MLS sets all-time record for regular season attendance
Major League Soccer has set a new regular season attendance record of more than 11 million fans, surpassing the 2023 season record of 10,900,804.
Austin FC part ways with Wolff
Austin FC have parted ways with head coach Josh Wolff with immediate effect. Wolff led Austin ever since they joined MLS as a 2021 expansion team. He accumulated a 45W-60L-30D record across four seasons, only making the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs in 2022 when the Verde & Black also reached the Western Conference Final.
Just a couple of Sunday games to get to real quick. Let’s talk it out.
New York City FC are turning into a dark horse MLS Cup presented by Audi contender right before our eyes. We’ve known they have the talent. The results haven’t been there, though, not until the last couple of weeks. It seems like their win over New York Red Bulls might have been the ultimate get-right game. Either that or their late equalizer against Inter Miami might have been the ultimate get-right moment.
They’re playing excellent ball and have plenty of talent. They won’t be favored against any of the best of the East, but they may just have a chance to make waves. Making those would be a lot easier if they’re able to latch onto a home playoff spot on Decision Day. They’re two points behind Orlando City and will take on Montréal a couple of Saturdays from now.
Nashville are officially eliminated. This year felt lost early on. They made some progress under B.J. Callaghan, though. A full offseason and a reworked middle of the roster could work wonders.
This one stayed quieter than Portland needed it to. They’re locked into a Wild Card spot now. It feels like this team is too good to be stuck there, but they’ve missed too many opportunities down the stretch.
Josh Wolff is out in Austin. Y’all will be shocked to learn that I believe Austin FC had and have much bigger issues to deal with.
If you don’t know by now, I’m on the side that managers don’t matter nearly as much as roster quality (and so is a lot of data). The bottom line is that the rosters in Austin haven’t been great.
You can go back and pin a decent amount of that on former sporting director Claudio Reyna, who left that role in January of 2023. Austin’s initial expansion roster in 2021 understandably looked like your standard expansion team. The 2022 side looked a lot like the same side with a heckuva lot more luck. And the 2023 side looked a lot like the same side without all that luck. Now we’re in 2024 and, well, yep, still about the same.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder where Austin would have been if they hadn’t had a smoke-and-mirrors run to second place in the West in 2022. But they did. And, like St. Louis this season, they didn’t do much to counteract the inevitable regression to the mean.
What they did do during much of Wolff’s tenure is whiff on DP signings. Cecilio DomĂnguez, Tomás Pochettino and Emiliano Rigoni all came up short of expectations. Alexander Ring has been fine but can be considered a symbol of Austin’s unwillingness to spend on a third DP that isn’t TAMable. And Sebastián Driussi hasn’t even been able to see the same stratosphere as his outstanding 2022 season. The U22 spots haven’t produced either for Austin.
Sure, you can put some of that on coaching and we don’t know what level of input Wolff had on key roster decisions. But these aren’t things that will be fixed overnight with a new manager.
The good news is I don’t think Austin are looking for overnight solutions. The reaction yesterday from folks who follow the team seemed to be that this was the moment Austin could finally start to move forward into their second era. Austin have been in it for a while, though. Sporting director Rodolfo Borrell arrived in the summer of 2023 following Reyna’s departure. Borrell came with no previous MLS experience into a new country and a new club. It makes sense that change would come slowly.
Now, we’re a year and a half on and it seems like Borrell is ready to fully make this team his own. Wolff’s departure isn’t going to fix the roster, but it will allow Borrell to bring in someone he feels can effectively start from zero and fit with the team he wants to build. If that team isn’t very good… well, firing the head coach on a struggling team doesn’t get rid of the pressure, it just redistributes it to other places.
Sometimes new ideas, new faces and a new culture can be a good thing. That’s what Austin are aiming for with this move. It does make some sense after four years of the same messaging. None of it will matter if the roster doesn’t get the same treatment.
- The Galaxy are on a historic run at home.
- Take a look at every call-up for the October 2024 international window.
Good luck out there. Go to meetings as often as you can.
