Someday, someone in Major League Soccer will hand Eric Wynalda the managerial car keys. At that point, he will either proceed to drive the club right down Glory Road – or he’ll batter the bus en route to driving it over the doggone cliff.
Hard to say which, although it could surely go either way. Wynalda is something of a mad scientist in the game, capable of grand things but also capable of wrecking ball destruction. His soccer brain is sharp and streetwise. His eye for talent approaches profound, as evidenced by his ability to gather up a bunch of cast-offs and show higher tier teams what’s what. We saw as much in last summer’s U.S. Open competition.
But the former U.S. international striker comes with no filter; witness his notorious propensity to lash out at the U.S. Soccer establishment. Whatever his faults, you have to say that self-awareness isn’t one of them. What Wynalda told the L.A. Times last summer: “Everybody thinks that I’m just a TV guy with a big mouth that’s very critical of things. And I get it. They’re right.”
On the other hand, the guy knows the game. And in speaking of the very high-profile managerial opening now in MLS, in New York, there’s a case to be made the Wynalda fits the Harrison bill.
It will probably take a big personality to drag the New York Red Bulls into a better place, trophy-gathering wise. And it would take a man with steel-girded opinions to stand up to the new regime, now the province of Scottish sporting director Andy Roxburgh and the organization’s French head of soccer Gerard Houllier.
They have apparently not yet offered the managerial position to Scotsman Gary McAllister, although the Red Bulls and interested journalists kept our guy Richard Farley busy yesterday trying to unwind it all.
So while the Red Bulls deciders make their choice here (uh, tick … tock, guys; MLS camps open in a couple of weeks, and the draft is just 14 days away), perhaps they can lay this on the table as supporting evidence:
This piece from Once A Metro makes a cogent case for Wynalda as the best choice here.
It will be a bold stroke when someone does trust Wynalda to be a club’s flag carrier. But in all honesty, if they are concerned about wins and losses – and the Red Bulls organization really should be concerned with little else at this point – they could do a lot worse.
Personally, I would have more faith in Wynalda, someone who has played in MLS, someone who knows everyone important enough to know in American soccer and someone who does have bright ideas about the game, over a Scotsman with zero knowledge of MLS, and only slightly more than “zero” in terms of managerial success.
