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Josh Wolff is out in Austin. Y’all will be shocked to learn that I believe Austin FC had and has much bigger issues to deal with.
If you don’t know by now, I’m on the side that managers don’t matter nearly as much as roster quality (and so is a lot of data). The bottom line is that the rosters in Austin haven’t been great.
You can go back and pin a decent amount of that on former Sporting Director, Claudio Reyna, who left that role in January of 2023. Austin’s initial expansion roster in 2021 understandably looked like your standard expansion team. The 2022 side looked a lot like the same side with a heckuva lot more luck. And the 2023 side looked a lot like the same side without all that luck. Now we’re in 2024 and, well, yep, still about the same.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder where Austin would have been if they hadn’t had a smoke and mirrors run to second place in the West in 2022. But they did. And, like St. Louis this season, they didn’t do much to counteract the inevitable regression to the mean.
What they did do during much of Wolff’s tenure is whiff on DP signings. Cecilio Dominguez, Tomás Pochettino and Emiliano Rigoni all came up short of expectations. Alexander Ring has been fine but can be considered a symbol of Austin’s unwillingness to spend on a third DP that isn’t TAMable. And Sebastian Driussi hasn’t even been able to see the same stratosphere as his outstanding 2022 season. The U22 spots haven’t been produced either for Austin.
Sure, you can put some of that on coaching and we don’t know what level of input Wolff had on key roster decisions. But these aren’t things that will be fixed overnight with a new manager.
The good news is that I don’t think Austin is looking for overnight solutions. The reaction yesterday from folks who follow the team seemed to be that this was the moment Austin could finally start to move forward into their second era. Austin have been in it for a while though. Sporting Director Rodolfo Borrell arrived in the summer of 2023 following Reyna’s departure. Borrell came with no previous MLS experience into a new country and a new club. It makes sense that change would come slowly.
Now, we’re a year and a half on and it seems like Borrell is ready to fully make this team his own. Wolff’s departure isn’t going to fix the roster, but it will allow Borrell to bring in someone he feels can effectively start from zero and fit with the team he wants to build. If that team isn’t very good…well, firing the head coach on a struggling team doesn’t get rid of the pressure, it just redistributes it to other places.
Sometimes new ideas, new faces and a new culture can be a good thing. That’s what Austin is aiming for with this move. It does make some sense after four years of the same messaging. None of it will matter though if the roster doesn’t get the same treatment.
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