Heath Out, pt 1.

A series of reflections on the Heath Era of Minnesota United

I met Adrian Heath in Los Angeles at the MLS SuperDraft in 2017. Things were different back then. All eyes were on us: Loons were joining MLS, a new manager, a new league, and they had the number one pick. We all know what happened next. Vadim Demidov, snow, Grant Wahl. Bloodbath.

When I shook Adrian’s hand, I made a joke about getting a drink sometime and the handlers around laughed it off. Not gonna happen. It took me a long time to adapt from the era where I could grab a drink with the gaffer and get their insight. I had become friends with our previous manager, Carl Craig. Often when I saw failure on the pitch, I at least knew what he was trying to do and then that made my writing/evaluation better, but it also made me a bit more willing to overlook or explain the problems.

But it was a new era. The guy with the soccer website wasn’t going to get a half-boozy tactical preview. Fair enough. But when things went bad—and boyo did they go bad—my comrade Alex Schieferdecker wrote an analysis of the scouting and tactical failures that was scathing. The team was livid. We were not going to get interviews or anything anymore. “Why would you say all this crap when it’s not true, you could’ve asked what we were thinking or what our philosophy was!”

This was only a few months into the new era, but it set the stage for everything after. It was a constant cycle of: we don’t need to tell you anything and now we’re really not going to tell you anything because we’re mad.

In the end, after 7 years of Heath what can we say about the manager aside from assessing the results? I can’t remember a single event (aside from a “come meet the new gaffer” event at the local) where he showed up to interact with the public. Even at the last open practice, he didn’t address the fans. And that lack of connection led to people criticizing him more than they would have perhaps if he was “likeable” (but key here is not liking him, it’s having any relationship to him). The Heath Out world was always over-exaggerated the way social media always makes these things, but very few people actually liked having him as a manager.

And that separation between coach/fans became the template for the new era. The previous era was one of a collapsed distance: Wonderwall was a song the players sang to the fans. I can’t emphasize that enough. It was something they did and the fans picked up on, but there was a clear handing off when after a match the players came over to the Dark Clouds and sang Wonderwall and we joined them.

While it was always going to change—I never had illusions about it—the reason many of us were there was because it was more than just a soccer team. What took me a long time to finally recognize was this is just a soccer team. And my bitterness took a long time to fade from that. A player coming out as gay was more than just a sports event, it was far bigger than that. To see him sit on the bench on Pride Night was the decision of people for whom this is only about soccer. This is just a sports team. (I maintain that bringing him on would have lit the stadium on fire and would’ve been a positive sporting decision).

The same went for the decision to leave a substitution unused and deny club legend Miguel Ibarra a chance to play one last time in Minnesota. Whatever you think of Ibarra, he put us on the map. We were The Team that Nobody Wanted, but we had a player that Sepp Blatter called “The American Messi.” Obviously, in hindsight it was all weird and hugely overblown. But when Miguel came back from national duty, the team had a standing room only Q&A with him and fans. And he loved playing here. He was shy, but he loved the fans.

The referee pointed to the spot and Miguel remained on the endline, warming up. It was a sad, whimpering end to an illustrious career. Most fans understand the reality that this is afterall a game and a business. But if that’s all it is, if the connections between fans and players don’t matter, then what’s the point?

There is far more to say about the Adrian Heath era, but I wanted this first reflection to be what has been for me a transition to realizing what many others recognized far before me: this is just a sports team. And all the special attention and energy that might come from believing this is different than any other sports team, that can be redirected elsewhere.