Having arrived at HeathOut dot com, you are no doubt aware that I am over the moon with excitement for a moment I thought would never come.
Adrian Heath is out.
Not just out as head coach, a move that was likely coming at the end of next season when he moved into a Director of Football-esque role, out of the organization entirely. His impact will continue to be felt for years to come, but both the team’s strategy and how they execute it will be the domain of someone else — probably multiple someones.
Adrian Heath’s departure from Minnesota United was overdue. His tenure put him in the conversation with coaches like Jim Curtin and Peter Vermes; his performance was decidedly more Gabriel Heinze.
But if it had been unambiguously terrible, it would have ended far sooner than it did. Instead, Heath’s time in Minnesota was decidedly, frustratingly middling. To wit:
— Heath had playoff appearances in four of his seven seasons, but only advanced beyond the first round once.
— He led the team to two finals, the 2019 U.S Open Cup final and 2020 Western Conference Final, but both were losses stemming directly from coaching decisions.
— The team had a subpar 81-51-91 record in league play under his guidance, but a much better 76-41-63 record after the team’s disastrous 2017 and 2018 seasons for which he can’t bear all of the blame.
After seven years of mediocrity and mixed results, it was time for the team to move on; soccer coaches, particularly in MLS, aren’t typically afforded the better part of a decade to make their mark. Even after the team got on solid footing after its awful start to life in MLS, Heath couldn’t get consistent results from his charges.
In 2019, with Ozzie Alonso locking down central midfield and Romain Metanire giving the Loons one of the best two-way fullback performances in MLS, Minnesota started to look good in his chosen 4-2-3-1 formation. The lack of potency at striker kept the team from thriving, as did the battle between Heath and Darwin Quintero that left the Colombian starting on the bench for both the 2019 US Open Cup final and the team’s first ever playoff game. The Loons won neither, but looked markedly better after Quintero subbed on in both games.
During the 2020 season, they added Emanuel Reynoso in place of the jilted (and aging) Quintero and had their best season ever, but a lack of depth and Heath’s dogged unwillingness to rotate players meant the season ended in tears once again as heavy legs and weary minds gave Seattle enough room to complete their comeback in the western conference finals.
From that moment on, the Loons have been in a slow decline.
If I had to pick a team that was emblematic of Adrian Heath’s tenure at Minnesota United, it would be the 2021 team. They started 0-4, which dropped expectations for the team like a stone, but they followed it up with a seven match unbeaten streak to right the ship. The team played pretty well for large parts of the season, but never got on the kind of run they needed to make a serious challenge for the top spot in the west. Results look fine on the surface, but a deeper dive reveals a lot of missed opportunities like going to DC and getting beaten 3-1 by a team that would miss the playoffs, or the 0-0 draw against SKC when the Loons played up a man for 70 min and amassed 3.0 xG but no actual goals. Many things went right, but never enough things to compensate for the lack of a strategy.
They would go to Portland for what should have been a tight playoff game and instead were completely outplayed, embarrassed themselves with petulant antics, and watched Metanire’s time in Minnesota end with a hamstring injury — though of course he went back on the field and proved that the injury was severe instead of being subbed as he should have been.
On his way out of town, Ethan Finlay went on Michael Rand’s Daily Delivery podcast and admitted the team had no offensive plan outside of getting the ball to Reynoso and hoping he could beat enough defenders to get an open shot for himself or a teammate. This wasn’t some incredible revelation, it was clear to anyone who watched the team consistently, but to hear a player actually say it was damning.
Though complaints about Heath had been around for years, beginning more or less with the moment the team hired him instead of Gio Savarese, they picked up steam in ‘22. Ever streaky, the Loons would go as high as getting 25 points from 11 games and as low as streaks of four points from eight games and one point from six to put them on the verge of missing the playoffs entirely. They did limp in, but once again lost in the first round.
This year, the collapse did not stop. Unless they can go to Kansas City and win outright, they will fully miss the playoffs — when 63% of the league will make it — for the first time since 2018. I genuinely believed Heath’s job was safe when Reynoso didn’t show up for the first part of the season, but the way the team finished the season made it clear Heath needed to go.
It wasn’t just the results, plenty of teams have lost to St. Louis and LAFC this season, it was the team’s utter capitulation. Even when they Loons were ahead, losses seemed to be looming right around the corner and even the players knew it. Against San Jose, when the Quakes scored late to tie it, Minnesota had enough time to find a few more clear cut chances and just…didn’t. Heads were down, there was just no will to fight anymore. More than anything that had come before, that kind of internalized defeat is untenable.
My personal gripes with Heath were mostly personnel- and tactics-based. His insistence on using a 4-2-3-1 formation irrespective of who he had available kept the Loons constantly feeling a piece (or three) short when the roster seemed to have enough talent to do better. He had His Guys™ meaning someone like Raheem Edwards or Aziel Jackson could suddenly be so deep in the doghouse, they’d be sleeping on forgotten toys that no longer squeaked. When the chosen players were clearly exhausted, making season-shaping mistakes, they were still ran out there again and again.
The lack of subs wasn’t just an idle frustration, it directly led to the Loons struggling toward the end of seasons.
Setting 2020 aside because the schedule was so strange, the Loons consistently faded as the season ended. Since 2018, they never had a higher points per game average after September 1 than they did before it. Some years it didn’t really matter — 2021’s 1.48 PPG fell to a very survivable 1.32 — but over the last two seasons, the drop was massive. In 2022, the team went from 1.63 PPG to 0.57 PPG or a 55 point pace over a full season vs a 19 point pace. This season was worse: The Loons fell from 1.4 PPG to 0.43 PPG or 48 points vs 15 points.
Nine MLS coaches have gotten fired this season, Heath is far from unique. Unlike Bruce Arena, there was no one single moment where it all went wrong; unlike Wayne Rooney, the team’s expectations weren’t out of line with reality and the coach was forced to take the blame. No, over the course of seven seasons, Heath simply wore the team out, first on the field then off it. Even if his replacement struggles to improve results, the move was necessary.
This will be the most interesting Loons offseason since 2019: Everything is on the table.
PS: I plan to keep the site going at least for a while. I’ve got a few ideas for posts before the new coach is installed — and no, I won’t be immediately registering [COACH]Out.com…I’ll give them at least a couple games.