I had not seen that but I happened today to read this from the NYT which was published in May because someone posted the link on Twitter today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/sports/soccer/atlanta-united-mls.html
It is a very similar article, but has a bit more about Eale's role. Between the 2 articles I came away with 2 conclusions.
1. Blank and the team have been very smart, and very fortunate both. To say the latter is not meant to detract from the hard work, intelligence, creativity and cash they have put into it. But the good fortune is this: Blank hired Eales who was most recently in Tottenham, and I'm sure he did fine, and was limited by the Spurs' role and spend level in the PL. But Eales was not some obvious superstar hire. Blank could have had all the same ambition and intentions and never interviewed Eales and nobody would ever think, "If Blank were serious he would have considered Eales." But he did look at Eales, and Eales is the one who turned MLS upside down by convincing Blank to spend big $$ in Latin America on young players and a big CONMEBOL coach. And then they spend on these young players and hit on 4 out of 5 which again is based on good talent assessment but damn, that's also a bit lucky, especially as I suspect 2 of them probably outperformed even their fondest wishes.
2. I think CFG is as ambitious in their intentions as Blank is, but they are not as ambitious in their temperament, or soul. They are a rather non-inventive corporation, even as big companies go. They never even went through a period when they were young and disruptive. Man City has upset the hierarchy in the PL by spending both heavy and smart and winning, but they have not reinvented anything. They did not change the way PL teams do business. There was no moneyball involved where they saw inefficiencies or lost opportunities. It was just a willingness to spend massively and hire good people. And all good credit for hiring well and buying the right players. But the fundamental strategy is what any completely non-creative person would come up with if tasked with taking a non-top-5 team and moving them to the top of the pyramid and offered nearly unlimited financial resources.* Every hire is basically by the book. Again, all due credit for doing that well. I'm not saying they're dumb or cannot succeed, but there's no spark, nothing that makes you stand back and say "That was brilliantly inventive." They got the best European managers they could who more or less fit their style until Pep was available and now they have Pep, which is the easiest decision to make in the world of soccer and requires zero creativity on the part of management. Pep is creative in his coaching. But nothing else in CFG's business practices shows that sort of creativity.
With NYCFC, hiring Reyna was a smart, traditional inside-the-box, and yes, ambitious hire for MLS. He knows the local talent, has probably as good of a US network as anyone, is well respected, etc. And though Kreis was a total failure he was pretty much the same mold: successful and well-respected in MLS and and they did not go cheap on his salary. If you were thinking ambitious but inside-the-box about a coaching hire for MLS when CFG hired Kreis, he was on the short list of available candidates. It just never occurred to CFG management -- Soriano or whoever -- that MLS was ripe for disruption with coaches like Tata or players like Atlanta has because CFG is not about disruption. CFG has a very business school business plan to create cookie cutter teams all over the world and build a vanilla baby blue brand.
After Kreis failed, they retreated into the safe and comfortable even further, and went with two very familiar inside hires. Both have amazing pedigrees and were the best available people within CFG. And I don't think they did so because Tata or GBS is too pricey. I think they're just outsiders and not obvious MLS-type coaching candidates and not the sort of people CFG ever anticipated hiring for their MLS project.
The scary thing is I expect they still have no clue that Blank and Eales have reinvented MLS in a way that bypassed the CFG strategy. This doesn't mean NYCFC can never win a trophy, or have a year occasionally better than Atlanta. Every team fluctuates. But Atlanta's best is above our best right now, and I fear that unless we change -- not just do better but really change -- we can only exceed Atlanta when our best coincides with their downturn.
* If CFG have been creative anywhere it is in the ways they have channeled money to work around FFP rules. But that's just in service of the basic non-inventive strategy of spend a lot and spend it well.
mgarbowski's writeup of the personnel decisions they made, it seems like CFG's issue was not that they didn't want the very best - just perhaps that the pools they were willing to look at were somewhat limited and perhaps predictable.
