Five games. That’s all we’ve had together.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Five matches and already people start asking whether this looks like a Tomás Villalba team. I understand why – they’re impatient because they care – but football doesn’t work like that. If changing a club only took four hundred and fifty minutes then every owner in the world would sack their manager every other month and start again. Ojalá!  If only it were that easy. The reality is much less glamorous. You spend those first weeks thinking you’re going to teach football, then you realise you’re actually learning far more than you’re teaching.

Those first two defeats forced me to admit something that was uncomfortable. Especially Brooklyn. I walked away annoyed, convinced we’d underperformed, but after watching it back a second and third time I realised the players weren’t really the problem. I was. I’d been trying to coach the team I wanted rather than the team standing in front of me. There’s a massive difference. This isn’t my squad – not yet. Yes, we’ve started bringing players in and we’ll continue to do that over the coming weeks, but this group already had habits before I arrived. Instead of trying to erase them overnight, I had to understand them first.

So I took stock of where we sit as a team and where everybody else in this league sits. I spent three mornings with my analyst over coffee building graphs – not because I love graphs, madre mía, I’d much rather be out on the grass – but because numbers remove emotion. Emotion tells you Brooklyn was a disaster. Graphs tell you something else. I knew that we’re already a ball-playing side. Since I’ve been here we’ve averaged around fifty-two percent possession and eighty-eight percent pass completion. That’s structured possession football, moving the needle a bit further upwards since I took over. That’s not chaos. In fact, it was exactly the platform I’d hoped to inherit. The football with the ball wasn’t the issue at all. The question became much more interesting than that.

How do we stop everybody else playing the football they want to play?

That became the obsession. Not our possession. Theirs. Not how many passes Miami complete, but how many passes the opposition suddenly can’t. I figured we could crack this quicker – beating styles that have been put together over years felt ‘easier’ than trying to build a style that could take years. Against Indy Eleven they completed fewer passes than they normally do. Brooklyn did too, despite beating us. Hartford had far less possession than their average and completed the ball much less cleanly. Detroit were exactly the same. Four of our first five opponents have walked away playing below the level they’re accustomed to with the ball. That isn’t coincidence. That’s the beginning of an identity.

Pittsburgh was probably the most important game of the lot because, on paper, it looked like we’d taken a step backwards. They had more possession than usual and their pass completion actually increased. If you only looked at those numbers you’d think we’d abandoned everything. We hadn’t. I’d deliberately backed us off. Less emotional pressing. Less trying to win the ball in five 
seconds because that’s what I wanted. More accepting what these players are capable of today rather than what I hope they’ll become six months from now. We defended space better. We stayed compact. In league play, their average is almost twelve shots a game – they managed seven on that dat. They normally reach the final third against around seventy-two times – we reduced them to forty-six. They had the ball, sí, but they had it where we allowed them to have it. That’s completely different.

When I first arrived, Miami reminded me of basketball. End to end. Constant transitions. Panicked clearances. Blocks. Counter-attacks. Nobody ever stopped long enough to control the game. Now we’re defending fewer actions inside our own penalty area. The centre-backs aren’t constantly throwing themselves in front of shots. The clearances are calmer because they aren’t arriving under the same pressure. We’ve only kept one clean sheet and I’d obviously like more, but clean sheets don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes the biggest improvement is the one nobody notices because the danger never arrives in the first place.

We didn’t come here to reinvent football in two months. We came here to build something stable enough that, one day, we can become brave again. That’s the order. Stability first. Confidence second. We’ve added three players this week – Santiago Morales, Isaiah Parente and Jonathan Tomkinson – we’ll bed them in, get them to learn the ropes, build their confidence, build them into the team. Then comes the football I really believe in. I think people assume coaches arrive with one fixed idea and force every player into it. That’s ego. My job isn’t to prove I’m clever. My job is to leave these players in a better place than I found them. For the first time since arriving, I think we’re beginning to see the same picture. Eso es lo importante. Everything else can wait.