The sideline celebrations and Matías Almeyda’s staff hugs of 2019 have been replaced with somber sideline faces in 2020. Photo credit: MLSsoccer.com
When you talk to a certain segment of San Jose Earthquakes fans, the argument of who is to blame for the current misfortunes seems to start from the premise that manager Matías Almeyda is a genius and therefore none of it could be his fault.
Simply put, I think that’s false, and even if it isn’t, it’s lazy analysis to take it as a given. For me, Almeyda has never proven that he can be successful in environments even remotely like this, and the evidence has been piling up against the idea that he can. Part of this stems from not truly understanding his track record before San Jose, which is an area I want to explore in this piece.
That doesn’t mean he’s not a good coach, and couldn’t succeed elsewhere. It just means he’s not currently the right guy for San Jose, and in my opinion, the club would be better off with someone else.
This is the third in our three part series about the three most important men in determining San Jose’s fate going forward. You can read the first, focused on ownership, here, and the second, focused on GM Jesse Fioranelli, here.
What Is Almeyda’s Real Pre-San Jose Record?
There are different types of managers out there, broadly in two groups: tacticians and man-managers. Within each group, there are a million possible sub-variations that would make a manager more suited to one situation or another. For the man-managers, are you one of those guys who builds a long-term culture (Alex Ferguson) or do you quickly rally a broken squad into winners but later burn them out (Jose Mourinho)? For the tacticians, do you install an unwavering long-term identity (Pep Guardiola), or are you an expert at putting your players in whatever position works best for them (Joachim Löw)? Are you good at taking lesser teams and punching above your weight (Eddie Howe), or are you suited to navigating the power dynamics of galácticos (Zinedine Zidane)?
For me, this is one of the great misunderstandings about Almeyda, born out of not understanding his prior history. He’s clearly a motivator more than a tactician, which is easy enough to see from his charisma and the way that his teams appear to buy into his philosophy. There’s no doubt he changed the psychology of the 2019 Quakes from the broken 2018 version, for example.
But one of the misunderstood aspects is that his prior successes were extremely short-term, and were all at huge clubs that had devolved into losing cultures. They all dramatically out-spent their opponents, investing massively behind Almeyda, and what they needed was someone to rally the troops to row in the same direction and believe in themselves once again. They were so financially superior to their opponents that the niceties of tactics didn’t matter much, and a long-term project wasn’t required.
Don’t believe me? Check out this thread from ex-Quakes Epicenter Editor Joel Soria:
Could the Quakes invest more? Sure. But to replicate the conditions of success for Almeyda in the past is utterly unrealistic in MLS generally due to salary rules and in San Jose specifically due to break-even financial constraints.
I also think people perhaps don’t understand the nature of Almeyda’s “success.” With River Plate, he won the second-division title (against vastly inferior sides), but was dismissed just months later as the Argentine super club wallowed in the middle of the table and Almeyda lost the confidence of the board. With Banfield, not quite as large of a club but still one of Argentina’s historical powers, he managed a promotion from the second division in his second season, but the team was fairly unimpressive in the top flight by the time he was scooped up by Chivas.
Chivas is probably the most-misunderstood part of Almeyda’s tenure. Yet again, it was a super club, a sleeping giant in the Mexican league with immense resources and playing talent, who had simply fallen into deep dysfunction. Almeyda quickly corrected that culture, got players to buy in, and was hugely backed by the board. He won a Liga MX/Copa MX double. But by his third season, the positive effect had worn off. The club very nearly got relegated in the league in spring 2018, and the performances were a mess. They did manage to win the CONCACAF Champions League at the exact same time, but their draw included exclusively financially inferior MLS teams, took just 6 real games (with apologies to Dominican side Cibao), and was mostly done with an incredibly negative posture where they barely hung on to victory in both the semi and the final. The board wasn’t convinced that this trophy offset the deeper shakiness they were observing and dismissed him shortly thereafter. Oh and keep in mind from Joel’s thread: he also left the club in a major financial bind after burning through cash during his tenure, harming their long-term prospects.
As such, he’s never spent more than 3 years in one place, and has lost the confidence of boards in those short periods twice now despite trophies. Those are not good signs for long-term success, or a “project” as Fioranelli and Almeyda like to call it.
My point here is twofold: first, Almeyda’s prior track record is not unimpeachable evidence of a management savant such that we should not blame him for what’s going on in San Jose. Second, and more importantly: these circumstances were so dramatically different than what he’d be tasked with in San Jose that there was very little evidence either way whether or not he’d be able to succeed in it. That’s why I was excited about Almeyda’s appointment at the time, because I considered it a very worthy, ambitious roll of the dice.
Finally, all that success was front-loaded. So we should’ve seen some of that magic already, and the prognosis beyond his second year at all three of his prior stints indicates we don’t have anything better to look forward to.
On-Field Performance For San Jose
One of the excuses given for the poor 2020 performance is that San Jose simply doesn’t have the talent to compete. I think this is one of the easiest claims to dispense with, just by comparing Almeyda’s 2020 to all prior (permanent) coaches under Fioranelli, who if anything, were at a greater talent deficit with their opponents:
| Year | Coach | xGD/game |
| 2017 | Kinnear | +0.02 |
| 2017 | Leitch | -0.17 |
| 2018 | Stahre | -0.29 |
| 2019 | Almeyda | +0.18 |
| 2020 | Almeyda | -0.47 |
Even dreadful Mikael Stahre, with his dreadful squad, was less incompetent than the 2020 Almeyda Quakes. And those 2020 Quakes have a whole raft of players Stahre would’ve died to have on his own roster. Just think about the gap between Marcos López and Joel Qwiberg. Or Jahmir Hyka and Cristian Espinoza. Or Judson and Luis Felipe. Or Oswaldo Alanís and Harold Cummings. And so on. MLS has gotten better over time, but the Quakes have been improving their talent level faster than the league as a whole (which isn’t, of course, to say that they’ve caught up).
xG is an imperfect metric, but it tells us that what we’re seeing is “real” and not a fluke. That miserable -0.47 figure actually includes the Orlando performances, for anyone tempted to forgive his 2020 on the basis of his middling success in those unusual conditions against an extremely weak draw. This team deserves to be last place in the league, and deserves to be conceding what would be a league record of goals against, period. Moreover, the dreadful period actually dates back more than a year ago: the last game the Quakes won, outside of the bubble conditions of Orlando, was August 31, 2019. If the entirely unfancied managers who preceded Almeyda were capable of doing better with less, then that’s a warning sign.
We must consider, however, the very strong performances that Almeyda managed in 2019. Surely, if we can criticize him for 2020, we should credit him in 2019? Absolutely. The problem is, a coach who can produce better results in his first year on the job is quite different than a coach who can produce consistent results over time. Part of that speaks to their motivational style, whether it’s the longer-term culture-building or short-term adrenaline. For me, Almeyda is clearly a shot-in-the-arm kind of guy, and the magic appears to be wearing off, given how frequently the team has utterly given up lately. But it also speaks to whether or not their tactical approach is robust enough to stand up to scrutiny, or flexible enough to change as needs arise. Clearly it hasn’t been, which leads us to…
Tactics
People regularly reference the tactical schemes of Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds and Gian Piero Gasperini at Atalanta as examples of man-marking systems working, and justification for why Almeyda’s system isn’t pure nonsense. I personally take exception with the comparison to Bielsa, the greatest tactician since Rinus Michels, who has innovated several different tactical approaches in his career that have gone on to influence the top managers of our time. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: I’ve watched Marcelo Bielsa. Marcelo Bielsa is an idol of mine. And Almeyda, sir, is no Marcelo Bielsa.
These Almeyda supporters are right about one thing, though: man-marking clearly can work. But it just as clearly isn’t working in San Jose. For me, there are three elements to this failure: MLS roster rules unsuited to it, poor execution of the tactics as expressed, and an unusually naive and unsophisticated version of the scheme.
As for the roster rules, its relates to the physical demands of the system: if you rely on intensive, 1v1 marking throughout the field, you need rosters that are 1) deep, allowing for rotation of exhausted players and 2) balanced, since the system becomes as weak as the weakest individual link. Obviously, MLS roster structure, which has two privileged classes of players (DPs and TAM players) directly cuts against this. Almeyda very clearly has certain players he trusts, but that number is less than 11, and got smaller when Magnus Eriksson left. To rotate enough to make the system work, particularly in intensive periods of the schedule like now, you’d need something closer to 18 trusted players. And the drop-off between player number 3 and player number 15, say, is much greater in MLS than it is in Liga MX or the Argentina Primera División. As such, I have my doubts the system could ever do well in MLS in the long run.
As for execution, the interesting thing to note is how large of a percentage of the recent goal flood allowed have been the result of the system breaking down i.e. functioning incorrectly, with someone losing his man, teammates failing to help, or a sweeper not stepping up to halt progress as appropriate. Check out this clip from the 7-1 Seattle thrashing as an example:
If this was early in the Almeyda era, fair enough. But we’re talking about more than 18 months in, with largely veteran players on the field. Contrary to Taylor Twellman’s comment in the above tweet, I don’t think this clip is evidence of why man-marking cannot work. I think it’s evidence that Almeyda has still been unable to coach the correct reads and triggers despite a long period of time to implement his ideas and a stable roster. If the system is working correctly, there should be handoffs, and there should be a free sweeper to halt Morris’s momentum.
That gets to my third point: I don’t think Almeyda’s version of man-marking is a particularly sophisticated one. Again, this is not Marcelo Bielsa we’re talking about, who knows every counter tactic and counter-counter tactic that has ever been considered by another coach, and counter-counter-counter tactics that only he has ever thought of besides. Close observers of Almeyda’s system will be able to see that he appears to ignore some very basic pressure-cover-balance principles that apply regardless of man-to-man or zonal marking. It’s part of why the goals conceded look so humiliating: it’s very basic stuff.
And the system is therefore not particularly accommodative to the situation, the opponent, or the personnel. Last week’s thrashing by the Colorado Rapids was an excellent example: he faced off against a midfield three, and sent out a 4-4-2 with 16-year-old Cade Cowell as a second striker. That meant the kid had to track one of the three central midfielders across the entire field, frequently defending on the edge of his own 18 yard box, 1v1. It also, of course, ruined any offensive shape. That’s a recipe for disaster, and there’s no reason it had to be that way: a more tactically astute coach would’ve coordinated a slightly less dogmatic man-to-man scheme with more handoffs or perhaps ditched the sweeper. They could have even (gasp) lined up with three central mids to avoid the problem altogether.
With this much film available, opposing managers now know how to attack Almeyda, and Almeyda has not figured out any response. One of the more popular opponent tactics I’ve noticed this year is to press the Quakes right back, whereas in 2019 teams were more content to hit them on the counter. This press-against-press has dropped the Quakes from leading the league in possession to just 7th, and from 2nd in the league in shots to just 15th. There simply have not been solutions.
All of this is without mentioning the truly baffling inability to manage a particular game state (such as holding on to a lead) or the ways in which his subs, particularly in 2019, had a tendency to completely wreck the shape of the team.
Player Development
This is a mixed bag. My strong personal intuition is that a man-marking scheme, with a coach who is more of an inspirer than a technical and tactical instructor, is not a strong environment for the development of young players.
However, there have been a few success stories. Jackson Yueill, already on an upward trajectory, significantly advanced the physical and defensive dimensions of his game under Almeyda. Those dimensions allowed his strengths on the ball and in his passing range to shine, and made his all-around game good enough for the USMNT. Almeyda also found an excellent role for Tommy Thompson, whose limitations previously made him a bit of a tweener. Marcos López, after a very poor 2019 season, looks to have far more confidence now and is starting to fulfill his potential.
On the other hand, there have been numerous stalled developmental projects. Top of the list is JT Marcinkowski, the homegrown keeper who the US National Team considered their top under-23 stopper but Almeyda considers no better than 3rd stringer and career USL man Matt Bersano. Marcinkowski’s superiority to Daniel Vega with the ball at his feet is massive and inarguable. As a stopper, his statistics (G/xG) indicate that he was above league average in 2018 and 2020, while Vega’s 2020 season is even worse than Andrew Tarbell’s dreadful 2018. Even if Almeyda really thinks Vega is a better stopper today, surely it would’ve been worthwhile to develop the Quakes’s keeper of the future for the last two years rather than let him (and his valuable homegrown contract) rot?
Then, of course, there’s the curious case of Nick Lima, who started his career under Almeyda as a 24-year-old National Team debutant with European transfer prospects. He was San Jose’s player of the season in arguably both 2017 and 2018. Since then, cast off to a less-comfortable left side, and placed in this unorthodox system, he was a husk of himself, and barely looked like he deserved to play at all. But the kid’s still got it, as shown by his excellent work pocketing Cristian Pavón a few weeks back while on his natural right side. Good coaches recognize strengths and weaknesses, teach what they can, and put players in positions where they should succeed. Whatever it is with Nick Lima, it hasn’t worked.
Eric Calvillo and Luis Felipe, who have both showed flashes of being potential starters back in 2018, have also not taken a meaningful step forward since then. Siad Haji and Gilbert Fuentes, two of the most technically gifted players in the organization, don’t look even remotely ready for the MLS level, although in part that’s due to injuries and the inability to shuttle back-and-forth to Reno during the pandemic.
One impediment to youth development is Almeyda’s penchant for signing and starting players who block developmental pathways, such as Vega, above. The average age of Almeyda’s preferred starting lineup in 2020 is an astronomical 28.7 (compare to the 23.5 average the Rapids put against them the other night). Signings like Ríos and Fierro, which I’ll discuss further shortly, have directly blocked people like Danny Musovski, Calvillo, Haji, Cowell and others from getting the game time they might’ve used to develop. I will of course give Almeyda credit for playing Cowell, the one young player he’s played above more veteran options with any regularity, but it would be hard to keep a kid of his gifts off the field for any coach.
Some of these issues speak to poor teaching, but more of them to me speak to poor talent identification, which is actually a potentially worse problem in the long term, since savvy assistant hirings can add to the teaching capacity. It also causes problems for…
Transfers
Almeyda wasn’t brought in to the club to take charge of transfers, but Fioranelli surely understood that bringing him on meant giving him a much bigger say than he gave to Kinnear, Leitch, or Stahre. And true to form, the transfers in the last two years have borne the distinct imprint of the Argentine’s influence.
First off, the good: it’s almost unimaginable that Cristian Espinoza and Oswaldo Alanís would have joined the club in the absence of Almeyda. They’re arguably two of the team’s very best players, with Espinoza amongst the top creators in MLS statistically last year, and Alanís bringing defensive class (and even some delicious goals!) that the side sorely needed. Even better, the financial terms they came on were spectacular: Espinoza originally on a subsidized one-year loan, and then a cut-rate permanent transfer. Alanís is on a one-year heavily subsidized loan. Both players’ desire to be in San José, and specifically to work under El Pelado, surely played a role in those sweetheart terms as well.
But there is a “bad” side to Almeyda’s presence: Andy Ríos and Carlos Fierro almost certainly wouldn’t have been brought in if not for the Argentine’s insistence. Fierro has looked ineffectual, and Ríos serviceable at best, despite the fact that collectively they’re getting paid more than $1.5 million per year on top of whatever transfer fees the club had to shell out. Good MLS clubs are built on nailing the DP and TAM slots in the roster, and using their international slots judiciously. Those two transfers are disasters in that regard. It’s not that they’re terrible players, it’s that they aren’t justifying the salary and roster resources that were used for them.
There are some others, like Marcos López, where Almeyda was probably a factor but not as obviously determinative as in the four above. Judson was brought on when Almeyda was, but that smacks of a Bruno Costa signing if I’ve ever seen one.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that Almeyda’s interests in the market are necessarily on a shorter time horizon than Fioranelli’s, so you see deals like Alanís, Vega, and Ríos, who are all in their 30s, making the team better today but not necessarily building a long future project.
But on the whole, it’s not been bad. You gain access to certain players and deals you never would’ve otherwise, but you also have to accept some duds when you’re empowering someone who isn’t a specialist in the transfer market. If anything, it’s probably a small net positive.
One associated problem however is the amount of control you have to hand over to a coach of Almeyda’s reputation and personality. A GM cannot simply say no to his demands, and that means that there’s very little check against his worst instincts. If you’re trying to build for the long term, that means there’s always going to be a conflict. Jesse Fioranelli just signed a long-term extension, and for a club like San Jose, who wants to be able to compete without out-spending its opponents, you need a long-term trajectory. In general, this isn’t it.
Connection with his constituencies
Like it or not, a major part of the job for a modern coach is keeping the fans happy, win or lose. There are some coaches who were modestly successful on the field but reviled by fans, while others manage to retain fan support despite poor results.
There’s no doubt that Almeyda is the latter category. He’s a passionate, high-energy, and inspiring character. He’s played the game at a very high level and won major trophies, giving him credibility and gravitas beyond any of his predecessors. He’s also Spanish-speaking and Latino, arriving from one of the biggest clubs in Mexico, giving him a natural connection to a huge chunk of the Quakes fanbase that rightly felt underrepresented before. It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s handsome, with (once) long flowing hair.
The players clearly bought in. Bushido Code, to them, is not mere BS. Although that’s something to watch going forward, given the dispiriting capitulations we’ve seen lately.
The media, on the other hand, of which I am one, is probably a bit more skeptical. He’s engaged in some fairly shocking breaches of media norms in the US, including not bothering to show up for press conferences he’s required to attend (even before the infamous “headache”), putting certain players off limits, and kicking media out of practices. On one level, that could just be down to Almeyda being used to the customs in other countries, which are indeed different, but I can’t help but view it through the prism of a charlatan attempting to hide what’s really behind the curtain.
Should you, the fan, care what media people think about your coach? Not necessarily. But I think it provides a datapoint that, when viewed in the context of everything else we know about him, might signal someone whose substance can’t match his style.
Conclusion
Almeyda might be a very good coach. His players really do respond to him, and the fans have connected with him in a way that I don’t believe has ever happened in San Jose before, even in prior incarnations. He managed to successfully instill confidence into a teaming coming off a traumatizing 2018, and his tactics led to must-watch soccer and a near miss with the playoffs.
The problem is, the last 12 months, dating back to last season, have provided very little evidence that he can get this collective to achieve even the sum of its parts, let alone punch above its weight. And that fits into what we know of his historical record: he’s good at quickly flipping the mentality, and winning in the short term when backed with massive investment. What we’ve yet to see, and have reason to doubt, is whether he can build a long term culture with sustainable tactics.
In some ways, just getting a coach who will steady the boat, get players to achieve roughly at their talent level, and foster the long-term development of youth is all you’re really looking for. We don’t need a star manager in San Jose. What we do need is a bit more investment, an excellent 2020-2021 offseason of recruitment from Jesse Fioranelli, and a coach who will be singing from the same hymnal as the entire organization.
I personally am a huge fan of Ian Russell, the coach of Reno 1868, who has fashioned winners out of each and every one of his squads despite not having nearly the same spending as competitors. He’s clearly an excellent talent identifier, he’s a great teacher who has shepherded along some young prospects, and is a savvy, flexible tactician. He’s really good at putting guys into positions where they’ll succeed, rather than forcing square pegs in round holes. Of course he’s also someone who has deep roots in San Jose, and would immediately provide a comfort level that’s badly needed. He’d also definitely be a team player about whatever Fioranelli’s vision is, rather than carry around his own center of gravity as Almeyda does.
But Russell is just one option. I think there are a lot of perfectly fine coaches out there who would succeed if they were sufficiently backed, both financially and through savvy roster management from a GM. You really just need a coach who won’t get in his own way, and that’s unfortunately what Almeyda is doing through his tactics at the moment.
Quakes fans don’t expect to win championships every year. What we do expect is consistent effort, a sense of identity, and some amount of hope in the long term project. None of those things are working right now, and it’s a time for change. While certain changes in ownership and in the front office make sense, the biggest one needed is the most recognizable face of them all: Matías Almeyda.
