THE GREAT DC UNITED COACHING DEBATE

This season I have been very quiet in regards to "my team", DC United, but it is now time to weigh in on the coaching issue. I always hate to muddy the waters of BigSoccer with facts but sometimes it is just unavoidable. The current debate seems to revolve around the demise of Tom Soehn and who should replace him.

Currently there are only two people on the face of the planet with the experience to manage DC United. These two people are Steve Nichol and Tom Soehn. Nobody in the world of soccer has experience dealing with the issues that these two coaches do. The only others in the world that come close are Dominic Kinear and Preki. Kinear and Preki are close seconds but don't have quite the travel arrangements to juggle as Nichol and Soehn.

So you can vote to sack Soehn, replace him him with the only other qualified coach, one that loves Route 1 football and seems to enjoy losing the big games. You can forget about Ben Olsen, Jaime, El Diablo or Sir Alex. Get these guys and your throwing a two year investment of On-the-Job-Training away. There isn't a single one that has the experience dealing with the issues that Tommy has. The bottom line is that MLS must address the problems prohibiting the League from being competitive in International competitions while maintaining quality of play in the league.

I guess first and foremost is the congested schedule. This season DC United has 49
fixtures(not counting the playoffs) in less than 8 months (229 days). Compare that with Manchester United's(since we used Sir Alex above) schedule of 47 fixtures in 295 days.That amounts to an average, day and a half more between games for Manchester. Sir Alex Ferguson deals with his 6.28 days between games juggling a roster of 38 players, trying to keep players healthy and working around the inevitable injuries. I would also like to note that the average salary in the Premiership is $1.24M. Tom Soehn deals with his 4.77 days between games with a roster of 18 men and 10 developmental players, with a salary cap of $2.3M. While it is exciting to note that the average wage in MLS is up to $129,395 (the Designated Player Rule has alot to do to with that) the minimum for developmental players is $12,900 and for general roster players it is $30,000.


The other issue surrounding the MLS schedule is the amount of travel involved. DC United will travel over 48,000 miles(that's twice around the Earth) if we don't make the play offs.This is an issue that really can't be addressed but needs to be mentioned. Manchester United will travel close to 10,000 miles this season. They will play in one game where they will have to cross 3 time zones and one game where they cross 1 time zone. DC United on the other hand will travel to 5 games across 1 time zone, 6 games across 2 time zones, and 4 games across 3 time zones. Last year when Beckham was asked if he was surprised by anything in MLS, particularly if he was getting hacked alot, his response was something to the effect that defenders are rough everywhere. His surprise was the size of America, "the most we traveled was one to two hours". This air travel brings into play disruption in circadian rythms(jet lag) and performance issues. The general rule is that you will need a day of recuperation for each time zone crossed before you are back to "normal". Other issues such as increased swelling at altitude have to be managed.

So between jet lag and recovery times following games the bottom line is DC United is almost never training with players at optimum, combine that with a roster of 18 players and ten players that aren't making enough to live in Washington and you've got the 2008 season. Even with a strong Front Office doing a good job finding players as stop gaps the quality suffers. I've heard alot of folks say we were really unlucky with the injuries this season but the truth of the matter is that we would have been lucky to stay healthy. The bottom line is all this talk about development and fitness there really is no time in the schedule for such nonsense.