Fantasy GM: What I’d do this offseason

Vako and Danny Hoesen are signature European players from San Jose Earthquakes General Manager Jesse Fioranelli’s early days with the club. Chris Wondolowski’s future faces questions coming into this offseason.

Most offseasons I publish a piece describing what decisions the team faces and how I personally would go about addressing them, as a means of analyzing and predicting what will happen next. This year, I’ll do the same, but the simmering tensions between Matías Almeyda and ownership threaten to so alter the outlook that it feels a bit like building a sandcastle before the tide comes in.

The Argentine manager has openly and boldly criticized owner John Fisher’s lack of ambition, and my sources within the club indicate there is very real dissatisfaction from ownership with the extremely erratic results on the pitch, and a lack of acknowledgement of the large investments the club has made to make Almeyda’s reign successful. Ownership sees Almeyda and Jesse Fioranelli as inseparably linked, by the way, since the Swiss GM was the one who pushed to hire him.

If the club decides to do their best to hang on to that duo, presumably that will come with an increased injection of spending that they’ve been braying for. If ownership doesn’t want to stump up the money, or is unconvinced that Almeyda is the real deal and allows him to leave for Monterrey, it’s highly likely you’ll see Ian Russell take over the coaching job. I’ve made no secret of my admiration of Russell, the reigning USL coach of the year and former Quakes player and coach, but that would represent a dramatically different path, tactically and strategically. Although I’ll stand by my set of recommendations here regardless which path ownership chooses.

There’s also another complicating factor: we’re working under a new CBA while also coming off of a coronavirus-impacted year where we had no public salary information whatsoever. So it will be a bit hard to predict exactly what things will look like in 2021.

Regardless, I’ll attempt my usual sand castle exercise. As always, feel free to reference my famous salary spreadsheet, which has my best guesses about the salaries and contract details of the roster over time. There’s now a (speculative) 2021 tab in there with the outline of what I’ll suggest.

Plan of attack

The Quakes’ fundamental challenge this offseason is the same as the one that was rather poetically described by Jose Mourinho when assessing his own squad last season: “It’s like when you have to pull a blanket up and your feet are left out.” 

The Quakes actually have a halfway decent starting XI, as exemplified by the lineup that was closing the season together. But introduce any suspensions, injuries, or international absences, and the house of cards falls quickly. I was struck by how weak and untrusted Almeyda’s bench options tended to be down the stretch. San Jose’s feet were showing. And that’s not even considering the physical toll that Almeyda’s system takes on its players, making it even more important to be able to rotate when necessary.

On the other end of the spectrum, just one of three potential Designated Player spots was filled and playing regularly, and the lack of game-breaking talents was an obvious deficit against the better teams. Cristian Espinoza was the best player on the pitch against Sporting Kansas City, showing how important getting those deals right can be. Imagine how nice it would be to have three of them?

Of course, San Jose has a tortured history of designated players. Innocent was a monumental, historic bust. Simon Dawkins had a few nice moments and was on the cheap end of the DP spectrum, but was significantly affected by injuries and never lived up to his salary. Vako has actually been reasonably successful, managing a respectable 26 goals and 13 assists in 6300 minutes played in San Jose. However, using the Football Manager database as a reference point, he was MLS’s 21st highest paid player but just the 67th most talented. That means the Quakes weren’t getting adequate value for money.

Although the DP problem and the depth problem might seem distinct, they’re actually interrelated, just as one’s feet and one’s shoulders are by the blanket: adding two elite players to the top of the roster actually provides more depth and slack throughout, because it effectively bumps everyone down a slot. Imagine a world where Andy Ríos, Chris Wondolowski, or Carlos Fierro are the second best options at their positions rather than the first?

Jesse Fioranelli divides his squad in three groupings, roughly the first team starters/regulars, contenders that are pushing for a spot but currently are backups, and longer-range prospects. I’m aiming for a starter and a contender at each of the 11 spots in the lineup, with the remaining 8 roster spots going mostly to developmental prospects. I’ve also aimed to leave enough flexibility in terms of salary cap and roster slots so that mid-season adjustments can be made easily.

Options and declines

There is no set of publicly-available information about contract lengths and options in MLS, unlike the other major North American sports. As such, the best I can do is guess, based on my knowledge of the norms of the league, what has been said about particular transactions, and the like. Here are my best guesses:

As such, right off the bat, some of the declines are obvious: Danny Hoesen, Vako, and Guram Kashia. Those three are all highly-paid, haven’t contributed in line with their salaries, and are poor fits for Almeyda’s system. However, despite all three being European, none of them are using international slots. Similarly, there are a few obvious players to retain (either by exercising their options or extending them, as needed): Wondo, JT, TT, and Flo. There are a few that are a bit more complicated: Vega would make sense on a pay cut, and if he could get a green card, while Salinas is more a matter of his desire to continue playing. For my purposes, I’ll assume both meet those conditions and return. Ríos is probably worth bringing back since there aren’t a huge number of other productive options, although I’d prefer him as a rotational rather than front-line player. The remainder are where I think I would choose differently than the current Front Office: they like Bersano, Skahan, and Marie quite a bit, but are much lower on Luis Felipe than I am. However, trying to split the difference between my preferences and fitting the manager’s playing style, I would actually end up letting all but Marie walk, and I’d let him walk too if the right prospects bubbled up from the draft and homegrown ranks to cover the fullback spots.

Major New Acquisition Targets

For me, there are four clear areas for improvement individually that would also solve the squad’s collective issues: a DP Striker, a DP number 10, a starting center-back, and another option for the central midfield rotation. They also would allow a serious statement of intent from a level-of-investment perspective. Below, I’ll summarize why I’d be looking for the position, offer some MLS models, and even suggest a few potential transfer targets:

DP Striker – While Wondo is genuinely a miracle, time comes for all of us, and even at his peak, he wasn’t the sort of physical presence that Almeyda appears to appreciate in his strikers. He’s also not athletic enough to stretch the field on those counters that Almeyda’s system generates. Strikers can be a tough position to fill in the transfer market, since goalscoring tends to come and go, and to be overpriced when you do find it. However, MLS teams know this is one of those places where going big generates the biggest rewards. Lucas Cavallini and Kacper Pryzbylko are excellent models within the league of physical, hardworking number 9s that I think would thrive under Almeyda, particularly the former. However, players of that caliber typically cost more like Cavallini ($5M+ transfer, $1M/year salary) than Pryzbylko (free transfer, $277k/year salary). Brazilian football has a bunch of hard-working strikers who aren’t quite at European level, and I’d be tempted to look for one of them, such as Raniel, the 25-year-old from Santos with a solid all-around game. You could even try to snag a guy like Mario Mandžukić, who is currently a free agent and in his pomp would’ve been an ideal fit, although who is now 34 and may well be past his prime.

*Note: after this article was published, Peruvian-American striker Matías Succar was linked in Latin American press, but is a bargain young prospect, not a designated-player-quality signing

DP number 10 – Almeyda’s system can work with a few different types of players in this role, as evidenced by the fact the two most successful options were Magnus Eriksson and Andy Ríos, but it certainly requires a willingness to run and get stuck in. However, we’ve never seen a player with genuine star-quality as a creator in that role. Imagine someone of the caliber of Nico Lodeiro (who is a very willing runner, by the way) underneath the striker. Of course, it is not brave of me to suggest that Nico Lodeiro would improve this team, as he’s arguably the best player in the league. But if the Quakes can get 60% of that level of production, that would be worth it, and there are plenty of options throughout Latin American football that surely would fit the bill. I’d even be tempted to go for an under-23 player here, given the roster benefits from that destination. Just looking to Almeyda’s homeland of Argentina, you can find teenaged attacking midfielders like Alan Velasco, Matías Palacios, and the American-born Matko Miljević, whom I suggested last spring. If Fisher opens up the checkbook, those types of players would be in play.

Starting Center Back – The Quakes back line is, quite simply, too old, slow, and unathletic to be ideal in a man-marking scheme. It did solidify somewhat down the stretch, but was never the strength of the team. In an ideal world, especially with Kashia leaving, the club would invest in a starting-caliber option that could rotate with Jungwirth and Alanís, and would add more height and athleticism to compensate for their weaknesses. The “ideal” MLS version of this is obvious, to me: former Earthquake Ike Opara. It’s unlikely that San Jose would be able to pry him from their Western Conference rivals (and on-field kryptonite), but I would genuinely give it a serious look. If they couldn’t, don’t look now, but US International Cameron Carter-Vickers has his Tottenham contract expiring just next June…

Backup Defensive Midfielder – Judson is incredible. I love him. Quakes fans love him. And yet we still probably underrate how important he is to the overall success of Almeyda’s system. However, he runs himself into the ground, almost never gets subbed off, and his role does tend to accumulate a bunch of yellow cards. That means you can’t count on him to be 100% sharp for 90 minutes a game, 34 games a year, even though he does an incredible job staying fit. The problem is the squad has no viable backup options to give him a rest or to cover. Just look back to the first two games of the 2020 season, which Judson missed, to understand how bereft the team is without him. As mentioned above, I quite like Luis Felipe, but his game is poorly suited to Almeyda’s system. The good news is it’s not terribly difficult to find hardworking ball-winners at a decent price, so Fioranelli should be able to deliver this one. You’d want a player that wasn’t just purely a backup for Judson, but someone you’d feel comfortable relying on as a starter in the double pivot whenever it became necessary through rotation. My ideal is Montréal’s Samuel Piette, a combative, tireless ball-winner just about Judson’s size who is on an affordable contract, but it’s hard to imagine the Impact being interested in letting him go. A slightly more plausible target, bear with me here, is Columbus’s Fatai Alashe. He’s athletic and performed best in San Jose in 2015 and 2016 when given the assignment to effectively man-mark the opposing team’s number 10, making him a potential ideal tactical fit. He would also be an easy acquisition target, albeit perhaps not quite as high-quality as I would ideally like.

Other Business

Of course, there are the SuperDraft, homegrown signings, and other minor mechanisms to add players to the squad. We know that there’s real value in them, given how much of San Jose’s current squad arrived in that manner, but these are young players and most of them are not sure-fire prospects, so it’s a bad idea to rely on them to fill specific gaps and needs in the first team. Instead, you want to look to these youth as long-term investments in potential.

As such, despite my miraculous (and lucky) correct guess of the Quakes 2019 draft pick months ahead of time, I won’t be factoring any specific guesses in this category when building my roster: they’ll be the cherries on top, to be counted on only in the future. From what I have mapped out, there will be up to 3 spots available for drafted and homegrown players. That leaves us with…

The Resulting Roster

Position	Starter	Backup	Prospect(s)
GK	JT Marcinkowski	Daniel Vega	Emi Ochoa
RB	Nick Lima	Paul Marie
RCB	New CB	Flo Jungwirth	Jacob Akanyirige
LCB	Oswaldo Alanís	Tanner Beason	Casey Walls
LB	Marcos López	Tommy Thompson
CDM (6)	Judson	New CDM
CM (8)	Jackson Yueill	Eric Calvillo
RW	Cristian Espinoza	Cade Cowell	Siad Haji
CAM (10)	New DP	Andy Ríos	Gilbert Fuentes
LW	Carlos Fierro	Shea Salinas
ST	New DP	Chris Wondolowski

Salary Cap: $8.89M utilized out of ~$9.2M combined cap, GAM, and TAM

Roster Spots: 27 of 30

International Spots: 8 of 8

Median Age of Senior Roster: 26.7