Naturally, most eyeballs in and around the league have been firmly trained on the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs and the chaos they’ve again delivered in the 2024 edition’s first two phases.
Tyler Heaps has been watching those closely, too – it’s a key scouting exercise as much as anything, given the decisions awaiting him this winter. He’ll tune in next weekend as the four Conference Semifinals unfold, the final steps of a year-long journey towards MLS Cup presented by Audi.
But Heaps and his San Diego FC colleagues have an even more urgent set of milestones looming, and they’re closer than it seems to the rest of us.
“Two months from yesterday, the players report,” SDFC’s sporting director and general manager noted to MLSsoccer.com during a wide-ranging one-on-one conversation this week, alluding to the opening day of preseason for the club’s inaugural campaign.
The expansion newcomers, who debut as MLS’s 30th team in 2025, only have six players on their current roster. Officially, at least.
The clock is ticking loudly before their opener next February against LA Galaxy.
“It's a pretty daunting countdown whenever you don't even know which players are going to report yet,” continued Heaps, who welcomed his former U.S. Soccer coworker Mikey Varas aboard as head coach in September. “We have a decent idea, but it's more about the staffing as well, so trying to get all the staff hires sorted. We probably have nine or 10 left to go.”
Laying the foundation
At 33, Heaps is the youngest chief soccer officer in MLS and one of the youngest at his level of responsibility in league history. Yet he readily acknowledges that errors, and the lessons that sprout from them, are unfolding in real time as the all-encompassing process of building an organization from scratch approaches its hectic zenith.
“We've made a huge amount of progress, and now we've got a lot of people moving to San Diego, trying to get them and their families settled, using those as the guinea pigs as we're getting ready for the players shortly after,” he said, speaking from SDFC’s corporate offices in the Little Italy neighborhood north of downtown.
“So making a lot of mistakes, but also really making sure that we get those out of the way before, obviously, we get into 2025 with the players and everybody else that's coming.”
That squad-building project parallels the physical construction of the San Diego FC Performance Center and Right to Dream Academy, the 125,000-square-foot training ground and residential campus where preseason will begin.
The landmark facility on land of the Sycuan Tribe, who are part of SDFC’s ownership group, is on track to open by the turn of the new year, with a soft move-in throughout December and a nine-day January window where they'll iron out final kinks before that first group of first-teamers walks in the door.
Staying flexible
The bricks-and-mortar will almost certainly be complete well before the roster is. With MLS’s Primary Transfer Window historically open well into the regular season – this year’s window closed on April 23 – Heaps sounds inclined to keep tweaking it throughout the first half of 2025.
“Our biggest word that we're using right now is flexibility,” he explained. “I think we don't want to put ourselves in a difficult spot, no matter what way we go. We're obviously an expansion team, so any international we bring in is going to be on a brand-new contract. So that could be a long-term contract … to lock ourselves into that puts us in a difficult spot. While we can look at a roster and say we know what the strengths and weaknesses are going to be, we have no idea.
“We may actually play a month of games and then determine, actually, it makes more sense to go get this guy now. So just trying to leave ourselves as much roster flexibility as possible, so we don't put ourselves in a difficult situation where we're chasing the salary cap, or we're chasing to try to get rid of somebody whenever maybe we don't need to do that.”
De Bruyne rumors
Who else will join Duran Ferree, Marcus Ingvartsen, Paddy McNair, Alex Mighten, Jeppe Tverskov and Hirving Lozano, the skillful Mexican winger who is San Diego’s first-ever Designated Player, in that pioneering group? Might Kevin De Bruyne be among them?
The Belgian superstar has repeatedly been linked to SDFC, with the latest media reports suggesting he’s “very open” to joining the fledgling outfit as he enters the final months of his contract at Premier League powerhouse Manchester City, with few signs of an extension. He’d instantly become a foundational figure in Southern California, a face of the club alongside Lozano and a vital contributor in what’s expected to be a youth-oriented project in the long run.
“I enjoy watching him play football,” Heaps said of De Bruyne with a wry smile. “I think a lot of people enjoy watching him play football, so I'll just leave that at that.”
Assuming all the coverage to date is not entirely off base, San Diego likely have to wait and watch as multiple factors outside their control play out in terms of De Bruyne’s situation; it’s a scenario somewhat akin to Inter Miami’s pursuit of Lionel Messi or LA's daring courtship of David Beckham at the dawn of the DP era. Heaps uses the analogy of dominoes – some played, others falling in or out of place as events unfold.
Expansion Draft
Before free agency opens and the MLS SuperDraft occurs, Heaps sounds eager to throw a few bones on Dec. 11, when the Expansion Draft takes place four days after MLS Cup 2024. SDFC can select up to five players left unprotected by other clubs, and/or use those picks to extract other assets from their new league peers.
“The other DP is obviously a big priority of ours at the moment, but so is the Expansion Draft, because we think there's going to be some really quality players available,” he explained. “We think this will be the deepest Expansion Draft ever, not only by sheer numbers, but there's now 29 teams that are obviously up for grabs. This is the first Expansion Draft with the full U22 [Initiative] and DP lineup of the roster.
“So we fully expect there's going to be some very good players. I've had many conversations with clubs around the league, and you can see some that are panicking and some that are quite calm in it, just because they know what they're going to have to potentially leave unprotected.”
Roster model
All of that will likely affect SDFC’s decisions about which MLS roster construction model they will adopt. The Designated Player Model would enable them to pursue two more established standouts like De Bruyne. Limiting themselves to two senior DPs would open up the U22 Initiative Player Model, with space for four rising under-22 talents and up to an additional $2 million in General Allocation Money, which could be deployed in myriad ways.
“We see it as probably an attacking player, again, to complement Hirving,” said Heaps of San Diego’s next showpiece acquisition. “So we're looking whether it's right wing, or whether it's [a No.] 8, [No.] 10, somebody that can impact the game.
“We're looking there as a U22, we're looking in a couple of different spots, to try to find ways that we can make those types of players successful. We've done a lot of analysis around the U22 Initiative and how some teams have struggled with it, other teams have had a bit more success. But also, for us [it’s] to define what success is. Is it that they're playing minutes? Is it that they're contributing goals and assists? Is it that we have to sell them abroad for an X amount of increase?”
Right to Dream influence
Central to that, and the club’s conception, are their ties to Right to Dream, the groundbreaking international academy network with outposts across Denmark, Ghana and Egypt whose player-development model will center San Diego’s approach.
Founded by former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon with an emphasis on holistic personal development alongside identifying and nurturing soccer talent, RTD has helped hundreds of boys and girls rise from humble circumstances in Africa to attain professional careers and/or high school and college scholarships in North America. MLS observers will be familiar with alumni like David Accam, Emmanuel Boateng and Josh Yaro, while the likes of Mohammed Kudus and Kamal Sowah have blossomed into standouts in top European leagues, reaping combined transfer fees north of $120 million and counting.
The idea is academy products will eventually be SDFC’s bread and butter, in both footballing and business terms. But with the first crop of teenage prospects not enrolling until the fall of 2025, talent from their RTD affiliates will arrive to fill the gap in the meantime.
“We have a luxury in that we have three fully functional academies up and running in the world, and they're all being trained and developed in a similar way,” said Heaps. “So hopefully that expedites what we're looking at from our player standpoint, and we can hopefully get this academy here up and running as quickly as possible, so we start to see the benefit of that into the first team.”
Ingvartsen and Tverskov, who will arrive from Danish Superliga sibling club FC Nordsjaelland, are on the veteran end of the spectrum but are deeply familiar with the RTD way. Rising talents in the RTD network who might have expected to move through Nordsjaelland en route to bigger, brighter stages in Europe are now being shown that a star turn in MLS can offer them comparable opportunities.
“We'll also lean into the West Africa pipeline. They've had a tremendous amount of success there,” said Heaps, who worked at Right to Dream before moving laterally to SDFC. “It's difficult because we need to prove that this is a pathway, and sometimes that is challenging when you've been able to break the Superliga transfer record however many times we have in the last five years.
“So a lot of the ones that are coming through there see that as a successful pathway, but that we also need to prove that it exists here as well, and this is becoming a league that a lot of eyes are on now with the new Apple deal, and also with the quality of the league continuing to get better with superstars and high-quality players joining it.”
Game model
What’s more ironclad is San Diego’s desired game model. Whoever they recruit in the months ahead, the expansion side will seek to charm their soccer-loving city with an assertive, ball-dominant style of play honed by RTD. Heaps points to the example of last year's MLS Cup champions, who showed that approach can be less of a gamble than conventional wisdom might admit.
“We like the ball. We take a lot of risks, but that's how we think, that is the proper way to develop and the proper way to obviously play the game,” said Heaps. “So we will build out. We will try to overload teams. We will try to control the game with the ball. We think that lends, actually, to the United States in terms of this, because of the travel schedule and because of where you have to go on away games.
“You see what a team like Columbus has done, where they're able to go on the road and still control those games, and how that has helped them, obviously, in the last couple of years. So that's how we'll approach things,” he added. “First and foremost we want to entertain, and the way you do that is by scoring goals. So that's at the center of everything that we try to do.”
