Moving past Danny Stone, where does Phoenix Rising go now?

On May 26, from the carriage of an L train in Chicago, I sent two texts to my PHNX Rising Podcast co-host Max.

“Worried about the locker room,” my texts read. “Danny needs to get a grip on things quickly.”

The night before, Danny Stone‘s Phoenix Rising team had given away a 1-0 lead to lose 2-1 for the second time in four days. Just over a month later, Stone was relieved from his duties as head coach.

The warning signs had already started to present themselves. As the final whistle blew in Indianapolis, Emil Cuello immediately headed for the exit. The midfielder had been substituted for at half-time, and despite turning back towards the field as called by one of his teammates, he was still the first to leave the playing surface by some margin.

In the remaining five games with Stone at the helm, Cuello made the matchday squad just once, playing seven minutes off the bench.

Another member of Rising’s traveling contingent that day looked at me as they left the field, simply saying “it’s not through lack of talent.”

From the outside, this could have been a blip. Prior to the league defeat in Indianapolis and Open Cup loss against Major League Soccer side Seattle Sounders, Rising had been unbeaten for a month.

It wasn’t, though, and for that Danny Stone paid with his job.

In a rare display of unity across the Phoenix Rising fanbase, the decision to part ways with Stone has been almost universally panned. Instead, they’re pinning the blame on club president Bobby Dulle, along with sporting director Brandon McCarthy.

The fans aren’t wrong that the issues with Phoenix Rising run far deeper than simply the head coach, but it’s also true that Danny Stone made errors throughout his tenure. The extent to which those can be pinned on him rather than as a consequence of fighting with one arm tied behind his back is the main question at hand.

The club brass won’t outright admit it, but as Dulle spoke in a post-Stone interview of “energy and intensity levels that looked like they’ve been dropping,” he correctly hinted at the fact that Stone didn’t have the full backing of his locker room.

Changes to training sessions had caused some unrest, with sources within the club intimating that players felt underprepared on the weekends as a result. Seemingly erratic team selection, with swaps in the starting lineup each and every week, certainly didn’t help either.

Then, there are other factors: those which fall somewhere between Stone’s shortfalls and the hand that he’d been dealt.

There is undoubtedly talent on Rising’s team, but along with that can come egos. Under Juan Guerra, who led Phoenix to a title, that was manageable. But Guerra’s man management skills were always the point. When we talk of how impressive he was in that regard, we aren’t blowing smoke up his rear. That’s why he was getting calls from Major League Soccer this past offseason. He always was that impressive, and to expect a rookie head coach — or in all honesty, many of the head coaches available at this level — to carry that same quality from the get-go is simply absurd.

Three separate sources described one member of the 2024 squad throwing a “tantrum” over playing time earlier in the season, only to be rewarded with a starting place on the following weekend. Where the blame lies for some of these decisions isn’t clear, and likely never will be, but other sources also indicated complaints going above the head of Danny Stone to club management instead.

This all may sound like it’s painting a bleak picture, and in honesty it probably is. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t salvageable at various points, though. At least one previous coach of this team serves as a perfect example of that.

Rick Schantz was always a polarizing character. Those who played under him, when the camera is off, will never really hide away from that. It can go from the milder critiques — that when arriving in Phoenix, it was really never the image they had in their head of how the club would be run — to the more full-throated disliking, as evidenced by the former player who would gleefully text with each passing game as Schantz edged ever closer to his downfall in 2022.

This isn’t to paint some image of Rick Schantz as some univerally disliked character. There were always people who stood by him, and there are those who will, to an extent, stand by him still today. But make no mistake that the group was held together in part by a solid backroom staff that had the respect of his players, but predominantly also by winning. It’s no shock that as momentum failed in 2022, and the latter completely dried up, Schantz’s side went into a spiral from which they could never recover.

To the former point, Danny Stone took the head coaching job with just Darnell King as an unspecialized assistant coach. King is a well-respected former captain of Phoenix Rising, and one who will undoubtedly have a long and successful coaching career if that’s what he’s intent on doing. He was also a rookie assistant coach backing up a rookie head coach, and deserved time and space to find his own footing in a new role.

Soon added to the mix was Diego Gómez, who since Stone’s departure has stepped up as interim head coach. Gómez had success in NISA, and if it weren’t for the demise of the Queensboro FC expansion project, could have already been a USL Championship head coach in his own right. Outside of Phoenix, people have spoken highly of him to me, and praised his football mind. But in his time as an assistant coach, multiple sources again highlighted that he hadn’t been able to make the impression on the playing staff that anyone would have hoped for.

Even among the more extended coaching staff, Rising’s strength and conditioning coach Jeronimo Aimar, who in those first days without Guerra would have been a critical link with the Spanish speaking players, arrived late to preseason due to visa issues. So too did several players, despite their visa category being open to premium processing for an additional fee to the club.

But it’s by looking on the field that you see quite why the fanbase is so unsatisfied with the decision to pile the blame onto Danny Stone. It’s clear there’s a regression in performances relative to the 2023 season, but why wouldn’t there be when multiple key players left and were never satisfactorily replaced?

Between Danny Trejo, Manuel Arteaga and Carlos Harvey, Phoenix Rising lost 39 goals scored from 2023, alongside 20 assists and 90 chances created. The attempt at replacing those goals appears to amount to the loan signing of Rémi Cabral, and Rémi Cabral alone.

Yes, Cabral has had success at an MLS NEXT Pro level. He’s even had a fairly successful 2024 campaign with Phoenix Rising. He was, undoubtedly, a decent addition to the squad. Any idea that he would close that gap on missing goals alone — or at the very minimum, close it enough that others could step up and fill in for the missing output — is just something that the fanbase will not, nor has it ever, bought. Frankly, nor should they.

Yet that is exactly what club leadership will have you believe. In a tweet the same night as Danny Stone’s final match, sporting director Brandon McCarthy said that the main basis of the decision was “giving internal players a chance to emerge which is important and the difficulty of finding top attacking players for our level.”

There wasn’t unanimous support for that position inside the team. In his interview with PHNX, club president Bobby Dulle admitted that staff had provided names that they had interest in signing, and that supports what we’ve been hearing for weeks now. There was a desire within the club to bring in a new center-forward, but there just wasn’t the sense of importance or of urgency from certain parties to get a deal over the line. There have been hints of a new incoming player once the international registration window opens, but that still hasn’t rolled around.

While those recruitment decisions were being made on a collective basis, there was also a mandate to play a more vertical style of play. Rising possessed the pace in attacking spaces to be able to do that, but did they really possess the aerial prowess to go with it? How were they supposed to ultimately make that work?

Rising may have had some idea of plans in place, but the examples put forward by Dulle in an attempt to try and defend a supposedly ambitious recruiting round this offseason have been trashed around the fanbase and league. John Morrissey describing his comments as “cover-your-ass doublespeak. This roster build raised red flags from the get-go.”

That, at its heart, is the crux of the issue that Rising fans seem to be taking such issue with. Danny Stone paid for the failures of the team to date, but the others seem to be moving on with little-to-no accountability. In Dulle’s own words, when asked if there would be changes to processes outside of the coaching change: “Not at the moment, no. I mean, obviously we’re going to continue down this pathway.”

Dulle has been a longtime face at the club, joining as chief operating officer right around the time of the team’s rebrand from Arizona United. When promoted to the role of club president in early 2023, a statement from governor Bill Kraus described him as “the glue that holds it all together on both the business and sporting sides of the franchise.”

Yet it’s no secret to anybody that Dulle has shown an increased interest in the sporting side of the organization as the years go by, and it’s an observation borne out by more sources than I could count on my hands from across the years. Dulle had played the game in his youth, up to the Division II level in college with Grand Canyon University, before spending years with the Harlem Globetrotters.

Meanwhile, Brandon McCarthy, who made his name in baseball, became sporting director ahead of the 2023 season. He’d never previously held a job in this sport, but spent most of 2022 building connections and taking scouting courses to put himself into the position to take the task on. He also holds an ownership stake within the club.

In an interview with Backheeled earlier this year, it was said that “McCarthy doesn’t believe his lack of experience in soccer on or off the field has impacted his credibility as a sporting director, in the eyes of fans.” The last two weeks have shown that notion to be as questionable as the team’s performance this year to date.

Between the two, in recent years, they’ve overseen a transformation of Rising’s processes off the field, with a focus on creating a clear identity for the club that could transcend any individual coach. The problem is, by and large, that that identity has been a mid-table club.

No four game run, especially when three of those games would have finished as draws had they ended in 90 minutes, can wipe that away. Rising pushed on in the 2023 playoffs because of a united squad, a head coach who managed to squeeze the very best out of the team and a variety of intangibles. Still, the side managed one win, three draws and two losses in 90 minutes for its final six games of 2023. That is identical to what Danny Stone managed in his final six games before being canned, albeit against different opponents.

Over a 34 game regular season sample size in 2023, the team finished sixth out of 12 in the Western Conference, with the tenth best expected goals tally in the league as a whole. It was the definition of mid-table. Minus several key players, in particular on the attacking front, they’ve fallen further.

McCarthy is taking a battering on this front as some inevitably zero in on his use of data and analytics in decision making, but that’s slightly misguided. Analytics do have a place in football, but they have to be implemented well to actually succeed.

The use of data in and of itself has to actually advance the team above where they would be without it. Rising have pioneered this approach in a way within USL Championship, but at the end of the day, have they outperformed payroll these past two seasons in a way that would indicate successful processes?

The reality is that the situation on the ground at Phoenix Rising is less Oakland A’s in Moneyball, and more akin to a scenario where the New York Yankees found an innovative new way to finish .500 and still advance, with everybody and their dog offered a postseason berth. That outcome might satisfy some, but the financial reality of USL Championship is that lengthy postseason runs that are exclusively on the road don’t make money for teams.

With no changes of note behind the scenes, you really have to question if a post-Danny Stone Phoenix Rising is actually going to make the step up that it needs to. From first watching of the club under an interim manager in San Antonio, it certainly didn’t look so. And while a new striker may come in, and other squad issues may be addressed, unless the lessons are truly learned from the club’s current scenario, how is this team going to avoid falling foul once again next year?

Moreover, how are you going to easily get the fans back onside after this debacle? Goodwill from elements of the fanbase towards Bobby Dulle may have been hard to find in the first place since the struggles of the 2022 season, but outright mockery of Brandon McCarthy’s social media claims are the new trend in a way that they never were before Stone’s firing.

None of this will be an easy task, and that’s not even addressing the need for a new head coach to be appointed. You’d have thought a candidate worth their salt would want to put in the research on a new club in the same way you’d expect them to research a new player. If you see the sheer strength of anger sitting around the club, and you have the ambition and talent to want to go to a higher level in the future, wouldn’t that give you some pause? It probably should.

As MLS potentially circles in on the Phoenix market, with the very real risk that Rising is left out on the dark amid an investment consortium’s attempt to develop a new stadium in Mesa, now is not a time that the club can afford to fail to take its fanbase with it on decision making. There are key choices to make over the coming weeks, and those could honestly prove critical in their ability to recover them.

Just over a month ago, it was Danny Stone that was the focus of my texts, noting that he needed to get a grip on the locker room situation quickly. He didn’t, and he departed several weeks later.

Now, it’s Phoenix Rising, the club itself, that needs to get a grip, and desperately needs to do so before things find a way to get worse.

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