With the first-team squad almost settled, I’ve also started looking at what happens underneath it. The academy has a few players who are too interesting to leave sitting there, but not quite ready for San Diego yet, so four of them are moving up to Oceanside. The logic is simple. Oceanside gives me more control over their training, their individual roles and their development, while still letting them build up appearances at what should be a higher modelled level than the academy. They will all come in on Reserve contracts, so there is no salary-cap hit either.

Francis Mohammed is probably the most obvious promotion. He is 17 and already has a really interesting striker base: 15 acceleration, 15 pace, 14 finishing, 14 first touch, 14 heading and 15 technique. The weaknesses are mostly mental, particularly Decisions, Composure and Concentration. Oceanside gives me the chance to shape him properly rather than just hope those parts catch up naturally. Mark Wayo is a different sort of project. He is 17, quick, brave and already has 14 Tackling, 12 Marking, 16 Bravery and 14 Pace, but he is undersized and weak in the air for a traditional centre-back. Rather than trying to turn him into something he is not, I want to develop him specifically towards the Wide Centre-Back role and improve the technical side of his game. Hamza Peprah is moving up as the left-sided development project. He has 14 Acceleration, 14 Pace, 18 Natural Fitness, 13 Crossing and 15 Teamwork, but still needs plenty of work on Passing, Positioning and Composure. The plan is to mould him towards the inverted wing-back role, which is exactly the sort of specialist job that makes more sense to develop deliberately at Oceanside. The fourth is Stephen Moreno, who might actually be the best profile of the group. He already has 14 Decisions, 13 Anticipation, 12 Teamwork and 12 Work Rate, with a Fairly Professional personality. Technically he is still raw, but there is enough there to start shaping him as a controller/deep-lying midfielder rather than just another generic defensive midfielder.

The common thread is that none of these moves is simply because the players have good star ratings. Each one has a fairly obvious future role attached to him, and each will also arrive with a training-related target. I like that because it makes the step up to Oceanside feel earned rather than automatic. They are not just being promoted and left there; they are being given a role to develop towards and a standard to meet in training. That is what I want Oceanside to become: not a holding pen for prospects, but the point where the better academy players start being trained specifically for the football we want to play at San Diego, with clear expectations attached to that progression.

With pre-season finished and most of the bigger structural work now done, I want to give this version of San Diego enough time to actually produce some evidence before I start changing things again.

There has been a lot of work over the winter: recruitment, training, set pieces, the base tactical shape, the more aggressive and more controlled IP variants, and the opponent-specific OOP work. At some point you have to stop building the machine and find out whether it works, so I’m setting the first proper review point at 10 league games.

The important thing for me is that this will not just be a look at the table and a judgement based on points. Last season’s numbers give us a useful baseline, and I want to know whether the football itself has moved forward. San Diego averaged only 45% possession, conceded far too much territory in the final third, and despite generating 45.12 xG across the season scored only 28 goals. There were some decent underlying attacking numbers hidden inside a team that still finished bottom. That makes the first ten matches as much about control and efficiency as outright results.

I want to know whether we are keeping the ball because the structure is working, rather than simply circulating it. I want to know whether the 3-2-5 is producing better chances instead of the low-xG shooting we saw too often in pre-season. I want to know whether the reactive OOP shapes are actually reducing the amount of football opponents are able to play in our half, particularly through the final third. There is also a deliberate test of the attacking output. The target is not to suddenly produce enormous xG numbers. Last season’s 45.12 xG already works out at a little over 1.3 per game. The failure was converting that into only 0.82 goals per match. If we can maintain that underlying chance production while becoming more efficient in front of goal, that would already represent meaningful progress. The set pieces get their own measure as well. I’ve put far more time into them than I normally would, both in the routines themselves and in training, so I want an actual return from that work. Three corner goals in the opening ten games is the first benchmark, with the wider aim of establishing ourselves among the better set-piece teams in MLS.

The five KPIs below are therefore the first checkpoint rather than end-of-season targets. They should tell me whether the principles are translating from the tactics screen into competitive football.

1.After 10 games, San Diego FC will average at least 50% possession, improving substantially on the 45% recorded in 2030 while maintaining a pass-completion rate of at least 88%.

2.After 10 games, San Diego FC will average at least 1.30 xG per match, maintaining or improving upon the 45.12 xG generated across 34 matches in 2030, while converting that attacking output into a higher scoring rate than last season’s 0.82 goals per game.

3.After 10 games, San Diego FC will restrict opponents to fewer than 12 shots per match and fewer than 80 opposition final-third passes per match, improving on the 433 shots conceded and league-worst 95 final-third passes allowed per game in 2030.

4.After 10 games, San Diego FC will remain inside the MLS top half for chances created and final-third passing, building on 2030 totals of 82 chances created (6th) and 75 final-third passes per game (13th), while producing a greater proportion of shots from inside the penalty area.

5.After 10 games, San Diego FC will have scored at least three goals from corners and rank among the leading MLS teams for corner goals, providing an early measure of the impact of the new set-piece routines and dedicated training programme.

If we hit most of them and the league results are reasonable, I’ll be very reluctant to interfere. If the results are poor but the underlying numbers are good, that becomes a question of patience and execution. If both the results and the KPIs are poor, then we will have proper evidence that something needs changing.

That feels like a much better way of approaching the first part of the season than reacting to every bad result individually.

Ten games. Then we dig into the data.

March felt like the first month where the ideas started to become a team rather than a collection of experiments. The results were mixed, but almost every game gave us something useful: the new game-state shapes worked in different ways, the higher tempo improved the speed of our possession, the right side started to become a real attacking weapon, and some of the problems were much easier to separate into individual errors rather than structural ones. One win from five does not look spectacular on paper, but the performances were generally competitive and, by the Chicago game, there were signs that the football was beginning to settle into something much closer to what I had in mind when the rebuild started.

LA Galaxy (A) – 1-1: This was probably the most tactically encouraging game of the month because the new game-state shapes worked immediately in a competitive setting. Starting in the more aggressive 3-2-4-1 helped produce the opener, with Rotondi’s pull-back finding Müller arriving late rather than everyone already occupying the box. After scoring, the 3-3-3-1 control shape largely did what it was designed to do: Galaxy had possession but Puig was kept quiet and their central progression was blunted. The lesson came later, when returning to the normal 3-4-3 opened the game up and Galaxy eventually equalised. Müller was excellent as the stabiliser, while the match gave us our first real evidence that the control shape can work, provided we use it because the game needs calming rather than simply because we are ahead.

Colorado Rapids (H) – 2-2: This was much more frustrating because the overall performance was good enough to win. We had 55% possession, 1.90 xG to their 1.25 and three clear-cut chances to none, while the increased tempo made the circulation noticeably quicker and crisper. Rotondi was very good again, Salvo scored, and Culbreath was outstanding, producing 0.94 xA and constantly causing problems from the right. Both goals conceded felt more like poor decisions than structural failures: Paulsen ignored the short-distribution instruction before the first, while the second came from a poor turnover in the 3-3-3-1. The bigger tactical lesson was that the control shape is not an automatic “see the game out” button; against Colorado it invited pressure late on when continuing to threaten them may have been the better form of defence.

Portland Timbers (A) – 0-1: This was one of those results where the scoreline hid a reasonably good underlying performance. We created 2.45 xG from 20 shots and had 18 corners, while Portland’s winner came from a 25-yard effort that deflected and wrong-footed Paulsen. That is not something I would build tactical conclusions around. Müller again dominated progression with 17 progressive passes, and Culbreath continued to create from the right, but Rotondi had a poor game and the finishing deserted us. The main takeaway was to trust the process: if we keep creating that volume and quality, losing 1-0 to a deflected long-range shot is variance rather than evidence that the structure needs changing.

Houston Dynamo (H) – 1-1: This was the clearest example of the difference between shot volume and shot quality. We had 17 shots to their eight and 10 on target to three, but only generated 1.08 xG. That told us the problem was not getting into attacking areas, but what we were doing once we arrived there. Too many attacks were still ending in low-value attempts rather than the extra pass, cut-back or delayed run that creates a genuinely good chance. Bombino was the standout, scoring and producing another strong performance in the inverted role, while Müller again gave us control underneath. Defensively the structure was solid enough; the bigger question was how to turn quick, clean possession into better-quality final actions.

Chicago Fire (H) – 4-1: This was the first match where everything seemed to come together. We had 51% possession, 91% passing and generated 2.32 xG while restricting Chicago to 0.92, and the attacking relationships finally produced the sort of output we have been looking for. Culbreath was outstanding with 1.49 xA, seven key passes and six dribbles, Rotondi scored twice, Peralta scored, and Salvo contributed an assist while still generating 0.48 xG himself. Uribe was excellent defensively and Simpson-Pusey contributed heavily to progression from the back. More than the scoreline, this felt like validation of the higher tempo: the same positional ideas were still there, but the ball was reaching the attacking relationships before Chicago could settle into their defensive references.

The key, for me, is to let this run for another five games, all of which are on the road. We go to St Louis CITY (25th in the Supporters Shield, with us 23rd at the moment), Montreal (22nd), Colorado (26th), Austin (20th) and Real Salt Lake (4th) with some momentul, an increase in hope and a chance to finish April much further up the table. Once we do that, I’ll dive back into the KPIs.

A small bit of man-management this week with Lucas Ríos, whose training level had dropped far enough that I felt it needed addressing properly rather than just another passing warning. His latest weekly rating was down at 5.90, and with the squad now settled into the new training programme I want there to be a clear expectation around the standard being set day to day.

This time the conversation went well. Ríos accepted the criticism and, unlike a couple of others earlier in the season, was also willing to agree to a formal target. He now needs to achieve an average training rating of 7.2 by 14 June, which gives him a little over two months to show that the response is genuine rather than just saying the right thing in the meeting.

I like having something measurable attached to these conversations. It gives the player a fair period to respond and gives me something more useful to judge than one good or bad training week. If he gets above 7.2, then the issue has effectively been dealt with. If he misses it, despite accepting the target, that becomes another piece of evidence to consider when I review roles and squad places later in the season.

It is not about dropping somebody immediately because of a poor training rating, especially if they are still contributing in matches. But I do want standards to mean something, and this feels like a better way of handling it than repeatedly having the same conversation every few weeks with no real consequence attached.

One thing I’ve started paying much more attention to in matches is individual body language. I have probably been guilty in the past of either ignoring it completely or reacting too strongly to it, so I’m trying to find a middle ground where it actually informs my decisions.

The first principle is that I want to use individual shouts far more than team shouts. Unless we are losing heavily, winning comfortably, or the whole side has clearly shifted into the same emotional state, I don’t really want to send one message to eleven different personalities. If Lohan is anxious while everyone else looks composed, then Lohan is the problem to solve, not the team.

The shout itself needs to match the emotion. Anxious usually gets Calm Down. Very frustrated is more likely to get No Pressure. Encourage is there for somebody who looks nervous or flat but is still trying to do the right things, while Focus is more useful when the issue looks like concentration rather than confidence. I’m trying to avoid automatically reaching for Demand More or Fire Up simply because somebody has gone red.

The more interesting part is what happens afterwards. Because there is quite a long gap before you can use another shout, I don’t think it makes sense to insist on giving somebody two or three interventions before making a decision. If I use a shout and then spend the next 10–15 minutes watching the player force passes, lose his tactical assignment, dive into challenges or generally look like the emotion is affecting his football, I’m happy to start thinking about the substitution there and then.

Equally, negative body language on its own is not enough to get somebody taken off. A frustrated player on a 7.2 who is still doing his job can stay frustrated as far as I’m concerned. The body language is an early-warning system; the football tells me whether it has actually become a problem.

The other thing I’m interested in is whether these reactions start teaching me something about the personalities that the game does not fully show. A lot of the important information is hidden anyway, particularly around pressure and big matches, so repeated behaviour should tell its own story. If somebody is consistently anxious in major away games, reacts badly to criticism and then performs poorly, that becomes useful evidence. If somebody regularly looks composed when everyone else is struggling, that tells me something too.

I’m not going to draw conclusions from one match, though. The aim is to build up a picture over time: what emotional state appears, what intervention works, and whether it actually affects performance.

So the basic rule for now is pretty simple: manage the individual first, give the response a chance to work, then judge the football. If the mood stays bad but the performance is fine, leave him alone. If the mood stays bad and the performance starts falling with it, that is when the hook becomes part of the management rather than a punishment.
The second block of five games felt different to the first. There was less experimentation, fewer obvious tactical swings and, perhaps most importantly, a sense that the same structure was beginning to survive different types of matches. We still had games where the possession numbers were ordinary, games where the chance quality was not perfect and games where the opposition found openings, but we also started turning those performances into points. Across these five, the recurring themes were clearer: Culbreath continued to emerge as a major creative outlet, Peralta increasingly looked like the missing piece on the left, and the team began to show that it could win without necessarily dominating every metric.

St. Louis CITY 1–1 San Diego FC
This was probably the least convincing performance of the five. The headline xG of 1.54 looked respectable, but that included a missed penalty, so the open-play chance quality was considerably lower than the number suggested. St. Louis had 16 shots, 10 on target and 2.29 xG, which meant Paulsen had to be excellent just to keep us in the game. There were still positives in possession, particularly through Culbreath, Peralta and Salvo, but it again felt as though we could reach good areas without always filling them properly. Ríos came off the bench to rescue the point late on, which was useful in itself given the conversations we have had around his training standards.

CF Montréal 0–1 San Diego FC
The replayed Montréal game ended up being much more controlled than the version lost to the crash. Against their back three, Rotondi was moved centrally as a Deep-Lying Forward after the more conventional centre-forward role was simply swallowed by the three centre-backs. Peralta played from the left and Salvo from the right as an Inside Forward. It was not a particularly explosive attacking display, with only 0.88 xG, but we controlled the match well enough, limited Montréal to 0.61 xG and no clear-cut chances, and Culbreath once again became the decisive player. The positional experiment was useful too: Rotondi could disturb the back line by dropping away from it, even if neither he nor Salvo produced much individually.

Colorado Rapids 1–2 San Diego FC
This was the first match where the result probably flattered us more than the underlying numbers. Colorado had slightly more possession, more shots and 1.13 xG to our 0.51, so after several weeks of feeling that performances had deserved more, we finally got a result that perhaps deserved a little less. The most interesting part was Peralta on the left as the Wide Forward. He finished with an assist, six key passes and 0.30 xA, and suddenly the role looked far more connected than it had with Rotondi there. Salvo scored from the right-sided attacking role, while Culbreath continued to provide the width and progression outside him. It was only one match, but it started to feel as though Peralta might be the player who makes that left-sided role work properly.

Austin FC 0–0 San Diego FC
Possession dropped to 44%, but the performance itself was much better than that number suggested. We had 14 shots to Austin’s seven, created 1.57 xG to their 0.70 and generally produced the better attacking moments without finding the finish. Salvo was the main culprit in that sense, accumulating 0.89 xG and the game’s clearest San Diego chance without scoring. Peralta was quieter but still contributed creatively from the left, while Culbreath and Müller again carried much of the progression and chance creation. Defensively, this was one of the stronger displays of the block: Austin were limited to two shots on target and relatively little genuine threat.

Real Salt Lake 0–1 San Diego FC
Game ten was probably the most even of the lot. Possession, shots, xG and clear-cut chances were all close, and it felt like the sort of away match that could easily have gone either way. Ríos made the difference with the only goal, while Paulsen’s 7.9 performance was just as important at the other end. We completed 91% of our passes and remained composed without ever really controlling the game, which perhaps says as much about the progress as any dominant performance would have. Rotondi was quiet again, but the team found a way through and then protected it. After ten games, that feels like the right point to stop judging individual matches and start looking properly at the data.

The overall feeling from these five is that we are not miles away. The same basic structure has now taken us through ten competitive matches without any major permanent change, and the flaws are beginning to look specific rather than fundamental. There are clear questions around left-side penetration, box occupation, the role of Salvo, and whether the out-of-possession shape leaves too much space outside the midfield, but there are also signs that the answers may already be inside the squad. Peralta on the left, Culbreath’s growing influence and the ability to win tighter matches all feel important. Now the ten-game sample exists, the next stage is to find out whether the data agrees.