LOS ANGELES – I’ve been thinking it would help to have a good fortune teller on retainer.
Because we have so many teams in Southern California, most of them regularly cycling through coaches, it would be great to write about the latest New Hire with total confidence: “Oh, no. This is definitely not going to work out.”
Or: “Yes, indeed! They absolutely nailed this hire!”
But without a crystal ball, you can’t really know until you know. There are so many variables, so many moving parts, and how much value do you assign to culture shock, in terms of team or country or both? You’re only as good as you most educated guess.
That said, my hunch about Alex Straus – based on a sparkling track record in European and an impressive first impression – is that Angel City FC nailed this hire.
The 49-year-old Norwegian is the club’s third* head coach in four years. (*Fourth if you count Sam Laity, who served on an interim basis for the first 10 matches this season while the club’s decision-makers were methodically scouring the globe looking for the right person.)
Straus is that person, the one who Mark Parsons, Angel City’s new sporting director, believes can transform Angel City from a popular attraction to a popular winning attraction, though his side had to scramble to even it up in his debut, a 2-2 tie – “a game of mixed feelings,” he called it – against the 1-8-2 Chicago Stars FC.
To take Angel City from a cool, internationally recognizing brand to a cool, internationally recognized brand that’s as successful on the pitch as off.
In Europe, where women’s soccer has taken giant strides, Straus ran to the front of the pack, proving he can win, and not only win, but win fun – and a lot. And with a human touch, by caring foremost about the personal in his personnel.
“My philosophy is centered around people – people,” Straus told reporters at his introductory news conference earlier this week his new club’s new training facility in Thousand Oaks, the largest such dedicated space in the National Women’s Soccer League.
“I’m here to facilitate for our players to be able to go out to the pitch, have a clear plan, know how to execute it. That’s the biggest job for me – so I need to adapt to that, and not for players to adapt to me…
“I had a different view when I was younger,” he added. “It was all about titles, trophies, medals, whatever – but in 2018, I changed my view: ‘I’ll start focusing on people instead.’ And that’s when I started winning.”
Let’s check the tape: In 2018, Straus was hired at Sandviken in Toppserien, the highest women’s football league in Norway, and led the team to its first cup finale since 1995. Then, after a couple years coaching Norway women’s under-23 and under-19 teams, he again took over at Sandviken in 2020 and the next year, led the club to its first league title.
In 2022, he took his talents to Germany and took over FC Bayern Munich Women, where he became the first Bayern women’s coach to win three consecutive Bundesliga titles.
“You cannot just replicate what you have done, but I think there are things that we can put in there,” said Straus, a loquacious soul who introduced himself by asking and answering your questions himself, having yet to see his new squad perform in person: “What will we look like? And how it be presented on a pitch?
“We want to be the main actor on the scene. We want to control the games,” he said. “I want to have the ball for 90 minutes [they had it for 62% of the match Saturday] and the opponents can take the kickoffs and we will get it back … because I believe what we all love about this game is playing the game, not being reactive to what opponents do.”
If that sounds like the assignment-understanding swagger you need to keep a Los Angeles audience satiated, Straus went on: “I know what good looks like. I’ve been part of it, I have that experience, I know how it’s created … you need to build that environment that wins and wins again. The first time everybody can do. When you do it the second and the third and the fourth and you create the dynasty, that’s what we want to do.”
He’s saying this about a club that’s now a meh 4-4-3; that’s gotten no further than the first round of the playoffs, in 2023; and that finished 7-13-6 last season under Becki Tweed – but which, nonetheless, had enough cachet to lure him off his mountaintop in Germany to the L.A. basin, a move made official in April.
“When it started four years ago, I was working on the opposite side of the world, and everybody knew about Angel City from Day One,” he said of the club that splash landed on the scene in 2020 with a star-studded ownership group, that will sell out 22,000-seat BMO Stadium despite struggling with its on-the-field results, that’s valued now at $250 million.
“These things that you managed to do in five minutes,” he said, “normally it takes 10 years, 15 years to create that. These type of people I want to work with.”
The man delivers a good pitch. But unless you know a good, prognosticating psychic, we’ll have to wait and see if I’m right in thinking Angel City got it right. And whether the people – the people! – on his new roster can deliver on the pitch. If, under Straus, Angel City can check that last box, the most important one: Winning.
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