The first proper conversation I had with Joe Erwin lasted nearly an hour and I don’t think we mentioned results once. That caught me off guard. Most owners want to know how quickly you can get promoted, how many goals you’ll score, whether you prefer a back four or a back three. Joe kept coming back to Greenville itself. He talked about the city the way people talk about somewhere they’ve chosen rather than somewhere they simply happen to live. He’d built businesses here, watched downtown change, seen restaurants open, breweries fill up, families move back into neighbourhoods that had been forgotten, and somewhere in all of that he’d become convinced football should be part of the same story. He said a football club should leave the city healthier than it found it. I wrote that sentence down because, honestly, owners don’t usually speak like that.

You can tell pretty quickly whether someone is using words like community because they genuinely believe them or because they know supporters like hearing them. Joe never sounded like he was selling anything. He’d spent years building companies around people before he ever owned a football club, and I think that changes how you see success. Winning matters, claro que sí, but winning becomes part of something bigger rather than the whole thing. I left that meeting thinking he didn’t really want the best football club in South Carolina. He wanted Greenville to have something that belonged to it, something people could point at with pride on a Saturday night.

Then Zach Prince walked in and the conversation changed completely.

I’ve met sporting directors who try to impress you with scouting reports and spreadsheets. Zach just started asking football questions. Not the easy ones either. He wanted to know what happens after the first press gets beaten. How I decide which centre-back is allowed to step into midfield. Why one wing-back holds width while the other arrives late inside. We ended up standing in front of a whiteboard for nearly forty minutes drawing arrows, rubbing them out and drawing different ones. At one point he laughed and said, “I think we’re arguing over about three yards of space.” He wasn’t wrong. Those three yards win matches.

The thing I appreciated most was that he wasn’t looking for revolution. He’d spent years helping build this squad around a three-at-the-back identity and he wasn’t interested in throwing all of that away because a new coach had arrived with fresh ideas. “The structure stays,” he said. “The details can evolve.” I loved hearing that because too many clubs mistake change for progress. Football doesn’t work like that. You don’t improve by setting fire to everything that came before you. You improve by understanding why it existed in the first place. A 3-4-2-1 isn’t a prison anyway. I can still create the same relationships. The same overloads. The same rotations. Football isn’t the formation printed on the teamsheet. Football is what the players become once the game starts moving.

Walking around the training ground that first week, I kept noticing how different the rhythm felt. Knoxville always felt like a group of brilliant people doing three jobs each because they had to. Here everyone has a role. Analysts analysing. Physios doing physio work. Recruitment talking recruitment. Coaches coaching. It sounds obvious until you’ve lived without it. I suddenly found myself with more time to think about football and, strangely, that’s both exciting and dangerous because if you give me another two free hours every day I’ll probably invent another tactical problem that didn’t exist yesterday.

I watched the squad train. Bueno… that’s when I started smiling.

You can tell within about fifteen minutes whether players understand football or simply play it. Not whether they’re good. That’s different. Whether they understand pictures. Whether they scan before receiving. Whether they naturally arrive five yards away instead of ten. Whether their first thought after passing is where the next space will appear. These lads are intelligent. That’s the word I kept writing in my notebook. Intelligent. They solve problems instead of waiting for someone else to solve them.

Markus Anderson and Pedro Velurtas caught my eye straight away. Proper wing-backs. They don’t just run because they’ve been told to run. They recognise when width matters and when it doesn’t. Julian Carrasco… madre mía. Every Argentine coach falls in love with a number ten eventually and I don’t think I’m going to be any different. Then there’s Tavio d’Almeida, who might actually be my favourite after one session. Centre-backs are supposed to defend. He looks like he wants to organise the whole game. I watched him carry the ball twenty yards into midfield during a small-sided game and thought, “Yeah… we’re going to have some fun.”

People keep asking if there are players I’m worried about. Honestly? No. That doesn’t mean everyone fits perfectly. Nobody ever does. But I’d rather coach players into ideas than coach fear out of them. That’s much harder.

The expectations are different too. Nobody talks about surviving here. Nobody celebrates finishing in the play-offs because they’ve done that almost every year since the club was founded. They’ve won this league before. They’ve lifted trophies. They’ve built a reputation for competing every season. You don’t even need someone to tell you that. You can feel it in the building. Standards live in small habits. The cones are already out before training starts. Video clips are cut before you’ve asked for them. Meetings begin on time because everybody arrives early. It isn’t dramatic. It’s just professional.

I realised after a few days that this is probably the first time in my career where I’ve walked into a club that already believes it’s supposed to be successful. Knoxville asked me to help convince them they belonged. Greenville already believes it belongs. My job isn’t to create belief anymore. My job is to make a very good football team become an excellent one.

If I’m honest… that’s exactly the challenge I’ve been chasing.