For a man walking away from a club with less than one win every three games – as said club helpfully pointed out in their statement on his departure – Jason Kreis will be just fine, in MLS circles at least. The former RSL coach may be without a job this morning, but he’s already being linked with clubs from Toronto to Chicago to Seattle, based on a reputation that’s barely been diminished by his New York City FC misadventure.

That alone says as much about the idiosyncratic world of MLS management and the skillset its most successful exponents possess, as Kreis’s sacking and mooted replacement with a European coach (Fabio Capello had been linked even before the club sacked Kreis) says about the ambitions and local cultural literacy of City Football Group.

What had started as a series of exercises in sensitivity – CFG arrived in New York making all the right noises and followed up with a series of surefooted and seemingly astute appointments that included Kreis – has gradually devolved into a kind of cultural civil war, from the Frank Lampard fiasco onwards. And the fault lines were defined by MLS’s state of exception – and the type of best practices thus needed to navigate league rules designed to foster parity and competitiveness.

Kreis had built a serial playoff team in Salt Lake by defining a philosophical approach to the churning personnel turnover that the league’s roster-building restrictions tend to dictate. He found undervalued players rather in his own mode, and defined a style of play and technical values for them, and for those technically versatile young players he and his staff identified and trained to replace them. And having identified a key group to build around he was able to maintain a remarkably consistent core for his team for years, before the salary cap started squeezing a now successful roster. He was also able to play some very attractive possession-based soccer along the way.

So when CFG, under the recommendation of sporting director Claudio Reyna (whose voice was conspicuously absent from Monday evening’s statement), appointed Kreis as the head coach, it seemed like a smart move, very much in keeping with their stated desire that this would be its own club, and presumably, therefore, tailored for its own local context.

And that context is everything. I once interviewed Miles Jacobson, the director of the Football Manager series, and he mentioned in passing that the company has a couple of staff members who keep track of the rules and formats for the leagues around the world, in order to keep the game as realistic as possible. One of the staffers monitors dozens of leagues around the world including all of the established European and South American leagues. The other staffer monitors MLS and Australia’s A-League.

The mechanisms in MLS are complex and the solutions to consistently thriving in it, more so. Good coaching matters, of course, but so does an understanding of the limits of roster balance and for want of a better term, sustainable farming of players. Kreis, the son of an agricultural feed specialist from Iowa, had worked with the RSL technical team to develop a sustainable team ecology in Utah. Unfortunately, in New York City, the scenario increasingly looked like a bad Monsanto experiment – as the new expansion team would struggle towards finding some sort of balance with each other, only for the likes of Lampard and then Andrea Pirlo to arrive, be injected into the side, and at times seem to do little more than add water weight.

The three losses to New York Red Bulls were symbolically galling as well – especially since the Red Bulls’ philosophy this year looked like a much more recognizable Jason Kreis-like scenario: A low wage bill, some smart horse-trading for undervalued players, and interestingly enough, a sporting director, in Ali Curtis, who in his previous capacity at the league office had helped draft many of the MLS rules his team were now thriving under.

The Red Bulls’ success also highlighted an area where Kreis is not without blame – under Jesse Marsch, the Red Bulls have been fit, well-drilled, and the basics, like being good on set pieces, have been strong. New York City have been poor on the latter in particular. It’s also fair to ask whether Kreis was in over his head in dealing with players of the stature of Villa, Lampard or Pirlo. Fair to ask, probably not fair to conclude, unless you also ask how many of the decisions that went into Lampard’s delayed arrival, and Pirlo’s languid sightseeing tour in New York (the viral Vine of him standing transfixed by the near post as NYC concede from a corner makes him look like nothing so much as a country visitor trying to figure out a midtown crosswalk) were also made over Kreis’s head.

We’re some eight years into the designated player era in MLS, and we’ve learned a lot in that times about what works and what doesn’t. Crudely put, players have to legitimately have something left at stake for these experiments to work. David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Robbie Keane, and yes, David Villa (the lone success as a New York DP this year), were arriving in the league at a time in their careers when they would still have been sought by many top, if not elite, teams in Europe, and with the potential to be around for long enough to be “implicated” in the fortunes and histories of their new teams. And in turn, for those histories to become part of their own stories as players.

What doesn’t work for a team is buying a superannuated player for name recognition and ticket sales regardless of their suitability for the particular task at hand – especially in an expansion context where the imperative for a team to cohere is paramount. The bright spots of the season, other than Villa’s contributions, were watching young midfielders like Thomas McNamara and Kwadwo Poku seize their chances, or even the brief renaissance of the likes of Mehdi Ballouchy – the type of technically gifted but under-utilized player who had all the hallmarks of a Kreis reclamation project. But even as modest signs of growth occurred, the undroppable presences of Lampard and Pirlo often seemed more of an obstruction than a benchmark, and ultimately that seemed to suggest a schism in the supposedly coherent philosophy of head coach and parent group.

No prizes for who would take the fall in that scenario, and it was perhaps telling to see a frustrated Kreis hauling off Lampard and Pirlo in the second half of a September loss in Dallas that realistically ended the team’s slim playoff hopes. With Villa already on the bench after half-time it was hard to escape the impression that Kreis, back in the town where he started his journey as an MLS player, wanted a moment to go down swinging on his own terms.

And now he’s gone, and if the rumors are true it’s possible that somewhere in the glass-walled New York City themed meeting room at the City Academy in Manchester, Fabio Capello is staring in disbelief at a Football Manager screen. City Football Group may feel that they’ve indulged the locals enough by giving Kreis a chance, and that his failure justifies a return to the proven expertise of a European veteran. But this is MLS, and for better or worse, even the greatest are only as good as their guides here.