How To Win in MLS w/ Limited Resources

sbrylski

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Apr 24, 2014
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Curious to hear some takes on this. Obviously, spend to the maximum, scout well, have a good coach/leadership, and replenish depth from an academy would be ideal. But most/all teams rarely are going to achieve all of that, or have the resources to do so. Putting on your best moneyball hat, what would your priorities on a budget be if you were the GM of an MLS team?

1. Top of the Roster? Spend on DPs?
2. Middle of the Roster? Hit on TAM guys?
3. Roster Depth? Try to be 3-deep at each position by focusing on quality Americans?
4. Academy?
5. Coaching?

Where's your focus, and what considerations are you willing to de-emphasize?
 
Personally, I'd go with #1 and #5 as priorities. It could go horribly wrong with injuries, but if not (i.e. ATL) you could take it all the way. Then after that I'd work on 2->4->3. 4 leads to 2 leads to 3 leads to 1.
 
Curious to hear some takes on this. Obviously, spend to the maximum, scout well, have a good coach/leadership, and replenish depth from an academy would be ideal. But most/all teams rarely are going to achieve all of that, or have the resources to do so. Putting on your best moneyball hat, what would your priorities on a budget be if you were the GM of an MLS team?

1. Top of the Roster? Spend on DPs?
2. Middle of the Roster? Hit on TAM guys?
3. Roster Depth? Try to be 3-deep at each position by focusing on quality Americans?
4. Academy?
5. Coaching?

Where's your focus, and what considerations are you willing to de-emphasize?
If you’re playing Moneyball, you have to look at *all*of the models to see what produces the greatest outlay of scoring juxtaposed against the likelihood of preventing goals. You could say #3, and that is how KC does it (mostly), but there may not be a way to round out a team to produce more than what 3DPs could do.

I guess that’s my way of saying picking one of the numbers is more of a wish list item from the hip as opposed to really knowing what would be best since a lot of analysis has to go in to it. My opinion is that all 5 are needed in moderation, and the GM has to be flexible with the approach each year since the market supply is not always fluid and flush with options since there is a lack of MLS free agency/ability to sign American/domestic players and fewer foreign players available during the winter transfer window.