The summer transfer window opened on Monday in Major League Soccer. FC Dallas sits fourth in the Western Conference. The team spent the last two months resting, retooling, and getting healthy during the World Cup break. Every instinct in American sports says this is the moment you push.
So I asked Eric Quill the simplest version of the question: if you could walk into a meeting with Dan Hunt and Andre Zanotta right now and demand one player, what type of player is it?
“I’ll take Messi,” he said in an interview with Big D Soccer. “That’s the obvious answer, right?”
The he actually answered, and the actual answer is more interesting than any name he could have given.
“Nothing stands out. We have a pretty good idea about where our roster is at the moment.”
That is a fourth-place manager, one week from the restart, telling you he doesn’t especially want a big new signing.
The case against buying
Quill’s reasoning isn’t laziness and it isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s a specific bet about what this team’s actual asset is.
He spent the entire spring building a culture that he describes as night-and-day different than the one he inherited. He talks about the group in terms of camaraderie and fight before he talks about them in terms of quality. And he’ll tell you plainly that the quality isn’t always there. What’s there is a room that works.
He’s not eager to put a stranger in it unless the move is the right one.
“Sometimes when you think you’re enhancing yourself with a new player, when you have a really strong group, things are going really well,” Quill said. “It can be a little bit scary to get it wrong, because we’ve seen one player can change the group if they’re not taken care of the right way.”
And then Quill tells you the part of where his head really is at the moment:
“Locker rooms are an interesting place, and we’re not in a place where we desperately need something.”
Quill’s evidence is the road form. He brought up the trip to LAFC in March unprompted - a game FC Dallas lost, but one he believes his side was better in. His read: they’ve already shown they can go into anybody’s building and outplay them. If that’s true, the marginal value of a new signing is small, and the risk of a wrong one is not.
“I like our spine. I like our depth,” he said. “We don’t want to tinker too much right now.”