we thought it would. So that was encouraging.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, someone said to me yesterday, like Albert Rusnak still looks like he's getting to know these players. And I said, well, he is. Most of the players he's playing with, he's only been training with for a few sessions. He doesn't have that much time with any of these guys yet.
Squad Rotation and Fitness Strategy
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, and look, and we're also trying to get to know Albert, right? I mean, we need to figure out what's the best role for him exactly, right? What's the best combination of players? And, you know, and I've been talking to this a bunch in other media, Jeremiah, but the difference this year may be that I don't know if our best, quote unquote, best 11 is going to be on the field week in, week out. You know, what I think we have with this team with 28 guys signed and, you know, a bunch of those fairly proven players
00:06:53
Speaker
you know, if we're too deep in every spot is we can manage the team very confidently. Like the most encouraging thing, if I'm honest, last night was that we made five subs and all the subs were good, right? And Leo Chiu scored a goal and, you know, Ro came on and scored a goal and, you know, Ro Dan played three different positions again and, you know, had a goal and two assists. And, you know, that's the kind of stuff that we're going to have to see more of. I mean, we are now in March, the beginning of the season,
00:07:21
Speaker
to play five games in 15 days as a result of advancing last night. That's not counting the Nashville game. If you count Nashville, then it's six games in three weeks, six games in 21 days. That is a lot of minutes in games to pile up early in the season when you don't have full fitness levels for everybody. I think you're going to have more squad rotation than maybe you've ever seen from us.
00:07:44
Speaker
So the good news is we have a pretty good team and we think that we can compete on all fronts. The challenging news though is going to be, if that best 11, let's say ultimately Christian Roldan looked pretty good as a winger last night, and maybe Rusnot winds up central and Roldan winds up out wide. I know a lot of the preliminary feed was, hey, Rusnot will play out wide and Roldan will play in the middle. But all I would say is we don't know
00:08:11
Speaker
But until you get a fully fit JP and a fully fit Nico Ledero, and you get them all on the field together, and by the way, a fully fit Louis Diaz.
00:08:21
Speaker
It doesn't matter, right? Because you're just, you're going to move those guys around where they need to be to have the best outcome for where the team is right now. But I do think it may honestly take a half dozen games to get to a point where physically everybody's on the same page. And we're not so congested that we're literally just surviving from one game to the next, to the next, because even just think of the challenge in the next round, right? It's not just five games in 15 days, but Leon, again, is a big trip.
00:08:50
Speaker
And you have the two legs, right? And the first leg is at home, so you have to win. So anyway, without getting too far in the weeds, there are a lot of challenges around who plays where, when, in terms of trying to win on all these fronts. It's great just to make our statement of intent. I think we've done that. But the details really matter about how you go about trying to execute on that attempt.
00:09:14
Speaker
Someone asked me this, and I had a suspicion to the answer, but I'll ask it to you. How much of that rotation can be planned and how much of it are you just by the nature of this whole thing? You're sort of forced to
00:09:31
Speaker
play it by ear and just say like well this is what our best like like can you afford to like pick a starting lineup for Nashville before you even play the uh the second leg of of uh of the Montagua uh series no but
00:09:47
Speaker
you can always be prepared, right? Just like as in life, you have a plan A and a plan B, there is nothing that prevents you from writing out, hey, if we win, here's what the lineup is going to be for Nashville, because we have this onslaught of games. Plan B, okay, this is what happens if we go out by two goals in the 60th minute,
00:10:07
Speaker
against Matagawa because then we can get some guys off to rest and potentially feel a little bit better lineup in Nashville. Because again, Nashville is not a stand alone, right? It's the first of six games in 21 days. So it's to your point, it's a much more complex matrix of decision making, but it requires more planning, not less, right? So it's not that you can go in and say, hey, we're just going to wing it, we'll figure it out. For sure, the outcome of Matagawa and how we executed that outcome
00:10:34
Speaker
was always going to impact Nashville, but that's that's too simple. It's not just Nashville, it's RSL and the first Leon leg. All three things of those are definitely connected in terms of building guys up in a systemic fashion, getting guys comfortable with one another. And if you say, hey, we're going to prioritize the Leon game.
00:10:55
Speaker
then that has a knock on effect on both the RSL and the Nashville game in terms of ramping guys up and both ramping guys up and on their load management. Because again, that means two games on turf as well, right? Nashville's on turf, RSL's on grass, Leone's on turf. And with some of the older guys, you got to take that into account as well.
00:11:16
Speaker
And so I've always been curious about this, you know, you go back to 2011, you famously helped RSL get to the brink of a Champions League title against Monterey and
00:11:29
Speaker
MLS teams have gotten similarly close, but no one has really gotten any closer to winning that. Winning this championship, where do you think MLS is sort of hitting a wall? What is keeping MLS from pushing through and having a team actually lift that trophy?
MLS Challenges in International Competitions
00:11:48
Speaker
Look, if you're going to try to win champions, you have to sacrifice MLS.
00:11:52
Speaker
And look, we are getting closer to the day where that's not true. But certainly when we went after it at RSL in 2011, we made the conscious strategic decision that this was what we were a small club, and this was going to put us on the map. We were going to take a shot at Champions League, and we didn't care if we lost every league game between now and then. And you saw the team that arguably got the closest since then in Toronto in that 2017 team that won a lot of things, won the Canadian Championship, won MLS Cup.
00:12:20
Speaker
I can't remember if they want to support a shield or not, but they know they lost in penalties in Champions League. You know, if you remember that, yeah, they didn't even feel reserves in the games, MLS games in between, you know, the Champions League games. I mean, they went absolutely all in to try to win.
00:12:36
Speaker
the tournament and they almost did it. So look, as players develop, as academies come along, as MLS Next Pro gets its feet underneath it, it becomes more sustainable, right? I mean, when you and I were talking offline beforehand, the part that was most exciting to me about the Metagua game is that we didn't win that game 2-0. We won 5-0 and we made 5 subs and won 5-0. And if you look at the team that finished that game,
00:13:02
Speaker
that was hugely encouraging as to what we can do because now we can move beyond this idea of what is our best 11 and we have to have those 11 players on the field in order to succeed to well hey Ashley for us now maybe we only need six maybe maybe we need eight maybe against the best opponent you still need 11 but
00:13:22
Speaker
there are different combinations and formations of that that you can use, and you can still be successful across all fronts. So, you know, I would say it's that prioritization, and I think it's, you know, as I alluded to earlier, it's hard early in the season when you have very limited preseason preparation. You know, if you get a Mexican team in the first round, like the team I take my hat off to as Montreal having got San Jose Laguna,
00:13:46
Speaker
I think that's about as tough an assignment as it could have been. For us though, again, we were missing seven of our top 11 players to national team duty. It's just not possible in three practices to take on a Mexican team on the level that you'd be even a month later.
00:14:04
Speaker
So hopefully now, again, if we have an up runway here, we got through Matagua, we can build into Leon. It helps us again. It's a team with which we're familiar, right? Because we played them in the League Cup final. So we do, we're not starting from scratch. And anyway, so there are some reasons to think we can be successful. But I think it's the combination of the time of the year, the cycle of preparation, and just the sacrifice that has to be made, that had in the historically at least had to be made
00:14:33
Speaker
in order to really take a shot at Champions League. Is it overstating things to believe that something as simple as charter flights could also be an element that helps change that? No question. No question. Because it's all long trips. The only trips you're taking are long trips. Unless you're based in Texas and playing teams in Mexico. Everything is long.
00:14:56
Speaker
So for sure it helps, for sure it helps to get guys home. Again, when we're coming up right now, we talk about five games in 15 days. That's where it really makes a difference because now you can get that extra night in a bed in the middle of that sequence that can really help you recover. And look, it allows us to control the food that the athletes eat during that periods as well. So we really have a much better chance to recover them.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think Brian actually talked about this before the first leg of my talk. My talk was that that used to be a two day journey because you used to have to fly to Texas and you'd spend a day in Texas. You'd train in Texas and then you'd fly out and you might only show up in in Honduras the night before the game. Now you can actually travel there as you would to any other away game. You know a day or two before and you can get settled. You can have a proper day of training. You can get a proper meal and get the proper sleep
00:15:51
Speaker
And hopefully that's the little difference. The other area of margin I'm curious about is the psychological aspect. Is that still a thing, do you think, when it gets to crunch time, when a trophy's on the line, or do you think that that's no longer a thing? Are we beyond that?
Improving MLS Competitiveness
00:16:11
Speaker
I think with the quality of player, you have an MLS now we're beyond that, right? I mean, you're talking about Nico Lidero that's won a Copa America and played in the World Cup and, you know, Rui Diaz has played in the World Cup and, you know, maybe Joe Paulo hasn't played in the World Cup. He's played against some darn good players in Brazil coming through.
00:16:28
Speaker
Albert Rusnak's played in that, you know, you can go on and on and on down the line. I mean, you're talking about on our team, I think at least 10 or 11 or even 12 guys that have played full internationals for a long time. And so those guys, those guys, we played a lot of playoff games in the last couple of years. And, you know, what I think helps Jeremiah is league's cup.
00:16:48
Speaker
Because again, now it's not just knockout games, but it's knockout games against Mexican opposition. And so I do think that helps because you get more familiar with how those teams play. And when you have continuity then from last year to this year within our team specifically, I think we could get a real benefit from that. But I don't believe there's some psychological thing at this point that like, hey, we can't beat a Mexican team because they're just, you know, they're so much better than us. We're just lucky to be competing. I think we're past that.
Long Acres: New Training Standard
00:17:17
Speaker
Well, the other big news element that we've been dealing with or celebrating, I suppose, over the last week or so is that as you guys announce the big opening of Long Acres, we just finished a conversation with Adrian, where he
00:17:34
Speaker
Talked a lot about that and I don't want to go over all that same ground, but there was a an element to that story that I wanted to ask you about and I had heard this story that way back in 2015, the sounders had just launched s two. They were getting ready to and it sort of made some promises about upgrading starfire.
00:17:54
Speaker
for like making it into a little bit more of a proper professional stadium. And they were going to do some upgrades, I suppose, also to the training facility. And the story I heard was that you kind of looked at those plans and thought, well, this isn't really going to set us up for the next 10 or 15 years. Maybe we should be looking bigger. And so the question, the two questions I have for you is one, is that story accurate? And two, do you feel like now that you see what we're going to be getting in long anchors, do you feel like that decision was ultimately a good one?
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, look.
00:18:27
Speaker
As long as this is a good one, I've had a chance now to speak to some of the Casey Kellers and certainly not saying verbatim what we talked about. But hey, could you ever imagine playing in a place like this when you were growing up in Seattle, talking to Chris Henderson, stuff like that. And when you see those guys say, kind of light up and be like, I always dreamed of this. This is amazing. It's all worth it. It's that aha moment where you're like, OK.
00:18:56
Speaker
This isn't eight years in the making since I've been here. It's not 20 years in the making since Adrian on the team. This is a generational thing that we're doing here. And so I think it's absolutely worth it in that sense. You have to go back to the founding story. Yeah, I came in and there were plans to upgrade
00:19:20
Speaker
S2 before they were called to come into finance. The team was being launched. It was one of those where I had come in in January of 2015. The team, of course, they've been working on launching it since the middle of the
00:19:33
Speaker
the year before. So I was kind of coming in midstream. And, you know, we just, there were a lot of things we didn't know about how that team was going to perform and what crowds we were going to draw, et cetera, et cetera. And so a lot of it was, you know, maybe an ounce of caution and proceed carefully and let's get a real handle on this before we invest and make sure we're investing in the right places. So, you know, yes, something to do with that. But I think the long-term play to get a really world-class facility at Lawmakers, I think it's really going to pay off the franchise.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess that opens up to this idea that, you know, we've heard a lot about this being a world class facility and and all signs point to even if you had made this investment as recently as three years ago, it probably would have looked very different because this the
00:20:17
Speaker
the standard that MLS has now set over the last three years is so far beyond what anyone was thinking in 2015, but even more recently than that, like 2017. And so it's, to me, like one of the most stark differences is like how much bigger the idea can be and still feel realistic. But beyond that,
00:20:40
Speaker
How important was it, though, to keep up, to sort of keep up and maybe even set a new standard? Because, best I can tell, you guys haven't necessarily missed out on anyone because of Starfire, but it does sound like maybe that day was coming where you couldn't attract certain kinds of players if the Sounders training facility was really falling behind as much as it was in danger of falling behind.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, you know, Jeremiah, this reminds me a little bit about one of the big questions I asked when I came over from Salt Lake and I said, hey, you know, you guys play on turf at CenturyLink. And I was asking Adrian, I said, you know, how many guys have you lost recruiting wise because turf at CenturyLink? And he kind of looked at me. He's kind of puzzled by the question. He kind of chuckled a little bit. And he's like, you know, there's 40,000 people that are in that surround that stadium at CenturyLink. And it was sorry, now Looman, but then CenturyLink.
00:21:34
Speaker
And by my third home game with the Sounders, I was like, oh yeah, no one's passing on this because of the Terp. It's all about the fans and the atmosphere and there's no way you're ever gonna miss somebody because of that. And so I do maintain, Jeremiah, we are in a little bit of a virtuous cycle, right? The team has won consistently, it's been consistently managed, it's been both on the field and off the field, it's been consistently owned.
00:21:57
Speaker
the fans are the lifeblood of the franchise. The ownership is committed to taking those resources and pushing them back into the team and I don't think one thing about a training facility being gradually becoming outdated. Look, like everything else, we had to keep updating it, approving it, keeping it on a level with everything else and I do think it got to the point with Starfire
00:22:23
Speaker
Where you needed to make a decision needed to be either put more into because that I mean that's a great facility that the people that run Starfire are wonderful they've been great partners of ours. You know they have a great mission there in terms of helping underprivileged kids and providing stem education and a lot of other really good things. You know, but it had got to a point, as you said, I think in the last three years I think there were 12.
00:22:46
Speaker
new training facilities that were opened in MLS. It's just crazy when you see that amount of infrastructure spending and then you do have to have a solution whether that's a start-up or somewhere else.
Community Engagement at Long Acres
00:22:57
Speaker
Ultimately, we were able to find a really good opportunity with Long Acres and it keeps us in the neighborhood too. I think that was desirable as well. I had never really thought about this way, but I do wonder if
00:23:12
Speaker
if Longacres is almost as much about continuing to tell those fans that this is, that it's not just an investment for future players, but it's an investment into the fan base. It's an investment into showing, it's like a way of showing ambition, but also, you know, welcoming fans with something that is not just like come out to the park and watch us train through a chain link fence, but like come out to our training facility and enjoy an afternoon that might involve more than just a training,
00:23:41
Speaker
you know, watching a training session, but like having a coffee or having a drink, watching a game, doing all these other activities that could potentially be, uh, all going on at, at lawmakers. Yup. Yeah. Look, I think that's definitely part of it. And, and, you know, we've, we've said already, we know we want fans to, we've always had fans as part of things star fire, and that's not going to change. And, um, I look, I think it's part of our connection and who we are. I mean, I think it's in the ethos and the Alliance council's part of that. And.
00:24:12
Speaker
So hopefully none of that's changed. And yes, hopefully it's a signal of intent to everyone. And look, I didn't sense that there was a lot of doubt amongst the fan base. Again, when you're in these cup finals and MLS cups and stuff like that, that we were slacking a whole lot. But to the extent that folks were concerned about the future, I think this does put those fears to rest, at least for the foreseeable future.
00:24:34
Speaker
So if I remember correctly you were involved in at least the early stages of planning at ourselves new facility you're clearly going to be involved in the planning stages of this one. But can we assume that now that you know it's two years away that you'll actually want to work at this facility is what you didn't get to do it at rsl.
00:24:53
Speaker
The truth is that Weibull did vastly more for that RSL facility. When I was there, this is so long ago now, Jeremiah, I mean, that's crazy. I mean, we were happy at Salt Lake.
00:25:09
Speaker
So this was, I think it was 2013. I left after the 14 season that we got one dedicated training field that was, you know, within driving. It was four blocks away from the stadium because originally we were in literally in a different community. I mean, it was kind of the distance between Looman and Starfire.
00:25:29
Speaker
That was what it's Salt Lake when I got there in 08, sorry, in 07. That was how far it was to drive to practice every day, because there were no locker rooms down at the field. So we had a field, but it was no joke. It was probably a 30, 40 minute drive.
00:25:45
Speaker
where you'd have to get dressed and go down there and train or you just train and change at the field and you know it was very you know so like we had this the upgrade that we did while I was there was just we got a field that was within you know at least a jogging distance of the stadium and so Weil did their whole facility and he's kind of our secret weapon again to help us with this new one so I'm not sure if I answered your question at any point there but I think I just wanted to you to guarantee that you're still going to be here in 2024.
00:26:13
Speaker
That is well beyond my control as we started with, right? Yeah, exactly. Good point. Hands want me back and then we can figure it out from there.
00:26:21
Speaker
Fair enough. But you bring up this idea of what training facilities used to be like in MLS. And I think it's especially stark when you look at what those training facilities were like in the 1990s when the league was first launching. I mean, how vast is that difference between the training facilities you were training in as a rookie versus the training facility that you guys are talking about opening in two years?
00:26:48
Speaker
Look, my favorite story, training story from my playing career was in Dallas. We trained at a private school and we had a double wide trailer and we had dropped the double wide trailer in the parking lot of the private school and they had a peacock for a mascot.
00:27:05
Speaker
And so you would end in this double wide, by the way, it's not it's not like you had like a locker in space, like there was the coach's office, which doubled as the video room, you had a training, like it wasn't even a room, it was like those like a closet, like with like with like one table crammed in there to take people on.
00:27:22
Speaker
then you and you had one equipment area that had a washer dryer and all the shelf space all within this trailer and then you had to and then as you got dressed and you had to get past the peacock because the peacock could be kind of aggressive territorially in order to get to the field you had to get past the key peacock to get to the field and you had to train on the field before recess because the kids needed the field for recess so you had to you had to get out there and do it and
00:27:47
Speaker
Nowadays, all the fields are irrigated and they drain underwater. When I was in Dallas, we had 41 days where it was over 100 degrees and the earth was literally broken open. You were just diving as a goalkeeper on the scorched earth in the pre-dawn hours and just living the dream.
00:28:10
Speaker
Yeah. That's every, every kid dreams of that when they, when they imagine being a professional athlete, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I tell everybody, I, I, my, in my professional soccer career, I tapped out, I made 40 grand one year.
00:28:24
Speaker
That was the high water mark. So, you know, some of that's a reflection of my own ability to be clear. There were guys that made a lot more than that. But, you know, what do you think that at the very least, like the, you know, Obed Vargas is signing for more money than I made at the, you know, at the height of my grandeur than, you know, the league has made a lot of progress.
Sponsorship and Wine Promotion
00:28:46
Speaker
Full pull wines are based in Seattle, owned and operated by Sanders fans, and have been sponsoring Nota Adieira since 2011. They offer the best boutique wines of the world to members of their mailing list, with special focus on their home, the Pacific Northwest. Their model is simple. One, they email compelling offers.
00:29:06
Speaker
Two, you request bottles that sound appealing, and three, your wine arrives at their soda warehouse and is ready for pickup or shipping. Their soda tasting room is also open to the public. If you're interested in joining their mailing list or learning more about them, visit fullpaulwines.com.
00:29:27
Speaker
Well, you know, you bring up O-bed, but the Academy is also a big part of this training facility.
Unified Player Development at Long Acres
00:29:34
Speaker
Like you're going to be able to have for the first time, all of your players, whether that be from the first team all the way down to the Academy in one space, they'll all have their own locker rooms. They'll be able to presumably train even around the same time. You could theoretically have a coach or you could move from one field to the next and watch everyone training, which I imagine is not the case now, but, uh,
00:29:56
Speaker
What is the, what does that do for this team's ability to move forward as a modern soccer club, like move into the next 50 years?
00:30:07
Speaker
Look, some of it's just keeping up with the Joneses, which there's a more eloquent way to say that. But as you said, I mean, the World Cup's coming. These investments are coming in part because we hope that Seattle becomes a host city for the World Cup. And you're going to see a lot of investment then in the community and in facilities around that.
00:30:27
Speaker
and you're going to see growth of the league. The most obvious thing is the rise in the acquisition fees, the expansion fees, et cetera, that have gone up exponentially in the last decade. I think you're going to see that trend continue. But again, if you're going to become a top league in the world post-2026,
00:30:47
Speaker
when I think that's the ambition, then you got to do things like the big boys do. You do have to keep up with the Joneses. You have to put yourself on a footing to handle that kind of stuff. And I think we're doing that with the long acres investment.
00:31:04
Speaker
One of the other things that the Joneses around MLS are doing these days is not only buying expensive players, but also starting to get into the global sales market.
Sounders in the Global Player Market
00:31:16
Speaker
We're seeing it at Dallas, we're seeing it at Philadelphia, we've seen it in Colorado, we're starting to see more and more. How close do you think the sounders are to getting to that point where
00:31:27
Speaker
It's not just building the back end of the roster, but that it's actually grooming players to be sold to bigger clubs in Europe or bigger leagues. I think we're there already, Jeremiah. I mean, I think once teams committed to building out academies and MLS committed to the MLS, what's now the MLS next league,
00:31:48
Speaker
And now I'm less next pro I mean, seems like every couple of years again we're building out that infrastructure as a lead to continue to facilitate this I mean, when you know again to go back to when I played I think we had 20 guys on a team.
00:32:02
Speaker
Um, if I'm remembering correctly, and now we have up to 31. Yeah. But the difference is honestly, isn't that stark in a sense? So you had 20 guys and they were all expected to play in games there and going back 20 years with MLS. And now you have 30, but it's really, if you look at the minutes, a lot of times it's, it's.
00:32:21
Speaker
16 to 20 guys in that senior roster that are playing the ball for the minutes, and then everything else is developmental. So what we've done, I think, is pretty smart and strategic. And now, instead of having more journeymen, run-of-the-mill average players, we've taken a lot more high potential younger players, the type of players who could be sold, who could become special players as opposed to role players,
00:32:45
Speaker
and we've really spent some time and investment in those types of guys, and I think that investment is going to pay off. I mean, certainly, one way to think of it is, last year,
00:32:56
Speaker
We got a lot of praise, right? Because we came out with 13 games a row. I think it was unbeaten and all that. And we got six all-stars. And we've had ourselves in the back a little bit. And then we weren't actually that special from that point on. And we went out in the first round of the playoffs. And ultimately, it was kind of a minor disappointment of the season. If it's possible to be disappointed with a 60-point season, probably shouldn't be.
00:33:20
Speaker
But we also played 4,000 minutes of under 23 kids. And that was more or less fell from the sky. Now, it didn't from a planning purposes perspective. But the reason we were able to soak through all those injuries, the change of formation certainly helped. But it was because of the young players. And when you talk about that minutes, I think we can even increase that total, given the number of games, the competitions, Open Cup, Champions League, et cetera, et cetera.
00:33:49
Speaker
And, you know, maybe your sweet spot is closer to 7,000 minutes or something like that. But, you know, again, you want to play those high potential guys. And you're seeing that as we it's part of its cultural right. Like we just hadn't played young players here at the Sounders very often. Yedlin was the exception, not the rule. And even Yedlin had gone to college. Right. So he was not. I think he was 20 when you. Yeah, I think he was 20.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yeah, and Johnny was gone before I got here, so I didn't get to know him individually, but now you're starting these kids, and again, what was last year? It wasn't just Joshua Tenzio, it was Danny Leyva, and it was A.B. Sisoko, and it was the game in Austin where he started five teenagers and won the game, right? And we're an international story, and now it's
00:34:37
Speaker
Lo and behold, Obed Vargas, right? He's ready and steps in and, you know, let's not underplay that debut. 180 minutes against a foreign team, you know.
00:34:48
Speaker
to just go out there and act like, hey, this is no big deal. Never looking out of place. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like at 16 years old, like, you know, I think I was learning how to drive a car when I was 16. I can't remember any other real notable achievements at that point in my life. Like in this guy's playing pro soccer, like he grew up there. So, you know, a tip of the cap to Obed certainly, but the point is that this is a progression, right? Because again, we finished that team with Leo Chu playing a wing and Leo Chu has now got two goals and two assists in 180 minutes.
00:35:17
Speaker
The guy's average is literally a goal of game right now. So I mean, you can't have a better return than that. And then right next to him is Sam Adinaron. All he did was score 13, 14, 15 goals for defiance last year. And again, coming in and showing his pace and his power and, you know, again, like some of them maybe aren't as refined right away, but like, we don't need them to be special players. We can have that first 11, that's a lead.
00:35:41
Speaker
And what we need is for these guys to be able to come in and contribute and plug into the system and function within the group. And I think we we really made a lot of progress on that front. And again, I think that'll help us compete on all fronts.
Balancing Player Sales and Team Needs
00:35:54
Speaker
And I think it'll help us make, you know, lots of subs and games without disruption.
00:35:59
Speaker
and hopefully keep our older guys healthy and fresh for when we really need them at the end of the season so we can make a deep run in hopefully in both Champions League and in MLS.
00:36:12
Speaker
So from where you sit and you're having to balance the need for supplying players for your first team and selling players that will presumably allow you to buy even better players down the road, how do you go about balancing those two needs that are sometimes at odds? Like I would think there's a sweet spot, but there's also gonna be times when you're getting offers for players, but you kind of feel like you need that guy to help compete.
00:36:43
Speaker
Look, a lot of it comes down to the players. And I think this gets lost in a lot of this, you know, that the teams are, you know, are lauded and celebrated like they got this fee for X and that fee for Y. And, you know, every player is a human being and some want to go and some don't want to go and some want to go to very specific places and not to others. And, you know, you know, we talked about a little bit with Newhoo. Newhoo had, you know, named to the team of the tournament in AFCON earlier.
00:37:08
Speaker
you know, and like, what are you going to do? When's he going to go? Like, what if, you know, hey, you really need him. Well, you know, we're going to talk to new who and see what he wants. I mean, it's his career, right? I mean, and certainly we're going to have a say and it's kind of work for both parties and all that stuff, but you have to factor that into the equation as to what the players want and how you can be accommodate them, et cetera. And if you do that, right. I mean, the fundamental Jeremiah is this, if you treat people well,
00:37:34
Speaker
they're going to speak well of you, and the next player is going to want to come and play for the Sounders. And as long as we have lots of players, particularly now that we have meaningful free agency and MLS, right? And we talked about, ah, Rostock was the best deal so far. It was also kind of the first year of functional free agency, like a changed free agency where you had lots of good players available.
00:37:56
Speaker
You know, in that system. If we, again, if we treat people well if we maintain, we're the sounders and we do things a certain way. We're going to get a lot of good players through that process. And so the sale process then becomes reflective of
00:38:11
Speaker
Are we doing the right thing culturally? And if we're true to that, then yeah, we're going to make some money some years. We're going to maybe lose some money some other years. But hopefully we're making enough where we're taking those proceeds, we're pushing it back into the team. And look, we do need to compete for the title every year there. That's what the sounders are. That's when you put 40,000 people in Lumen Field over and over and over again,
00:38:38
Speaker
You know those fans that audience expects a winning team and a team that contends for championships and you know this isn't going to become a club that sells, you know, four or five players a year, and then just waits a couple years and rebuilds and then competes every couple years you know our ambition is to
00:38:56
Speaker
compete for championships every year. And in the meantime, hopefully make some intelligent financial transactions, similar to the Brad Smith deal. On paper, again, we got a lot of you lauded us for what a great deal on Brad Smith. But if you look at it just on a human level or on a sounder's level, it didn't make any sense to trade your left back two weeks before Champions League started.
00:39:22
Speaker
But you had to make the hard choice because you knew that you were trading that two weeks or that four weeks for hopefully another year of the championship window being open. And so in that context that you'll made sense and I think that's how you that's the kind of decision you have to make with the transfers.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess along those same lines, I think it's been interesting to watch how you guys treat players that are maybe a little farther down the line. The most recent example is probably Sam Rogers, who's now at Rosenberg in Norway, and he seems to be doing really well. But at some point, you guys made the hard decision of sort of just letting him go. Ray Serrano, another player, you guys have essentially loaned out to Louisville.
00:40:07
Speaker
You don't really have a whole lot of ways to get it back, but how important I guess my point of the question is, how important is allowing players like that who you might not have a necessary necessarily have a clear path for in the organization to go out and find the best deal for them?
00:40:25
Speaker
put Henry Wingo in the top of that list as well, right? Right, yes. And it's the same concept, right, is you want to treat them well as people. And look, you know, some of those guys, you know, had their struggles with us, right? I mean, and it doesn't always work out with everybody with the best intentions. Sometimes it's not the right fit, or it's not the right match. And it's better for everybody to get had to start anew somewhere else. And, you know, as much as you think of it in sports, and you think of like,
00:40:53
Speaker
You know the kind of middle tier player like getting a fresh start somewhere I think it applies more with young kids because you got to get launched and in order to be launched, you have to have confidence and in order to have confidence, you got to have some support around you and some folks pushing you up.
00:41:10
Speaker
And it's just, you know, it might be as simple as you have three guys in that position that are established, and no matter how good that that kid is, it's just really hard to break through. And so, anyway, each position is different each cancer is different.
00:41:25
Speaker
situations, different families, different. But yeah, if we treat them well, we give them opportunities. Some of those opportunities are going to be outside of the sounders. But again, if you handle those the right way, and if you treat people well, in theory, those kids may want to come back, right? Like DeAndre Yedlin, and as I told you, that was all predated me.
00:41:44
Speaker
But DeAndre said some awfully nice things about the Seattle Sounders, even in route to signing with Inner Miami, right? And now he was signed in for a Sounders guy in Chris Henderson, right? There's no, don't miss that coincidence. But, you know, it certainly sounded like DeAndre had a really good experience at the Sounders, and that this might still be a place where he finishes up in the end. And again, if you have
00:42:06
Speaker
half a dozen guys out there that say that, that do that, you're going to reap the rewards. I mean, just think of a Kellen Rowe or a Freddie Monteiro, just of the most two recent examples, right? Like both of those guys came back on below market deals because they had really good experience. I mean, Kellen hadn't even played for the Sounders. You're just from Seattle and had kind of just missed being able to sign with the 2009 Sounders, from what I understand. It was just too, just beyond the homegrown rights claiming period.
00:42:34
Speaker
So, and those guys have been really important contributors for us. So every little bit helps. Do you think your personal thinking on this has evolved during your, I don't know, I guess you're going into 15 years now as a chief soccer officer in this league.
Evolving Role of Chief Soccer Officer
00:42:52
Speaker
Has this always been your philosophy or do you think it's sort of evolved and come around to a more holistic perspective?
00:43:02
Speaker
I mean, I think to give a fair answer to that, Jeremiah, you'd probably have to ask somebody other than me in terms of like, go back and talk to some of the guys that played for me at Salt Lake or something like that. But I like to think it's always been important. I know that when we started in Salt Lake, Jason Christ and I, we shared a great deal in common in the sense we'd gone to college together, we played in the pros together, we'd literally lived in the same house together.
00:43:28
Speaker
And it was really important to us to treat people well and at that small little club, we felt like what made us competitive that that was a real advantage, because the MLS rules, they can be interpreted in harsh and draconian ways, at times, there are things you can do.
00:43:46
Speaker
And it doesn't mean you should do them, or at least if you have the luxury that if you can avoid those rule-based outcomes, maybe you can find a softer landing or a softer solution. And we were always attuned to that, because we always felt that that gave us a competitive advantage that we had. And again, coming to the sounders, where you have massive increase in resources, it seems like the same is still true. And look, I ask questions like that of Adrian, because Adrian's now, I think I've now
00:44:14
Speaker
Maybe this year, I finally maybe have a longer tenure than Adrian as a GM of the Sounders. It's pretty close. And so I did ask him a bunch of those questions. And it was clearly very important to Adrian that we treat people well, and that that had been successful, that there was no difference from the small club to the big club in that sense. And Chris Henderson, it was always a personality. I'm always like, if you don't like Chris Henderson, there's something wrong with you.
00:44:41
Speaker
You need to reassess your priorities. And I think, again, that ethos really translated in terms of how we identified players, right? Chris was our chief of talent evaluator forever. And he picked good guys, and he picked good characters, and hopefully we treated him well, and most of those guys felt like we were respectful of them.
00:45:03
Speaker
Along those same lines, how do you feel like the chief soccer officer position has evolved during your 15 years in doing this job? That's interesting. It has changed completely. Utterly, it's unrecognizable from what it was. When I started in September of 2007 with Salt Lake, I think we had a staff of seven.
00:45:28
Speaker
We got, we got all the way up to 11 by the time I left in 2014. But contrast with, you know, the Sounders are 35 and 40, 35 to 40, depending on, right? And this is first team, first team. Right. This is the soccer, the whole soccer department, like that's their full personnel. And to be clear, like, at that time in 2007, in a way, there was one team, there was one team with 20 guys. And I'm pretty sure the guy of those 20 guys,
00:45:58
Speaker
And maybe there's a maybe but there was at least three or four guys that made 12 grand a year. And we had something made 12 grand and something made 18 because we've had to put them all in house because they couldn't even afford housing there were there were below, you know, a subsistence level from a wage perspective, and
00:46:15
Speaker
So coming from that to just managing that group and the psyche of that group to then adding for first academies, but then realizing that if you did academies, you really had to have second teams. And then once you did that, right, well, now we actually have to integrate them and create development departments. And look, if you want to, again, go back 20 years.
00:46:38
Speaker
I had when the teams I played on, we had a head coach, we had an assistant coach, and we had a medical person. That was the stat. That was it. I played five years as a goalkeeper and I never had a goalkeeper coach. I had guys that volunteered and guys who came in and guys who are still friends of mine, Rich Barnard, still a friend of mine to this day, was awesome and was really helpful to me, but was not a professional in the broadest sense of the word. And now we don't have
00:47:04
Speaker
just Tommy Dutra, we have a goalkeeping staff, right? We have Josh Ford there as well. And we have a part-time guy, Fred, who's coming to board to help the Academy. And you have a performance staff. I mean, one of Adrian's innovations was to start the Sports Science Department and hire Dave Tenney and Robbie Rometty. And now we broke off analytics from Sports Science. So you have entire departments that didn't exist before.
00:47:31
Speaker
And now you've taken gone even one step beyond that and now you have departments that have our respective the first team, the second team and all of the player development. So you have multiple tiers, you have multiple departments, and that requires a much more sophisticated organization and a much more process based like as much as I preach.
00:47:52
Speaker
evidence-based decisions, objective decisions, process-based decisions. A lot of that's of necessity because you can't reinvent the wheel if you're making the same decision about how you're going to train your goalkeeper when he's 17 versus how you train him when he's 24. There's going to be some subtle differences for sure.
00:48:09
Speaker
But you have to have the right nutrition, you have to have the right psychological platform, you have to have the right performance base, you have to agree on what the data means in terms of how you should load your players to get them fit. So, and go on and on, but it's literally, it's a different job altogether.
00:48:28
Speaker
Well, and it sounds like, I mean, cause if I understood correctly, there was a time when the chief soccer officer was also the primary scout. He was the guy that was in charge of the cap. He was in charge of doing all these things that were about, you know, one step removed from picking the lineup. And now you see a whole team of people who oversee certain aspects of that, let alone, I mean, like you're a lot more removed, I guess is my point from picking the lineup than you were when you started.
00:48:57
Speaker
For sure. No, I mean, look, we I mean, we're sort of like, you know, like we we had them get DVDs mailed to us.
00:49:06
Speaker
of a player that we were interested in. And like, if you got two DVDs and you got to watch two games as somebody, that was amazing. And so, yeah, so talent identification was a huge part of the job because it was just this incredible number of hours of just literally physical stacks of DVDs, taking guys out, putting in the player, watching it. And now we have software where you can literally, as editors, you can pull up any touch of any player within 24 hours of any game in the world. And so that just think of the scale of that information.
00:49:36
Speaker
In order just to process that that is that is a big data problem now. And so you have to have someone in the data analysis thing looking at what are all the commonalities of those touches those actions those tracking events. And then you have your scouts, and then look, then you have.
00:49:53
Speaker
you know, what we call our sporting director and other teams called a technical director, but even that role is so specialized now, right? Because, you know, Craig Weibel is the guy who's at practice most days, right? He's the one that's interacting with the coaching staff on a day-to-day basis in terms of processing the information that comes from all of this front office output to mesh it and marry it up with all of the on-field output of
00:50:17
Speaker
the coaching staff, the performance staff, the medical staff, etc. So it is this gargantuan project where you are now as the CSO. You're an executive. That's what you are. You're running the company. And again, I think you're going to continue to see this evolve. You see this with Darren Eals in Atlanta, with Chris Klein in LA, with Bill Manning in Toronto, with Tim Vespichenko in Columbus. You're going to, where you see
00:50:41
Speaker
the CSO person become a CEO-like person, where now you really have to funnel all of the strategic resources of the company and direct them efficiently in order to be as competitive as you possibly can. And Adrian solves a lot of those issues for us. He's there. That's the function that he occupies for the sounders. So that's maybe not the way we go. But
00:51:05
Speaker
that idea of having to organize everything across every aspect of the business, that is now profoundly important to being a CSO.
00:51:16
Speaker
Has the position evolved in a way that maybe better suits your, you know, you're a lawyer, you are clearly, you like to think about this stuff. Does it better suit you now? Or do you still aspire to be in sort of like a CEO of a soccer team kind of position? Like what do you see for yourself? I guess the question.
00:51:38
Speaker
Look, I think, you know, I always want to get these questions. I want to stress, you know, it's been it's been a really good year in Seattle. It's been a lot of fun. Family's really happy.
00:51:53
Speaker
to gloss over that in the past. But look, when you're talking about multinational corporations that run teams on multiple continents and multiple leagues, and you look at, again, the expansion of the ownership base with an MLS, and just
00:52:13
Speaker
I mean, one of the interesting people that we spoke to about our sporting director position before we hired Craig Weibel was a guy named Marco Garces. And I feel comfortable talking about some of this now because Marco has got hired by LAFC. And Marco was this amazing candidate. And he was running, he was working with Paducah at the time in Mexico. But most, it's the norm in Mexico.
00:52:38
Speaker
to run multiple teams or multiple academies. And you get other interesting challenges that way. So look, I don't think that there's a one size fits all. There's not like, hey, I got to go do this to be fulfilled kind of thing.
Future Ambitions for MLS Growth
00:52:52
Speaker
But yes, with an executive skill set, I do think that broadens the horizon of the possibilities of things there are to do. And for anybody, if you do the same job without changing, without evolving for 15 years,
00:53:06
Speaker
for anyone of even reasonable intelligence, that's going to get really dull after a while. Now, the good news is because MLS has grown so quickly, again, coming from 8, 9, 10 people at Salt Lake 15 years later, 35, 40 people in Seattle and multiple teams and multi international competitions and again, a really diverse very ownership group with lots of interests and walks of life. I think there's one of the things that I've
00:53:35
Speaker
grown into is when I was a younger person, it was a straight march based on ambition. On some level, I felt like I had to leave Salt Lake because I had to go to a big club because I had to see if I could do it. And so far, so good. And certainly want to keep evolving, want to keep growing. But some of it is, I think the league is going to keep growing and evolving. And there are a lot of potentially exciting things ahead in that regard.
Fan Engagement and Team Quality
00:54:05
Speaker
Well, Garth, that seems like a good place to call this. You have once again been very, very generous with your time. And as always, we love having you on Yacht Con. It's a great time to get to pick your brain and to learn a little bit more about this team that we love, this sport that we love, this league that can sometimes drive us all crazy, but is so much fun to follow. And that you're such a,
00:54:34
Speaker
open book in a lot of ways that gives us insight into all of this stuff that, I don't know, I feel very lucky that to be following and reporting on a team that seems genuinely curious or genuinely wants to educate their fans in a way that helps them understand all of this stuff. So thank you so much for doing this Garth.
00:54:56
Speaker
Look, you're welcome. But you know, I want to return the compliment because it goes both ways. Again, because we have such an educated, sophisticated fan base, it's not just that they're very broad, but it's fairly deep. And again, that allows us to do things like
00:55:12
Speaker
we can sign the best player. And that may sound like a completely facile, simple thing, but I don't know that you can sign the best player in LA, for example. Like you have to worry about marketing and perception and demographics and things like that. And if you can just focus on putting the best soccer team on the field, I think that really is a huge asset and it's because of our fan base and their rigorous continuous support that we're able to do it.
00:55:41
Speaker
Yeah, well that makes fun to cover it too. It's all a virtuous cycle and I feel very lucky to have some small part in that virtuous cycle and I love that the sounders seem to appreciate that they have a role to play in facilitating that cycle, not just kind of
00:55:59
Speaker
putting the product out there and being a hands-off approach. Thank you for appreciating it too. With that, I guess I'll tune out for Yacht-Con 22.5. Remember, we are getting back this summer. That's the plan. We're going to get in person and we're going to see people and maybe even shake hands, hug if it gets really crazy. We got to hug, man. I got to get back to hugging again. I know.
00:56:28
Speaker
That's a big part. Well, you're a big guy like me, man. You need a lot of love. Hopefully, we can get back to you safely. All right. Well, with that, I'll bid you farewell. Thanks for listening. I'm Jeremiah O'Shan, and this was Yacht-Con 22.5.
00:56:48
Speaker
Green Douglas, where were the waters cut through? Down to wild mountains and tangents you flew Canadian northwest to the ocean so blue It's Roll On, Columbia Roll On Roll On, Columbia Roll On Roll On, Columbia Roll On Your power is turning our darkness to dawn Roll On, Columbia Roll On
00:57:26
Speaker
We love you. Let's win another one!