Nobody needs to be told the Vancouver Whitecaps are off to a rough start. They have one win this year in the league and one in the Voyageurs Cup; other than that, it's a bunch of draws that were so-called "moral victories" and a bunch of losses that weren't even that. Some impatient fans have already been calling for the scalp of head coach Teitur Thordarson, claiming that the 59-year-old Thordarson is in over his depth at the Major League Soccer level.
It may not just be the usual fan chatter on an unsuccessful team, though. It might be that the Vancouver Whitecaps organization is losing faith in Thordarson. The Whitecaps seemed half-reluctant to make Thordarson the team coach for MLS in the first place, and now they may be closer to letting him go.
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In early September, the Whitecaps announced that Thordarson, who had managed the second-division Whitecaps since 2007, would lead the team into their first season of Major League Soccer. This was an unusual delay, particularly for an established coach: Portland had announced that John Spencer would be their first MLS head coach back in August. The Philadelphia Union hired Piotr Nowak in May the year before their MLS debut. Only the Seattle Sounders rivaled Vancouver for tardiness among recent expansion teams, replacing Briam Schmetzer with Sigi Schmid in December of 2008, and in that case they had to lure Schmid from the Columbus Crew.
When Thordarson signed his extension to coach the Whitecaps, he got just a one-year contract with two club options. A one-year contract is a bit unusual for a head coach in a discipline where it's acknowledged that coaches need to be looking to the next season as much as the current one. It tends to lead to coaches just managing to try and keep their job. But between the contract and the delay in signing it, it seems to reflect that even from day one Tom Soehn and the Whitecaps front office were reluctant to keep Thordarson around.
Then the team signed Denis Hamlett as an assistant coach. Hamlett's last professional experience was as head coach of the Chicago Fire for two seasons. He provides Thordarson with an experienced hand who knows his way around the league, but he also waits in the wings in case the front office thinks Thordarson isn't up to the challenge. Hamlett is just 42 but has been coaching, either as a head coach or an assistant, in MLS since 1998. In a unique league which calls for ingenuity and an agile mind, Thordarson is the third-oldest coach in the league beyind Dallas's Schellas Hyndman and the venerable Bruce Arena. The last time he coached at a Major League Soccer-like level was in 2003, when Thordarson managed the then-Norwegian Premier League side FK Lyn. For all Thordarson's experience, when it comes to a Major League Soccer-like level he is arguably less experienced than Hamlett.
From the beginning of the year, the Whitecaps have promised great things. So far, the results haven't come. There are many reasons for this and I, personally, would blame the coach almost last of all, but I'm not the one who makes the decisions. One needs just swing by a fan site or a well-read Whitecaps blog to see the vitriol from fans towards Thordarson, criticizing his tactical sense, his formations, his substitute policies. Much more worryingly, influential midfielder Davide Chiumiento <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/sports/soccer/Chiumiento+wants+central+role+Whitecaps+frustration+mounts+Thordarson/4775518/story.html">hit out at Thordarson</a> last week for not using Chiumiento properly. Any time locker room dissension reaches the public eye, that's going to worry the higher-ups.
If the Whitecaps never had much faith in Thordarson to begin with, they might not need much of an excuse to pull the trigger on a move. With a vocal minority of fans dissenting against Thordarson's management, they may see it as a chance to persuade Vancouver fans that the Whitecaps are serious about winning in the short-term. It would be a massive panic move, to jettison a coach with decades of professional success over injuries and bad luck. But as Toronto FC fans know, MLS teams are not immune to panic moves.