So Jason Kreis has been appointed as only the second head coach in Orlando City’s history – replacing the sacked Adrian Heath and returning to MLS management only months after his own sacking by fellow 2015 expansion team New York City FC.



It’s not been a great surprise to see Kreis back in the league so quickly, though there may be an eyebrow or two raised at where he has ended up. On the surface, NYCFC and Orlando City were radically different propositions as expansion teams when they entered MLS, but of late Orlando has offered one or two tells, not least getting rid of Heath (a cornerstone of their grassroots foundation myth), that might have given Kreis pause for thought before taking the job.

Yet for all that Kreis left NYCFC with his reputation in MLS circles largely intact, with most observers feeling he was given a hospital pass by the club signing an absent Frank Lampard and adding the bemused and bemusing midseason presence of Andrea Pirlo to an already lopsided midfield, Kreis had a bruising enough time and an indifferent enough record in New York, that he might not have wanted to overplay his hand when negotiating with Orlando.

Still, Kreis may have sought certain reassurances about his degree of autonomy with his new team. Over the course of Orlando’s first MLS season, Heath found his reputation dwindle from the heights of the team’s MLS-conquering, USL PRO-winning days, when the story of him pitching his vision to Orlando president Phil Rawlins in a Stoke pub became an iconic image of the way the club pitched itself.

For reasons that variously ranged from the genuine, to the sentimental, to the political, Orlando were prepared to use “the little team that could” mythology to their advantage, especially during the torturous stadium negotiations within Florida political circles whose success eventually triggered the team’s acceptance into the league. And Heath’s team of fighters fit with that myth.

Until it didn’t. The team went on a stirring run at the end of its debut season that briefly looked like hauling in Montreal for a playoff spot, but ended with the minor moral victory of still being in with a playoff shout on the final day of the season. Still, on the surface at least, compared to Kreis’s listless finish to NYCFC’s debut season, Heath looked to have done well.

But if the rug was swiftly pulled from under Kreis’s feet by his sacking at the end of the season, the ground was moving rapidly under Heath’s feet as well. Orlando’s majority owner Flávio Augusto da Silva had not been a notably intrusive presence in the opening months of Orlando’s MLS incarnation – enjoying the accolades for his influence in securing the signature of fellow Brazilian Kaká, but otherwise happy to go along with the “built from the ground up” narrative around the club, particular at a moment when City Football Group’s global vision looked to be foundering in New York.

But in the off-season, Da Silva began to make his influence apparent, and very quickly Heath went from being an emblem of the club to just another coach on borrowed time. In November Paul McDonough, the third part of the Heath/Rawlins axis that had built the club through its lower league incarnation, was relieved of the soccer operations part of his role, and left the club a few weeks later, soon to join future expansion side Atlanta.

McDonough was replaced on the soccer side by former Benfica Academy head Armando Carneiro, in a move widely attributed to Da Silva. With Carneiro intent on bringing in his own staff and transforming the culture of the club, existing staff were left in limbo, and resentful of the sudden sea change in the club culture and the evident abandoning of the patient three year plan for the team.

Amazingly, the turbulence din’t end there, as by the end of December Carneiro was gone as quickly as he had come, throwing the technical team’s preparations for the new season into disarray. Carneiro cited “personal reasons” but his appointment and the blowback from staff and fans had surprised Da Silva, who appeared taken aback by his first experience of the fans treating him as anything other than a savior for his choices.

Yet whatever the source of them, the “choices” continued. In a move that Kreis would have recognized the dynamics of, Antonio Nocerino was signed, without an obvious place for him to play, and quickly proved to be an expensive flop. Heath appeared to grit his teeth and concentrate on what he could affect – his rhetoric around the development of sophomore striker Cyle Larin, for example, was very much in line with the remnants of his three year plan – but he had been fatally undermined.

If the rest of the league largely let the off-season turbulence go unremarked, that may largely have been down to the fact that NYCFC was generating turbulence of their own – if their initial appointment of Kreis had appeared a sure footed reading of the league, its technical particularities and the qualities needed to navigate them, City Football Group’s handling of Kreis was rather less sensitive – and by the time his first summer in charge came around it became clear that Kreis was going to be the potential fall guy for problems that were not his making.

Having “tried” local knowledge, City Football Group went the way of experience bedded within their own organization by ousting Kreis and bringing in Patrick Vieira, who currently has the team top of the Eastern Conference, though not without stumbles along the way, including an infamous 7-0 home loss to the rival New York Red Bulls.

What Kreis might have been able to do with a second year team and a full complement of functional Designated Players, we will never know, but we will now get an intriguing intimation of it as he takes over in Orlando – where according to Rawlins his possession-orientated, attacking style, knowledge of the league and history with expansion clubs as a player and coach in Dallas, Salt Lake and, yes, New York, “ticked all the boxes”.

That’s what Phil Rawlins says, of course – Kreis must have been equally sure that Flávio Augusto da Silva agrees wholeheartedly to take the job. Certainly if Da Silva does give Kreis his full backing it could be a coup that sets one of the brightest young managers in MLS back on track, and reignites the love affair between owner and fans.

It will also readjust the workings of the current search committees, official and unofficial, around MLS. More than a few MLS coaches may be a little relieved to see the number one choice to replace them back in work, including Sigi Schmid (currently struggling at Seattle under Kreis’s former GM at RSL, Garth Lagerwey), or Kreis’s potential competitors for the vacant position at Houston, or future expansion sides in Atlanta, LAFC, Miami, Minnesota. Out of all of that group, Orlando have acted the most decisively, and got their man. Hopefully all concerned have been careful what they wished for.