Amid all the hubbub of St. Louis City SC’s dream first season — by many standards, the best for a Major League Soccer expansion team — it was easy to forget that the guy making all the right moves also was in his first season as a professional head coach: Bradley Carnell.
Yes, Carnell had 14 games as an interim coach with the New York Red Bulls in 2020, but he’s quick to acknowledge that being an interim coach you never get into the deep stuff. Carnell knew he wasn’t going to get the full-time job with Red Bulls, so he was just keeping things going until the new guy arrived and he would make the big changes.
“You live on the surface a little bit,” he said, “you really don’t dig into the roots too much.”
In St. Louis, he and sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel put the team together, and then, when the season began, it was Carnell nurturing the group they had cultivated. He guided the team to the Western Conference regular-season title and a bunch of expansion team records. And he learned.
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“There’s no copy-paste,” said Carnell, who turned 47 on Sunday. “Obviously I arrived here with a concept, with Lutz, and designed and implemented the concept in 2022 (with City2 the season before City SC began), but when you’re thrown into the trenches in the thick of things and the day to day, there’s no copy-paste. It never really prepares you for being in that moment, and that’s where I thought I grew the most is just part of being a leader. What does a leader do? How does a leader go through the structures and processes of whether you’re catching up with staff, catching up with players?
“I had a lot of copy-paste things ready and raring to go, but it just doesn’t always work that way and I think that’s the best things about it because then you find your own ways and your own niche, how to do things and solve problems when problems arise. I think I’m most appreciative of having the structure, having the copy and paste ready, but I’ve never really needed to use it because each team, each character, each group, presents a different set of problems, so the things I’ve experienced in my old coaching jobs, I thought they would apply here and it wasn’t always the same case, which I’m grateful for, actually.”
The challenges of the first season were high: International players who had never played in MLS before. Young players who had never played in MLS before. Players who had hardly ever played together before. They came together seemingly right away, and that was something Carnell didn’t think would happen as quickly as it did.
“I didn’t think that we could get all on the same page so soon,” he said, “and play a style that presents a lot of adversity because we put guys into positions where you sink or swim. Most of the guys learned to swim really quickly and then we put them into the deep end and then they learned to swim in the deep end as well.”
Goalkeeper Roman Burki, the most experienced player on the team and the player Carnell tabbed as captain, said he could see Carnell develop over the course of the season as a coach.
“We communicated a lot,” Burki said. “He knows exactly how I am. I know exactly how he is. Sometimes we have differences and we just have to find the middle part that both are happy with. He tries to understand my point of view. I try to understand his point of view and I think he experienced a lot in his first year because I know I'm a player who's very emotional.
City SC coach Bradley Carnell yells in the second half of his team's 4-1 loss to Sporting Kansas City in the opener of a playoff series on Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023, at CityPark.
"During the game, you see me shouting a lot. Maybe also in halftime, I tried to just push the guys with loud words, maybe it's sometimes a little bit like too much for the coach, but also it's good, like he knows exactly how I am, I know how he handles situations and sometimes it was a little bit different and we just accept each other or we respect the way we do it. And I think we grew even more together like this and now we have also a little bit of a plan that we want to adjust our game, style of game play, and I'm very happy about that.”
“First and foremost, Brad is really approachable,” said defender Tim Parker, the team’s vice captain. “And I think that's very important for the entire roster to understand that. He's willing to talk and discuss things that some other coaches in this league may not be willing to. So his understandability by being a former player really opens up the doors to the players in general being able to go to him with questions, problems. Why am I not playing? What can I do better or stuff like that. So he's definitely very open to that, and he has that open-door policy which makes him very, in my eyes, approachable as a player.”
There was no time for a vacation for Carnell after the season. He went briefly to Florida but was still on the clock, preparing for the draft or recruiting players on Zoom calls while there. He would have liked to gone to Europe and spent time watching another club work, like he was able to do in New York, but the shortness of the offseason and logistics didn’t allow for it. Instead, he and his staff watched a lot of soccer, constantly texting each other on weekends with things they were seeing in games that they wanted to show the team.
The team wants to be better in Year 2, even though Carnell knows that an improved team won’t necessarily mean a better finish in the standings. And Carnell, who thanks to his early hiring by City SC is already 14th in MLS in tenure with his current team, knows he needs to be better.
“It’s mostly for me as a leader,” he said. “Every successful manager has impeccable leadership skills of men, situational management, halftime management, so all these types of things. If I’m looking at it being critical, that’s where I can improve.”
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