Does San Jose have the best soccer team in America?

SAN JOSE — It was a March to forget.

Acclaimed coach Matias Almeyda started his Earthquakes’ tenure losing four consecutive games, including three at home.

Game, set, match. Season over with seven months left. Many disgruntled followers gave up on the MLS Cup playoffs. The Quakes had finished the 2018 season in last place with a mere four victories, and things seemed to be getting worse rather than better.

Almeyda, who last season coached famed Mexican club Chivas de Guadalajara, kept preaching patience as fans quit showing up at Avaya Stadium. He said he chose San Jose over other offers because he saw the core players were better than what they had been showing.

Just like that, Almeyda was right. Everything clicked once the Quakes adapted to the coach’s philosophy of playing aggressively in games and practices and treating teammates as brothers.

Simple, yes, but also successful.

“We knew it was going to be a process and every process takes time,” the Argentine coach told reporters after his team won last weekend for the fifth time in six games to become the league’s hottest property.

Almeyda, a former Argentine defensive midfielder who appeared in two World Cups and the 1996 Summer Olympics, knew something about a starless roster that few others did.

He knew the core players were better than the dismal 2018 record showed and it would become evident once they unified in the locker room.

“He could have come in and totally cleaned house and changed personnel,” veteran winger Shea Salinas said. “He didn’t do that. Even after losing those four games he said this is my group of guys, this team can win games.”

San Jose suddenly has one of the most exciting soccer teams in America. The feeling around Quakes headquarters is they are witnessing more than a “one-off” success like the playoff runs in 2010 and 2012.

Let’s start with the numbers:

–The Earthquakes are 9-2-4 in their last 15 MLS regular-season games heading into a home match Saturday night against the Colorado Rapids (5-11-5). San Jose has won three in a row, including consecutive road games in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

–The Quakes (10-7-4, 34 points) are undefeated in their last eight home matches with a 7-0-1 record since April 6 when the turnaround began.

–What has stood out like little else is the record numbers of shots. San Jose has taken at least 25 shots in three consecutive road games. The team never had 25 shots in a road game before this season. The Earthquakes set an MLS record for most shots in back-to-back games after pummeling the Los Angeles Galaxy and Vancouver with 32 strikes in each match.

This year, we have a confidence about us that we play the same at home as we do away,” said Salinas, who is enjoying a career year with five goals and three assists with 13 games left in the regular season.

These are Quakes no one has seen since San Jose re-entered MLS as an expansion team in 2008. They attack with vigor and control, playing soccer the way it is meant to be played.

Almeyda expects a similar effort on defense. When the ball turns over, the Quakes become harassers. If a starter is not up to the challenge, Almeyda replaces him with a teammate who can execute the lung-bursting runs up and down the field.

“I got tired of seeing anti-soccer,” he said in May. “For me, the anti-soccer people wait and allow their team to be carried by individual efforts. Our scheme involves everyone playing and everyone running. Everyone is committed and whoever is not committed is left to be exposed.”

The turnaround has perhaps saved the job of general manager Jesse Fioranelli, who headed into this third-and-final year of his contract looking every bit on his way out. He had churned through three coaches in two years of frightfully bad soccer and a fractured locker room.

Fioranelli had laid a strong youth foundation with the Quakes academy and the United Soccer League affiliate in Reno. But job security depended on success in MLS.

Fioranelli courted Almeyda, who has thick long locks but humorously is nicknamed “El Pelado,” or bald one, after the coach departed from Chivas last season.

Almeyda, 45, also has coached Buenos Aires giant River Plate, meaning he has led two of the Americas’ best club teams. Firoanelli has deferred to Almeyda’s choice of players.

The coach did not worry about signing well-known talent. He acquired players he knew, such as Cristian Espinoza, a winger from Buenos Aires. Almeyda also signed Argentine goalkeeper Daniel Vega, who last season played in the lower-division North American Soccer League but had spent six years at River Plate.

They have blossomed into important signings. With three goals and a team-leading nine assists, Espinoza is one of the league’s best outside midfielders.

Almeyda and Fioranelli have not stopped there. They recently signed Mexican winger Carlos Fierro, who played for Almeyda at Chivas. Now Argentine striker Andres Rios of Racing is expected to arrive this week. Rios, 29, will take the Quakes’ last international slot (each MLS team gets eight such berths). The spot will open once defender Guram Kashia returns from the Republic of Georgia with a green card that he is obtaining through what is known as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability, or EB1-A, category.

Although he does not speak English, Almeyda’s influence goes well beyond the new players. The coach also injected confidence into those he inherited.

Valeri Qazaishvili, the Georgian striker who is the team’s highest-paid player at $1.6 million, had been inconsistent in his first 1 1/2 years in San Jose. Almeyda refused to play him at the start of the season.

But he has been devastatingly good since the player known as “Vako” earned his chance. The forward has scored five goals in his past six league games. Equally impressive has been Qazaishvili’s ability to dribble through defenders and find open teammates.

Magnus Eriksson is another veteran who has grown under the new coach. The Swedish midfielder struggled in his first MLS season last year, but then, who among the Quakes didn’t? Eriksson, who scored his fourth goal last weekend, no longer feels responsible to continually create offense. Now he fits into the game’s flow better.

Tommy Thompson also has been transformed. The team’s first Homegrown signee seemed to have stalled as an attacking player. Almeyda turned Thompson into a right fullback who has the speed to get up the flank to help in the attack. Becoming a defender has resurrected Thompson’s career at age 23.

Even captain Chris Wondolowski, the all-time league leader with 153 goals, looks sharper than he has the past two years. Wondo, as fans and teammates call him, started the season on the bench. But when Danny Hoesen got injured, Wondolowski took over by scoring four goals May 18 against the Chicago Fire to pass Landon Donovan as the MLS’ top scorer. He now has a team-leading nine goals.

But with the latest additions, none of the players — not even the greatest goal-scorer in league history — can let up.

Almeyda is not afraid to tap the Quakes’ pipeline where three teenagers playing for Reno 1886 FC could be the team’s future. Like the Earthquakes, Reno has rebounded from a slow start and now stands second in the USL’s Western Conference.

Forward Cade Cowell, 15, has everyone excited. The player from Ceres joins Homegrown teens Gilbert Fuentes and Jacob Akanyirige, who also had signed at age 15.

“Our project is long term, four years if God allows it,” Almeyda said earlier this month. “In those four years, we have to make this team really competitive.”

Forward march.

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