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Soccerwiser: An hour spent inside Bobby Warshaw's brain

Plus some MLS moves that have caught my attention... some good, some bad

Matthew Doyle

— 4 min read
Soccerwiser: An hour spent inside Bobby Warshaw's brain

I was on Soccerwise last month with David & Bobby for… I guess it was a Bobby-guided soccer philosophy round table? I think that’s what I’d call it. Anyway, here are the links:

It was a lot of fun.

Note that I’ll have a column up on MLSsoccer.com soon (I hope) about the most significant moves of the offseason so far – the ones that have real title equity1 involved. We’re just waiting on a certain someone to sign a certain somewhere:

In the meantime I wanted to write a few words about a few moves elsewhere around the league that probably don’t have any title equity attached to them.

  • Nikola Petkovic to the Sounders

Or friends over at Sounder at Heart have all the details on this move, which is a loan from Charlotte – who originally paid $3m for Petkovic, a once-capped Serbian international, but weren’t able to develop him – with a buy option.

I just love the asset collection theory behind it. Once upon a time Garth Lagerwey2 was talking about how he views players like Petkovic, who maybe haven’t been able to show their best in their current situation. It was something to the effect of “He was capped a bunch at the youth level, he started for a good club, he got a multi-million dollar move. A lot of people in a lot of spots have thought he’s very good. So why not take a shot?”

It’s Craig Waibel calling the shots now, and Waibel sees roster-building a lot like Lagerwey does. In this case he has explicitly made a bet on Petkovic with a very low cost basis, and implicitly made a bet on Seattle’s ability to develop young players, almost like a second draft guy in the NBA finding a new team. Sure, they didn’t work out in their first stop, but they clearly have a ton of talent. Give them a better fit and a better opportunity in a more robust developmental culture, and let’s see what happens.

In this case I wouldn’t be surprised if Petkovic ends up justifying that $3m Charlotte spent on him. It’s just that if he does, the Sounders can keep him for, like $500k.

I’d bet Waibel spends a good amount of time just scouring the league for U-22 guys like this, ones with a big price tag who just aren’t quite panning out and can maybe be had for cheap. The Sounders don’t spend a lot, you see (as per Transfermarkt they’ve spent more than $2.5m on exactly two guys in the past decade), so this is a sort of backdoor to getting expensive talent onto the roster.

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This was my fear about the new D.C. CSO, Erkut Sogut. He’s a complete novice in that position but has a network of folks he’s worked with in Europe, and will end up throwing good money after bad (presumably on their recommendations).

And this looks like bad money. Munteanu has scored just TWO league goals this year in almost 1000 minutes, and last season’s numbers were very much career outliers based upon unsustainable finishing overperformance. Korenica, meanwhile, is a winger, is 29 and has scored double-digit goals in a league season *once*… eight years ago.

Part of the reason that I loved the Tai Baribo cashfer, even if it was a bit of an overpay, is that it prevented Sogut from making bonkers deals ($11m combined AT MINIMUM) like these for guys who project as marginal MLS starters. Spending a premium roster slot on Baribo – a proven MLS goalscorer in his prime – limited the downside variance, as did the trade for Sean Nealis and the free agency signing of Sean Johnson.

I’ll add that they made the right pick at No. 1 as well, according to everybody I know who really tracks college soccer. So they’ve done more right than I thought they would!

But man, it sure does look like they’re starting to do some big stuff very wrong.

EDIT: Apparently this has been mostly dismissed? I’d missed Tom debunking it, and am relieved to hear he’s done so.

I still don’t love the Munteanu move, but you can live with one C- signing. The real problems come when you stack a C- and an F.

  • Orlando sign Maxime Crepeau in goal

This one hurts. They had originally gotten a commitment from the far superior Carlos Coronel before São Paulo came in and stole him away. With a ‘keeper as good as Coronel you could make a “darkhorse contender” argument for the Lions. With Crepeau, my guess is they’ll be taking another trip to the play-in games.

Now, Crepeau should still be an upgrade over the departed Pedro Gallese. But man… this one’s tough.

  • New England start building out a roster of US youth internationals

In the past month they’ve cashefer’d in d-mid Brooklyn Raines and picked up center back Ethan Kohler for free from Werder Bremen. Makes sense given that the Revs’ head coach is Marko Mitrović, whose previous job was as boss of the US U-20s.

I will also point out that “pick up high-level youth players who are not being developed properly elsewhere” is a market inefficiency I’ve noticed smart MLS teams3 starting to exploit over the past year or two. It’s also a close cousin to the roster building/developmental bet I mentioned about the Sounders above.

Here’s a link to the exact moment in the pod I was talking about this:

  • Zach Booth and Chance Cowell to RSL

Same as above. Booth (in on loan through 2026 with a buy option) and Cowell (acquired outright from San Jose) are USYNT guys who haven’t quite blossomed – or are not in a position where they’ll be given a chance to blossom, in Cowell’s case – with their current clubs.

Well, RSL’s recruitment has been disastrous, but their internal player development (Diego Luna, Zavier Gozo, a few recent draft picks as well) has been pretty good. So why not get more high-level players in to develop, then?

  1. By this I mean it’s a move that could truly have some impact on whether or not a team lifts a trophy this year. Like, in my head it’s shifted the odds at least a little bit. ↩

  2. This was way back when he was CSO for RSL. ↩

  3. This is San Diego FC’s whole reason for existing. ↩

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