Real Salt Lake is a proud club with high expectations. Thus far this season those expectations have not been met and General Manager Craig Waibel readily acknowledges that.
In his weekly interview with The Bill & OC Show on ESPN 700, he talked about the culprit behind the team’s struggles this season.
“One word sums it up: Consistency. Not just in performance. We’ve had a lot of injuries. We’ve had extremely inconsistent performances from week-to-week. So consistency throughout the entire organization,” Waibel said candidly. “It’s been a little bit unstable and we’ve got to work diligently to create stability. It’s another word you hear thrown around. The truth of the matter is we haven’t been consistent and it’s a reflection of what’s going on, top-to-bottom. It’s not just the players. It’s not just the coaching staff. It’s not just the office. It’s a combination that we need to sort out and in the last few weeks we’ve addressed a lot of the inconsistencies and pieces we feel have contributed to it.”
RSL has restructured its leadership in the office in recent weeks, with Waibel moving from Technical Director to General Manager and others, including Chief Business Officer Andrew Carroll and Vice President, Soccer Administration Rob Zarkos. With those oars all rowing in the same direction, the organization hopes to take great steps on and off the field.
“It’s a matter of righting those and getting back on track in terms of our goals and the way we pursue them,” Waibel said. “I think we’ve pursued goals with less venom than in years past. And we need to get back on track.”
On the field, Waibel wants to improve the depth of RSL’s squad. This year alone, 27 different players have appeared in Claret-and-Cobalt with only three players – Tony Beltran, Luke Mulholland and Kyle Beckerman – starting 20 or more games. Because of injuries, suspensions and international duty, Head Coach Jeff Cassar has needed to look deeper down the bench for contributions from his team than typically is expected in a season.
To Waibel, the growth of the league has meant a greater need to be ready to load the team’s depth.
“The league keeps growing rapidly at a really, really incredible pace in terms of the investment and the level of player that we’re starting to attract. The depth becomes essential. We have to plan on having international players. We have to plan on that ‘reserve player’ starting multiple games,” he said. “It’s not the old version of MLS where you put together a core group of players and very rarely do they get called up and we’re watching international friendlies with everyone else’s players. We’re a league now that we have national team players built in throughout every roster. Depth is something that has to be considered in the succession planning moving forward in the next two, three, four, five years. When we build a starting lineup, we have to build it with pieces that can complement when we lose players to international duty or to injury that it doesn’t devastate a lineup. It’s essential we now grow with the league and accept that mentality.”
To hear the full interview, click here.
