D.C. United announced that England, Manchester United, and Everton star Wayne Rooney was coming back to the District to be their head coach on Tuesday, and the change couldn’t have come soon enough.
United, after all, had just lost 7-0 on national television to a Philadelphia Union side that has grown into one of MLS’s best-run clubs. The contrast—an intense, ruthless Union implementing a long-term, consistent vision to perfection against a D.C. side that was too open against a superior opponent, seemingly rudderless, and had no fight after an early concession—couldn’t have been more clear. One club has clarity in who they are and why they’re doing what they do, and the other does not.
This piece was going to hone in on a theme that D.C. United is a club at a crossroads, but let’s be real: they’ve been finding themselves at a crossroads for years now. Moving out of RFK Stadium and into the modern world of MLS was supposed to be where they made the turn, only for a series of choices that alienated many of the team’s most dedicated supporters, leaving scars that linger to this day.
Signing Rooney as a player in 2018 and bringing in Hernán Losada as the club’s head coach in 2021 were both moments to make that turn as well. Rooney left earlier than planned for understandable reasons, but the magic of 2018 had mostly vanished in the months before he departed.
Losada, meanwhile, charmed fans, but was let go early this year for an inflexible and reportedly abrasive approach in his dealings with staff and players. United’s tepid, unclear explanation of that choice left one segment of the fanbase angry at a perceived lack of high standards within the organization, and another portion disappointed that a potentially unhealthy culture of weigh-ins and humiliation seems to have been tolerated for over a year.
For United, it was back at the ol’ crossroads once again.
The pattern here is simple: United wants to get it right, but also hasn’t yet commited to long-term plans that are actually tenable. These ideas —a new stadium, signing a global superstar, an innovative coach—are all individual ingredients that could be used in building a sturdy, competitive MLS team over a long period of time. Sporting Kansas City used a new home to springboard into a decade of big crowds and contending for titles. Atlanta United, with Josef Martínez, is one of several MLS teams to make one perfect signing that defined their culture for years and got a generation of fans on board for life.
What these big moves won’t do is solve your problems by themselves. KC spent years being among the most shrewd operators when it comes to MLS roster rules and talent evaluation. Atlanta spent more than United ever has, and marketed themselves brilliantly. It’s not one thing; it’s all the things.
In D.C., the need for a comprehensive plan has often felt like it’s left aside for One Simple Trick, and the result is a temporary boost that fizzles after a year or so. United owner Jason Levien, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, acknowledged this to some degree.
“I saw where we were, and that we needed a real push—more than a push, we needed a direction—after Hernán left, and things just didn’t seem to be moving in the right direction,” said Levien. “There were some players this offseason that wanted to leave, and who I felt were quality players and quality people. And I wanted to understand: how do we build the right culture moving forward, that we’re attracting more players, and guys who want to be here?
“So there was an urgency, and it happened before the Philadelphia match. It happened in the four or five matches before that, where we said, ‘Wait a minute, where are we headed this season? Where are we headed next season? How do we build the kind of culture where we think we’re special, and we’re doing something positive in the community and positive on the pitch?’ And when we didn’t see that, there’s a lot of urgency.”
These are the right questions to ask, but to be fair, they’re also the same questions that have come up with these previous inflection points. It would be wrong to accuse United of not having plans, but it is fair to say that between the plans themselves and the execution, the organization keeps being in need of a direction.
Rooney was up front that this is a step in a managerial career that he wants to take to the top of the game. He’s not a mercenary, but he will want to progress to tougher challenges faster than MLS is going to become a Premier League-level enterprise. In other words, United cannot expect him to be here for a decade. This hire has to be part of a system of moves done in concert, or D.C. will be at the mercy of one of the dozens of European clubs that can offer a better opportunity in 2024 or so.
Is there reason to expect this time to be different? Believe it or not, United does have some of the pieces of the puzzle they need, though not in ways that have resonated nationally (ESPN and Fox effectively said “no thanks!” to putting United on TV once Rooney left) or locally, where diehards have been frustrated for nearly a decade and plenty of local soccer fans prefer to call it football.
Those puzzle pieces are the unheralded infrastructure that has been built over the past three years. United Performance Center, the club’s new training ground, looks unimpressive from the outside, but the lack of aesthetically pleasing wood and glass surfaces that greet you belie a facility that has top-tier equipment and functionality once you step inside.
Literally down the street, Loudoun United has not won many games in the USL Championship, but it is succeeding in its actual purpose, which is developing players for the first team. That objective fits hand-in-glove with the team’s academy, which despite a lack of recognition has churned out players who are ready for legit pro minutes as teenagers and play with serious urgency and decisiveness. Homegrown players make up over 20% of United’s current roster, and that percentage was higher at the start of this season, before a club-record transfer sending Kevin Paredes to the Bundesliga with Wolfsburg, and Griffin Yow’s more recent move to Westerlo.
Three more players were signed to MLS deals after proving themselves with Loudoun, while 20-year-old center back Hayden Sargis was signed after showing his potential with Sacramento Republic. The club is, per The Athletic, weighing the prospect of keeping Loudoun United in the USL Championship while adding an MLS Next Pro team that would play in Baltimore.
There’s a through-line here, which is that United believes it can create a conveyor belt that turns youngsters into MLS-caliber players (academy or additions from elsewhere), and has truly invested in that idea. Rooney’s experience with Derby County, which he said involved giving “around about 20 debuts” to academy players at his introductory press conference, has prepared him to be the coach at that kind of club.
There’s genuine promise in pairing the club’s tangible move towards being a talent incubator with Rooney’s ability—proven at Derby County, where a team full of those aforementioned academy debutants managed 55 points in the Championship, only to be relegated due to financial penalties—to give young players minutes and still get results.
That said, they’re clearly not going for a full youth movement. The Washington Post has reported that free agent attacking midfielder Ravel Morrison is extremely close to signing with United, and The Athletic says England attacker Jesse Lingard has held talks over a move as well. Both players are 29, and between them, outstanding forward Taxi Fountas, strikers Michael Estrada and Ola Kamara, and newly-signed attacker Martín Rodríguez, it’s not like Rooney is going to leaning on an under-23 squad.
Still, the club on Friday traded Julian Gressel, their chief chance creator, to the Vancouver Whitecaps in part because Rooney rates United States under-20 attacker Jackson Hopkins. Interim head coach Chad Ashton started Hopkins on the right wing in the first game of the Rooney era (even with Rooney, who is awaiting his visa, restricted to the stands), and used his final sub on another homegrown, Ted Ku-DiPietro, while trying to overturn a 2-1 deficit at home.
United’s pivot towards being a place where younger players are developed either to become MLS regulars or attract European transfers should be the emphasis here, and that (or any other long-term vision) needs to be made clear. A recurring problem for United is that its fanbase feels in the dark about why things are happening and where the club is going. The Losada dismissal is relitigated among fans on social media after every defeat because United’s motivations weren’t plainly stated. The team put tens of millions into a training ground, and opening it made no impact in local perception because all fans saw of it was a corrugated metal exterior.
When there’s a team that wins games and presents a plausible vision to embrace, the DMV takes to them. Rooney’s tactical vision already appears rather clear: it’s less madcap, for sure, but there’s a good reason for that at a club that had given up 27 goals in its last 11 competitive matches before he stepped onto a stage at Audi Field’s Eagle Bank Club on Tuesday.
“You can’t just go and press all over the place with no structure,” Rooney told Pro Soccer Wire just before being officially unveiled as United’s new head coach. “You need to obviously have a structure to how you want to press, and of course, that’s how exactly I’ve worked with my time at Derby as well,” said Rooney, later adding that “watching games back and watching the last few games live, the organization has to be better.”
That might feel like a move back towards the pragmatism of many seasons spent under former United boss Ben Olsen, but it’s also in line with the unflashy game models of a team like the Seattle Sounders, the current CONCACAF Champions League winners and a team that makes the playoffs like clockwork every year.
You don’t have to be MLS’s wildest high-wire act to to appease fans or embark on the path to being one of the league’s most respected clubs. Plenty of MLS Cups and Supporters Shields have gone to mid-block teams that just execute a good plan, and make smart moves off the field. They’re clear in their intentions, and their big moves are undergirded by smaller moves, all built into a longer-term plan. The on-field success becomes off-field success, with ticket sales going up, sponsors who want to be associated with a winner coming aboard, and all of those boring but vital metrics showing improvement.
If Rooney and United are going to at long last make a turn that takes the club to better days, and not end up back at this same old intersection they keep turning up at, they need clarity, coherence, and consistency at all levels as much as they need Rooney to improve results in the short-term.
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