VANCOUVER — It might be the offseason, but the Vancouver Whitecaps’ training headquarters at the University of British Columbia is buzzing. Marc Dos Santos and his staff are very busy at the moment.
“I am off to South America,” Dos Santos said after sitting down for an exclusive interview with Pro Soccer USA.
The Whitecaps have two big tasks heading into the 2020 season: player acquisition, and hiring a sporting director, a position the Whitecaps hope to have filled as early as the end of October.
But before talking about the new season, Dos Santos wants to reflect on the old season, which dictates the path forward. The Whitecaps finished last in the Western Conference with just 34 points.
“I’m hard on myself, but when I look back and see that we got 18 players in one month and a half — it was a little bit of Mission Impossible,” Dos Santos said about the rebuild of the team last winter.
Looking back, Dos Santos feels that the cuts made to the squad were perhaps too drastic. The sweeping changes throughout the squad gave the Whitecaps the look of an expansion franchise. But the Whitecaps could not rely on an expansion draft to secure players from within the league. Instead, the ‘Caps signed 12 players from outside Major League Soccer throughout the 2019 season.
“Not do as many changes as we did,” Dos Santos said when asked what he would do differently. “I would stay with players maybe another year. … I would have probably stayed with two or three pieces from last year. Gradually do the change — our change was too drastic, and we were not ready to do it.”
“The club thinks we needed a year that was a lot of pain because it is going to help in the future,” Dos Santos added. “For me, that was hard. But at the same time, I always say, I was the right guy for such a change because you needed a very patient coach, you need someone that would go through the pain that 2019 would be — other guys they just freak out after three months or give up.”
Ownership, however, believed that a culture change was necessary after five years under head coach Carl Robinson, especially after the infamous 2018 end-of-the-season press conference where played decried a poor locker room culture.
“That massacre,” Dos Santos said about the press conference. “I arrived with the news that someone’s agent wants a player to leave. I am on the phone with another player who is telling me: ‘It is not about you, but I want to move on.'”
With key players leaving, Dos Santos was forced to sign new players, arrange friendlies and organize a training camp.
“You are in mid-November, and preseason starts in January, and you are still trying to figure it out,” Dos Santos said. “Everything was rushed. Sometimes during the year, I was jealous of coaches that arrived at a club where there are 20 players, there’s a base, there’s a team.”
“What are the chances to succeed in this scenario?” Dos Santos said. “You need to be a guy with a magic wand, like Harry Potter.”
Dos Santos went to work without a team and also without the help of a sporting director or a scouting staff. It was a monumental task, but despite the obstacles Dos Santos and his coaching staff managed to put together a team that many thought would be competitive enough to perhaps challenge for the playoffs.
“Of our 15 losses, 12 were by one goal difference,” Dos Santos said. “We tied a lot of games. It is not good, but we didn’t lose those ten games we tied. If you turn those ten ties into six ties and four wins, you fight for the top seven.”
Dos Santos also pointed out that despite finishing last in the Western Conference, 34 points for a team in transition was not a bad outcome.
“Look at Toronto FC, the year after the championship they finished the league with 36 points, that is just a two-point difference,” Dos Santos said. “In light of all the struggles, we like to focus on what was good.”
Those positives for Dos Santos included the emergence of players like Maxime Crépeau, Érik Godoy, and Theo Bair, who have made significant strides in their development.
“We finally maximized the potential of Yordy Reyna,” Dos Santos said. “There were a lot of moments to be excited about.”
“It is also exciting to see what will happen with [Jasser] Khmiri,” Dos Santos added. The center-back missed almost the entire season with an injury. “This is a player that was in the notebooks of clubs in Germany, Belgium, and France.”
There are other positives in Dos Santos’ opinion. The club has put into place a new scouting department with three new scouts already aggressively finding new talent for the club.
The club appears close to signing a new sporting director and has already been linked with the sort of Designated Player candidates who could transform a franchise often criticized for being cheap by many of its fans into a true competitor overnight.
This was Part I of an in-depth two-part interview with Vancouver Whitecaps head coach Marc Dos Santos. Look for Part II on Pro Soccer USA this week.