Dear Patrick Vieira: Welcome to MLS and your long odds for success
Bonjour, Patrick.
Bienvenu a New York!
Actually, bienvenu on January 1, when you'll really begin your new job as New York City FC head coach. But we'll get to that.
It's been a while since a whole lot has been heard of you. You were, of course, one of the finest midfielders the game had seen before your retirement in 2011. You won three Premier League titles with Arsenal and four Serie A titles with Juventus and Inter Milan. You lifted the FA Cup five times and helped bring France to two World Cup finals, winning one, while claiming Euro 2000 as well.
Since you left the Gunners in 2005, your name has mostly been brought up whenever frustrated Arsenal fans try to explain what their perpetually incomplete team has been missing – a chorus that has only amplified in recent seasons. They have yearned for a "Vieira-type" – a hyper-athletic, bruising holding midfielder who could just as easily break up an attack, mark an opposing playmaker out of the game or start a quick breakaway with his distribution. Never mind that a Vieira-type comes along just once in a generation, if that.
But now you won't just be a retired great. You'll be something else. The second head coach in the second year of a much-hyped Major League Soccer team, taking over for the guy who was supposed to be perfect for the job but was fired after just one season. And you are, in a lot of respects, the opposite of that guy – Jason Kreis.
[FC Yahoo: The shortsightedness in New York City FC's firing of Jason Kreis]
Kreis was a scrappy striker, an MLS lifer who racked up the sixth-highest goal tally in league history. And after that, he had immense success managing a small-market team, Real Salt Lake. He had a profound knowledge of the league, its players and the challenges of starting an expansion team. He was given a full year to prepare before his inaugural season in New York. And he lasted just a season.
You, on the other hand, were most recently tasked with babysitting the unwieldy flock of super prospects Manchester City has herded into a pen dubbed the "elite development squad." Before that, you were the club's football development executive, or something.
People are saying nice things about you, of course. NYCFC's apparently outgoing president Tom Glick labeled you, in a press release, as "one of the most impressive young coaches I have encountered." Sporting director Claudio Reyna claims you have "all the characteristics required to make a fantastic head coach."
But your odds of succeeding, Patrick, are very poor.
It's not personal. And it isn't anything against your employer, either. You were a magnificent player. But there hasn't yet been a prominent former player who has come to MLS from Europe and been a successful head coach. Not without significant prior experience in the stateside soccer scene, anyway. Ruud Gullit never even began to understand the league. Aron Winter thought if he could just get the tactics right, it would all work out. It didn't.
What a lot of people fail to recognize is that success in MLS isn't as much of a function of being a good coach as it is your ability to game a complicated system. With a tiny salary cap and all manner of other limitations on how you can put together your squad, the trick is to find gains along the margins. Unlike the teams you yourself played on, which had a bona fide star in just about every position, the bulk of your lineup will consist of role players. And what you accomplish will depend on your ability to get the most out of those fringe parts, rather than the core of your squad. It's an entirely different equation from managing almost anywhere else.
The learning curve you face is steep. You'll have to figure out how to compete instantly with very modest talent resources, planning against opponents we're guessing you've never heard of. You'll need to work out how to put out a team that plays in the service of its three designated players, yet can also function without them on the days when their mid-30s bodies betray them. You'll churn through a 34-game season in eight months, playing at altitude and at sea level, in the cold and the heat, in desert climates and in soaking humidity, indoor on artificial turf and outside on the grass, anywhere from Vancouver to Montreal to Los Angeles to Houston to Orlando. Putting off your starting date for almost two months was unwise.
On top of that, you should probably know that you're stepping into the hardest job in MLS, Patrick. Since Jesse Marsch masterfully settled the chaos over at the New York Red Bulls – those are your new crosstown archrivals, even though they play way into New Jersey, just so you know – no job will present as many challenges as the one you've just taken on.
If you did so out of loyalty to City, the mother club that has employed you ever since your final season as a player, if you took one for the proverbial and literal team, you may well have jumped on a grenade.
The expectations are enormous. Your team will probably have the second-highest payroll in the league again. It drew very well in its maiden season but will have to put a better product on the field than last year's 10-17-7 performance to maintain that momentum. And while your stars, striker David Villa and midfielders Frank Lampard and Andrea Pirlo, are some of the biggest names the league has ever landed, their combined age will be 107 when the 2016 season kicks off. Villa was a success last year, but Lampard was underwhelming and Pirlo gave the impression he doesn't have the legs to keep up in this track-meet-like league anymore.
Not only that, but you also have a dysfunctional defense, an unbalanced midfield and a spare bench to fix. Your new team – as part of your old club – has at this early point in its nascent existence made every mistake the Red Bulls (crosstown archrivals, remember?) once did. Building around aging stars, rather than a homegrown core. Assuming someone with a famous name will sort everything out, instead of letting someone who knows the league clean house. Refusing to grant capable and qualified people the time to get it right, an itchy finger forever on the trigger.
Again, this is nothing against you, Patrick. We admired you immensely as a player. And your laurelled name brings yet more cachet to a league that could have no surplus of it. We hope you'll succeed. MLS – and, by extension, American soccer – will be better for having another successful franchise in the league's biggest market.
So best of luck, Patrick.
You'll need it.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
