Almost a month ago we discussed the whole “Who’s the New Gaffer?” thing and were assured by the RAJ organization that the head coaching search was “down to a final shortlist of candidates.”
Ummm…whatever happened to that?
Today we’re just a day over two weeks out of the Great Carrot Festival in the Coachella Valley, and we still don’t have a head coach.
Oh, and we’re down a keeper, Bella Bixby going out with a season-ending ACL before she’d played a single minute on an actual matchday.
So far the FO seems to be playing moneyball, picking up college and similar young players (most recently nicked a neopro midfielder from the Topserien) but conspicuously haven’t landed any big money A-listers.
I get that. Right now there’s not a lot of leverage. Europe is in mid-season, I’m not sure how deep Agoos and Carr can go hunting in South and Central America or Asia.
And we don’t know if they have or have not, if they’ve tried, how hard, and what happened! As far as we know the Bhathals might have people all over the world with sacks of cash trying to bait CDMs and centerbacks to come and play here.
Or not.
We just. Don’t. Know.
That hasn’t stopped people who talk and write about this stuff in public from pimpslapping the RAJ organization:
We’ve gone over this. The delay replacing Ken was baked in by the semifinal, and the timing that baked in was brutal given the calendar the other professional leagues follow. Coffey went to ManCity for, as far as we can tell, several reasons, some (or most) of them reasons that the club couldn’t rebut, delay, deflect, or deny. Bixby got hurt in training, like many players throughout the history of the sport.
Does that all suck?
Yes.
Is it especially “peculiar”? “Troublesome”? Given the priors, given the events, given the setting…I don’t think so. Frustrating? Fuck yes. Getting a bit worrying with the first preseason kickoff two weeks and a wakeup away? Yepperoonie.
But somehow uniquely weird and unsettling and indicative of fundamental, catastrophic flaws in the RAJ outfit?
I haven’t the slightest fucking idea, but a LOT of this stuff (Coffey, Bixby) is as good an illustration of “sometimes shit just happens” as anything I’ve ever seen.
What kind of bugs me is how Rifer, among some other pundits I’ve been reading, seems to be trying desperately to retcon the Ken Era.
We’ve talked about the “objectively good season” of 2025 and how low the “good” third-place finish bar was. His record over one-and-most-of-another seasons – 48 games – was 21 W, 10 D, 17 L, so about 43% wins. He never came close to a Shield or a star.
Compare that to some other familiar NWSL coaching names. These are the numbers from when I did this at the end of 2021:
Mark Parsons: 67-34-35 (6 seasons), winning percentage, 49.2% – 1 Shield, 1 Championship
Paul Riley: 63-28-35 (6 seasons), 50% (but 61.9% with WNY/NCC) – 2 Shields, 3 Championships
Vlatko Andonovski: 64-39-36 (7 seasons) 46.0% – 2 Championships
Laura Harvey: 76-41-44 (7 seasons) 47.2% – 1 Shield
Ken wasn’t a tire fire, but he wasn’t “objectively good”. His tactics, whatever they were, were as often as not a chaotic mess, his roster choices often inexplicable. Yes, his squads struggled with injuries in 2025. They also dropped points to clubs far more woeful than his own through mismanagement and missed opportunities. He never solved the lack of attacking coherence even when he had players like Caiya Hanks and Pietra Tordin and Reilyn Turner healthy.
So yes. I’d like to have a top-flight manager in the Thorns technical box this March.
Do I see a way to work around how this past (and the previous) season went to make that happen right now most quick smart. No.
And am I longing to see Ken back? Also no.
So.
Maybe we just wait and see what happens, eh?
- Notes on the Silly Season 2.5 Redux: Well…….? - February 1, 2026
- Notes on the Silly Season: Not So Silly Anymore - January 19, 2026
- Notes on the Silly Season, Part WTF!? - January 8, 2026
Honestly, I’m happy to go half a season with Lowden if it means we are getting a great coach from another league that is still in season (ie.. WSL). That being said, the FO should have never have said they were close to a hire and then just ghost everyone. What is the old saying, “Under promise and then over deliver”? A lesson to be learned.
Parsons as Angel City GM has did at least one thing right. He let everyone know he was going to take his sweet time to find the his “right coach”. 2 things actually, signing Hina!
I won’t say “happy”, but I get how we got here, and accept that it was always going to be difficult to make this hire.
If I had to go upside the RAJ people’s heads it would be for ripping the “interim” tag off Gale in 2024 after the six-game win streak. That was an unforced error; my compa Richard Hamje howled about it at the time and he was absolutely correct. Had they left things alone they could have 86ed him when he cratered the end of the 2024 season and then started a legitimate coaching search. But woulda-coulda…
And, yes; the early announcement of being “shortlisted” and then nothing? Poor, poor optics.
At this point we really do just kind of have to wait and see what the season brings.
I saw the removal of Gale’s ‘interim’ label as a KK LeBlanc thing, though of course I don’t really know. Partly this was how it was presented — IIRC LeBlanc presented the news and it was like a “look what I’ve done! yay me!” moment in typical KK style. I have the impression that the Bhathals, as new owners, leaned heavily on LeBlanc’s experience, and we know how that went. LeBlanc’s error was the Ken thing, and the Bhathals’ error was the LeBlanc thing.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, since the Bhathal purchase it seems that the Thorns FO has been mostly making good decisions (firing LeBlanc and then Gale, getting some good players in), but taking an inordinately long time to do so (e.g., both firings). I’m really hoping this pattern is true of the coach hire; it’s taking waaaaay too long, but if it’s a good result it will have been worth it.
Also I’m growing worried that the Bhathals won’t spend their money on players. Yes they’re shelling out a lot for the training facility, but that’s a real estate investment and they’ll get that money back if/when they sell the team. Not so for player acquisitions, and so far I haven’t seen them spend anything there. Yes we’re paying Wilson a lot, but that money comes out of the salary funding that the league provides to all teams, so, free to the Bhathals. Are they really standing behind “global epicenter” with their fortune, or is it just an empty slogan? Also they COULD recoup some of the spending on player salaries, in the form of increased team valuation: if the Thorns can keep themselves up there as one of the world’s best teams, when the Bhathals eventually sell the Thorns they’ll be worth tens or hundreds of millions more than they will as a backwater team. Unfortunately it feels like we’ve been slipping down from “one of the best” toward “backwater” pretty steadily since the 2022 ‘ship — 3-plus years now — and it’s going to take some real moxie to turn it around.
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P.S. Harvey has won three shields with the Reign (2014, 2015, 2022) and Parsons two with the Thorns (2016, 2021). And the 2022 championship winner was largely the team Parsons constructed, though of course Wilkinson was the coach then. I consider the shield a better indicator of a team’s quality than the championship, so I tip my hat to Harvey even while disliking how her teams play. (And, dammit, the shield should have been OURS in 2022 – we somehow drew that last game against the Bats, *who hadn’t scored in their previous five games*, after we led by two goals during the second half. The soccer gods must have hated us.)
The roster is…complicated.
I kinda get why the owners haven’t spent big there yet. First we didn’t have a real GM. Then, until the Coffey deal the roster looked pretty solid…IF everyone on SEI came back in form…less the Girma-grade CB we all discussed.
Now? The problem is access and certainty; trying to sign big names is difficult when the big names are in midseason elsewhere. And they have no idea who they’ll be playing for…
If the club ends up by the end of the European season without a major signing? That’s a real red flag.
Oh, and I was lazy; just grabbed the stuff I wrote back at the end of 2021 for the coaching comps and, yes, since then Harvey and Parsons had picked up more silverware. The point was simply to compare Gale’s “objectively good” season to some of the more successful coaches in the league to note that his work wasn’t THAT good…
IIRC, when Agoos made his remarks about a short list of candidates for the coaching position, he said they hoped to announce the new coach during the “preseason window.” Since it’s nearly six weeks till the Thorns first regular season game, I don’t understand the feeling that they’re behind schedule. I was guessing that we’d hear something around March 1, or maybe even later.
I think because 1) many of us think of that window as closing before Opening Day, with the hard stop beginning to descend after the Coachella Valley games, and 2) the FO has gone pretty silent since early January, leaving us to worry and speculate.
I’d rather get the hire right than worry about timing, but at some point the timing is going to matter…
I agree about the timing; I’m just hoping the critical point is still in the future.
The silence does leave us to worry and speculate, but we’d do that anyway. Can’t really blame it on the FO. If it wasn’t this issue it would be something else.
I’m kind of “yes and no” on that. I agree that we Thorns fans tend to spin up whether there’s a reason or not.
(And I’m not familiar enough with other fanbases to know if it’s “us” or fans in general…)
But I think it wouldn’t take a lot of outreach from the FO to calm the furor. If the HC shortlist turns out to be a bust? Tell us! “Well, we thought we had it down to three names but the top candidate wasn’t available and the next choice took another offer…”
Just ghosting the fans instead stokes the paranoia rumor mill.
Well, they’re gonna do what they wanna do, so…
Hey John! Did you get a chance to watch the Agoos press conference/QA with the Riveters? I feel like he did a good job at addressing why certain things are/are not happening, but I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
I watched both the Goose presser (replay) as well as the ACFC match from Indio. My thought is to screen the Houston game tomorrow (if it’s streamed) and then do a post-pre-season summary.
If your didn’t watch the Fox12 + presentation, the stream replay is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgevu_19dI0