Domènec Torrent Appointed NYCFC Head Coach (June '18) / Mutually Agree to Part Ways (November '19)

What Are Your Thoughts on Torrent as NYCFC Head Coach?

  • Quite Really Pleased

    Votes: 8 20.5%
  • Really Pleased

    Votes: 13 33.3%
  • Pleased

    Votes: 16 41.0%
  • Neither Pleased or Displeased

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Displeased

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Really Displeased

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Quite Really Displeased

    Votes: 1 2.6%

  • Total voters
    39
I’m all for using methods the new coach is accustomed to, but if the players have previously done fitness work without a ball, and are used to that, then there’s a big possibility that making this change midseason will lead to regression by player(s). New methodologies should be introduced during the off-season.

The people may be put in place now but they may wait to implement the new methodology later. I have to hope they don’t try to change much but just make the best of what they currently have for the time being.
 
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I’m all for using methods the new coach is accustomed to, but if the players have previously done fitness work without a ball, and are used to that, then there’s a big possibility that making this change midseason will lead to regression by player(s). New methodologies should be introduced during the off-season.

If that were really a thing, surely the same logic would have made mid-season transfers infeasible and the second transfer window would've been long abandoned? That is to say, by this logic surely any player who leaves one club mid-season to join another would be such a write-off to their new team due to not being able to adjust quickly enough that they might as well be put on a leave of absence until the following pre-season?

I'm sure that this kind of thing can have an effect, but I'm pretty sure it's waaaaay down the list of potential things that can go wrong with changing manager, and the potential effect is honestly far smaller than you're fearing.
 
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If that were really a thing, surely the same logic would have made mid-season transfers infeasible and the second transfer window would've been long abandoned? That is to say, by this logic surely any player who leaves one club mid-season to join another would be such a write-off to their new team due to not being able to adjust quickly enough that they might as well be put on a leave of absence until the following pre-season?

I'm sure that this kind of thing can have an effect, but I'm pretty sure it's waaaaay down the list of potential things that can go wrong with changing manager, and the potential effect is honestly far smaller than you're fearing.
There are many cases of new players not assimilating well after a midseason transfer - that’s not hidden information.

You’re discounting the mental side of physical conditioning where the player has to believe in what they’re doing. If using a ball for all exercises is unfamiliar and they’re uncomfortable with it (from a conditioning perspective) then they won’t buy in. It’s similar to distance training. One coach may get great results from an athlete by focusing on specific workouts of distance, intervals, and tempo paced exercises, but bring in another coach that believes in combining all of those into threshold runs that include surges and fartleks, and the athlete will readily balk and take time to adjust, usually with a regression.
 
Haha You brought up the hypo of if we were an independent team, so I was speaking in terms of that hypo. And yes, what you said w/r/t if we're a farm team I should likely just give up on the team now, perhaps. Of course I realize NYCFC wouldn't exist without CFG, but if the team is a full on farm team, i know many, many people in the tri-state area that would wish it did never exist. Let's face it. In the short term, this club and Red Bull are getting by okay... but in the big picture / long term, they're both very new and huge experiments that may or may not succeed.

RB has like 10 years....they are fine, they have been fine tuning their youth system and starting to give them some results, plus they are are more connected to their european counterparts ( players going to leipzeig, loans to RB, marsch potentially going over there etc). networks like this may become more common going forward because of how the game is starting to go in that direction( or is there already).....a business. We are trying the "city" way and having our youth systems slowly grow and using the networks to get players etc. I would like more homegrown players, but i know it will take time, so far sands and scally but we still know they are probably two years or so from making real impact on team.

What is the long term failure you are referring to? financial collapse? if that happens its not only these teams but hundreds of teams all around will feel that.

I dont know of it not wanting to exist ( I was never a RB fan since it was pain in the ass getting there every home game), i still meet people who are going to first game and enjoying it, ive met season ticket holders from Pennsylvania coming over saying they like this team and say the union sucks, i know people literally on the street telling hey man get that W, when im wearing my jersey / hat on my way to game days. some people dont care about the farm team, some accept it

if you want a true independent team right now in nyc, you can try the cosmos ....and we see how they are struggling
 
There are many cases of new players not assimilating well after a midseason transfer - that’s not hidden information.

You’re discounting the mental side of physical conditioning where the player has to believe in what they’re doing. If using a ball for all exercises is unfamiliar and they’re uncomfortable with it (from a conditioning perspective) then they won’t buy in. It’s similar to distance training. One coach may get great results from an athlete by focusing on specific workouts of distance, intervals, and tempo paced exercises, but bring in another coach that believes in combining all of those into threshold runs that include surges and fartleks, and the athlete will readily balk and take time to adjust, usually with a regression.

Eh, I'm just not buying it. Footballers aren't kids, who get confused easily by any change to their routine. You're talking about this stuff like it's Football Manager, where players have a hidden "familiarity" stat with certain formations that will always start from 0 and will go up slowly as you dedicate more, or like it's some kind of system where a player can only ever have one "preferred" form of training and will inevitably take several months to adjust to a new system. Training isn't rocket science, where it requires months and months of study to be able to make meaningful contributions.

Sure, players will have a preference and may enjoy one type of training more than another, but a player who honestly takes several months to be able to understand how a new style of training is supposed to be helping him is probably lacking in mental traits and not very good at learning things in training full stop. Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say that a player who "won't buy in" to a new training method (especially a relatively standard one like this) because he doesn't like that it's different to what he was doing before has serious attitude problems and probably isn't cut out to be playing football at the highest level.
 
Eh, I'm just not buying it. Footballers aren't kids, who get confused easily by any change to their routine. You're talking about this stuff like it's Football Manager, where players have a hidden "familiarity" stat with certain formations that will always start from 0 and will go up slowly as you dedicate more, or like it's some kind of system where a player can only ever have one "preferred" form of training and will inevitably take several months to adjust to a new system. Training isn't rocket science, where it requires months and months of study to be able to make meaningful contributions.

Sure, players will have a preference and may enjoy one type of training more than another, but a player who honestly takes several months to be able to understand how a new style of training is supposed to be helping him is probably lacking in mental traits and not very good at learning things in training full stop. Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say that a player who "won't buy in" to a new training method (especially a relatively standard one like this) because he doesn't like that it's different to what he was doing before has serious attitude problems and probably isn't cut out to be playing football at the highest level.
Actually, no, I’m not talking about it as if it’s Football Manager. I’m approaching it as a person who was an athlete, is a distance coach and understands how athletes respond to changes in routine.

And frankly, you’re dead wrong, training is like rocket science, people get their PHD’s in sports kinesiology and there are vast amounts of research out there on the training effects various methods have on the body and adaptation times required.

I won’t debate you any more on the subject, but whereas most stuff you post about you appear fluent in, I think you’re extending yourself quite a bit here.
 
Actually, no, I’m not talking about it as if it’s Football Manager. I’m approaching it as a person who was an athlete, is a distance coach and understands how athletes respond to changes in routine.

And frankly, you’re dead wrong, training is like rocket science, people get their PHD’s in sports kinesiology and there are vast amounts of research out there on the training effects various methods have on the body and adaptation times required.

I won’t debate you any more on the subject, but whereas most stuff you post about you appear fluent in, I think you’re extending yourself quite a bit here.

Alright, fair play. I concede that I have not been an athlete and if you have then I can't fight you on that front. I'll leave it at that also.
 
Yeah just ignore the litigious billionaire who would rather fold his senior squad to make his “damages” look more significant than let his fans watch soccer. None of the 3 are attractive picks but on the whole I’ll take CFG.

sure, but if anyone really wants to go to the whole "spirit" of the game there are many amateur teams playing in cosmopolitan league that are member clubs etc that have been going on for decades and some have actual history to them ( US OPEN Cup wins)
 
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Actually, no, I’m not talking about it as if it’s Football Manager. I’m approaching it as a person who was an athlete, is a distance coach and understands how athletes respond to changes in routine.

And frankly, you’re dead wrong, training is like rocket science, people get their PHD’s in sports kinesiology and there are vast amounts of research out there on the training effects various methods have on the body and adaptation times required.

I won’t debate you any more on the subject, but whereas most stuff you post about you appear fluent in, I think you’re extending yourself quite a bit here.
Genuinely curious, what does the diminishing returns curve look like on sports science (dare I refer to kinesiology)?
 
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Genuinely curious, what does the diminishing returns curve look like on sports science (dare I refer to kinesiology)?
No idea. But if I understand what you’re asking, the the following may shed some light:

One way to look at it is that performance is a result of training the body through exertion and then recovery. Recovery, not training, is when the body makes advancements. Figuring out the balance between the two for each athlete, and corresponding to the development of both fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers, is the science, and it’s not necessarily apparent without knowing how to correctly analyze the situation.

(Small but relevant tangent):
One way athletes have beaten training science is by using pharmaceutical science ala PEDs. PEDs allow for the athlete a *smaller* recovery period thus allowing more sessions of exertion without physically breaking down, which creates a higher peak. Without using PEDs, the athlete has a smaller window of getting the training “right” because of the symbiotic nature of exertion/recovery. This is why athletes on PEDs routinely beat clean athletes - they have a bigger window to “get it right” since they recover so much faster.

Too much exertion with too little recovery and the body breaks down. Too little exertion and the body doesn’t max out. To achieve the right balance, the athlete has to understand how to push themselves to their limits of the specific exertion while also being able to accurately relay how they “feel” to the coach. The coach has to be able to analyze the info they’re given (by the athlete and mechanical data) and be able to recognize if it corresponds to what the training should be achieving or if it’s above/below anticipated results. If the athlete isn’t comfortable with the training exercise, it could feel harder to them because of the unfamiliarity, thus not stressing the body enough, or the flip side is that they may not recognize that they’re pushing too hard which in turn overstresses the body which over time breaks down from not enough recovery. But getting it right, the training, could produce percentage points of increased returns, and for elite athletes, even fractions of a percentage point can mean the difference in competition. Look at Maxi - he’s ridiculously fit and can run non-stop, but if he doesn’t max out his training, and his fitness goes down a percent, that could be the difference between max running for 90min verse maybe needing a sub at 80-85min.

Sorry if that’s a long response, and hopefully it addresses what you were asking regarding diminished returns.
 
No idea. But if I understand what you’re asking, the the following may shed some light:

One way to look at it is that performance is a result of training the body through exertion and then recovery. Recovery, not training, is when the body makes advancements. Figuring out the balance between the two for each athlete, and corresponding to the development of both fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers, is the science, and it’s not necessarily apparent without knowing how to correctly analyze the situation.

(Small but relevant tangent):
One way athletes have beaten training science is by using pharmaceutical science ala PEDs. PEDs allow for the athlete a *smaller* recovery period thus allowing more sessions of exertion without physically breaking down, which creates a higher peak. Without using PEDs, the athlete has a smaller window of getting the training “right” because of the symbiotic nature of exertion/recovery. This is why athletes on PEDs routinely beat clean athletes - they have a bigger window to “get it right” since they recover so much faster.

Too much exertion with too little recovery and the body breaks down. Too little exertion and the body doesn’t max out. To achieve the right balance, the athlete has to understand how to push themselves to their limits of the specific exertion while also being able to accurately relay how they “feel” to the coach. The coach has to be able to analyze the info they’re given (by the athlete and mechanical data) and be able to recognize if it corresponds to what the training should be achieving or if it’s above/below anticipated results. If the athlete isn’t comfortable with the training exercise, it could feel harder to them because of the unfamiliarity, thus not stressing the body enough, or the flip side is that they may not recognize that they’re pushing too hard which in turn overstresses the body which over time breaks down from not enough recovery. But getting it right, the training, could produce percentage points of increased returns, and for elite athletes, even fractions of a percentage point can mean the difference in competition. Look at Maxi - he’s ridiculously fit and can run non-stop, but if he doesn’t max out his training, and his fitness goes down a percent, that could be the difference between max running for 90min verse maybe needing a sub at 80-85min.

Sorry if that’s a long response, and hopefully it addresses what you were asking regarding diminished returns.
That's awesome.

To make it far simpler, I'm curious what kind of percentage difference you think it would make in the worst case scenario with this kind of change in regime.
 
Actually, no, I’m not talking about it as if it’s Football Manager. I’m approaching it as a person who was an athlete, is a distance coach and understands how athletes respond to changes in routine.

And frankly, you’re dead wrong, training is like rocket science, people get their PHD’s in sports kinesiology and there are vast amounts of research out there on the training effects various methods have on the body and adaptation times required.

I won’t debate you any more on the subject, but whereas most stuff you post about you appear fluent in, I think you’re extending yourself quite a bit here.
If you are a fitness coach working for Barca, I would imagine you would be one of those people with the doctorate. Javier Perez has one in Sports Science.

The only thing we can hope is for smart, knowledgeable people to make decisions about how to proceed with the transition because we don't really know how things were really done in every training session and we wont know really how things are going to be done after in every training session.
 
That's awesome.

To make it far simpler, I'm curious what kind of percentage difference you think it would make in the worst case scenario with this kind of change in regime.
I have no idea and don’t have the background to figure that out. That’s what the PHD folk figure out.
 
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If you are a fitness coach working for Barca, I would imagine you would be one of those people with the doctorate. Javier Perez has one in Sports Science.

The only thing we can hope is for smart, knowledgeable people to make decisions about how to proceed with the transition because we don't really know how things were really done in every training session and we wont know really how things are going to be done after in every training session.
We have to hope this is the case but there’s still a relationship to be developed between the player and coach in order to hit the sweet spot.

Look at our first year - we had “experts” in the performance positions (if I remember correctly one was a former Olympic level coach from maybe Spain) and that team looked tired every match and was constantly getting injured. Granted, we had some less than stellar players on the roster, but anybody tired or hurt would have been a result of either overtraining with the body breaking down/not rested for matches, or the body was undertrained and the fitness wasn’t there that left them vulnerable to over exertion->injuries during matches.
 
So rather than take the time to find the best candidate (and Torrent may be it, idk) and put in a caretaker for the interim, they rushed to hire someone in the CFG organization (lazy) only to need a caretaker in the interim.

That about sum it up?

So let me get this straight, taking the time to find the best candidate = good, but taking the time to get the aforementioned candidate a work permit = bad?

I'm sure if CFG wanted a lazy hire who could start yesterday they could do it. Torrent isn't that hire, of course.
 
Some people on here weren't going to be happy with anyone they hired. They could have hired fucking Sir Alex, and people would complain.

Yeah, he's too old with medical problems. Not reliable. And his teams score and win during added time. I don't like that, I want to win knowing I can leave at the 75' at avoid traffic.
 
RB has like 10 years....they are fine, they have been fine tuning their youth system and starting to give them some results, plus they are are more connected to their european counterparts ( players going to leipzeig, loans to RB, marsch potentially going over there etc). networks like this may become more common going forward because of how the game is starting to go in that direction( or is there already).....a business. We are trying the "city" way and having our youth systems slowly grow and using the networks to get players etc. I would like more homegrown players, but i know it will take time, so far sands and scally but we still know they are probably two years or so from making real impact on team.

What is the long term failure you are referring to? financial collapse? if that happens its not only these teams but hundreds of teams all around will feel that.

I dont know of it not wanting to exist ( I was never a RB fan since it was pain in the ass getting there every home game), i still meet people who are going to first game and enjoying it, ive met season ticket holders from Pennsylvania coming over saying they like this team and say the union sucks, i know people literally on the street telling hey man get that W, when im wearing my jersey / hat on my way to game days. some people dont care about the farm team, some accept it

if you want a true independent team right now in nyc, you can try the cosmos ....and we see how they are struggling
Yea, I completely agree with everything you're saying. The trend of the sport globally is consolidation of money and power, and basically colonialism. I kind of hate everything about the direction the game is going as far as the business side of it. FFP is an extremely small attempt to push back a bit, but anyway, that's a whole other discussion.

I think that RB and NYCFC struggle with attendance to an extent (at least compared to what I think a club in this geographic region is ultimately capable of). To what extent that's due to both teams being farm teams in some sense, is hard to tell, but I don't think it's an insignificant factor (personally, and based on conversations I've had with a lot of people). Anyway, like you said, some people accept it. It's a personal choice; if I give up my tickets, etc., it's not like I'll wish ill upon the team.

And as far as the Cosmos go... woof. They're not a farm team... they're a bad remix of an old song. And don't get me started on NASL as a whole. I could definitely get behind a lower division team (and have in the past, based on temporary locations). Anyway, for now, I'm still here... We'll see how Torrent does, what the rest of the season brings, and what this coming offseason looks like.
 
So let me get this straight, taking the time to find the best candidate = good, but taking the time to get the aforementioned candidate a work permit = bad?

I'm sure if CFG wanted a lazy hire who could start yesterday they could do it. Torrent isn't that hire, of course.

Your statement assumes Torrent is the best candidate available, period. My comments don’t rely on that assumption.

If Torrent actually is the best candidate, then obviously you’re right.

But some people here have asked a legitimate question (and I’m one of them) if there would be better candidates available in the future that aren’t part of CFG.

Is Torrent the best option or is he the best readily available option within the CFG system? My hunch is the latter in which case it is a lazy pick.

And considering the overwhelming majority of the coaching staff on CFG’s payroll is foreign, there is little chance anybody they would pick could have started yesterday cause nearly everyone would have needed a visa regardless of whether they were good candidates or not.

I think this is part of a larger issue that other people have identified- NYCFC may just be a proving ground for Man City and not something CFG is really interested in developing for itself. Maybe i’m wrong but this choice seems to support that theory.
 
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