St. Louis CITY lay foundation for 2025: "We had to strengthen the squad"

Lutz Pfannenstiel once described himself as “one of the most superstitious people in the world.”

It’s a trait perhaps cultivated by his globetrotting days as a journeyman goalkeeper who holds a world record as the only footballer to play professionally in all six of FIFA's continental associations, a total of 25 clubs in 13 countries. He undoubtedly lived some rare cultural, maybe even mystical experiences along the way.

St. Louis CITY SC’s dire 2024 injury woes have driven him to new extremes, however.

“I always thought that injuries and referee decisions and that kind of things, it will somehow level each other out over the season with all the teams,” CITY SC’s sporting director told MLSsoccer.com during a one-on-one conversation this week, reeling off the litany of odd and offbeat circumstances that sidelined João Klauss, Tomáš Ostrák, Célio Pompeu, Joakim Nilsson, Rasmus Alm and other key contributors.

“It's basically bad luck, you know? I mean, I literally looked at all the injuries we had, how it happened on video, and it just feels like a curse. I did really start to think a little bit different. I never had it like that,” he said.

“If we're having six guys at the same time with a hamstring, then maybe we have to change something in training. Or if you see things that players are very, very vulnerable in a certain age, or can't play on turf, it's a different profile,” he explained. “If you look at our injuries, we did a lot of analyzing, we had a lot of talks, we went into the deepest dive you can imagine: We do not find a pattern. So it is simply a riddle for us.”

Roster overhaul

The charismatic German says it was all that, rather than an overpowering desire to overhaul STL’s roster on the fly, that led to the second-year club having probably the busiest summer transfer window in Major League Soccer.

With half a dozen new acquisitions and a handful of promotions from their MLS NEXT Pro second team, the de facto equivalent of half a new starting XI arrived in The Lou. The club also parted company with head coach Bradley Carnell at the start of July, naming technical director John Hackworth the interim boss in his stead.

CITY’s results have since taken a positive turn, with a 5W-5L-4D record across league and Leagues Cup competition since the start of July. It almost certainly won’t be enough to push them into the Audi 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, though, with STL’s elimination from that race looming as early as this weekend.

“It was one of these windows where we had no choice, because simply through injuries. So we didn't really want to be that active,” said Pfannenstiel. “Sometimes it forces you to make decisions. And I think, to be fair, maybe it was in the long term a good thing because we had to strengthen the squad.

“We still kept the core together, but it was necessary to make the changes.”

High expectations

The improvements leave the Missourians with a great deal more optimism about their 2025 outlook – and about this Saturday's cross-state clash with Sporting Kansas City (8:30 pm ET | MLS Season Pass), where a victory would do much to salve the wounds of this sobering second season in St. Louis, a rough hangover to their euphoric expansion debut.

The Kansans have struggled this year, too, and will carry the fresh wounds of a painful extra-time loss to LAFC in Wednesday’s pulsating US Open Cup final in Los Angeles. It’s safe to expect pettiness will trump pity at CITYPARK, even as Pfannenstiel acknowledges that focusing on the big picture is a central facet of his job.

“Yes, it's a rivalry. We enjoy it. We want to be the best team in the Midwest, that's always the ultimate goal. But we also respect the tradition and the history of Sporting KC,” he said.

“They won titles, they produce players, they're having a great system. So that's something we look in there and we respect it. But do we want to beat them? Of course. Do we believe we will be better than them? Of course. Do we believe that we're winning on Saturday? Of course we will. Believe it.”

Midwest rivalry

MLS’s newest derby ran hot right from the jump thanks to the cities’ existing layers of sporting antagonism. Pfannenstiel noted approvingly that there’s a tangible edge when the clubs’ academy and reserve teams lock horns, too, as well as competition regarding youth recruitment and brand-building in the wider Midwest region.

He’s cautiously confident that CITY SC’s blueprint for launch, combined with STL’s large, vibrant soccer scene, can close SKC’s decades-long head start in those spaces, particularly when it comes to nurturing homegrown players.

“The city is crazy about soccer,” enthused Pfannenstiel, detailing his commitment to catching a steady diet of youth matches – not only CITY’s, but those of established neighbors like Scott Gallagher SC.

“It is important to create that culture, and parents and players, as well as coaches, see that the first team really cares about the kids and cares about the development of football in the city,” he said. “That culture here, the tradition, the history, helps a lot. Sometimes we have more crowds at the second team than some [other] MLS teams have on a Wednesday evening, which is special for us. We’re pushing local St. Louis boys from the academy into the second team, in CITY 2, with the hope that they will make it into the first team.

“We have our own coaching education where our philosophy and playing style plays a big role, where the culture of St. Louis, I would say hard-working, blue-color, down to earth, hard-nosed if you have to be, grind and fight instead of being a ballerina. That is for me something that reflects the culture here in St Louis. That is how we want to be seen, but also how we act and how we connect to the community, and that is what Saint Louisians feel, the same as the [NHL’s] Blues.”

Style of play

STL and SKC facing off in Round One of last year’s playoffs dumped that much extra fuel on the fire. Sporting’s upset of top-seeded CITY – a resounding sweep despite the latter’s superiority in regular-season meetings – left wounds that still linger for Pfannenstiel & Co.

“Looking at last year, it was a bit of a crazy story,” he said. “We’re playing three regular-season games, and then we get them in the first game in the playoffs, which, somehow disaster was written on the wall, and that's exactly what happened.

“That is the moment when we needed to learn from a team that had a lot of MLS experience, which had a very experienced team also. When you’re looking at the players, and I'm not shy to say that when you're looking at the performance last year in the playoffs, they deserved to beat us.”

However CITY’s final four matches unfold, he maintains STL’s fundamental vision hasn’t changed. The identity of an uptempo, pressing-oriented game endures, albeit via a more nuanced approach to the philosophy than is found among Red Bull’s global network of clubs.

“We have a very interesting cultural mix where of course, the philosophy and the way of playing, the playing style, is a bit based on a Hoffenheim way of playing, where guys who grew up in that kind of system are very helpful to implement the culture very quick,” Pfannenstiel said. “We do not, and I stress on that, only go for German players or signing players from the Bundesliga. We are pretty much open for every market, but culturally, it needs to fit well together. And getting a player like Marcel Hartel, I think shows that there is plenty of talent in Germany.

“The way we played in Hoffenheim during my nearly nine years there was that yes, we chase and hunt, and yes, we are aggressive, and yes, we play high intensity. But if we do have the ball, we want to keep it. If we do have the ball, we want to create chances.”

"Best out of two worlds"

Analytics specialists have noted CITY SC’s attacking production and overall results markedly outpaced their underlying data for most of 2023. This year’s backsliding would duly seem to indicate regression towards the mean. Pfannenstiel agrees, if only to a point, and like other observers glimpses more expansive, fluid play under Hackworth.

“Did we overperform? I wouldn't necessarily call it overperform, but we got the maximum out of that,” he said. “We wanted to have a bit more idea with the ball because we had games last year where we had the feeling, ‘Well, now we have the ball. We don't know what to do.’

“We want to play more football; I think that's also what we owe our fans, and our style of being, I would say the best out of two worlds: Press as hard as you can when you don't have the ball, get the ball back as quick as you can and try to run, and I would call it high-intense the s--t out of the other teams. But once you do have the ball, then be calm, play. We have enough players who can do that.”

Pfannenstiel remains convinced that his homeland is an under-exploited marketplace for MLS-ready talent, even with some eyebrows raised at the preponderance of Germans (five) and other former Bundesliga players on the roster. Rather than bucking norms, he believes St. Louis are at the forefront of league-wide trends in that direction.

“There's always a lot of chatter and a lot of talk that, ‘Oh, there are so many South American players getting transferred in,’” he contended. “But looking at the way the transfers changed in the last two years, you see now more and more teams signing center backs from Scandinavia. You see a team like Atlanta, which was mostly having players from South America, suddenly goes Portuguese, Norwegian and French. That actually shows me that the league and the level gets higher and higher, because there are some players are coming over here that wouldn’t have come over here a few years ago.”

STL’s cluster of central Europeans has brought some benefits even the club didn’t plan on. When Hartel, Cedric Teuchert and Jannes Horn joined up this summer, the technical staff soon learned they’d all played together with Eduard Löwen on the German Under-21 national team several years prior – one more factor among many that has helped the trans-Atlantic imports get comfortable along the banks of the Mississippi.

“So these guys know each other since they’re 16, 17 years old," said Pfannenstiel. "Is there a certain chemistry immediately on the field? Sometimes, if you see us playing on one side, and there are these three guys playing in a triangle, you know there is something there … So that kind of connection between them, I think, helps them to settle down.”

Coach future

CITY’s improvements under Hackworth beg the question: Has he earned the chance to take the job on a permanent basis?

“I thought he did really well. He didn't have an easy job to come in. He came into a team that was not performing well, which was, in some ways, not functioning correctly anymore. And he got his head around it,” said Pfannenstiel, pointing to a solid Leagues Cup run, a recent home ambush of Western Conference leaders LA Galaxy and a smooth onboarding of the new signings.

“There is a lot of improvement,” he added. “The players are really happy and like to work with John. So with the view now to next season, I'm still observing, and we're still talking of course. It's my job to also look at other opportunities, internationally, nationally, before we make that decision. But I am definitely impressed with John’s impact … I did see definitely positive changes and positive movements and a more entertaining way of playing.”

A US soccer veteran with extensive contacts and experience at multiple levels of the pyramid, “Hack” is interested in staying on as the coach. Whatever happens, Pfannenstiel wants him in STL, in one capacity or another, for the long run.

“I think he made it very clear that he would like to be the head coach. So that's a fair statement,” said the CSO. “We haven't made that decision yet, but we are in that process and I hope that we will soon.

“But regardless of what will be the decision, John Hackworth will be still next year here with me in whatever role and that’s, I think, the most important sentence I can give you.”