There is a line of thinking in managerial circles that you’re not really a manager until your team has been thoroughly thumped. It’s the kind of experience that can be humbling for a coach, but also galvanizing. Put another way, it’s the ultimate test of how a manager keeps a group moving forward in tough circumstances.
For FC Cincinnati manager Pat Noonan, it took a mere 90 minutes for him to join that fraternity. On Feb. 26, 2022, FCC traveled to Austin FC for its season opener — Noonan’s first in charge — and got thumped, 5-0. In its previous three years of existence, Cincinnati had been on the business end of plenty of beatdowns — so many, in fact, that it had finished dead last in MLS each season, a feat not matched before or since. The season ahead looked like it would produce more of the same.
Twenty months later, when reminded of that night, Noonan said to ESPN, “We laugh about that.” He then corrected himself: “We laugh about that now.”
That’s because Noonan, GM Chris Albright, the players and the rest of the FCC organization have experienced a remarkable turnaround in 2023. After reaching the postseason for the first time in 2022, Cincinnati pushed on to claim the 2023 Supporters’ Shield with three games to spare.
“We’re as good as any team in this league,” Albright told ESPN. “Whether we’re able to replicate what we’ve done over the last eight months in a short sort of burst … could you have a bad night? Always, which is why I think Supporters’ Shield is so difficult, but I just don’t think we have any holes, frankly. I think we have the depth. I think we have the coaching. We have home field. The [playoff] format, you could argue its merits or not, I guess we’ll see, but we have a confident group.”
It’s the kind of form that has Cincinnati firmly among the favorites to win MLS Cup.
The search for identity
To get a sense of just how impressive their turnaround has been, you have to go back to the organization’s entry into MLS ahead of the 2019 season. Cincinnati was awarded an expansion team in May 2018, making a late sprint to the expansion finish line past the likes of Sacramento and Detroit, thanks in part to the will of team president, Jeff Berding.
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Then came the fateful decision to begin playing in the league in 2019, a full year ahead of two other expansion teams waiting to join, Nashville SC and Inter Miami CF. It gave the Cincinnati organization a mere 277 days to prepare for life in MLS, having spent the previous three seasons in the USL Championship.
The decision to enter MLS so quickly had consequences. The organization joined the league with what was essentially a USL-level infrastructure from the front office to the technical staff to the roster, and that was reflected by the results on the field.
Instead of learning from that expansion season, though, the mistakes were compounded. Cincy burned through a pair of GMs and three different head coaches. Berding was the common thread, but was criticized for meddling far too much on the technical side of the organization.
In 2021, one source with knowledge of FCC’s inner workings told ESPN that Berding had created “a burnout type of culture.” Berding responded by making no apologies for the fast pace in which the club joined MLS. Yet throughout those first three seasons, Cincinnati continued to struggle on the field.
“I probably had over 75 teammates over that [time],” defender Nick Hagglund said about his first three seasons in Cincinnati. “It was just in and out, in and out. There was no consistency. I feel like it was just a search for identity and culture from the get-go.”
Berding made many missteps at the helm, but he finally got one decision right, and it might even go down as the biggest in club history. In the waning days of the 2021 campaign, he hired Albright as GM.
Albright had previously worked as the technical director with the Philadelphia Union, a team famous for punching above its weight. He described the atmosphere around Cincinnati as “pretty gray” when he arrived; not a surprise given the amount of losing that took place. It didn’t take long for him to diagnose what was missing: an overall lack of MLS experience and know-how.
That FCC improved from last year’s playoff appearance to win the 2023 Supporters’ Shield is perhaps the most impressive aspect of their rise. In the parity-driven world of MLS, moving from the bottom to the playoff places is the easy part, but sustaining that momentum is where it gets difficult. While Hagglund and Vázquez both indicated they haven’t been surprised by FCC’s turnaround, both Noonan and Albright are more circumspect.
“I just think a lot of things came together,” Albright said. “The coaching’s really good. I think our environment’s really good, just as far as a place you want to come to work. And I think when you’re maximizing all those things and not missing on players — that’s a big one — you’re able to have success. But even that being said, this is still unexpected to be where we are right now.”
Not missing on players is at the core of why FCC have continued to improve. For the first three years of its existence, Cincinnati was an organization that whiffed on signings far more often than it hit. Now Albright has brought his Philly recruitment mojo with him, and the biggest impact has been on the defensive side of the ball. Center-back Matt Miazga and holding midfielder Obinna Nwobodo arrived midway through 2022. Nwobodo was teamed with Júnior Moreno, who arrived that year from a D.C. United team that Albright said “maybe didn’t do him a ton of favors.” They helped bolster a defense that went from conceding 74 goals in 2021 to 56 in 2022.
This year, defender Yerson Mosquera was brought in on loan from Wolverhampton Wanderers, and combined with a full campaign of Miazga and Nwobodo, FCC have conceded 37 goals with one game to play.
One of Albright’s bigger “signings” was convincing Kyle McCarthy to follow him from Philadelphia to be FCC’s director of soccer strategy, bringing with him considerable know-how of the transfer market. Hunter Freeman, a holdover from the dark years, stayed on as technical director.
“I would say we’re kind of the three-headed monster when it comes to the recruitment process,” Albright said. “And I think we took things that we did well in Philly, and I think put our own sort of spin on them and how we kind of filter players. But then ultimately, how do you convince them to sign? I mean, a lot of teams, with the availability of data, are looking at a lot of the same guys that are clearly talented. But how you kind of fit them together and how you convince them to come are still, I think, the hardest part.”
Albright added that Berding — the man with a reputation for meddling in player matters — has given him “complete autonomy.”
