San Diego’s Debut Season is a Great American Soccer Story

The expansion club has broken the mould in MLS and been rewarded with record-breaking results. The playoffs are next.....

You could be forgiven for missing the news but San Diego FC, a team which didn’t even exist 12 months ago, has just finished top of MLS’s Western Conference in record-breaking fashion. If so you have missed one of the great American soccer stories.

Perhaps because St Louis City also had such an extraordinary debut season two years ago, finishing first in the West, or maybe because soccer remains seriously under-covered by American sports media, San Diego’s achievement has flown somewhat under the radar outside of the committed MLS fan.

But it is worth pausing to reflect on just how extraordinary this story is and also how uniquely American it is too.

Nowhere else in the world are clubs being created from scratch. And with MLS now at 30 clubs there are going to be fewer of these stories to come - although there are going to be plenty of new clubs in the lower leagues in the USA in the coming years as the growth in the game expands well outside of the top flight.

The concept of expansion teams barely exists outside of the U.S. of course partly because, in Europe and South America, new clubs were mainly formed over a century ago and also because, due to promotion and relegation in a pyramid system, any new club which did come along would have to climb up the ladder from the lower leagues.

In this part of the world though, with closed leagues and no promotion and relegation, becoming an expansion franchise is the only way to enter a league, whether that be MLS, NWSL or USL.

The opportunity doesn’t come cheap. It cost San Diego’s primary owners, Sir Mohamed Mansour and the Sichuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, a reported $500 million to secure a franchise, a record amount and one which has helped drive the sky-rocketing values of MLS clubs.

Traditionally, expansion clubs in MLS, like in the other American sports leagues, have struggled in their first seasons. Cincinnati, for example finished 24th out of 24 teams in 2019 and Austin finished 24th out of 27 two years later.

Why has it been so difficult? Well, for all the many differences between MLS and European leagues, it is hard to avoid the basic football truths that impact success the world over.

When you create a club from scratch, every player is a new signing needing time to settle in to the new club. The same applies to the coaching staff. There is no existing ‘Locker room culture’ or leadership group and no established style of play. Rosters are assembled by bringing in players from other clubs and abroad meaning an awful lot of players and coaches (and their families) needing to find houses and schools and adjust to living in a new city, state or even country.

It is, as if, a Premier League club fired all its coaching staff and sold its entire first-team squad and signed 30 new players in one window for the new management team. Let’s just say there is a reason why no-one ever does that.

Yet San Diego have not only finished top of the West - their 63 points is the most ever for an expansion team, as are their 19 wins. Their 37 points on the road is tied for the most of any team in MLS history - alongside LA Galaxy in 1998 and Messi’s Inter Miami last year.

Until St.Louis’s impactful debut, the most successful recent expansion was LAFC’s opening season when they finished third in the West and made the playoffs.It is perhaps no coincidence that the co-founder of LAFC and its first president, Tom Penn, is the man who has overseen San Diego’s arrival in MLS, as CEO. Having a leader who knew exactly what is involved in creating a club and hitting the ground running has proved to be invaluable.

From a business point of view, the club has been an instant hit. San Diego have drawn average home crowds of 28,000, the fourth best in the league, they broke league records for merchandise sold through official club stores and signed a series of impressive partnership deals.

But the key to the success on the field was the way in which San Diego, despite the short runway to their debut, instantly had an identity and style of play.

Egyptian billionaire Mansour recently recalled that when he attended an MLS board meeting on December 12 last year, just two and a half months before the start of this season, he had just seven players under contract.

He did have a technical staff in place though and those appointments turned out to be inspired - if unorthodox.

The temptation for an expansion franchise is to seek out experience. LAFC had Bob Bradley as their first coach, the Seattle Sounders went with Sigi Schmid - San Diego opted for Mikey Varas, whose only experience above assistant level was two years in charge of the U.S. U20 team.

Varas, a Californian of Chilean heritage, has proved to be an inspired choice. His background in youth national teams, made him an ideal choice to work with a young squad and he has been able to quickly instill a distinctive style of play.

Varas is 42, but the man above him, in the crucial roster-building general manager role, the man who hired him,Tyler Heaps, was just 33 when he was brought to the club.

But despite his youth the owners knew exactly what they were getting with him.

Heaps had cut his teeth in various analyst roles with U.S. Soccer, innovating as he built out the analytics department for all the national teams. He then moved to Europe, becoming Head of Analysis and Insights at AS Monaco, a club well known for smart recruitment.

His next role was with the Right to Dream organization in Denmark, a global youth development and education system with bases in Ghana and Egypt as well as the Scandinavian country. Right to Dream has itself been crucial to San Diego’s success and the academy set up in Southern California is expected to produce the next generations of players for the club.

The Danish connection has been crucial- defensive midfielder Jeppe Tverskov has brought experience as captain and winger Anders Dreyer who has lit up the league with 19 goals and 19 assists, delivered numbers that would make him an MVP candidate if it were not for the presence of Lionel Messi in the league.

Dreyer, 27, was a bargain with just $5 million paid to Belgian club Anderlecht for his services, a deal which must go down as one of the smartest acquisitions from Europe in MLS history.

All the focus in the pre-season was on the signing of Mexican international Hirving ‘Chucky’ Lozano, but it was Dreyer who made the instant impact, scoring both goals in the 2-0 win at defending champions LA Galaxy in San Diego’s first ever game.

That game set the tone of the entire regular season - San Diego’s brand of smart possession, well co-ordinated pressing and devastating breaks in transition has been particularly effective on the road.

SDFC have a league best 12 wins from 17 games on the road and Dreyer has been a big part of that success with 17 of his 19 goals coming away from home where he has made 27 of his 38 goal contributions.

The team’s form at home has been less impressive, they ranked 18th in MLS with a 7-5-5 record with the team’s approach not quite as effective when teams allow them plenty of possession and employ a low block to limit the damage from those fast breaks.

The overall roster features plenty of young talent, in line with the club’s philosophy and with smart rotation, the club has delivered more minutes for U-20 players this season than any other club.

But Heaps was wise to ensure there was plenty of experience in the starting line-up for the first season.

Panama international Anibal Godoy, who makes up a solid central midfield pairing with Tverskov, is 35 and has over 200 MLS games under his belt as well as 155 appearances for his country, while U.S. midfielder Luca de la Torre, a San Diego native, has added nous to the midfield.

Smart use of the loan market, to bring in young players from MLS clubs and Europe, has created a squad which was not only instantly competitive but also had half an eye on the future.

There has been a tendency in MLS over the years for clubs to follow a template. A core of MLS journeymen, a smattering of young talent and the money spent on a couple of foreign ‘stars’ at number 10 and number 9. Heaps has found the right mix of youth and experience but with very few players who have years of MLS soccer to their names.

If there was a gamble in what Heaps and San Diego did it was in trusting the data and their instincts over the tried and tested in MLS and understanding that you don’t ‘disrupt’ the league in your first season by following the well trodden path.

“It’s beyond belief for an expansion team in their first year, what we have accomplished so far,” Mansour said recently.

Whether San Diego can end this remarkable debut season with a deep play-off run remains to be seen. The ‘home advantage’ of the top seed position, doesn’t seem quite such a factor given Varas’s side’s better performances on the road but with Dreyer in such electric form and the team brimming in confidence, there is a daunting task awaiting the winner of Wednesday’s Wild Card game between the Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake.

After overtaking Vancouver on the final day, with a 4-0 win at Portland, Varas insisted his team should take a little time to appreciate their achievement.

“It’s monumental. You have to celebrate these moments because they dont come all the time and what these guys did, every single day for the last 40 weeks, man, they’ve done something special,” he said.

“It is an incredibly humbling project to be a part of. And now we ask ourselves, what now? Because we’re hungry for more.”

(Photography courtesy of San Diego FC)