Marsch & Armas in-flight
Marsch and Armas can sound off-key because they use a corporate nowhere voice that has no home, no nostalgic warmth, no tangible authenticity beyond an approved list of motivational phrases and quotes.
Jesse Marsch finally has an assistant to fill the gap created when Mark Jackson left his coaching role to take over in the gap in the league table occupied by MK Dons. Chris Armas is best known in the Premier League for being laughed out of Old Trafford while trying to help the reddest bull of them all, Ralf Rangnick, convince the squad of overpaid brats over there to run. The aftermath of that half-season is only one place to look for information about Armas, though. Another place is in the gushing profiles that were talking up his arrival.
“The first thing Jesse Marsch told me about bringing Chris in was that the guy’s a winner,” Max McCarty told The Athletic, about Marsch bringing his old Chicago Fire teammate to be his assistant at NYRB back in 2015. In training, according to teammate Alex Muyl, Armas then showed himself to be “a fucking competitor.”
This reminded me of a profile of Marsch himself, on the MLS website, from shortly after taking over at Elland Road. Jim Curtin, a teammate of Marsch and Armas at Chicago Fire, was certain Jesse would succeed at Leeds. “The biggest compliment I can give is that Jesse Marsch is a winner,” he said. “He has been from day one, and always will be.”
So now we have two winners, although we should keep in mind that Marsch and Armas have basically won the same things, at the same times. They were together at Chicago Fire from 1998 to 2005 — Armas stayed until 2007 — sharing wins in the MLS Cup, the Supporters’ Shield, and three hoists of the US Open Cup (plus one more for Armas). Armas did more internationally — 66 USMNT caps to Marsch’s two, winning two CONCACAF Gold Cups and US Soccer Athlete of the year. But as a coach, his only honour is from his time on Marsch’s staff, winning the Supporters’ Shield as his assistant at NYRB in 2018.
They’ve a lot of shared history, but this is US Soccer. One challenge for the sport’s grandiose ambitions of reaching the semi-finals when it co-hosts the World Cup in 2026 is that it doesn’t have the infrastructure it should across all fifty states, each the size of a European country. It’s still relying on a late-1990s generation that looks more like a single high school athletics programme. Writing about the scandal enveloping USA head coach Gregg Berhalter and star player Gio Reyna and their families, Leander Schaerlaeckens wrote at The Ringer that, ‘Anybody who is anyone in the domestic game has known everybody else who is anyone for decades’:
‘To wit, the senior [Claudio] Reyna and Berhalter played youth soccer together, coached by Reyna’s father, Miguel. They went to St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark together, a school that somehow produced four men’s national teamers and eleven pro soccer players overall (as well as, uh, Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy). Maybe that’s because the school is in New Jersey, which has yielded a wildly disproportionate number of national team players — six National Soccer Hall of Famers issued just from little Kearny (population 40,000). But that still doesn’t account for Claudio being the best man when Berhalter married Rosalind. The incident from college had been forgiven and the families stayed close. The Berhalters’ son, Sebastian, played for Austin FC, where Claudio is the sporting director and Berhalter’s former assistant, Josh Wolff, is the head coach; Gio Reyna, of course, played, or possibly still plays, for Berhalter.’
Jesse Marsch is 49, Chris Armas is 50. Claudio Reyna is 49, Gregg Berhalter is 49, Josh Wolff is 45 and was Jesse Marsch’s roommate at Chicago Fire, part of the same team with Chris Armas for four years. Jim Curtin, former coach of Brenden Aaronson at Philadelphia Union, is 43 and another from that Chicago Fire squad, later also Marsch’s teammate at Chivas USA. US Soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart is 53 and did at least grow up and play most of his career in the Netherlands, while earning 101 USMNT caps alongside Berhalter, Reyna, Wolff, Marsch, Armas and co. These are so many guys who could all be the same guy, and after a while the sheer guyness makes them merge and blur into variations of this one guy, the US Soccer guy, filling every executive office of the sport.