The Italian playmaker would be a dream for MLS fans. But it may not help coach Jason Kreis’s vision for the team

Last week New York Red Bulls defensive midfielder Dax McCarty tweeted enthusiastically about having just seen Andrea Pirlo going for a run beside Manhattan’s West Side Highway.

Dax McCarty (@DaxMcCarty11) Just saw Mr. Andrea Pirlo running along the westside highway here in NYC. His jog is as elegant in person as it is on TV. As was his hair.

By Saturday night, when the Italian legend was photographed at Yankee Stadium watching New York City FC play, and the rumors were swirling about an imminent deal for Pirlo to sign for them, it may well have occurred to McCarty that he should have tripped the Italian up.

McCarty’s Red Bulls, who ushered Thierry Henry and Tim Cahill out of the door in the off-season, have lost their last four league games and will play NYC FC this weekend. While Pirlo, along with Frank Lampard, would arrive into a surging NYC FC already boasting David Villa, and who could overtake their rivals for the first time this week.

The proposed signing of Pirlo and the imminent arrival of Lampard would seem like an unequivocal coup, just adding to the momentum of coach Jason Kreis’s team. Pirlo in particular is probably the archetype of Kreis’s footballing ideals of ball possession – he’s certainly one of the few players in the world who can speak in his autobiography of “caressing” the ball and not cause himself or anyone who’s seen him play, to blush.

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Look closer though, and the story is a little more complex. Pirlo may have just come off a Champions League final appearance for Juventus, and the decline of a player of his footballing brain can be managed better than that of more physical midfielders, but he’s still 36. Lampard is 37.

And while even with a combined age of 73, you’d expect that quality of midfield addition to be good for making a goal or two in MLS, it’s a short term solution. Where David Villa, the first of the club’s designated players, was 32 when he arrived, and typical of the most recent rash of MLS big names in arriving as a potential multi-season face of the franchise, Pirlo, like Lampard, may not be around long enough to provide more than extravagant decoration.

And don’t underestimate that headache for Kreis. He had already indicated to Ferran Soriano, the CEO of the City Football Group, who was pictured with Pirlo at the weekend, that a mooted move for Xavi would have been a redundancy for the role he wanted Lampard to fill. Kreis had also pointedly expressed an interest in signing a younger designated player, and he has specific ideas of the type of player rather than type of brand name he’d like to see. And there’s a strong argument that what he needed was his version of Kyle Beckerman.

It might seem absurd to be talking about a player who induced many eye rolls with his inclusion in the USA’s World Cup squad in the same conversation as Lampard and Pirlo, but the comparison is structural rather than a direct measure of talents. When you look at Beckerman’s contribution to the US team, he’s a player whose hard work and pre-emptive reading of the game is both modest yet vital in ensuring the team has balance, and it was a contribution he brought to Kreis’s successful RSL teams at the base of the coach’s preferred midfield diamond.

And just as Pirlo may be the technical archetype of one part of Kreis’s footballing philosophy, Beckerman, with all his limitations, represents another – the hard, often unglamorous work that underpins the team and insists on their right to impose their preferred style, while breaking up opposing teams’ attempts to impose theirs. The emblem of the RSL sides Kreis built was also a player who fit the club motto of “the team is the star”.

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Big name designated players can be a distraction from such collective focus. After his disruptive stop-start arrival in LA, David Beckham eventually became a success for the Galaxy when his third head coach, Bruce Arena, adjusted the team to play to his strengths, and particularly when he employed the industrious young midfielder, Juninho, to do a lot of the running that permitted the less mobile Beckham’s field-stretching passes.

Pirlo too, knows a thing or two about adjusting for lack of pace by putting passes exactly where he wants them, and the fantasy version of NYC FC’s game will have him dropping exquisite balls behind defenses for Villa to poach, or for Lampard to mop up with perfectly timed secondary runs.

At some point in the next year, we’ll see some goals scored in that fashion, and for US fans of the game (and that includes writers) who aren’t too hung up on team allegiances, the sight of those three doing their thing will be a lot of fun, and those fans won’t be too concerned at the long-term implications.

Kreis has to be concerned with those implications however, and while more than capable of setting up his team as a support platform for talented veterans to perform, it chafes against what he does best and what he was supposedly brought in for – spotting young technical players, and cycling them into a long-term consistent vision for NYC FC, capable of riding out the built in boom and bust mechanisms of MLS forced parity.

The plug and play upgrades he’ll be handed with Pirlo and Lampard may or may not instantly integrate into the NYC FC team – and anybody who’s been following just how hard won their recent coherence has been will not be taking that team chemistry aspect for granted – but they will also be additions that will need to be accommodated and supported in the structure of the side for the time that they are in New York. They’re a dubious luxury otherwise.

The majority of the new fans who’ve made their curious way to the Bronx for NYC’s debut season at Yankee Stadium will not be losing sleep at the prospects for Mehdi Ballouchy, Thomas McNamara, Ned Grabavoy, or even the emerging US national team staple Mix Diskerud. Each of those players has worked their part in slowly bringing the NYC FC midfield up to speed, but each of them is too young, too unsung or in Diskerud’s case, too second tier an attraction as yet to offer the draw that Pirlo and Lampard do, even at the very twilight of their careers.

For Soriano too, some high profile additions to the experimental model of City Football Group – one that is very much his baby and is an idea that dates back to his Barcelona days – hardly does any harm for his personal status with his bosses. Especially after a year in which the flagship team in the group, Manchester City, mounted such a limp defense of their Premier league title, and which has started in the US with NYC FC struggling for an extended period after their high profile launch.

If Soriano, like his appointment Manuel Pellegrini, is on something of a probationary period right now with Sheikh Mansour, his much vaunted emphasis on the long-term stability and organic development of the worldwide group may have had to sharply pull focus to the here and now.

And Pirlo being Pirlo, we’ll be lucky to witness such time as he does have. It’s Pirlo. Whatever the reasons and issues, he is coming to New York City FC, and it’s a great moment for the team and its fans. Getting from one moment to the next will now be the challenge.

