I was handed the financial report at the start of the year and, honestly, I barely looked at it.

I remember thinking it was almost funny. If they wanted my opinion on the finances, surely that meant they were finally going to ask my opinion on everything else? Bueno, apparently not. The recruitment continued largely as it always had, players arriving “for me” rather than because of me, and I want to be careful here because these weren’t bad footballers. Far from it. We wouldn’t be where we are today if the recruitment had been bad, and actually I think the profiles increasingly fit the football we’re trying to play. But every player has another number beside his name that I hadn’t really considered before. His salary. His value. The length of his contract. What it would cost to replace him. Suddenly I wasn’t only looking at whether a player could help us win on Saturday. I was asking whether Miami FC could afford for him to help us win on Saturday.

Completing my Continental C licence changed the conversation. We sat down a few months ago and I told the board that if they wanted me to take more responsibility, then I needed to be allowed to say when something didn’t make sense. We are achieving what they asked of me on the pitch, but there is another league table that nobody sees, and I don’t particularly like where we sit in that one. We need to reduce the wage bill, control what we’re spending on staff and, most importantly, become a club that actually generates money from footballers. Without a conventional scouting operation, we have to be creative about how we recruit too. Agent offers, contacts, opportunities in markets we understand. It isn’t glamorous. Nobody puts the cost-per-minute graph on Facebook after a victory. But if I want this project to exist in three years, I have to care about it.

That’s why some of the departures perhaps make more sense than they first appeared. Isaiah Parente brought us $300,000 and Santiago Morales another $475,000, despite neither being central to my plans. Those were relatively simple decisions. Benja was different. Muchísimo más difícil. He had ten goal contributions, had become important to how we played and was one of the footballers I trusted most, but he was also costing us more than $100,000 a year in wages and had already told us he didn’t intend to renew when his contract expired in eighteen months. We could pretend sentiment mattered more than arithmetic, keep him, enjoy another season and potentially watch millions of dollars walk through the door for nothing. Or we could accept what Miami FC has to be. Auxerre triggered the $3.4 million release clause immediately. Perhaps that tells us we set it too low. It also tells us Benja had outgrown this level. Sometimes doing your job properly means developing somebody until you can no longer justify keeping him.

The South American market has helped us enormously because agent offers have given us access to players we otherwise might never have found. Leonardo Vieira, Renaldo Ruschel and Claudio Barzola aren’t simply bodies filling holes either. I want them to create pressure inside the squad. Vieira gives me time to decide what happens with Miguel Pajaro, who is approaching an important contract decision while already being one of our more expensive players. Ruschel gives us another option while I decide what a thirty-two-year-old Joel Sonora looks like next season. Barzola, once fit, gives me an alternative to Dassler. That last one matters because I didn’t give the green light to Dassler in January and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my mind. Sixty thousand dollars a year for a player who isn’t close enough to the first team is a gamble this club cannot keep making. Now that I have more influence, I have to own those decisions too.

Benji Caplin is perhaps the clearest example of what I want us to become smarter at. Losing Cremaschi could have caused panic. Instead, Caplin arrives on loan from Athletico Paranaense with no wage contribution and gives us time. Maybe he becomes fantastic. Maybe John Ruvalcaba responds to the opportunity and makes the position his own. Either outcome helps Miami, and neither requires us to throw money at the problem because we’re frightened of having a hole in the team. Eso me gusta. Recruitment should give the coach solutions, but it should also give the club options.

I’ve even asked the analytics department to send me a monthly cost-efficiency report now, which is a sentence I never imagined I’d write when I became a coach. Cost per minute against cost per goal contribution. Simple. Cruel, sometimes, but useful. Francisco Javier Castillo and David Sibrian jump off the page because they’re giving us first-team performances on salaries well below the squad average. Jamir Johnson and Arney Rocha are similar: affordable footballers producing regularly. Joel costs more, but he’s contributing enough to justify it, while Matías Robetto has provided excellent output despite much of his football coming from the bench. The centre-backs don’t give us goals, obviously, but they’re relatively inexpensive and perform their primary jobs well. That’s the sort of squad I want: not cheap for the sake of being cheap, but a squad where I can explain why every dollar is being spent.

Then you reach the uncomfortable names. Blake Gillingham is the backup goalkeeper yet costs almost twice as much as our starter. Why? Josh Torquato hasn’t produced enough to justify costing significantly more than Christian Cappis and, at twenty-one with a valuation above $1 million, I have to ask whether his greatest contribution to Miami might eventually be the transfer fee he brings us. John Ruvalcaba is different because the opportunity is now right in front of him. We gave him a new contract because we believe in him, but “project” cannot remain a permanent status. He’s twenty, Cremaschi has gone and there are minutes available. Ahora te toca, John. Show me.

Luquinhas might be the hardest conversation because it brings us back to where all of this started. He was another Santiago Aguirre signing rather than somebody I specifically requested, and because I’ve used him so little his cost per minute is enormous without the output to compensate for it. Maybe that’s unfair on him. Perhaps the failure is mine because I haven’t found the role. But I asked myself the same thing about Dassler and eventually there comes a point where being patient with everybody becomes expensive. If I now have a voice in building this squad, I also have to be prepared to use it when the answer is no.

That’s the part of management nobody really tells you about. I thought greater control would mean choosing more players. I’m beginning to understand that it mostly means deciding which ones you can afford to lose.