FC Dallas: youth and the dark arts leave club close to the treble

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/oct/28/fc-dallas-treble-mls-young-kids

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When FC Dallas lifted the Supporters’ Shield on Sunday, it was hard not to view it as a job mostly done, but not fully complete yet. Their hunt for the treble is still on. They secured the US Open Cup in September, the Shield in October, and have their sights firmly set on lifting the MLS Cup in December for an season that would be unprecedented in US soccer. On top of that, last Thursday they advanced to the quarter-finals of the Concacaf Champions League. It has been a special season for Dallas, a season where almost everything has gone right, and the seeds of their long-term, youth-focused philosophy have finally started to bear fruit.

The man behind all of this is the Colombian Óscar Pareja, who played for Dallas from 1998 to 2005, joined the backroom staff immediately after retiring, ran their academy, and finally become their head coach in 2014, a job it seemed he was always destined to inherit. There were stints in between with the USA Under-17 team, and two mixed years as head coach of the Colorado Rapids, but he always looked desperate to come back to Dallas, a place where he feels most at home. There’s an extreme level of mutual comfort: Dallas has been inMLS for 21 seasons, and Pareja has been involved in 16 of them.

Because of Dallas’s commitment to nurturing and fostering their own young talent – their insistence on playing their kids – it is fitting too that Pareja’s nickname is Papi. He is the father, the grand architect of their whole program. He crafted their system and has shepherded many their bright, young talents through the ranks. The program is designed in his image, and is a beacon for those who see American, homegrown talent as the way forward for MLS.

While the idea of MLS as a retirement league propped up on the tired legs of ageing European stars is outdated, Dallas is standing out even in this new ‘MLS 3.0’ climate, with their unflinching commitment to their youth programs and their academy. They run a single program, with a single philosophy, throughout all their age groups, and start inculcating players as young as 10. In a US soccer landscape where youth development is often fragmented between high school, local travel teams, pay-to-play programs, and various semi-pro academies, FC Dallas is unique in its top-down adherence to a single philosophy.

And that approach has already paid dividends. If the senior team has won a double this year, then the academy has also won a double of its own, claiming the 2016 U-16 and U-18 national titles. But the main focus in Dallas is on development, not winning. As the current academy director Luchi Gonzalez told the league website: “Winning a championship is an amazing honor, but our ultimate goal is a day where we can sign a player to the first team.” They have hit that goal again and again, signing 15 homegrown players since they retooled their academy in 2008. And it is not just FC Dallas that wants to sign players from their academy, earlier this year Schalke swooped in to sign their starlet Weston McKennie, and current Bournemouth player Emerson Hyndman is another prospect who spent significant time in the Dallas youth system.

Their system is unparalleled in the US, and it clearly deserves all the plaudits heading its way. But when you zoom out from the hothouse, fevered atmosphere around the academy, the most intriguing signing Dallas might have made is not one from their youth team to their senior team, but one who was without a club at all, and last played in the Guatemalan league.

On 15 September, FC Dallas announced that they had just signed Carlos Ruíz, who was without a club since May, for a second stint at the club. 15 September also happened to be Ruíz’s 37th birthday. In fact, Ruiz is old enough that in his first stint with the Dallas, he played in the same team as Pareja.

Ruíz is the ultimate MLS veteran. He holds the record for most postseason goals and is 10th on the alltime MLS career goalscoring charts. But it’s also his style of play and his demeanor, as much as his age, that sets him apart from the FC Dallas setup. He is a master of the dark arts, and is adept at drawing free kicks and wearing defenders down with bitty, attritional fouls throughout the game. He will do anything to win, and his nickname, Pescadito, or little fish, comes from his habit of flopping to the ground to try to con a free kick for his team. If the FC Dallas academy – with its lofty ambitions and surety in doing things the right and proper way – is philosophy, then Ruíz – with his gamesmanship and poacher’s instinct – is pure, unabashed pragmatism.

The marriage of the two can be thrilling to watch. On 16 October, Ruíz scored an 89th-minute winner to propel Dallas back to the top of the table and give them control of the Supporters’ Shield race again. It was a goal of unexpected grace, an agile, little first time dink over the ‘keeper at full speed. If Dallas are going to win the treble, they might first look back at the moment that secured them the double and be grateful that Pareja added experience to his roster, steel to his silk.

The signing of Ruíz might be less perplexing when placed in the overall schema of Dallas’ plan, though. If one of the core tenets of any academy system is the maximization of local and available talent, Dallas has done an excellent job of recruiting in one of the Latino soccer hotbeds of North America, then that belief can undergird a whole system.

An academy is all about success delayed, inching towards a future. It is about the flurry of small gains building into something greater. It is this same incremental approach that allowed Dallas to find their center-back pairing, Matt Hedges and Walker Zimmerman, through the college draft, a player acquisition method most teams treat haphazardly.

As Matthew Doyle, a senior editor of mlssoccer.com, pointed out in his final day round-up: “They don’t leave any stone unturned. That’s why they’re champions.”

And with their star playmaker Mauro Díaz out for the playoffs, Dallas is going to have to start finding solutions throughout their roster, and it would surprise no one if they called upon Ruíz to add to his record postseason goals tally. They make an unlikely couple – Papi y Pescadito, the philosopher and the pragmatist – but Dallas hope they can remain in love just long enough to win them the treble.