Last Wednesday I had tickets to two different soccer games. My own fault; I’d bought a pass to the Pilots Women versus Pepperdine earlier in the week, but then accepted a ticket to the Timbers play-in game from a friend whose wife couldn’t go.
Both Portland teams lost.
I chose the worse of the two, though; the epic beat-down rendered by Vancouver in the “Where’s Your Car Show 2: Electric Boogaloo” play-in/wildcard match.
I won’t pretend to be a better fan than I am; I left after the Timbers’ fourth concession. The game was over by then, and to stay felt like watching a good friend get ass-whipped in a fight they were tanking. I left feeling embarrassed, grim and kind of dirty.
As we now know, “grim and embarrassed” was pretty much a good description of what happened, both on the pitch and off it.
Which brings us back to something that’s been chasing both Portland soccer teams for a while now: owners.
I’ve written a bit about the owner situations, both the old – Peregrine Sports and it’s local face Merritt Paulson – and new, RAJ Sports and the Bhathals.
The old was…troubling.
Mostly because of individuals, most of whom we know of and many of whom are gone. But also because the Paulson/Peregrine “style” seems to be a sort of “good-enough”, sloppy, careless, frat-boy-grab-ass thing. Passing stuff like Mike Golub behaving like a fourteen-year-old, pulling kid-bully stuff out of his ass, like grabbing people’s lunches or hucking soccer balls at them. Letting Gavin and Paulson get off lying or evading responsibility. Hiring based on pal-ness or “loyalty” rather than integrity or skills.
Put in context that makes the shit Riley got away with look like a difference in scale, not in kind.
The Peregrine FO doesn’t seem to have changed their course, just trimmed their sails to the “don’t show the public your whole ass” winds. Word coming out of the Timbers roster this autumn suggests that the reindeer games continue in private. The likelihood that will affect what should be a pretty serious roster build this offseason seem fairly significant.
The reality is that Peregrine is 1) unlikely to change – Hank Paulson has shown no interest in the club, he’s well-liked by the MLS owners, and Merritt shows no evidence of concern – and 2) unlikely to respond any differently than they did to the end of the Gio years…meaning that I wouldn’t hang on in hopes of seeing dramatic improvements in the backline, f’rinstance.
The Timbers will be, as they have been for most of their MLS existence, a mid-table struggler or worse.
That’s where we’re gonna be, Timbers fans.
The Thorns..?
Hard to tell.
The slow progress of the sale – another bit of typical-Peregrine-lazy-ass-fuckery – put the Bhathals well behind the ownership power curve.
But…
LeBlanc should have been an easy early call. She was a Paulson squid-ink hire, a “feel-good” piece of 2013 intended to pacify fan ire. In her two years as Peregrine GM she had some roster hits but as many or more lazy, sloppy (see a pattern here..?) misses.
Instead she hung on until her unsuitability became unavoidable then, in RAJ fashion, was removed by getting kicked upstairs.
Norris? Another panic hire to settle the waters roiled by L’Affaire Mengisson. Nice guy, over-his-head-assistant-grade coach in the technical box. Kicked upstairs for…
Gale? Another assistant, whose failings were compounded by the RAJ mistake in tearing off the “interim” bandage too early.
The sum of these parts look to me like a C-Suite crew thoroughly out of their depth. They didn’t perform their due-diligence before coming in, then either chose to keep, or were talked into keeping, staff who were not good at their jobs.
I’m reading lots of angst about how the WNBA club and development deals mean the Bhathal’s collective eyes will be off the soccer ball to which my thought would be, when have they really been on it?
The RAJ tenure has so far been supremely meh, which is unsurprising since it appears the organization did little or no preparation for managing the club here. They’re the usual finance types, seeing soccer (or basketball, or baseball, all of which they have pieces of) as merely a part of their “asset portfolio”.
The idea that, just maybe, it might take some specific skills to successfully run a winning soccer club, seems somewhat opaque to RAJ.
And, like Peregrine, I don’t see any reason to suspect that will change dramatically.
My guess is that Gale will be quietly knifed once the playoff exit occurs.
The real “what-ifs” come then.
Can this outfit find a truly gifted GM? All you Parsons fans, remember! His days were in a pre-free-agent time and were paired with the savant of NWSL1.0, Gavin Wilkinson.
Could he be brilliant? Sure. Could he be a hot mess? Also sure. It’d be nice to search hard for someone with success in transfer leagues like those in Europe, though, before settling for the familiar name.
And then there’s the gaffer. Again…can the RAJ gang resist the so-far-unresisted habit of grabbing someone known, rather than taking a flier on someone ambitious?
I honestly don’t know. Owners, like weather, turf, and referees, are “you get what you get”. You don’t get a voice and your choice is support-the-club-or-don’t; there’s no middle ground. There’s no “I love my club but loathe my owner(s) so…”.
I don’t have to enjoy that.
But that’s where we are.
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At this point it is going to be wait and see. I agree that there is no reason to expect ownership to get it right, but there is also no reason to think they will get it wrong. I’m ambivalent about Parsons as GM, with the caveat that he did have success in building and maintaining a top tier team in his stint with the Thorns. I just want the next GM to have some sort of plan to bring the Thorns back to relevance.
I still maintain that the players here can succeed. I would expect a new coach to have some players they want to bring in to implement their system, but don’t expect a massive turnover.
I look at it the other way; given their tenure to date I see NO reason to give the Bhathals the “benefit of the doubt”. So I’m going to assume the “world-wide search” for a GM is unlikely to do BETTER than Parsons, a guy with a shouty personality whose “success in building” came 1) in a VERY different NWSL and 2) with the who-knows-how-much input from GW.
If they do? Great! But, again, I see no reason to assume they will and several (LeBlanc, Norris, Gale) reasons to assume they won’t.
I honestly have no idea how good this roster can be, or what this roster needs to be that good. What it clearly needs before anything else is 1) a HC with a sound vision on the field and a sound judgement of the players (s)he needs to encompass that vision, and 2) a GM whip-smart and clever at managing rosters, trades, and signings in the free-agent era.
If that means a fire sale? If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
I’m still agnostic about the Bhathals, holding in a wait-and-see pattern until this offseason is complete. They presumably supported firing Norris, which was good, and they effectively fired LeBlanc, which was also good. The latter took a long time but LeBlanc hadn’t had any resources to work with until this year, and it’s okay with me that they let their assessment of her stretch out awhile. And not firing Gale? It would be a bad look for the team to make two coaching changes in the same year, so I’m more or less okay with that too. I don’t like owners with itchy trigger fingers.
But they need to make good decisions about GM and head coach, and make some good player acquisitions to shore up our defense and get more support for Smith up front than just Weaver. We’ll see. I’m expecting some announcements as soon as the Thorns season is done.
Mmmmokay. ISTM that by January 2024 LeBlanc had made enough goofs that RAJ should have had a finger on the trigger. If the reddit tales are anywhere close to true she’s not just a meh GM, she’s organizational poison.
Gale wasn’t a firing problem. The problem was they fucked up by pulling the interim tag off. That was an unforced error; it 1) made the bold “world-wide search” proclamations look foolish and faked, and 2) put them in the position of NOW having to “make two coaching changes in the same year” (unless they’re complete idiots they’re gonna have to can him this winter, which will fool no one…). Had they kept the tag on they could have politely thanked him and eased him out gracefully; tried you, didn’t work, sorry…
So as I said; I’m not writing them off. Yet. But I’m not expecting much, either. They’ve shown little flair for this business.
If they do suddenly start to show some I’ll be thrilled.