Sporting KC
More on Rumored Sporting KC Coaching Candidate Raphael Wicky
Tom Bogert is reporting that Sporting Kansas City have three coaching finalists for their head coaching job. Let’s learn about Rapha Wicky.
On Thursday night, the first hint of a Sporting Kansas City coaching rumor bubbled to the surface. The Athletic’s Tom Bogert reports that the team is down to three finalists. The only leaked name of the three is Swiss coach Raphael Wicky.
If the name sounds familiar, he’s got some Major League Soccer ties. He had a relatively long playing career that ended in MLS with the now defunct Chivas USA in 2009. He also played internationally for Switzerland. Before coming to the US, he played Atletico Madrid, Werder Bremen and Hamburg, among others.
After his playing career ended, he moved into coaching and spent two seasons as the head coach of the Chicago Fire.
Coaching Career
The Fire aren’t Wicky’s only stop on his coaching journey. The former Swiss international player started his coaching career at Swiss giants FC Basel. He worked his way through the youth ranks before taking the head job in 2017. He spent only one year there, coming in second in the league, though they entered as defending champions. He also went out in the semi-finals of the Swiss Cup and the Round of 16 in Champions League.
After departing Basel, Wicky landed with the United States U-17s as their head coach. That job lasted less than a year before he was made the manager at the Chicago Fire. He joined in December of 2019, ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortened 2020 season. The team ended with a 5-10-8 (23 points) season.
The Fire missed the playoffs by a single point, but Rapha would return for year two. He didn’t quite make it to the end of that season before behind dismissed by the Fire after 51 games at the helm. The team was 12th in the East when he was let go. Over his two seasons, he went 12-25-14 as the head coach in league play.
The next year Wicky was back in Switzerland, this time at another giant club, BSC Young Boys. He coached them to league and domestic cup titles that year. The following year he would be fired in March after a string of tough results. Young Boys would bounce back and win the league without Wicky at the helm but had already been eliminated from the Swiss Cup.
After his most recent departure, Wicky has been linked to some English clubs, including Middlesbrough, Burnley and West Bromwich Albion over the last year.
Another Candidate?
The KC Soccer Journal’s Mike Kuhn did some sleuthing of his own last night and discovered that one of the other two finalists for the Sporting KC job may be Freyr Alexandersson.
The 43-year-old is currently the manager of Icelandic club SK Brann. Alexandersson was the coach for the Icelandic Women’s National Team for six years from 2013 to 2018. He’s also spent time coaching in Belgium, Denmark, and Qatar.
All the sources on the Alexandersson rumor point to a paywalled site though, so he could be someone who interviewed who didn’t make Bogert’s rumored final three coaches. For Freyr’s part, according to this source, “he has received several inquiries but has rejected them all.”
Whoever is going to be the coach for Sporting KC will likely be hired soon. On Tuesday, Sporting Kansas City announced the departure of interim coach Kerry Zavagnin after 26 years with the club. That announcement surely was made knowing a permanent coach was about to be announced. When the next coach is announced, it’ll be the first new permanent coach in over 16 seasons after the firing of Peter Vermes in March.
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Sounds like we should be prepared for disappointment. Maybe the owners are having problems finding people.
To be fair, SKC has given us precious few reasons to be positive over the past 5 off seasons.
However, I don’t want to jump the gun with negativity here. I think the first big change (hiring David Lee) set the tone that SKC’s institutional soccer core is changing. Lee seems to have carte blanche to build this club in the way he sees it. Because of that, I think Lee needs to hire a coach that can work within the boundaries and guidelines that he is creating. That coach may not have been wildly successful in other places. Honestly, we simply don’t know what kind of coach David Lee needs. Because Lee has a track record of success, I think we need to cut him some slack and see what happens.
I do think the SuperDraft and free agent acquisitions will be telling. Rebuilding a roster mid-season for most of the world’s clubs, isn’t an easy task. I think 2026 SKC will look a little like San Jose after last year (lots of free agent types). The difference is that I hope Lee finds some very good youth prospects and U22s.
I I know and I totally agree. Every time I bring that up, I get voted down.
What makes you think you should be prepared for disappointment? At least one experienced manager is in the running This isnt the NFL or NCAA basketball where you intimately know every candidate. Chances are, whomever they hire, you’ve never heard of them. This is a global sport. There are thousands of prp soccer managers.
Other teams have full rosters and coaches. Other teams that outplayed us for years. To think we’re going to fill out a roster, hire a coach and be competitive in a 3 week window is a really glass half full approach. We have to give Lee time. PV was given way too much time. That makes it harder to trust the next guy.
We’ve known we’re moving on from Kerry for a long time. They’ve had a year to find a manager. They should’ve been looking even while the interim manager was working.
Same song and dance on the roster. I used to blame PV. I can now see it is ownership. Not a good idea to fill your roster a week before preseason. We do it every year. Bring in one or two additions who need half the year to gel, only to watch them not work out.
I agree we might not know every potential manager. It’s a tight knit world though. They’ll have connections to different clubs through the years as a player and coach. Then KC soccer journal will do a great job getting us the 411.
Hmm, at first I was interested, but then realizing that he coached the Fire gives me pause. To be fair, the Fire have been hot garbage for a longtime, so he probably didn’t stand a chance anyways, but still. I think what’s most exciting is the fact that there’s even a rumor since that means we’re probably close.
We already know how to lose, we don’t need another manager to reinforce that skill.
When i saw the name i recognized it from the Fire. I get that the Fire was a tire fire of a club at the time so you couldn’t expect greatness from anyone. His track record at the big Swiss clubs is pretty decidedly mixed too. The Swiss league is a cut below not just many of the other smaller Euro leagues, they are a cut below MLS too.
He’s currently unemployed and he’s already got a track record that says he probably cant do the job. If we offer him the position, I sure hope he’s used his unemployment to rethink his philosophies. If we offer him the position and are 9th in the West in 10 months, I hope Lee and Ownership continue rethinking their philosophies.
The more I’ve read about Wicky since the release, the less I like him as a potential hire. That said, I think Lee will be faster to fire a bad coach if the wrong decision is made. But it’d be nice to avoid making a bad decision.
The real question is why hire him in the first place? Right now it seems that sporting Kansas City is a train wreck.
Here’s hoping the other two “finalists” are people a little easier to rally behind, and one of them makes the cut.