Backpass: The Case For, and Against, Robin Fraser

This season is a mess. Should the responsibility, and the ax, fall squarely on Manager Robin Fraser?

I am on record as being agnostic on firings. I’ve been fired. I don’t advocate others get fired - even well paid soccer coaches.¹

But let’s face it: soccer is a results-driven business. If you don’t win games, changes will be made in order to make sure you do. The players generally get swapped in and out when their contracts expire. But sometimes it isn’t the players - it’s the manager.

Noted soccer expert Matt Pollard largely concurs with this. He’s also unlikely to call for any heads on platters. But as an astute observer of recent MLS history, he notes that finishing last does not bode well for coaches.

Will Fraser be fired? Should Fraser be fired?

So let’s take a moment to explore what’s wrong with the Rapids, what isn’t, and which of those things we can squarely assign to Robin Fraser as something he is responsible for.

Don’t Fire Fraser: The Case For Robin

1. This is GM Pádraig Smith’s mess.

Here’s a fun thought experiment.

Phil Neville was Inter Miami’s head coach from 2021 to June 2023. This season he ran up a putrid 5-0-10 record (WTL), good enough to have the team squarely in the bottom of the table. He was fired on June 1st. Shortly thereafter, Inter Miami added Lionel Messi, Sergio Busquets, and Jordi Alba.² This helped Miami storm through the Leagues Cup in dominant fashion, including the recent thrashing of defending Eastern Conference Champions Philadelphia Union, on their way to earning the Cup Saturday with a penalty shootout win over Nashville SC. Messi has had 10 goals in his first 7 games for Inter. Miami currently looks unbeatable.

So the question is: Would Phil Neville be 5-0-10 if he had Messi? Would Tata Martino have been anywhere near as successful in Leagues Cup without Busquets and Messi?

Probably not. So the parallel question is ‘Would Robin Fraser be more successful if he had better players?’ Certainly he’d be successful with Messi and Busquets, but then of course, literally anybody could. My 10-year-old could manage that team. “Leo, Sergio, do your thing. Everybody else, run around a lot. Also, don’t forget to play defense.”

In other words, the players are lousy and that ain’t Robin’s fault. He crafted a playoff-caliber team in 2020 and 2021 because he had Diego Rubio, Jack Price, Sam Vines, and Kellyn Acosta. The current Rapids are a collection of ‘the other guys’ from that team - Cole Bassett, Lalas Abubakar, Keegan Rosenberry, etc. The new players added - Connor Ronan, Sam Nicholson, Andreas Maxsø - haven’t proven to be good enough for MLS³, and that’s the GM’s fault.

This theory makes sense, but it’s also an eternal problem - that it’s all the GMs fault, always, forever. This also could also be seen as an argument not for ‘let’s hang on to Robin; it’s not his fault,’ but rather ‘the whole lot is rotten. Fire ‘em all.’

2. Yeah but injuries!

The Rapids two best players are Jack Price and Diego Rubio. Out of a possible 4,140 minutes they could have collectively played this season, they have played just 640 minutes. Any coach is going to struggle without their best two players, so it’d be better to evaluate Robin Fraser when he’s had a full season of Diego and Jack.

The Jack Price loss, in specific, has been a huge problem over the past two seasons.

The 2021 Colorado Rapids had 9 goals from dead-ball situations, the highest in MLS. Captain Jack was responsible for the pass on 8 of those (Steven Beitashour had the other assist). Price had 12 total assists on the season; the Rapids won the Western Conference. He was good for 2,531 minutes on the year.

In 2022, calf problems limited Jack to just 1,110 minutes. The Rapids produced only 5 goals from dead-ball situations - 13th-best in the league. Jack had 3 total assists and the Rapids 10th out of 14 teams in the West. One thing that kept Colorado afloat was Diego Rubio’s fantastic goal production, as the striker put in 16 goals.

Price AND Rubio been out for almost all of 2023, and the Rapids have suffered. To date, they have a league-worst 16 goals. They’ve created 4 goals from dead-balls (not league worst, but not good, either) , all from Connor Ronan. Diego Rubio has just 1 goal. Put the confluence of those two being hurt and nobody stepping up to produce in the void, and it’s a catastrophe.

Note: this is a corollary to ‘It’s Pádraig’s fault’ in the sense that a decent football team should have some depth. The Rapids tend not to have the finances to allow for depth. But, to be fair, remove the two best players from any team and they’ll struggle. The guys we hoped would step up - Bryan Acosta, Cole Bassett, Darren Yapi - really haven’t. That’s because they aren’t DPs. Shit happens. We’ll go again in 2024 and maybe everything will be ok because we’ll be healthier.

3. The success in 2020 and 2021

You don’t fire Robin because coaches shouldn’t be judged on a small data set. Every coach has a bad year or two. This theory is that we should take the long view - let every coach who has demonstrated success in a couple seasons prove that the success wasn’t a fluke, but rather the failure is the anomaly. Patience, grasshopper.

4. The problems aren’t tactical

The simplest way to evaluate tactical success, other than wins and losses, is Expected Goals For, Expected Goals Allowed, and Expected Points. That filters out luck and tends to demonstrate whether the team in question is producing quality chances while limiting good chances for the opponent. Which, to my mind, is what a good coach does: set the team up with an idea that they can execute which will, if they strike the ball well, give them more goals than their opponent.

Colorado has produced an xGF of 25.51, but has, as I mentioned above, just 16 goals; they’re underperforming expectations by 9.49 goals. Only Minnesota has underperformed worse in goal scoring (24 goals on 35.15 xG).

The Rapids xGA is 28.72 against an actual Goals Allowed of 30 – so roughly they defend as expected and are not particularly unlucky at letting low-probability shots become golazos. The maths say that this xGF and xGA together should produce an Expected Points of 31.12; which is 15th out of 29 MLS teams. So they should be decent! For comparison, Inter Miami have the worst xPts in the league of 19.59. They also have a league-worst 18 points. Of course, they no longer care about any of that, because now they have Messi and Busquets.

Instead, the Rapids have just 19 points. They’re underperforming expectation by 12.12 points. That’s the second largest Points to Expect Points gap in MLS. (NYRB has a 13.10 pt gap, with 39.10 xPts and a paltry 26 points to show for it.)

How to explain it? The Rapids finishing is atrocious. The team gets into goal dangerous places, but with a woefully inadequate attacking group, (Kevin Cabral, Sam Nicholson, Darren Yapi, and Cole Bassett) they aren’t getting the job done. Those four players have produced 9.4 xG but only 5 goals. However, the problem really is team-wide. Out of 30 players who have suited up for the Rapids this year, only one has produced more goals than expected: Lalas Abubakar (2 goals on 0.8 xG).

Robin has gotten these guys to create changes, and the math says they should be right where most of us predicted: mid-table and in competition for a playoff spot. The players just can’t score, though. Robin’s done his part. His strikers and forwards have let him down.

Fire Robin Fraser: The Case Against Him

1. Lack of individual player growth

Quick: name a player who Robin Fraser inherited or acquired in 2020 or 2021 who has steadily gotten better under the head coach’s tutelage. Diego Rubio? He had a great 2022, but is it a blip or a trend? Maybe I’ll give you Diego Rubio.

Other than that, you’ve got a bunch of crafty veterans that have staved off father-time without totally degrading, like Michael Barrios, Danny Wilson, Steven Beitashour, and Keegan Rosenberry⁴. You’ve got some mid-career players who haven’t really shown significant improvement under Fraser: Cabral, Jonathan Lewis, Sam Nicholson, Lalas Abubakar. Then you’ve got a bunch of young players that are playing-League-of-Legends-in-their-mom’s-basement levels of ‘failure to launch.’ Cole Bassett; Darren Yapi; Calvin Harris; Ralph Priso; Moïse Bombito; Anthony Markanich; Oliver Larraz.⁵

The lack of development amongst these young guys irk me a ton. OK, so let’s say you have a team that sucks. But you’ve got a group of young, talented, hungry players. Maybe your team doesn’t win much with them - but shouldn’t they see a lot of minutes? Show improvement? All the listed youngsters have played good minutes, but somehow they seem to make the same sloppy mistakes or fail to show progress. Harris shows flashes. Yapi looks great right up to the moment he has to shoot. Bombito looked really good for a few games and suddenly seems to make incredibly poor choices at the exact wrong moment. Markanich was deemed unnecessary.⁶ Bassett and Priso look like they’re actually getting worse.⁷ Fraser won’t play Larraz with the first team – which is weird because I really doubt he could do much worse than most of our starters.

Do we know this is Fraser’s fault? Of course not. But good coaches take good players and make them great. Robin Fraser helped made Sam Vines great in 2020 and 2021; Auston Trusty in 2021 and 2022⁸. Since then and other than that, player growth has stagnated.

2. Zero actual trophies

One mother-fucking trophy. In franchise history. Twenty-eight years in MLS. And just one trophy. Robin Fraser is just another Rapids coach with zero trophies in a long line of Rapids coaches with zero trophies.

No coach in modern MLS history has had as much *access* to trophies as Robin Fraser. He could have won MLS Cup or the ‘MLS is Back’ trophy in 2020. MLS Cup in 2021, 2022, and 2023. US Open Cup in 2022 and 2023. The 2022 Rapids were in Concacaf Champions League, but were knocked out of that. The 2023 Rapids had a shot at Leagues Cup.⁹ That’s nine trophies we could have won in the past four years, and we have none.¹⁰

By this I mean - if we’re going to slag Pádraig for constructing this weak-ass team for 2023, then it’s only fair we give him credit for constructing the beast of a team that dominated in 2021. But of course, there’s no trophy for winning the Western Conference and then getting knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. And when it comes to game-by-game results, managers often get a lot of credit. Or blame. Meaning - there’s no reason we shouldn’t have gone deeper in the 2021 playoffs. Or lifted our second MLS Cup. Or rather, the reason is that Fraser’s game management was lacking, and we lost.

3. Adapt or die

The dodo was a big, happy, dumb flightless bird on the island of Mauritius. Contrary to popular belief, it was not hunted to extinction because it was tasty and dumb and easy to catch by sailors. It was rats, dogs, pigs and cats that wiped out the dodo. They laid eggs in nests on the beach, and after ships began visiting the island and humans began living on the island in growing numbers, the nests were raided or trampled by all the human’s pets and livestock. The dodo never had a chance, because it couldn’t adapt - or more accurately, it didn’t know how.

The Rapids are not a dodo. They’ve got a lot of smart soccer men on that staff. But they aren’t successfully adapting.

The team is still roughly playing in the same 3-4-3 they played in last season. The team is still executing a long-long-short strategy of long diagonal after long diagonal that forces the opposing fullbacks to follow our wingers as they stretch the field; then the Rapids use those runs to allow Ronan and Wilson to occasionally fake the long ball and go shorter and up the gut.

Also, there’s only three different corner kick routines that I’ve seen them run over and over for the past three years. The team’s tactics are old and stale, but I keep seeing them.

There are many other ways of structuring and organizing the team, many other tactics, approaches, and set plays. It’s time to make some changes. If we don’t, we will die.

4. If Robin’s way is the Rapids Way, and the results are this bad, shouldn’t we do something else?

Robin Fraser has a style of play. Clearly, however, it isn’t really working at this club right now.

Robin’s preferred tactical style is basically ‘with the right amount of movement and possession, mixed with keeping in position to defend when needed, we can go toe-to-toe with any team in this league.’

My response is: no, you can’t.

I said this on the podcast this week - small market teams need to use moneyball tactics to exploit market inefficiencies. The Rapids, and the Rapids Way, is not doing that.

The Rapids do not spend the money to compete toe to toe with the same tactics as the better teams in this league, but we keep trying it anyway.

Colorado refuses to buy the big money DPs it needs to play beautiful, flowing, attacking 4-3-3 football. It’s just not the direction the ownership wants. And before you tell me ‘we can’t afford Messi/Busquets/Chicharito/Vela/Muktar/Almiron’, let me remind you that Jorge Mas is worth about $1 billion. LAFC’s ownership group is probably worth $4 billion.¹¹ Arthur Blank is worth an estimated $7.9 billion.

Stan Kroenke is worth $12.9 billion. That’s the assets of the owners of Inter Miami, LAFC, and Atlanta United combined. If we wanted three exceptional $10 million a year DPs on $100 million transfer fees, our owner could do it. Hell, if we wanted a team of clones from the DNA of Garrincha, Pelé, and Johann Cruyff, Kroenke could probably afford to do it, a lá Jurassic Park. He simply chooses not to.¹²

So we should be playing small-ball. Pay medium-sized money for under-valued assets. Spend big on affordable positions like d-mid or right back. Have a bunch of TAM-level midfielders and defenders, and play a brutal, old school bunker-and-counter. Be a defensive team and make it miserable to score on us.

Or! Be a low-skill, high-athleticism team. High press and counter-press and under-press and over-press the shit out of every opponent. Just terrorize your opponent into turnovers non-stop. Run them into the ground, and have the endurance to be better than them at altitude from minute 80 to 90.

A reminder that the Rapids Way stated: “going forward we will look to target players who play with boldness and urgency. We will look for players with high soccer IQ and game intelligence. Explosive players with good mobility. Players whose first instinct is to drive forward, to seek out the line-breaking pass, and to take on his opposite number.”

My take is: we can’t afford the players that play with boldness and urgency; or players that drive forward and seek out the line-breaking pass. We need to find other guys. Cheaper guys.

The only thing that makes this section, ‘Ditch the Rapids Way’, different from the section above, ‘Adapt or Die’, is a long term vs short term approach. Robin cannot be beholden to the Rapids Way ideology if he’s convinced it won’t work. He’s got to sack up and head into Pádraig Smith’s office and say ‘we can’t play bold and urgent line-breaking soccer with a bottom-quartile payroll. We need a new approach.’ My critique in ‘Adapt or Die’ is that Robin hasn’t found short-term fixes to the teams problems this year, and that’s worthy of firing. My critique in this fourth section - ‘Ditch the Rapids Way’ - is that Robin hasn’t built an ethos or a team plan or a process, like Jim Curtain has in Philadelphia or Brian Schmetzer has in Seattle or Gary Smith (!) has in Nashville.¹³ He’s been given round pegs, but he’s got square holes, and he keeps jamming them in there instead of re-envisioning the whole damn thing.

…

Should Robin be fired? I don’t know. Not for me to say.

But you should read the points above, and choose the ones that are most compelling ones to you. And then tell your friends. Or post on social media. Or email or tweet us at HTHL.

Maybe Robin is the cause for the failures this year.

Or maybe he’s just a convenient scapegoat for a whole bunch of problems he isn’t responsible for.

Maybe, if we simply trust the process, next year will be better.

I mean, it can’t be worse, right?

1. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, like being incredibly incompetent, or engaging in racism, sexism, homophobia, or player abuse of any kind.

2. Messi and Busquets are on DP deals. Alba is a TAM player. Miami officially (on the league website, lists Gregore as their third DP, with Leo Campana listed as a Young DP. Which is

3. I think those three are good enough for MLS, but they haven’t proven it with wins yet.

4. Feels weird to count Keegan Rosenberry as a ‘crafty veteran’, but the dude is 29 1/2. He’s no spring chicken.

5. I’m excluding Daniel Leyva and Connor Ronan; Leyva hasn’t been here that long and I’m just not convinced he’s anything other than a replacement-level player. Ronan is great, and has been great, and I see no evidence that any of that is due to Robin Fraser any more than Tata Martino can take credit for Messi.

6. Markanich was great and I am super disappointed we traded him. However, Gutman seems like a solid player. Not someone that’ll win us a cup, but one less thing to worry about at a key position.

7. It could be argued that they are not getting worse. This is an optical illusion. Rather Bassett and Priso weren’t all that great to begin with and if they start regularly, it shows. Personally, I think they’re both capable of better and they just need to be told how.

8. Did he help Trusty? Did Trusty simply get out of the logjam in Philly and go to a team that needed him on the backline? We’ll never know.

9. Lol no we didn’t they should have just engraved Messi’s name on that thing when he landed at the airport in Miami a month ago and just handed that shit to him.

10. Yeah, I know 2023 isn’t over. But we ain’t winning MLS Cup.

11. The article says $4.5 billion, but the largest owner in 2014 was Vincent Tan, and his 20% stake was bought out in 2020.

12. Many, many times I have written about our owner not giving a shit about the Rapids. The Rapids are not a soccer team to Kroenke. They are an asset. An investment. Kroenke sees the valuation of the team rise year over year and makes sure management keep operating loses to a minimum, and he’s satisfied. It is very hard for the GM and coach to pursue a trophy when the owner does not care a wit about a trophy.

13. Former Rapids head coach Gary Smith has skippered Nashville since 2020. they have never missed the playoffs. They have a clear tactical identity. They just came in second in Leagues Cup. He’s built something there.