Following FC Cincinnati’s first year in the United Soccer League, the coach that they had stepped down. This came as a surprise because they made the playoffs that year. The state of FC Cincinnati soccer seemed to be falling apart from the outside. I didn’t know this at the time because I didn’t follow the USL at all before FC Cincinnati soccer. FC Cincinnati had a good back up plan in case the of a situation where the coach couldn’t continue with the team. They hired a man named Alan Koch as Director of Scouting and Analytics and Assistant Coach in December 2016 instead.

Koch’s Experience

The head coach stepped down February of 2017 and FC Cincinnati elevated Koch to head coach days later. In digging into his background, it is easy to see how Koch moved his way into professional soccer. Koch, a South African native, first started coaching at Simon Fraser University for seven seasons and ended his time there with 126 wins, twenty-one ties, and seven career losses. After he left there, he was hired with Vancouver Whitecaps FC 2, which is part of a Major League Soccer franchise by the same name. Koch did work on the Major League Soccer draft for the Whitecaps, which means he knows something about players who will be on FC Cincinnati’s roster in the spring.

While I may not like his on-field decisions all the time, Koch seems to get his players to play hard. The unbeaten run that they are on in the league is a reflection of players buying in on the coaching philosophy. The question is when FC Cincinnati moves from the United Soccer League to the Major League Soccer are the MLS players on the team going to buy into the FC Cincinnati culture of doing work? I think that they will certainly keep that culture alive.

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