They’d been looking shaky for some time, but on a rainy Sunday night in Albuquerque, the wheels finally came off of Phoenix Rising’s Campeones Tour bus.
It was a game that encapsulated so much that was wrong with Rising’s 2024 season: enough possession, but nowhere near enough to show for it as the side lacked time and time again in chance creation.
Inevitably, interim head coach Diego Gómez will pay for the season’s end with his job at the top, much as Danny Stone did back in June. To assume that moving on from a coach who has been here for months will be the solution to problems that have been evident for much longer is simply misguided.
Because the warning signs really have been there for much longer.
Phoenix Rising suffered its worst season under its current name in 2022, missing the playoffs for the only time. The team hobbled their way to 6th out of 12 squads in the West in 2023, before going on a four game run where the team managed, with a coach that squeezed every last bit of talent out of his squad, to will themselves through three games that would have ended as draws in the regular season. In 2024, the squad limped into 8th place with the lowest points-per-game tally ever recorded by a playoff squad in the Western Conference.
Perhaps Pa-Modou Kah will change things, should he come in as head coach as reported by Tom Bogert. But if you’re going to bring in a football guy, with a football resume, and a truckload of football experience, you cannot have his decisions undermined in any way by excessive interference from those who simply don’t have it.
Brandon McCarthy, a former Major League pitcher and part-owner of the club, decided ahead of the 2023 season that he should be installed as the club’s sporting director. Bobby Dulle, the longtime club president, has more frequently over the past year opined publicly on the rationale behind the club’s footballing decisions and his own role in them.
Neither of these men has played a minute of professional football. Neither of these men came to Phoenix Rising from working at another professional football club. Frankly, I struggle to see what exactly qualifies them to intervene in the club’s recruitment strategies in the way that they do.
Even taking a goal that McCarthy himself stated as a rationale for why this club needed a sporting director, he has failed at the very first test, with the club lurching from near-disaster to near-disaster time after time in 2024.
“You can’t have a situation where all of your IP goes out the door if a manager says ‘hey, I got this job’ and leaves,” McCarthy said in a preseason interview with Backheeled.
Yet, months later, with head coach Juan Guerra having left just before the start of preseason, that’s one of the exact arguments put forward for why this club immediately shifted gear and went into reverse.
Guerra’s departure hit this club hard, and its timing wasn’t ideal. But that wasn’t the primary reason for Phoenix Rising’s failures this year.
Rising failed in 2024 because, instead of building upon a foundation built at the start of the Guerra project, the club completely failed to replace key pieces that departed the team after a championship win.
Between them, Danny Trejo and Manuel Arteaga were the most formidable attacking pairing in the league. Carlos Harvey brought bite in the midfield, as well as forward-focused drive that nobody has come close to replacing since.
At a fan Q&A in September, Dulle and McCarthy stated that they didn’t find anybody of the caliber they were looking for at the number 9 position over the offseason. That’s why they chose to believe that internal players would step up in ways that none of us really expected, and that they could simply wait until the summer window to make additional moves. That strategy was doomed from the start.
By waiting until the summer, Rising’s leadership played a high stakes gamble that the team would tread water until the point that reinforcements could come in to push them over the line. Their mistake was assuming that a team that was clearly flawed in some ways last season, as evidenced by a their 6th-placed finish, would somehow manage to stay competitive without any of their top attacking players. There was no reasonable scenario in which they would have.
Then, for McCarthy to suggest, as he did at that fans’ Q&A, that a player like Erickson Gallardo – who scored exactly one goal in a Rising shirt – could be a replacement for Danny Trejo – who scored 19 over a similar timeframe – is so laughable as to make you question if he’s even watching the same sport as the rest of us.
Yes, signing a solid goalscoring option is hard. I won’t pretend that I have the answers on how best to do it, or that it’s an easy job. I don’t know how to build a rocket ship to Mars either, but if you told me you could make one with baking soda and vinegar, I would laugh at you, and my reaction wouldn’t be any less valid for the fact that it’s difficult to actually build one. And I wouldn’t hire someone who doesn’t have any real experience in building rockets to clean up your mess, either.
Even with summer recruitments, Rising failed to substantially move the needle on the season. Tomás Ángel never hit form, and another striker saw their move to Phoenix fall through. Both of these were entirely plausible outcomes, and once again outline the risk taken by waiting until the last minute to make the necessary moves.
There’s no shock, then, that Rising’s goal tally dropped substantially from the upper echelons of the league to less than one a match – less than any other team that qualified for the playoffs.
Carlos Harvey’s departure also hit the team hard, especially given how late in the day it came. But to hear that turned into an excuse when Las Vegas Lights, a perennial laughing stock of the league, managed to blow up its entire squad and rebuild completely in around a month and a half, before then going on to finish in the top four… It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, does it?
The simple fact is that Rising’s approach over three whole seasons has done nothing to suggest that this team truly knows how to restore its position as the juggernaut of the Western Conference. McCarthy may not bear responsibility for the first season of the three, but hasn’t done enough in the latter two to convince that he knows how to recover from it.
Phoenix Rising can’t afford to continue to miss out on finishing in the top four because this club is going to bleed money every time that it has to travel for playoff matches. The 2023 playoff run, as magical as it was, was a drain on team finances. This club may not cut corners on its spending in aggressively chasing after players, but they can’t afford to miss out on hosting postseason games. The last was in 2021.
Rising’s attendances grew a paltry amount in 2024, just about 150 people per game, versus the previous year. That came with the backdrop that this team was the defending champion, yet the stadium was still less than 70% full. Ticket revenue may have risen by a larger percentage, but when you add in the context that last minute ticket deals were for the most part eliminated, that isn’t a surprise. It’s also not easily repeatable: you can’t simply increase revenue each year by scrapping cheap options that no longer exist. And the hot summer? Welcome to Phoenix for the forseeable future. It’s probably not going to dip much in the long-run.
That’s another large issue for this team. Bobby Dulle might have to wear different hats as club president, but I shouldn’t be hearing him talk overly about styles of play and how he involves himself at any stage of recruitment besides contracts in one ear, while in the other ear I have members of the club’s ownership complaining to me about empty seats at the stadium. It just doesn’t sound like a wise allocation of resources, and makes me question how much focus is really being given by those at the top to important off-field issues.
Then there’s Brandon McCarthy. His position as a part-owner of the team as well as a sporting director is always going to lead to some awkward situations, but the manner in which he downplayed that dynamic in a preseason interview with Backheeled gives me serious cause for concern.
I’m sure he doesn’t go in to any scenario lording it over anyone else in an unfair manner, but the idea that you can simply wave a magic wand and make the conflict disappear is naive. It’s naive in the same way as getting into shouting arguments with fans in the stadium, straw manning their arguments on social media, or saying that people don’t view you differently for your lack of experience.
It’s that lack of experience now that has likely led to such a short leash from elements of the fanbase. When teams struggle, the trust in club leadership to turn things around has to be grounded in some actual evidence. Clearly, there are increasing elements of the fanbase that simply don’t have that trust.
It’s up to Dulle and McCarthy, in their positions as leadership, to convince people that this club isn’t just being treated as football management fantasy camp, and that they actually know what they’re doing. If the fanbase can’t see that, you can’t blame them for your own failure to demonstrate it properly. Following it up with a head nod, a dismissive smile, and a comment that you love the fact they care so much while doing nothing to really act on their concerns is so patronizing as to only make things worse.
After Danny Stone was let go by the team, Dulle told me in an interview that the club wasn’t planning on changing its wider processes. But with no real bump in results after Stone’s replacement, even when reinforcements were brought in, it’s clear that those processes simply aren’t working. To blindly stick by them is nothing short of ignorance, and if Dulle and McCarthy can’t see that and actually act upon it, then they only further prove their critics to be correct in having doubts.
Phoenix Rising Football Club failed in 2024. They followed up a championship with one of the most disappointing seasons in club history. In doing so, they fired a much-loved coach, who conveniently is also now doing a substantially better job at a different USL Championship team. The club has managed to drive a wedge between its leadership and at least some elements of its fanbase.
This season cannot be repeated. Given that talk is already out there about a stadium being planned in Mesa to host a higher-level team, and that this certainly won’t be the only time that such a topic comes up, this club can’t afford to fail on the field. Nor can they afford to fail off the field.
But, if change isn’t made to the way that Phoenix Rising works, in a football sense or off the field, I fear that we will see mistakes continue to be made over and over again.
Top image: Antranik Tavitian/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK
