Seven Thoughts (and Two Charts) about DC United's Coaching Change

Troy Lesesne is out. René Weiler might be in.

As you’ve probably heard, DC United fired Troy Lesesne after Wednesday’s 2-5 loss to Nashville in the US Open Cup quarterfinals. Tom Bogert and Steven Goff report that the team already had talks with various candidates over the past few weeks and is on the verge of hiring Swiss coach René Weiler. It’s not quite a done deal as I write this, though. A few years ago DC got to this point with Chris Armas before negotiations suddenly broke down, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Most of my thoughts about this are going to be responses to some common themes I’ve seen in fan reaction.

"Nothing matters until the owners sell the team."

Many fans reasonably point out that the club’s problems start with the ownership. I think that’s beyond dispute. The complaint often continues that the owners only care about real estate and don’t care about the team winning. That I doubt, mainly because the few people who have actually talked to Jason Levien (e.g. Pablo Maurer) say otherwise.

My biggest complaint about Levien, and I guess this is me with my writer hat on, is that he’s too secretive. He needs to do more interviews, be more transparent with fans, and take responsibility for his mistakes. I think hiring Hernan Losada and especially Wayne Rooney seems bad in retrospect, but both decisions were defensible at the time. My advice, Jason, is show up for some interviews. If you’re not comfortable with it, just talk to a team site “journalist” throwing softballs. Admit some things haven’t worked and try to convey some sense that you’ve learned something from your time with DC United, Swansea, and so on. If you think the criticism you get over the team’s spending on players, the MLS Next Pro situation, and the Academy isn’t fair, respectfully acknowledge the complaints and explain why.

And look, if they want to sell the team, great, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Back in the 90s, I didn’t want John Kent Cooke to continue as owner/operator of what is now the Commanders because of the nose-dive the organization took after his father wasn’t in charge anymore. Well, in the end financial circumstances forced him to sell…to Dan Snyder. Oops. My takeaway from that experience is that there is always a worse owner out there. Yes, Dan Snyder is an extreme outlier, but bad sports owners are a dime a dozen.

At any rate, this newsletter focuses on the first team’s play on the field, and in terms of on-field performance, MLS clubs can do well with terrible owners, and clubs with seemingly perfect owners—I’m thinking Arthur Blank and Atlanta United here—certainly don’t always have great results. So I want to acknowledge the owners haven’t been great but move on.

"No one could have won with this terrible roster"

Based on my very limited information, I like Troy Lesesne a lot as a person. I spoke to him for about two minutes last year and found him very charismatic. He seemed like a good leader, and sure enough on his watch DC United players have mostly stayed motivated despite a lot of tough results. When talking about tactics, he sounded credible and definitely seemed to have clear ideas for what he wanted to do, particularly going into this season.

But…there's no way to sugarcoat this: the 4-2-3-1 tactics he had the team work on throughout preseason failed miserably. After the crushing loss to San Jose, he switched to a much more conservative defensive posture that did largely stop the defensive bleeding, but at the cost of crippling the offense. Yes, Christian Benteke’s injury was certainly a bad break, but the results with him still weren’t great (he was on the field for the San Jose game, for example).

Maybe the players were just so bad no one could have done better. It’s very hard to compare players across teams as fans since we see DC’s players struggling through the long grind of the season while we tend to see opposition players only in highlights. But rather than try to play the game of “this guy wouldn’t start for any other MLS team” (that’s just rarely true but not that informative: remember there are five MLS teams with fewer points than DC), let’s just compare DC’s players this season to…themselves.

Christian Benteke isn’t doing quite as well as last year, but when healthy he hasn’t been bad and at his age it’s possible he’s just losing a step. But what about Jared Stroud? Aaron Herrera? Lucas Bartlett? I think they looked significantly better last season and they’re in their prime. Sometimes a player’s form nosedives for no reason that we can see as fans—Jared Stroud in particular might be a candidate here—but all three of these guys look worse. I’d also throw in David Schnegg as he’s also looked steadily worse this season. This is a pretty young team, actually, so those are almost all the key veteran players. Kye Rowles has looked pretty consistent, I guess, but everyone else seems to have gotten worse.

Meanwhile, none of the young players seem to be improving. Again, you have to expect nonlinear development and some real misses with young players. But the list here is pretty long: Matti Peltola, Boris Enow, Gabriel Pirani, Kim Joon Hong, Hosei Kijima, Garrison Tubbs, Jacob Murrell…

Now again, maybe Ally Mackay just brought in a bunch of scrubs. We’ll get to that. And Joon, I have to say, really hasn’t shown me anything. But all the other players I listed have shown flashes of real quality! But never more than flashes, and with the possible exception of Pirani, it doesn’t feel like any of them have made any sustained improvement since they arrived.

Given this situation—veterans getting worse, young players not improving—I don’t agree with some people’s sentiment that Lesesne deserved more time. Instead I lean towards Tom Bogert’s comment on Soccerwise that this move seemed, if anything, overdue.

“It was disrespectful to Lesesne to secretly hold talks with potential replacements and only fire him when the next coach was almost ready to sign”

Not only do I not have a problem with this, I see this as a good move and maybe a little evidence of learning from the ownership. This same ownership group, remember, put us through long interim spells after firing Olsen (7 games with Chad Ashton to end the season) and Losada (14 games, again with Chad Ashton). Ashton did what he could, but nothing was gained from those stretches. The organization was just treading water. When something’s not working, and the team currently is not working, let’s try something else as quickly as possible.

That goes double for this situation where there are a bunch of players who either are playing worse or who aren’t developing. If I’m right that some of them could show better with a different manager, by acting now there’s 13 games across 3 months to figure out who they are and take that into account when making offseason roster decisions (okay, really more like nine or ten games since it looks like the new coach will need a work permit to get started).

So I actually appreciate the (hopefully) quick turnaround. As for the “disrespect” angle, sorry, I’m not worried about that either. In MLS, players get traded at a moment’s notice without realizing the general manager has spent months lining up a replacement. They also get mercilessly cut at the end of the season if it’s even slightly beneficial to the club, both young players trying to get a foothold in the league and experienced guys like Russell Canouse. Given that reality, I think middle management—Lesesne and Mackay in this case—can’t complain when it turns out they bear the same risks.

Yes, yes, I know the owners aren’t held accountable in the same way, but that’s just how sports works. In fact, it’s usually how life works.

"Ally MacKay is the real problem, seeing as he’s missed on most of his players and can't blame the inherited contracts any longer"

Unfortunately, I still maintain he really can still blame the inherited contracts for the Klich situation. Don’t get me wrong, in a perfect world, ownership would have bought out Klich’s contract and then paid for a DP to replace him, but given finite resources for the roster, I understand waiting so that all the available money goes towards new players instead of getting rid of an old one. This has forced Mackay to build the roster in reverse order of the normal way, bringing in roleplayers and waiting to put the core talent in place.

I’m going to wait until the end of the season for a more thorough evaluation, but despite the bad season, I think he's mostly done a good job finding value. I'm happy with him bringing in Peglow, Kijima, Herrera, Servania, Antley, and Rowles given what was paid for them. Bartlett, Stroud,and Herrera did really well last year, again based on what was paid for them, so we’ll see what happens the rest of this season. The big value misses (so far) are Joon, Peltola, Pirani, Schnegg, and Enow, and I still think any of those players could still come good.

And of course most of these players would probably look better if they had at least one more DP playing with them. Mackay says they’ll bring in such a player in the upcoming transfer window, so we’ll see what comes of that.

“We should hire a coach who knows MLS, not some random foreign guy”

I know this is ancient history, but I guess Curt Onalfo permanently soured me on MLS retread coaches. I haven’t seen a lot from other teams in the meantime to change my mind about this. I guess Greg Vanney just won MLS Cup with LA, but he was coming off a strong record at Toronto. DC’s options for coaches with MLS experience typically look a lot more like Chris Armas. No thanks.

This moment is a bit unusual since there are at least two MLS coaches available who seem like better options. Jim Curtain would be everyone’s first choice, and apparently DC reached out to him and got nowhere. No surprise there seeing as he apparently turned down Atlanta United during this past offseason. Atlanta is an obvious pick for best job in the league, so yeah, if he wouldn’t take that, DC didn’t have a chance. Curtain is still cashing paychecks from Philly and apparently enjoying some much-deserved family time. Good for him.

The other possibility was Giovanni Savarese, who had a pretty solid stint with the Portland Timbers (four playoff appearances in five full seasons, including two MLS Cup losses). Better than Chris Armas, I suppose, but…I don’t know, not particularly ambitious.

Going with a foreign coach is riskier. There’s a long list of foreign coaches with respectable pedigrees who have failed in MLS, one assumes due to the strangeness of the league and perhaps some difficulty relating to American players.

But I think the most interesting aspect of DC’s coaching candidates is that the club seems to be looking for experience. That might sound obvious, but actually this turns out to be a novel concept for DC United. I saw someone on Reddit say, half-jokingly I think, that if hired René Weiler will be the most qualified coach DC United has ever hired. This made me want to run down the whole list, which even after some recent churn really isn’t that long:

Here’s the details from that chart:

• Bruce Arena (1996 - 1998): Seventeen seasons as coach of the University of Virginia’s soccer team (plus seven as coach of their lacrosse team)

• Thomas Rongen (1999 - 2001): MLS retread coming off a failed two years at New England and, before that, one good season with Tampa Bay (but a bunch of NCAA and minor league experience before that)

• Ray Hudson (2002 - 2003): MLS retread with two years of experience as a manager in Miami before it was contracted (his second year was quite good in fairness)

• Piotr Nowak (2004 - 2006): Young and literally his first coaching job of any sort

• Tom Soehn (2007 - 2009): Young, promoted assistant coach, first job as manager

• Curt Onalfo (2009): MLS retread after a bit more than two mediocre years with the Kansas City Wizards

• Ben Olsen (2010 - 2020): Young and literally his first manager job after short time as assistant

• Hernan Losada (2021 - 2022): Young, up-and-coming coach with just over one season of experience in Belgium

• Wayne Rooney (2022 - 2023): Young and coming off a bit less than two seasons as manager at Derby where initially he seemed to reinvigorate the team, but its form suffered (something most attributed at the time to Derby’s other struggles)

• Troy Lesesne (2024 - 2025): Young, up-and-coming coach with less than a full season of experience

Perhaps a simpler way to look at this is to just consider how old the manager is when hired:

Foreign hires are always a gamble, but at least René Weiler is a different kind of gamble than Hernan Losada.

“René Weiler is a bad choice because he hasn’t stayed anywhere for three entire seasons”

Overseas, managers change more frequently than in MLS and especially at DC United. While I love the idea of having a Sir Alex Ferguson-like long and decorated run from a great manager, given DC United’s place in the world, I think that’s just not realistic. Just like we can’t expect a player to stay on a modern MLS team for a decade unless they aren’t all that good, a truly successful DC United manager will inevitably get poached, if not by another MLS team, then by a team abroad.

In fact, the only DC United managers who didn’t clearly overstay their welcome both left after three years: Bruce Arena (poached by the US national team) and Piotr Nowak (his departure was quite ambiguous and maybe DC United actually stealth fired him, but at best he went on his own terms to coach the US Olympic Team).

When Wayne Rooney was hired as manager, there was a lot of discussion among fans about the fact he clearly saw the job as merely a stepping stone to a Premier League post. “Sure, he’ll be good here, but he’s just going to leave us in the lurch after a year or two!”

If only we’d been so lucky as to get into the lurch in the first place! At this point, if Weiler does well and we’re sad to see him leave after two years, that would make him DC United’s best coaching hire in two decades.

Who’s really going to be in charge?

I know that as usual I’m droning on for too long, but I have a final point I haven’t seen made elsewhere. When Wayne Rooney joined, he was simply the manager and Dave Kasper was still the general manager. However, it is abundantly clear that whenever Rooney disagreed with the front office, ownership sided with Rooney, so in practice he was calling the shots on transfers.

I mention this because René Weiler hasn’t just been a coach, he’s coming off a season as sporting director of Servette FC. In theory, he’ll just be the coach and Ally MacKay is the general manager and “Chief Soccer Officer” who hired Weiler. But we know ownership (mainly Levien, presumably) is very involved in coaching hires and probably was overriding Mackay’s judgment during the Pogba pursuit.

So if Weiler is hired and then has a disagreement with Ally Mackay about, say, which DP to sign or whether to exercise Christian Benteke’s 2026 option…what will Levien do?

There’s no way for us to know. Maybe Levien doesn’t even know. But it’s something to keep an eye on. Let’s face it, it’s very likely the only reason we know about the Pogba thing at all is that Mackay was mad at the owners and leaked it to the press. If Mackay loses (or has already lost) the trust of ownership similar to how he’s on thin ice at best with many fans, well, Weiler has already moved upward at his last job.

I just wanted to note that possibility, but I’m not going to worry much about it today when the Weiler hire isn’t even official. We all know the most DC United thing to do would be for the deal to fall apart at the last second and for Steven Birnbaum to suddenly be hired instead, so—no offense to Birnbaum—I’m just hoping the deal actually gets done.