OPINION: Sporting KC Fired Peter Vermes at the Exact Wrong Time

Timing. Sometimes in life it is everything. When the timing of something is off, it can be life altering. A missed connection. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In sports, timing often needs to be perfect. The perfectly timed touch. Knowing when to release a pass to beat your defender. Or when to take a shot to beat the goalkeeper.

When it’s time to move on from a player, that timing is critical as well. Keep a player too long and they may hold down your roster. Move on from them too early and they may go to another club and help them lift a trophy.

The same is true about timing of moving on from a coach. Sporting Kansas City got the timing completely wrong this week when they fired mutually parted ways with Peter Vermes this week. Was it too early? Was it too late? That’s up for debate, but it was unequivocally the wrong time.

An Inconceivable Contract Extension

The case to fire Peter Vermes has been building for a long time. Some have argued when the team missed the playoffs in 2019 that it was time for a change. While there were highs since then, there were more lows. The case continued to build when Sporting KC missed the playoffs again in 2022, had a 10-game winless run in 2023 (despite a record pace in the 2nd half of the season) and missed them again in 2024.

Choose your point that it broke you, the argument has been there.

However, ownership would disagree with you. They disagreed so vehemently that they gave Vermes an ill-advised five-year contract extension off the back of the failed 2022 season. He still had a year on his contract, but instead of seeing how 2023 went, the team committed to paying Vermes for six more seasons.

He made it exactly one year and six games into that extension.

That extension looks worse every day. If you recall, US Soccer was trying to interview Peter Vermes at the time of his extension, so certainly he used that leverage. Now ownership can pay PV for nothing for nearly the next four years, on top of paying interim coach Kerry Zavagnin and whoever earns the permanent job. Not a good look for ownership when most coaches don’t even get five-year contracts in Major League Soccer.

Ownership Weren’t Spending

Amidst all the calls for Peter Vermes to be fired as Chief Soccer Officer and Manager last summer, we learned that ownership was, to put it bluntly, being cheap. Vermes indicated the team was near the bottom of the league in spending and that he hadn’t been given a budget to sign players since 2020.

During the press conference, ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle asked co-managing owner Mike Illig about the lack of investment from the club. Illig basically insinuated that it was untrue. “I never really had a conversation with Peter about that quote and I would challenge that we haven’t invested,” said Illig. “I will say that, if and when Peter ever asked for something, he pretty much got it.”

Perhaps it’s a parsing of words, but it comes off as a contradiction to the press conference Peter gave after the Mike Burns hire. If you look at how the roster construction was occurring, it seems clear the team wasn’t spending anywhere near the level of their peers around the league.

Vermes also repeated a tale in that presser, telling a story from 2018 about how the team was in first place and he had gone out and negotiated a deal including a transfer fee for a striker. He agreed to terms and brought it to ownership, and they said something to the effect of, ‘We’re in first place, why would we do that?’

The team went on to continue to play a mix of Khiry Shelton and Diego Rubio at striker, and they came up short in the Western Conference Finals against the Portland Timbers. It may have been the last time Sporting KC were truly on the verge of a major trophy.

There are multiple reports of the same thing, but this time for an attacking midfielder, between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. Ownership rejected that move as well.

Why Let Vermes Start the Rebuild?

As a part of this press conference announcing Mike Burns as the Sporting Director where all these quotes from Vermes came out, another important piece of information was conveyed. Sporting KC were going to have the largest budget ever to rebuild the roster and they’d give Vermes and Burns the next three windows to accomplish it.

Vermes was fired on March 31st. The first of those three windows doesn’t even close until April 23rd.

The issue is, Sporting KC have already started their rebuild. First, they parted ways with many players, like future legends Tim Melia and Johnny Russell, after 2024. Then the club is rumored to have spent around $9 million in transfer fees for new Designated Players Dejan Joveljic ($4m confirmed) and Manu Garcia ($5m rumor, but it included Shapi Suleymanov).

Joveljic and Garcia are signed through 2027 with options for 2028.

What if the new coach doesn’t have those players in his vision for how the team should play? Unless someone takes them off Sporting KC’s hands, they are here for at least three seasons. And that’s two of a potential of three Designated Players tied up. Teams basically have to hit on their DPs to be competitive in MLS.

Why let Vermes spend that money if you are going to give him six games into the season and not see how it plays out? (And if you are thinking ‘Burns spent that money,’ he reports to Peter.)

It would have made more sense to move on from Vermes after 2024 before these players were in the door. The problem is, Mike Illig told the gathered media on Monday he didn’t even consider it.

Blair Kerkhoff (KC Star): “To what extent was a coaching change considered at the end of last season before this season got going.”

Illig: “There wasn’t a consideration for that. It was, uh, full belief in Peter and Mike and the team to show what we could do. Obviously, there’s (trails off). Having Mike Burns come into the mix. Watching him and Peter work together, it was pretty cool to see that dynamic work. I think we’ve collectively demonstrated that we’ve made good changes that were suitable for the results that we expect [this] season and every season.”

Who is in Charge of the Soccer Side?

Perhaps it even makes more sense to have moved on from Peter even earlier.

According to Sporting KC Legend Jimmy Conrad and MLS Insider Tom Bogert, they confirmed what many of us had already expected about the Mike Burns hire. Many of the potential candidates who may have been interested in being Sporting KC’s Sporting Director, weren’t interested in the setup KC has.

In most clubs, the Sporting Director is the top job and the coach reports to them. However, in Kansas City, whoever took the job would report to CSO Peter Vermes. Because of that, many of the best number two guys in charge around the league weren’t interested in that arrangement because it would essentially be a lateral move.

That leaves everyone wondering, is Burns the best guy for the job? By all accounts, he’s done well. He helped the team get out from under the massive weight of the huge Alan Pulido contract that was signed before he was around. Though from the way Peter tells it, perhaps it was Vermes that facilitated that exit to Chivas.

As for the players Burns has brought in, there are signs of promise, but so far no one has been exceptional. It is only six games into the season and only Joveljic got even a sliver of preseason with the team. It’s too early to tell if any of these signings are bad or not.

But Burns was out of an MLS front office job after being dismissed from the New England Revolution in May of 2019. There were indications he wanted a front office job but wasn’t being hired. The other candidate that came before Burns was the disastrous hire of Gavin Wilkinson, who was so toxic because of his involvement in scandals in NWSL that he was fired eight days after SKC hired him.

Ownership Has to Get Better

At this point, ownership has fumbled the handling of everything on the soccer side of organization. They could have fired Vermes earlier or perhaps given him more time to see what he could do with actually having a budget.

Instead, they chose the exact wrong time to make the move.

Mike Illig, and anyone else in his brain trust, have to get these next moves right. They have to find the correct Chief Soccer Officer first. Until a CSO is in place, there is no need to hire a permanent coach because that CSO will probably want their guy in place. Sporting KC will just end up with another coach on the scrap heap. And frankly, that could happen anyways. As Illig said this week, Peter Vermes is a unicorn. It’s hard to get a coaching hire right. It’s hard to get the CSO hire right. Illig was clear that’ll be two different people this time. It’s also hard to win soccer games. And it’s really hard to win trophies.

That trophy drought, dating back to the 2017 US Open Cup, may go on for a long time if the decision making we’ve been seeing, continues.