Finally, after almost a year of saying it was the position of highest priority, Sporting KC have been reportedly in negotiations with a DP #10 target, Manu Garcia of the Greek Super League club Aris.  SKC fans have to feel like the old lady titanic gif that says “It’s been 84 years…” upon hearing this report.  There is obviously work yet to be done to get this deal completed, but it is finally a clear sign of intent from a club that has until now, only been capable of relaying promises without results.

It did not take long for the takes to come pouring in about Mr Garcia, from parsing his injury history, to tearing apart his goal-scoring stats, to asking “Who the hell is Aris Thessaonliki” to salivating over some absolutely absurd passes in his YouTube highlight videos.  Thankfully I am a certified sicko and fired up Wyscout to look at some of his event comps and hopefully can provide a bit more detail on the player and what his potential might look like.SKC also played a game(sort of) against FIU last Saturday.  These scrimmages rarely tell you much and this one even less so given 5 players were held out for precaution and they could only play a 60 minute game because SKC had so few players available to participate.  That did not stop too many people from trying to parse any useful information from the game that we literally have no actual information on than 8 tweets and a post game press conference.  Honestly the post game presser was more useful for gleaning gems about playing style, Mason Toye’s attributes and how the team looks to use them, and Mr Burns’ trip “overseas” that we have since learned likely included a stop in Greece to work on the Garcia deal which is still pending.

We teased it last week, but we are going to do a bit of a tactical refresher on the tactical setup we think is most likely to be deployed by Vermes this year.  He has been giving us tidbits during his media availability and the players have as well that should help clarify expectations, and it has been a minute since we dusted off the positional play handbook as well as the possession structures and counter-pressing shapes and pressure triggers that we expect to see and what that means for maximizing the personnel the team has available to it.  So, this is as good of a time as any to review and refine our perspectives on that philosophy.

Finally, we’ll do a quick review of analytics perspectives on the heels of Matt Pfeffer joining the ASA pod this week, discuss Diego Luna’s breakthrough with the USMNT, and take a look ahead at the upcoming week as the European transfer window comes to a close and transactions being worked on there start to accelerate.