It’s the Tuesday before the San Jose Earthquakes visit the Sounders for the one, and only, time this season. Given my recent relocation to an hour outside of Seattle, you’d think my mind would be on the possibilities if the Earthquakes can make like Sporting KC and steal one in Seattle this weekend. Instead, having just met with Jared Shawlee, Earthquakes COO, along with our own Alex Morgan and Tom Bogert from mlssoccer.com, I’m sitting here identifying what I’d like to see different or improved from the next general manager of the San Jose Earthquakes.
So if you are reading this, Jared, Ian Anderson, and Jed Mettee, I hope this unsolicited list will be useful to you in paring through your shortlist and asking grueling questions of the candidates. (Also, my wife says I’m not available to move back to the Bay Area even for guaranteed three-year money, so apologies in advance. She says she can’t handle the stress.)
Now that we know former Quakes player, interim general manager (prior to Jesse Fioranelli), interim head coach (following Mikael Stahre), and current technical director Chris Leitch is going to be in the shortlist of candidates, we have a good sense of the type of candidate the team is going for.
This is not a readout of the details of the discussion with Shawlee. If you’d like that, Tom Bogert has already provided it for MLSsoccer.com. Here are the basic points of the GM part of the discussion:
- In-depth knowledge of Major League Soccer is a key requirement, although current employment in the league is not essential.
- A track record of success in the league is a key requirement as well.
- A sports consultancy named Sportsology will be helping the club vet the prospective shortlist candidates. There have been mixed results and mixed feelings about their quality. They will also help the team fill other soccer operations roles going forward.
- Interviews for a shortlist of four to five candidates will be held in August.
- The offer process should conclude in September.
- The new hire will have the remainder of the season to become familiar with the current roster for consideration for offseason roster decisions and signings.
The title of the hire may not just be “General Manager”. Shawlee used the term “Chief Soccer Officer” in the conversation to indicate this role will be the top soccer-side role in the club. I’ll use “general manager” or “GM” throughout this article, however, in keeping with the historical club context.
As Shawlee correctly pointed out on our call, the vast majority of clubs that have won the Supporter’s Shield and MLS Cup over the past decade had someone in the general manager or equivalent top soccer role that came from within Major League Soccer. Leitch fits that role to a “T” and has been performing duties similar to a general manager or assistant GM, at least, for quite some time.
Long-persisting rumors and sources have indicated that Leitch understands the MLS salary cap mechanisms extremely well and has advised the last two GMs on them while tracking the team’s roster compliance. He has helped the club build out rosters previously, including Reno 1868 FC’s roster working with Ian Russell, helped identify SuperDraft picks such as Jackson Yueill and Tanner Beason, helped to attract Bay Area talent like Cade Cowell to the club’s academy, and then helped sign homegrown talent. He’s not only been entrusted with the authority to make roster decisions for the remainder of the season: according to everyone I’ve talked to, he has a “great eye for soccer talent.”
So let’s consider the requirement of “Hire someone from within the league” already met, regardless of the final candidates. That reduces the list to six steps rather than seven steps.
So here are my Six Simple Steps to Hiring the Right Earthquakes General Manager. (I’m available to conduct interviews.)
1. Hire someone who will improve the club connection with the fans and the media
The Quakes have had some recent history with general managers and coaches who were not the warm-and-fuzzy types. Without a doubt, Jesse Fioranelli was a huge step in the right direction in his engagement with the fans and with the media, plus hiring the usually-engaging Matias Almeyda was as well.
It’s unfortunate that most general managers and head coaches, including Almeyda, see engagement as undesirable obligations. Soccer in the US needs more charismatic individuals who will welcome the new-to-soccer public into the sport and into the club. This requires hiring those who can be a face of an organization and generate news and awareness outside of independent club-specific sites like ours. Almeyda brings some of that, although he’s lacked trust in the local media covering the team due to the toxic media environments he’s dealt with in other countries, which has hampered the authenticity, messaging, and usefulness of it.
What I enjoyed about Fioranelli is how genuine a person he was. He loved the Earthquakes, and he loved being the general manager of the Earthquakes. He could probably speak your primary language — English, Spanish, Italian, German, and more. In that, he was a great ambassador for the club who should have gotten much more public exposure than he got. One of the great things Fioranelli recently did was answer fan questions directly along with Shawlee before the start of the season over a Zoom call. It’s not easy to explain to fans in preseason why you didn’t bring on that DP 9 that they wanted.
The Quakes must hire a GM who will not only continue all of this but take it to the next level starting with weekly media appearances (which are required of general managers, if requested, but rarely followed). The hire needs to be someone who will meet and talk with fans on the concourse before a game, and also will build relationships and arrest the attention of the mainstream press and TV news.
Sitting near Seattle, let me tell you, this is possible. The Sounders are a real thing here and are on the nightly local sports segments with the Seahawks, Mariners, and now the Kraken. As a result, everyone I talk to knows the Sounders, even if they don’t watch. This type of mainstream media attention needs to happen to San Jose, too, and the right personality in a key position like this can help (so does winning to provide credibility).
There is concern that Chris Leitch can do this. He’s not known from his time as a head coach for being someone who likes to be in the spotlight and answer questions. He’s not known for having great communication skills. I talked to people who he has rubbed the wrong way, although most still support his selection. But it is absolutely critical that this area does not take a step backward.
2. Hire someone who will improve the club connection with local soccer communities
Matias Almeyda mentions in practically every press conference how their project is “one of youth.” But the criticism has been fairly raised in the past that the Earthquakes are casting too small of a net in the Bay Area. This is of their own doing, thanks to severing and not maintaining relationships with too many top youth clubs in the area over the past few years for who-knows-what political or financial reasons.
The team isn’t very well known in much of the Bay Area to begin with. Latino youth players watch a lot of Liga MX not the San Jose Earthquakes. They may know about Almeyda, and perhaps Chofis, but there’s not much more in the team for them to latch onto who they’ve seen play on the TV in their living room.
Recent decisions to end the Quakes Youth Club and the girls academy side, while not the decision of the general manager, have done little to set the club up as a beacon for youth players. Now it seems more exclusive and less inclusive. “If you are a future Cade Cowell or JT Marcinkowski, welcome to our academy! Otherwise, catch us on Saturday at PayPal Park.” But the latter is not happening as much as it used to.
There needs to be a renewed emphasis on connecting with Bay Area youth clubs, youth players, families, and soccer-loving communities. It not only will strengthen the player pathway, but it will bring new fans to the stadium. It will make the Earthquakes players the ones local players can look up to. My soccer-playing son became a Quakes fan because Wondo jumped a fence to give him an autograph, not because the game featured the world’s best soccer.
Some hope is on the horizon: our conversation with Shawlee discussed the progress toward a new training facility with “eight fields in total: two for the first team, three for our academy, and three for public use” that are going to allow the club “to do a lot more things and grow our reach in the youth soccer space.”
This “reach in the youth soccer space” should not just happen in San Jose or even the Bay Area but in the far-reaching communities such as San Joaquin and down through Salinas and beyond. A partnership with the new Monterey Bay FC could be extremely helpful in establishing a connection between the Quakes and some of the talent-laden and soccer-loving communities they barely touch today.
3. Hire someone to connect the player pathway but also expand it
Recently MLS announced the formation of a new league that will play at the D3 level in the US Soccer pyramid. Fioranelli was very proud of the work the team had already done to build a “player pathway” from the academy to the first team. Once Reno 1868 FC went defunct, as well as practically unused by Almeyda, it felt like the bridge was gone. However, the rise this past preseason of a team called the Quakes U-23 who have played games against the Houston Dynamo U-23, Sacramento Republic, Path2Pro Soccer, and perhaps the Oakland Roots, gives me a good feeling that the pathway is being fully reestablished.
Last season when asked about the possibility of a U-23 team, Matias Almeyda seemed very excited about it — curious for someone who didn’t use any of the talents in Reno until Benji Kikanovic, a player from the local region, was signed this offseason. In case you are not aware, the Earthquakes put a lot of money into making Reno successful. Eventually, it became a situation they did not take advantage of save for a few signings in 2018. That’s money down the drain.
The pathway should not just be the academy to the first team. Expanding the pathway needs to include the previous step about connecting with the community. The pathway needs to start with the full youth soccer community in Northern California to the Quakes Academy to the second team to the first team to Europe and elsewhere. Instead of ripping the best players out of clubs, trust and cooperation needs to be rebuilt with local MLS Next and ECNL clubs, not to mention the clubs with younger players not old enough for those levels. Homegrown signings should be done regularly — not to just make a press release, or set some record on the “youngest signing ever!”, but to actually bring players along to the professional level on a regular cadence. Given most will not enjoy a long, well-paid career as professional players, second-team players should be able to get an education, perhaps play in NCAA during the school year, and play in the second team in the summertime.
Some of these players will hit big, most of them will not, but a continuous movement of players is needed along with a willingness to move them quickly to new teams or new life opportunities when things aren’t working out.
4. Hire someone to identify talent from many sources, including from within MLS
One of the difficulties of having a strategy that looks too much beyond MLS is that doing so alienates others that embrace the special place that MLS has in the soccer landscape. Unfortunately, anytime an MLS player becomes available who could help out the team, the Quakes are not a part of those conversations. They are off doing their thing looking for players in Scandinavia and South America, although doing so has not overall yielded better players or better results. We’ve said it before: the current roster sags under the weight of international players that are easily replaced by MLS players for half the money (or less). Money that, when spent more wisely, can be used on a true Designated Player or two in the right places.
But MLS is not built on the backs of Designated Players. It’s built on the backs of mostly American and Canadian players or those that have chosen to make MLS their home league for the long term. Most clubs field six to eight players from the NCAA draft. Others add homegrown players from their own academies. Others have USL clubs and develop hopeful players from there or smartly sign the cream-of-the-crop from USL Championship. Some of the players come from CONCACAF countries and national teams like Jamaica or Costa Rica, raising the level of the confederation play in the process.
It’s difficult to scout and sign a large number of players from other regions with an MLS-sized scouting staff, particularly when you have a limit on international slots or feel compelled to pay them larger salaries to get them to move to the United States.
Should the Quakes have that impact player, perhaps a DP, from Liga MX? Absolutely. Two of them, in fact. But the core of the team should come from mostly American players with a few dual nationals sprinkled in.
In not doing this, Fioranelli unfortunately compromised both doing business with other MLS clubs and made it difficult to bring in new players due to Covid-19 and the lack of green cards. It shouldn’t be necessary to obtain another green card every time a player signing needs to happen.
To be successful in MLS, the Quakes need to have impact players from all these places: Quakes Academy, the U-23/second team, the SuperDraft, (mostly foreign) Designated Players, and roster-filling and impact players with MLS experience in successful teams. Core players should be given better-paying TAM contracts to be retained.
The issue with having an almost-unique style is the coach needs special players from particular clubs who can play it. It is severely limiting to what you can do as a club. Instead, borrow some of those elements that give the club a core philosophy and game model (more on this later), but stay true to what will work in MLS and what you can obtain through simpler roster mechanisms and from a readily-available and affordable player pool for 80% or more of the roster.
The current scouting pool is too limited. Reportedly, Chris Leitch has a deep Rolodex that spans all of the Americas and Europe. Certainly, a deep Rolodex is helpful, but more importantly, establishing a network of coaches and scouts that are compensated if they help bring a player to the Earthquakes (call it “Crowdsourced Scouting”…”Crowdscouting”?) can help expand the eyes and ears of the club into the areas to find key talent for both the second team and first team and help move Quakes players into top leagues when it makes sense to do so.
5. Hire someone who will embrace and reconnect the club with its roots and fan-facing culture of the Earthquakes
In hiring Matias Almeyda, I applaud the club’s efforts to connect with the core San Jose communities, especially the Latino community, and give that a major push. It was long overdue. But his hire alone was also insufficient, as it also required a true impact player or two that would lead to reestablishing a winning and exciting organization.
Broadly speaking, Latino families won’t tune in unless Almeyda is leading a winning club with at least a couple of names that are well-known. It feels like the right player signing from El Tri’s current roster is far more important than the coach. Not completing the Miguel Layun signing looms very large, but, frankly, an impact offensive player is needed more to get attention.
However, throughout the Fioranelli Era something has been lost of the tradition and history of the Earthquakes. I can sense it. I can feel it. So can the long-suffering fans in our Quakes Epicenter Slack. Having spoken with many former Earthquakes players, I hear the same story: “I feel forgotten by the club.” My friends, this cannot be.
The club cannot forget those who sacrificed to create its history since 1974. A special night here or there is not enough. These players I’ve talked to don’t just want to be remembered, they want to be involved. They want to be heard. They want to engage as coaches and front-office staff and in the academy. They want to share their stories with players and the youth who will become tomorrow’s players.
The Earthquakes have a great history that didn’t start in 2012 or even in 2002 or 2005. It deserves much more than a social media post when the anniversary of a special goal comes up. It deserves to be integrated into the fan experience at PayPal Park. It deserves big Hall of Fame nights, and, well, some sort of Hall of Fame place at the stadium. It deserves signings and talks and meet-and-greets and so, so much more than the legends of the club are given today. Expand the brand, be more inclusive, welcome in new fans, but don’t do so at the expense of the history of an amazing, historic, and original MLS brand.
The next general manager must help reconnect the history of the club and those that were a part of its journey, with this new generation of players and fans.
6. Hire someone who can play “Moneyball” correctly
You knew I was going here, and I saved it for last. It’s not only my final point, but it’s the most important point to the short-term success in year one and year two that allows most of the previous points to have the opportunity to be successful. It’s also the most important point to long-term success that includes points #1 through #5.
While The Athletic reported that Oakland A’s EVP of Baseball Operations, Billy Beane, was involved in the General Manager search, Shawlee downplayed Beane’s role as more of an advisor whose brain he “likes to pick from time-to-time.” but “not actively involved on a day-to-day basis.”
But as a regular public contributor within the best group of soccer analysts in North America, American Soccer Analysis, frankly I’ve become embarrassed by this chart as more and more clubs hire the right people to move out of Tier 3, quite often my peers in ASA.
Fortunately, ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle indicated that a “grounding in data and analytics would be required” from his discussion with Shawlee that followed our own discussion.
As an analyst that loves data and lives in data, let me be perfectly clear: the analysis basics are now table-stakes, not a differentiator. It’s not just event data: it’s video, it’s tracking data from Second Spectrum, it’s monitoring and performance data from those bras under the kits, it’s goalkeeping analysis, and more.
It is an investment, and it is critical.
But, in the case of a few special organizations, it has been and can be a differentiator. It can help clubs like the Quakes deal with the budget constraints of ownership — literally, the Quakes have the same majority owner that the Oakland A’s have. I bet John Fisher believes in “Moneyball.”
The analysts are not here to ruin the beautiful game any more than the A’s or Red Sox ruined baseball or the Golden State Warriors ruined basketball. To find inefficiencies or probabilities in your favor and take advantage of them so you score more goals and give up fewer goals is literally the point of the whole game. Carlon Carpenter and I have been writing about it for months on ASA.
“Moneyball” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but most people watch the movie and never read the actual book. (A lot of MLS clubs haven’t read the book according to Eliot McKinley’s graphic…) Of those who do read the book, they walk away with a commonly incorrect impression: find cheap players and castoffs that are good at some statistic and then win!
Spoilers: the A’s did not win in the playoffs, but Billy Beane and his staff did change the game of professional baseball. The Boston Red Sox used his methods to soon overcome the Curse of the Bambino, although Beane turned down their huge offer to be a part of it.
No, the real Moneyball method (and I’m going to write a longer, more-specific version of this for soccer executives this year for American Soccer Analysis) that is talked about in the book is how the A’s built an internal culture accountable to specific key performance indicators (KPIs) put in place by Beane’s predecessor (yes, Hollywood took big liberties with the movie plot’s adaption). The A’s built an organizational strategy from the low minors (“rookie” and “A” ball) to the big league club around those key performance indicators that became their special sauce until other clubs copied it. Managers were fired if they didn’t meet those KPIs.
The KPIs a club manages to must be ingrained into the entire culture of the club, just like any well-run business, and a soccer general manager needs to understand how to build that culture and implement it. The takeaway: do not hire a general manager that does not know how to identify, build, and implement that culture. You will be starting over again in three to four years (or less).
The whole organization from the academy to the second team to the first team must all be ingrained with the “secret sauce.” For the A’s it was “take walks and get on base” and “don’t bunt and get yourself out.” For a soccer team, the “secret sauce” will be finding inefficiencies within the respective league.
I know what I would do (read my current Where Goals Come From series for a starting point), because in soccer there is one measurement that trumps all others, and it is the only thing in the club’s control that matters. But there are many more metrics that support that and create that measurement, and those need to permeate the culture of an agile, metric-driven organization. A general manager can’t just say “score more goals and stop conceding them”. He or she must put the culture in place on what will be measured that contributes to that statement and hold managers, players, and lower-level teams accountable to the measurements.
The manager needs to have some creative input on “the how” to meet “the what“, but the general manager sets the strategy and principles that the manager’s game model must fit into.
This is the type of hire DC United recently made with Lucy Rushton, although she reports to the President of Soccer Operations, so she’s not in the top soccer role in that club. Candidates Sportsology and the Earthquakes FO should consider include: Ravi Ramineni, who was recently promoted to Vice President, Analytics & Research, for the Sounders; Devin Pleuler, Director of Analytics for Toronto FC, who was a key individual in bringing his club silverware a few short years back; and Fran Taylor, Assistant General Manager for the Rapids, who has recently done a great job bringing in North American talent from many places. Any of these selections may thrive better under the hire of a new president of the club. All of these people I’ve spoken to within the past couple of years and would be excellent hires.
If the Quakes FO want to identify more senior executives that support analytics but would require another hire to do the core work, that list should include Will Kuntz, SVP of Soccer Operations and Assistant GM of LAFC, and an early front-runner, Craig Waibel, Senior Vice President of Soccer & Sporting Director for Sounders FC. A dark horse who is more familiar with California today would be Todd Dunivant, the current general manager of Sacramento Republic in USL Championship (perhaps Sac Republic should be another partner now that the MLS thing isn’t happening…?).
Look beyond the individual job titles, as they are relatively meaningless and negotiated at the time of hiring to sound better. These are all experienced and proven second-level executives ready to become the top guy for an organization like the Earthquakes. Certainly, Chris Leitch would also need a couple of analytics hires as well to round out his own team if he’s selected.
It’s also worth pointing out that many of these candidates are used to working in clubs willing to spend more and may not adapt well to the constraints of the Quakes. That’s why the right Moneyball-esque, agile-thinking, metric-driven approach is so important here.
Conclusion
I’ve done my best to lay out the six steps, in addition to deep MLS experience, that will lead to the right Chief Soccer Officer for this club. Maybe Chris Leitch is the right person for the job. A lot of people who love this club privately say it’s his time. Maybe there’s someone else on my list that is better for this opportunity at this time, and Chris can learn more from them for the future.
I’ll express my opinion on the short-list candidates more freely on The Aftershock web shows until and after the hire is made. I’ll also continue to do more to provide tools to whoever gets this position through the Where Goals Come From project. Regardless, the Quakes front office can’t afford to get this one wrong. Earthquakes fans can’t do this for another four-and-a-half years.
