The first few days in San Diego were mostly about getting to know the people already running the club around me. This is a much bigger operation than Miami, with an established sporting structure and a lot more specialist staff behind the first team. Rather than changing things immediately, I wanted to understand who was responsible for what and how the different departments fitted together. Two people stood out straight away because of how central they are to the way San Diego has been built: Director of Football Tyler Heaps and Technical Director Kenneth Heiner-Møller. Between them, they provide a useful picture of the club I have walked into before I even start looking properly at the squad.

Tyler Heaps — Director of Football

Tyler Heaps is probably the most important person to understand when looking at how San Diego FC has been built. He came into football from an analytics background rather than through the traditional coaching route, having studied Mathematics and Computer Science before moving into performance and recruitment analysis. He spent around six years with U.S. Soccer, eventually becoming Director of Sporting Analytics, and was involved with the USWNT staff during their 2019 World Cup-winning campaign. From there he moved to AS Monaco as Head of Analysis and Insights, working across recruitment and sporting strategy, before joining the Right to Dream organisation. That eventually led him to San Diego, where he became the club’s first Sporting Director and General Manager ahead of their MLS launch. His role has been much broader than simply negotiating transfers. He has been involved in building the recruitment structure, shaping the roster and connecting San Diego to the wider Right to Dream network.

In other words, this is very much a club that Heaps has helped construct. I may be arriving as the new manager, but he is one of the people who has been laying the foundations underneath it for years.

Kenneth Heiner-Møller — Technical Director

Kenneth Heiner-Møller comes from a much more traditional football background. A former professional player in Denmark and Hungary, he later moved into coaching and has spent much of his career working in international football, coach education and player development.

He managed the Denmark women’s national team between 2006 and 2013, taking them to the semi-finals of Euro 2013, before moving into the Canadian system. He was part of the coaching staff when Canada won bronze at the 2016 Olympics and later became head coach of the women’s national team himself. After leaving Canada he returned to the Danish FA, where his work increasingly centred on coach education, talent development and trying to create a consistent footballing philosophy through the different national age groups.

San Diego brought him in as Technical Director with much the same idea in mind. His job has been to help connect the academy and first team, oversee coaching methodology and ensure that the football side of the club develops with some kind of consistent identity rather than becoming a collection of separate teams and departments.

That makes the division between the two fairly clear. Heaps is more concerned with how the sporting operation is built and how players are identified and recruited; Heiner-Møller is more concerned with how those players are developed and how the club actually wants to play. For a new manager walking into the building, they are probably the two most significant figures already sitting on the other side of the table.

Beyond Heaps and Heiner-Møller, there are another three people who look as though they will have quite a bit of influence on how things work behind the scenes. Filipe Çelikkaya is the assistant manager and therefore the person I will probably deal with most closely on a day-to-day basis, while Luciano Fusco is responsible for youth development and Mark Prizant heads up the scouting operation. All three have backgrounds that make considerably more sense once you look beyond the titles Football Manager has given them. There is a definite theme running through the staff here of player development, recruitment and trying to create a pathway between the academy and the first team. Given that I have arrived wanting to reshape the squad without ripping the whole club apart, that feels like a fairly useful group to have inherited.

Filipe Çelikkaya — Assistant Manager

Filipe Çelikkaya was born in Lisbon in 1985 to a Portuguese mother and Turkish father and came through the youth system at Belenenses, where one of the players alongside him was Rúben Amorim. His own playing career never really developed beyond that level, and he moved towards coaching relatively young, studying sports science and high-performance sport along the way. He also spent time in the United States at Sacred Heart University, giving him some experience of American football long before his eventual move to MLS.

His coaching career has taken him through some very good environments. He worked in Benfica’s academy, where Rúben Dias was among the players he coached, before becoming part of Bruno Lage’s staff and later working under Luís Castro at Chaves, Vitória Guimarães and Shakhtar Donetsk. His spell in Ukraine included a league title and a run to the Europa League semi-final, but the role that really established him was his return to Portugal in 2020 to take charge of Sporting CP B. At Sporting his job was about much more than winning reserve-team matches. Rúben Amorim wanted the B team preparing players specifically for the demands of the senior side, and Çelikkaya became an important part of that pathway. Players such as Eduardo Quaresma and Geny Catamo were among those who passed through his team, and his reputation became increasingly tied to developing young players inside a clearly defined tactical framework rather than simply collecting results at reserve level.

He left Sporting in 2024 and moved to Chicago Fire as part of Gregg Berhalter’s staff before eventually ending up in San Diego in this save. That background makes him an interesting assistant to inherit. He has worked with young players, understands heavily structured tactical football and has spent much of his career helping players adapt to the requirements of the first team rather than simply coaching them in isolation.

Luciano Fusco — Head of Youth Development

Luciano Fusco was born in Argentina and played professionally there and in Mexico before moving increasingly towards coaching. His education is as interesting as his playing background: he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in kinesiology, specialising in human movement and exercise physiology. Much of his subsequent career has been spent in California, which means he also knows the American development system particularly well.

He began coaching in the San Francisco area in the early 2000s and spent time with organisations including Burlingame Soccer Club and De Anza Force, where his work included both coaching and curriculum development. He later worked at UCLA and within the LAFC academy, while also being invited into U.S. youth national-team environments. By that point much of his career had already become centred on developing young players rather than simply operating within senior professional football. Fusco joined San Jose Earthquakes in 2018 and worked his way through almost every level of the club. He coached in the academy, became an assistant with Quakes II in MLS NEXT Pro and eventually moved into the first-team staff. That is particularly relevant here because it means he has first-hand experience of the exact sort of pathway San Diego is using: academy football, MLS NEXT Pro and then the senior MLS side.

San Diego originally brought him in as a first-team assistant, although by 2030 he has moved into the Head of Youth Development role. It is actually a fairly logical progression. With San Diego’s academy effectively operating as a separate club, deciding when a player is ready to leave MLS NEXT Pro and sign permanently for the senior team is going to be an important part of the job, and Fusco has spent much of his career working across precisely those stages of development.

Mark Prizant — Chief Scout

Mark Prizant has one of the more varied recruitment backgrounds at the club. He played college football at Hofstra University before beginning his career in coaching, including spells at Florida Gulf Coast University and with Chicago Fire’s U23 side. He eventually moved away from coaching towards scouting and talent identification, which is where most of his career since has been spent.

He worked with U.S. Soccer before joining Philadelphia Union as Director of Talent Identification within their academy structure. That period coincided with the development of a youth system that would later become one of the strongest in MLS, producing a steady stream of homegrown players and eventually players capable of moving on to European football. Prizant’s work there was centred on finding players early and helping build the recruitment structure underneath that pathway. From Philadelphia he moved to Manchester United, spending more than four years as a North America-based first-team scout. He returned to MLS in 2021 with Inter Miami, initially as Director of Scouting and later taking on broader responsibility for scouting and recruitment. He was part of the sporting operation during the period in which Miami went from an inconsistent expansion side to winning the 2023 Leagues Cup and the 2024 Supporters’ Shield.

San Diego hired him ahead of their first MLS season as Assistant Sporting Director, working underneath Tyler Heaps and overseeing areas including recruitment, scouting, data analysis and player development. He’s my Chief Scout, but the fact that he is also a club director makes more sense once you know the real background. He is not simply the senior scout handing over reports; he is effectively part of the club’s sporting leadership and one of the people Heaps has relied upon to build the recruitment operation.

The league table says San Diego FC were the worst team in MLS in 2030. Thirty-four games, nine wins, five draws, twenty defeats and just 32 points left them 30th overall, with only 28 goals scored and 41 conceded. On the surface, that looks like the sort of job where you arrive, clear half the squad out and start again. The more I have gone through the numbers, though, the less convinced I am that this is a genuinely terrible team. There are problems everywhere, but there are also enough signs of something workable underneath them.

The attacking numbers are the strangest part. San Diego created 82 chances over the season, the sixth-highest total in MLS, and took 406 shots, which put them 12th. They were also 13th for final-third passes and 12th for dribbles, so this was not a side that simply spent ninety minutes camped on the edge of its own penalty area hoping for the best. More importantly, those efforts added up to 45.12 xG, yet San Diego scored only 28 goals. That is an underperformance of more than 17 goals against expectation and makes the finishing problem impossible to ignore. They were creating enough, and creating chances of sufficient quality, for the attack to have produced far more than it did; the biggest issue was that they simply did not convert them

Possession tells a slightly different story. San Diego averaged only 45 per cent of the ball, which ranked 28th in the league, but still completed 89 per cent of their passes. That suggests a team capable of looking after the ball when they had it, but not one capable of controlling matches for sustained periods. The fact that they still managed to rank around the middle of MLS for final-third passing despite having so little possession is probably one of the more encouraging things I have found. There is enough technical ability here to work with. The challenge is turning isolated spells with the ball into longer periods where we actually dictate what the game looks like.

The defensive side is where the structure really begins to fall apart. San Diego finished dead last for possession won and also allowed more opposition passes into the final third per game than anyone else in MLS. Opponents were getting through the pitch far too easily, and 433 shots against placed San Diego 26th in the league. The pressing numbers were fairly ordinary rather than catastrophically bad, which probably says more than if they had simply sat in a permanent low block. They were trying to engage teams, but not doing it effectively enough to control territory or recover the ball consistently.

What is slightly odd is that the final defensive outcome was nowhere near as bad as all of that might suggest. Forty-one goals conceded is poor, but it is not bottom-of-the-league defending. There were plenty of teams above San Diego who conceded more. That makes me think the individual defenders and goalkeepers were often doing a reasonable job once opponents reached the dangerous areas. The bigger problem was how often they were being asked to do it.

So the picture I have at the moment is of a team that spent too much time without the ball, did not regain it often enough, allowed opponents far too much territory and then wasted a remarkable amount of what it created at the other end. That is very different from inheriting a side with no attacking threat and no ability on the ball. I do not think this needs tearing down completely. It needs much better control of matches and, above everything else, considerably more efficiency in both penalty areas.