It’s Josh Wolff‘s show now.
After shepherding the Verde and Black to an expectation-shattering top-four finish in 2022, Austin FC‘s 45-year-old head coach this month enters his third season at the helm hoping to continue his rapid ascent among the ranks of exciting young managers in Major League Soccer.
The breakneck pace should feel familiar to Wolff; things have rarely gone sluggishly in his coaching career since retiring as a player in 2012. Within seven years he had cycled through two MLS clubs and the U.S. men’s national team as an assistant coach, eventually earning the nod from Austin FC majority owner Anthony Precourt to take the Verde reins as Austin FC’s inaugural “gaffer.”
This season marks Wolff’s latest and arguably most impressive career level-up, though it’s not one he would have expected, nor likely even wanted. That’s because Wolff couldn’t have anticipated last month’s wild chain of events that eventually led to Claudio Reyna‘s resignation as Austin FC’s sporting director, followed swiftly by Wolff’s own appointment as the interim replacement.
It puts Wolff, at least for now, in the exclusive club of MLS coaches who also hold the top authority at their clubs on matters of roster construction. The others? Bob Bradley of Toronto FC, Bruce Arena of the New England Revolution, and Peter Vermes of Sporting Kansas City, with a combined 48 seasons of MLS head coaching experience between them. Two of them (Bradley and Vermes) even coached Wolff as a player.
It’s a rare form of double duty that represents the ultimate form of trust a club can bestow upon its head coach: complete carte blanche to not only manage the roster but also sculpt it in the coach’s own image. It’s generally understood to be an incredibly difficult dynamic to master, reserved for those who know the ins and outs of the global and domestic game better than most and can coach a match in their sleep. Wolff has certainly accrued some impressive bona fides in his brief coaching career, but he’s still relatively green. He’s not been handed the keys to the car as much as told to grab the wheel and keep it steady on the road.
Luckily for him, Austin FC managed to get the majority of its offseason business done before Reyna abdicated his post, and according to the club Reyna is still active within the Verde front office in an advisory capacity. That could be key to Wolff hitting the ground running in his expanded role. Equally important will be Sean Rubio, a high-ranking executive on Austin FC’s technical side who was also elevated to take over responsibilities previously held by Reyna and could be a candidate to take over permanently as sporting director in the near future.
So far, Wolff’s focus has remained on the team he already has assembled, one he hopes can build on the success of 2022. “We know we have to keep evolving and haven’t done anything other than have a very good second year,” Wolff recently told mlssoccer.com. “There’s ambitions inside our club that we want to be recognized as one of the best. To do that, you’ve got to do it year after year and you have to lift trophies. That’s how you establish it.”
There’s no immediate reason to doubt what Austin FC could be capable of in the coming months despite the front-office shake-up, if the early results from preseason are any indication: The Verde and Black bossed USL Championship side El Paso Locomotive 5-0 in El Tree’s preseason debut on Saturday at the St. David’s Performance Center.
This article appears in February 10 • 2023.
