Sigi Schmid's contribution helped shape the very ground MLS stands on

The most successful manager in MLS history, with Bruce Arena, topped a tree including virtually every active coach in the league

In the summer of 2016, as the LA Galaxy and Seattle Sounders prepared to face each other in an MLS regular season game, a graphic did the rounds showing the profound influence that the two coaches, LA’s Bruce Arena and Seattle’s Sigi Schmid, had had on the coaching culture of the still young league.

The family tree of young coaches in MLS who had either played for, or coached with, one of the two men, was so extensive that it represented virtually all the active coaching body in the league. The likes of Patrick Vieira, then at NYCFC, represented an extreme exception to the Arena/Schmid rule.

It was no surprise then, that when the news broke on Wednesday night that Schmid had died on Christmas Day in Los Angeles at the age of 65, the Twitter tributes from former playing and coaching associates looked like a core sample of the first quarter century of Major League Soccer.

From his days leading one of the elite college programs at UCLA, to coaching the Galaxy, Columbus Crew and Seattle Sounders to multiple trophies, Schmid had been an iconic figure and a seemingly immutable part of US soccer for decades – long enough to straddle the wilderness years before MLS, and its early Wild West days, through to the modern era of rapid expansion and an occasionally painful integration with the global football economy.

It’s fair to say that by the end of his career, when a second stint at the Galaxy ended in the ignominy of a mid-season departure in September of this year, the era he and Arena had defined seemed to be definitively passing. Within weeks of that 2016 game he and Arena were both gone — Arena on an ill-fated attempt to rescue the US national team’s World Cup qualification hopes, Schmid the victim of Seattle’s indifferent start to the season.

At the Sounders, Schmid had led the team to multiple US Open Cups but never to an elusive MLS Cup, eventually eroding his once impregnable position. He ended 2016 as a color analyst for MLS, watching the team he’d built claim its first MLS Cup under his successor, and former assistant, Brian Schmetzer. It was a bittersweet moment for Schmid and Seattle, who’d seemed synonymous in the early years, when the team delivered on every metric of expansion success except the one trophy that truly mattered.

Schmid did win MLS Cups though – and did so in very different soccer contexts and cities in Columbus and his first stint in LA. At times he traded blows with his old rival Arena, reprising contests that dated back to their days as college coaches. Schmid’s Sounders team beat the Galaxy on the final day of the 2014 regular season, to edge out LA for the Supporters’ Shield, only for the Galaxy to beat them in the playoffs en route to their fifth MLS Cup.

As it turned out, those were the last titles either man would win. Their influence remained undiminished but they would never return to such unquestioned pre-eminence. The fallout from the World Cup failure came to be seen as the end of an era in MLS as well – it’s a tough irony that Schmid’s success in helping shape that era should also see him cast as a relic of it, even as his curiosity and enthusiasm for the game never waned.

Schmid was not an intricate tactical coach – though that’s not to suggest lack of sophistication, more his core belief that he should set up his teams proactively, demanding opponents find a way to beat them, rather than figuring out reactive reads on what those opponents might do.

He was a shaper of players, slow to trust, but emphatic in his support when he did. Unlike Arena, he had no problem bringing young players through into his teams and trusting them to deliver. In recent years, the likes of DeAndre Yedlin and Jordan Morris were prominent beneficiaries of his belief in them.

When he eventually took his last coaching job at Arena’s former Galaxy team the hope was that his blend of experience and instincts for developing youth could meld the top-heavy designated player legacy of Arena’s last team, and the abundance of youth talent in Southern California. But with concerns about his health growing, it quickly became apparent that the energy to dominate and cajole his way to reconciling the organization was a challenge too far for the veteran coach. It was a melancholy footnote to a storied career.

It won’t change Schmid’s legacy though. MLS, at times, can walk a line between its executives’ stated ideal of being “nimble” and an addiction to novelty. At times its features echo the restless stucco architecture of Schmid’s beloved SoCal – the “old” constantly torn down and built over by the new. But Schmid’s contribution over decades helped shape the very ground the league stands on.