Sit with this for a moment — exactly who are the Houston Dynamo?

There is no way to cushion the barbed fact that the Owen Coyle era in Houston was a twisted wreck of misshapen identity. It wasn’t that Coyle didn’t know the American game or the American player or even the system in which they inhabit. At the end, it didn’t look as though he cared to learn.

More than any other team in the league, Houston desperately needed its last shift in coaching paradigm to work. Forget for a moment that Coyle came from outside the league (where the success ratios drop precipitously compared to those with domestic experience) and focus instead on everything around him, on the shroud around the club itself. There is no more puzzling market in the country, and no club has failed to tap into its own city like Houston has failed. Coyle was the opening. Or so they thought.



Coyle’s failures on the field – he stubbornly refused to switch formations to suit his roster and let one of his most promising players rot on the bench for unclear reasons – obscured institutional failures on a deeper level. The 2016 season allowed Houston to slide even deeper into the morass in its own city, the largest in the country outside the LA-Chicago-NYC triumvirate. Wade Barrett is doing his best to arrest the slide with a respectable end of the season, but the Dynamo will probably finish last in the West and well out of the playoffs for a third straight season. In a league with this much parity, that’s a rolling indictment.

Houston claims nearly 19,000 fans per game, but anyone who’s watched a game this year knows that’s highly inflated, by thousands even. More often than not the stands look like this, a game against the Union in early July without any competing pro games in the local market that day. Speckled with orange.

The reason the Cubo Torres deal was perceived as such a massive boon for the Dynamo wasn’t simply because he was, at the time, one of MLS’s most intriguing young stars. It was because he was seen as a Gio Dos Santos-in-miniature for Houston, a city with the third-largest Hispanic population in the country and one of the finest soccer stadiums anywhere this side of the Atlantic. Even if the goal is to market the team to all people groups, the fact that such a soccer-mad city had a young player on the Mexican national team radar was hard to put into adequate perspective. And it was wasted for… reasons.

Pulling the lens out even further, the Dynamo have largely been unable to lasso in the city’s wider soccer fan base, which exists in force and largely in MLS seclusion. It didn’t help that for years the club was a distant second priority for owner Phil Anschutz and AEG, which funneled nearly all of its interest and soccer cash into the LA Galaxy. The Dynamo won MLS Cups, yes, but once the bottled lightning of those teams was let loose and players dispersed, the club didn’t have the infrastructure to pull it back in.

The difference between the bottom of the table and the top in MLS is marginal. The gap isn’t in who can put together a quality 18-man roster. It’s in who can keep it together.

The wider discussion right now among Dynamo fans and pundits alike is whether or not Barrett has his interim tag lifted at the end of what’s been a disaster of a year, or whether the Dynamo cut him loose and look outward again. That isn’t irrelevant, but it’s also ankle-deep. The Dynamo need a wider scope than merely who occupies the sideline.

Mexican-born Gabriel Brener was a good start. He bought out AEG last December and became the majority owner of the club, following the necessary track of diversification among MLS ownership modules. The league’s best clubs founded outside the initial mid-90s foundation spasm – SKC, Portland, Seattle, Orlando – are led by a single moneyed figurehead hellbent on carving something special out of otherwise impenetrable limestone. To make a complex issue simple, they need someone stubborn enough to think soccer is just as germane to their market as any other sport. Whatever truth there actually is in the statement itself.

Brener’s task is not simple. Here are two major questions he must consider over the coming days, months, years.

What’s your identity?



I’ve maintained for years that the Rio Grande Valley is the most under-scouted and under-utilized soccer region in the country. Speaking from experience, it is rife with talented, technical players who need headier competition. And yet it’s separated from the Dynamo, the nearest pro club, by an hours-long car ride, which precludes players from trying out and playing without the means to do so.

That’s why I thought the establishment of Rio Grande Valley FC earlier this year was probably the most significant USL opening in the country. It taps into a tragically underserved market and opens a formal pipeline to the first team. That flow should be open for business already.

The Dynamo started the team with, among others, two deadly serious teenage attacking Homegrown talents: Christian Lucatero and Juan Flores. The former is the bigger name, having turned down an Oregon State commit to turn pro at 18 in lieu of nagging interest from Mexico (which is still trying to turn him south on the national team level). What’s more, RGVFC signed Wilmer Cabrera, the former USYNT coach and understudy under youth-forward FCD head man Oscar Pareja in Colorado, to run the ship.

Rio Grande Valley FC played 30 games this year. Lucatero got 271 minutes. Flores managed 51.

Houston needs to protect its own players and use the USL the way it’s designed to be used: give your own Homegrowns priority (this is literally a pillar of why the league exists), play them in a system at least partly shared by the first team and then move them up. But that’s predicated on the bedrock of playing time. If you aren’t playing your brightest Homegrowns, what are you doing?

The Dynamo have a poor track record producing players of their own, not that they’re entirely alone on that front in this league. Flores and at least Lucatero offer a reprieve on that front, and neither is playing enough to do anything but regress. RGVFC does have some quality talent in its stockpile, Memo Rodriguez chief among them, and no USL side is perfect in its first year.

But since the establishment of the Development Academy, the Dynamo have neither established themselves as a shrewd foreign talent identifier on the cheap like SKC or Columbus nor as a youth developer like FC Dallas or RBNY. You don’t need to pick one over the other, but you do have to pick at least one.

How will you attract fans?



This question is perhaps a bit more prosaic, and in some sense it follows on from the first. But the Dynamo have been waning in the local public relevance for some time now, and that’s reflected back in the vacant orange seats on Saturdays and Sundays. Life crackles in the concourses in Orlando and Kansas City and Seattle. And there’s a reason.

Think of fan interest as a mirror set opposite of the front office. Some fans – a hardcore minority – don’t care about the reflection’s aesthetics. They’ll bear it regardless, toting drums and flags and scarves and jerseys every match day. Another fraction, perhaps a bit bigger still, reacts to the subtle actions in the mirror. These are mid-range fans, interested in foreign leagues and savvy to the ways of the game but without overt rooting interest in the local MLS variety. The twitch that brings a Cubo Torres to town is met with a raised eyebrow and a purchased ticket. An interesting playing style or galvanizing coach signing is met with the same reaction.

Finally, the biggest group yet: those flooding the turnstiles when ownership does something crazy. Ibrahimovic crazy. Put Ibra’s stretched ponytail in the mirror and you will crack it.

Houston has never followed through on the final two subsections of fans. Their hardcore fan base has not grown in any significant way, and the team doesn’t play interesting enough soccer, employ interesting enough players or have any marketable star to steal time on the city’s already crowded airwaves. Signing DaMarcus Beasley and Ricardo Clark, USMNT stars trading on form of the past, was never going to move the needle in any significant way. Either in aesthetic, wins or marketing.

It’s frankly one thing to organize as a model franchise like FC Dallas and still fail to pull in fans. A lot of those issues are geographic in nature, but at a certain point you simply butt up against the market’s ceiling at any given time. Houston has yet to do that.

Houston’s day will come. Perhaps Brener is already drawing up these battle plans, and the club is lining up a signing that will change the paradigm.

I recently spoke with German DFL president Christian Seifert about myriad topics, and one of those was about Chicharito’s impact on Bayer Leverkusen and the Bundesliga as a whole. A player of Chicharito’s level is perhaps a reach for any MLS club just yet, but this is what we’re talking about in broader terms when we talk about things a Nico Lodeiro or Gio Dos Santos or Robbie Keane tow with them when they join MLS.

“Chicharito is, as far as I see, Mexican people love him. Of course this is a very important factor. The league has an image by itself, but people tend to follow players no matter where they’re playing. At the moment you have then on top these teams and players can compete in the Champions League, because from today’s perspective I would say the Champions League is probably the most exciting when it comes to the end. But it’s in fact the only trans-national competition where you can really see how strong teams and the league is. “This plus a lot of players like for instance Chicharito are very important. We love the fact that Chicharito plays in the Bundesliga. We know how important he is for us. I think he sees also that his style of play fits very much to German football. You see that it’s not about just going to another league or whatever. More and more players understand their style of play fits more to one team or one league better than some other leagues. For instance, we have some of the best Japanese players in Germany. You have six or seven Japanese national players.”

Items of importance for Chicharito:

— Good league

— Quality playing style

— Champions League

MLS cannot offer the third option (unless you count the wilderness that is the CCL), but the previous two are within reach. MLS is a good league, not on the Bundesliga’s level but a good league nonetheless. Is Houston’s playing style then conducive? Can they earnestly convince a paradigm-shifting player, based on the fans in the seats and the tactical system in place, he’d be well-served in Houston based on the kind of soccer they play? Based on recent years, first under Dom Kinnear and then under Coyle, you’d have to say no.

Those questions are the next frontier for the Dynamo, a club with arguably more untapped potential than any in the league. Once they can begin solving them, a sleeping giant in the south will awaken from a slumber that’s been far too deep and lasted far too long.