Offseason Guides: Reasons for optimism in St. Louis and New England?

Here is the usual reminder that I’m going to be doing two of these on Mondays and two on Thursdays until all 30 teams are done. So far so good with the twice-weekly cadence.

And here are the post-mortems for MLSsoccer:

• Western Conference dregs
• Eastern Conference dregs
• Wild Card losers
• Round 1 Sweeps

Another batch coming next week once Round 1 is finished.

Ok, in we go:

St. Louis City

2025 finish: 13th in the West on 32 points. Amusingly, their xGD of -4.9 was the best in club history. Improvement!

Biggest question: How big a teardown are we talkin’ here?

First, let’s recap the past 18 months:

• CSO Lutz Pfannenstiel fired head coach Bradley Carnell in the middle of last year.
• Carnell was replaced by technical director John Hackworth on an interim basis.
• Hackworth had a completely different game model.
• At the end of October Hackworth was moved back to the TD job, and by the end of November Olof Mellberg was imported to be the new manager.
• Mellberg had a completely different game model.
• At the end of May, Mellberg was fired and replaced by David Critchley on an interim basis.
• Critchley had a completely different game model.
• At the end of August, Pfannenstiel was fired.
• This week, Corey Wray was hired as the new CSO.

That’s a lot. That’s a whole lot. And through it all, club president and general manager Diego Gigliani seems to have taken an active hand in not just the business side of things, but also in the roster-building side.1 Someone, after all, had to have signed veteran goalkeeper Roman Bürki to a DP extension last week before Wray was hired; who could that have been?

Now, I don’t necessarily hate that signing, especially if Bürki’s contract is structured in a way where he actually doesn’t take up a DP slot in 2027 and 2028 (we don’t know that yet, so this is a bit of wishcasting on my part). But add that to Pfannenstiel being allowed to fill the club’s final two premium roster slots2 just before he was shown the door and… kind of “Frankenstein’s Roster” situation, right? The players aren’t necessarily bad, but they don’t necessarily all fit together unless you’ve got a lot of stitches and some lightning and ok I’ve exhausted this metaphor.

Bottom line is that Wray has been brought in to fix a 32-point team and has, as of now, zero premium roster slots to do it with. What’s he really meant to accomplish here?

Top winter priority: Hire a coach. Wray is the guy, presumably, who will be doing that.

We can work backwards pretty easily here to figure out the type of coach (and type of game model) Wray will be looking for. First, we know that Gigliani hired him, so it’s safe to assume the CFG-inflected side of things won out in the St. Louis front office power struggle.

And then we know that Wray was a well-regarded assistant GM first in Toronto during the Greg Vanney years – a team that won a lot and played pretty, ball-dominant soccer – before moving to Columbus for most of the past five years, with his final two seasons coming during Wilfried Nancy’s tenure – a team that won a lot and played the prettiest, most ball-dominant soccer I’ve ever seen in MLS.

I am assuming an alignment on vision from ownership to Gigliani to Wray to the new coach, and am hoping a type of stability that has heretofore eluded this club will come with it.

State of the roster: As mentioned, literally all six premium roster slots are now filled.3 That’s not great.

Also, they’re officially bringing back 22 players from last year’s roster, and as per their end-of-year release, are in negotiations to bring back six more. That doesn’t really feel like a rebuild!

The good news is that Wray should have a good amount of GAM at his disposal (especially if he can get Henry Kessler back at a more reasonable number) and that the team is sitting on a freaking gold mine. There are precious few areas in all of North America more talent-rich than St. Louis. Want do add both depth and top-end talent?

Pick up a shovel and start digging! It’s right there, and has been for more than 100 years.

• 2026 TAM players: Löwen, Ostrák, Teuchert

• 2026 U-22 players: Durkin,4 Fall, Girdwood-Reich, Jeong

• 2026 DPs: Bürki, Hartel

Where the XI stands now: The most I’ve ever enjoyed watching St. Louis play was under Hackworth, who deployed Marcel Hartel as a playmaking left wing (who would just come inside to the half-space) and Cedric Teuchert as a goalscoring 10 underneath a true center forward.

Noooooo idea if that’s what’s in store. But it’s what I’m going to put down here for now:

4-2-3-1:

• GK: Bürki
• LB: Wallem???
• LCB: Fall
• RCB: Kessler???
• RB: ???
• DM: ???
• CM: Löwen
• LW: Hartel
• AM: Teuchert
• RW: ???
• FW: ???

Things to know:

• I’m still really high on MyKhi Joyner, though obviously I didn’t list him in the XI above. Whoever the coach is should be able to find 2000 minutes for him across all competitions next year.
• Will João Klauss be back? There were rumors of Liga MX interest over the summer, and if those come to fruition this winter I don’t think it’d be a bad thing.
• I’ve always kind of thought Chris Durkin’s best spot would be as a ball-playing CB. Wouldn’t hate to see him get a look there next year, especially if whoever the new coach is plays a Nancy-esque system.

New England Revolution

2025 finish: 11th in the East on 36 points, though I’ve seen it said that they were the better team in most of those games.

Biggest question: Is Marko Mitrovic the guy to make this roster work?

The Revs teardown and rebuild, starting in the winter of 2023/24 and then continuing through this summer – four full windows – was so thorough and so complete that I simply can not imagine them wanting to do it all over again to any real degree. They’ve locked in all their U-22s (though I could see one of those of those guys being moved) and all their DPs (same), and they’ve spent that massive influx of GAM they got from their two years of outbound sales during the end of the Bruce Arena era, and this front office might be running out of chances. At some point they’ve got to make their ideas work.

So… you can’t change the roster any more, that means it’s time to change the head coach. And while it’s not officially official yet, I’ve no reason to doubt that Marko Mitrovic is going to be the guy calling the shots.

Is that the right choice? Obviously no one knows. I will say that I think New England’s personnel really does lend itself more to the 3-4-1-2 they were playing most of the year rather than the 4-3-3 we saw Mitrovic prefer in his stint as head coach of various US youth national teams.5 But just because he’s preferred one thing doesn’t mean he can’t coach another, and both last year’s US Olympic team and this year’s U-20s played with a lot of commitment, which is a good sign.

Get that buy-in and some tactical clarity and it won’t actually matter all that much what formation you’re playing.

Top winter priority: Well, we haven’t seen their year-end roster moves announced just yet so we’re not sure just how big of a bite they’re going to take out of their current two-deep.

So as things stand in the moment, it feels like the No. 1 priority would be a central midfield reassessment, where both Alhassan Yusuf and Jackson Yueill underperformed, and where Matt Polster’s not getting any younger. Upgrading there, or at one of the center back positions seems like work that can be done irrespective of where the rest of the roster stands.

But the real top priority should probably be finding a taker for either Tomás Chancalay (DP) or Luca Langoni (U-22) or both.6 That’d give them real flexibility, and a chance to upgrade in a significant way.

It’s a big ask, though. Neither of those guys were cheap.

State of the roster: Like I said, the two-deep is very solid. I honestly think you could just run this group back next year and have a real chance at 55 points (especially if Matt Turner’s going to be around past June and if Dor Turgeman is as good as he looked down the stretch).

There are no glaring holes; there is no lack of depth. And with Mitrovic in town – remember, his background is primarily as a youth national team coach – I assume the idea is to embiggen the academy-to-Next Pro-to-first team pipeline. And the Revs have built, over the past half-decade, one of the league’s best.

Is it all perfect? Absolutely not.

But also, it is absolutely not a 36-point roster. Ambitions will be high next season.

• 2026 TAM players: Campana, Ceballos, Fofana, Ganago(???) Yueill, Yusuf
• 2026 U-22 players: Feingold, Langoni, Turgeman
• 2026 DPs: Chancalay, Gil, Turner

Where the XI stands now: I’ve obviously got some questions about the formation and potential upgrades at a few spots, but this is a pretty complete group no matter how you slice it:

3-4-1-2:

• GK: Turner
• LCB: Beason
• CB: Fofana
• RCB: Ceballos
• LWB: Miller
• DM: Polster
• CM: Yusuf
• RWB: Feingold
• AM: Gil
• FW: Turgeman
• FW: Campana

Things to know:

• Leo Campana had some really good moments in the past but was underwhelming – to say the least – last year. He’s promised more in 2026 and, if he delivers on that, would not be the first player to bloom in the post-Caleb Porter era.
• Can Campana and Turgeman pair each other up top? I know they’ll score, but do wonder how the defensive balance would work.
• Ignatius Ganago is on a pretty large number for a guy who was only sporadically effective.
• It’s entirely possible that an offer they can’t refuse comes in for Peyton Miller, who turns 18 (and is thus eligible to transfer overseas) in two days.
• One of the things Mitrovic has to figure out is how to keep Gil higher in the build-out. Let him be a pure attacker instead of a guy who feels compelled to drop all the way to the backline in order to get touches as early as possible.

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