Amid a sweeping rebuild, Sporting Kansas City enter 2026 as a de facto expansion team in the eyes of many observers around MLS.
SKC had a mere 17 players under first-team contracts as they jetted south on Sunday to kick off their 2026 preseason in West Palm Beach, Florida, thanks to the profound roster overhaul being conducted by new president of soccer operations and general manager David Lee in the wake of last year’s last-place finish in the MLS Western Conference.
That’s about as close to a blank slate as an incumbent club can get in this league. Lee has said the resulting possibilities for rapid renewal were key in attracting him to leave New York City FC for the Great Plains last autumn.
Yet the project’s appeal apparently hits rather differently for its brand-new coach.
“To be honest, it doesn't really change much of my work,” Raphael Wicky told MLSsoccer.com during a one-on-one conversation after his unveiling last week.
“I'm the coach, right? My job right now, and this is what I'm excited for, is working with the players we have.”
Implementing a culture
It’s a somewhat counterintuitive message from Sporting’s first permanent head coaching hire since the long reign of Peter Vermes ended last March after nearly two decades in charge of soccer operations – and revealing.
Ask Wicky about his game model, and it sounds similar to what Vermes’ teams sought to produce over the past decade or so. Though in contrast to the former boss, who long held sweeping power as both head coach and technical director, Wicky seems to prefer a tighter, simpler focus.
“I like to have the ball rather than not have the ball, but if we don't have the ball, I like my teams to be aggressive, to be uncomfortable to play with,” said Wicky, who most recently oversaw Swiss Super League giants BSC Young Boys from 2022-24.
“My teams always have played as a unit, and that's what I'm going to ask here as well: Play together, play for each other, play with each other. That's what is very, very important to me. And then we can go into details of tactics.
“But before doing that, it's implementing a culture, a way of living and interacting with each other, because I strongly believe that that has a huge impact on your product on the field.”
Many – perhaps most – new hires in Wicky’s shoes would arrive with a shopping list, eager to exert influence over the roster construction process at the start of their tenure. But the former Swiss international insists he’s content to leave that in Lee’s hands.
“I'm not in charge or in control of that,” continued Wicky, now on his second stint in MLS after a 2020-21 spell in charge of Chicago Fire FC.
“For me, it was more important, the human connection with David, and the alignment of culture, leadership, playing style.
“I know there will be a lot of players arriving in the next weeks or months. David has said that in the initial press conference: They probably have to sign a double-digit number. But that's not where my focus is.”
"Here for every player"
If Wicky is happy with the division of labor that has become the norm at modern professional clubs, it’s probably a product of his own experiences as both an elite player and accomplished manager. And it might just be what makes him well-suited for Kansas City’s new era.
Wicky was a baby-faced teenage midfielder when he broke into the first team at Swiss side Sion, sparking a career that carried him to the heights of Werder Bremen, Atlético Madrid, UEFA Champions League-era Hamburg and Switzerland’s 2006 World Cup team before he ended his playing days in MLS with a brief stint at bygone Chivas USA. He promises to provide similar chances to those who deserve it at SKC.
“My job is to be here for every single player, and that's what excites me: to see the progress of a team,” he said. “But it also excites me to see the individual progress. And I've always done that. I myself have been a product of that.
"I was thrown into the professional teams when I was 16 years old, back in Switzerland, and someone gave me a shot. Then it's up to the player. I have shown that I will give players possibilities when they're young, but it's not about age. When they're good, they show me every day, ‘Hey, I'm ready. I'm good. I can do the work.’
“I'm not scared of that. But I also know that you need to put a young player into an environment that functions, and that's what we're going to try to do here.”
Sporting need significant reinforcements this winter if they are to make a quick turnaround. In the long run, however, the Midwesterners also aim to increase productivity from an ambitious academy system that recruits across vast swathes of the US heartland, and into which many millions of dollars have been invested.
That, and other potential competitive advantages, are considered vital for an organization keenly aware of its own market size compared to adversaries in larger metropolitan areas. Wicky expects to work on the youth pipeline, without losing sight of the reality that ‘coaching up’ players of all ages is an essential facet of sustainability in MLS.
“If you have an academy and you spend lots of money, and the coaches spend lots of hours, it should be part of the business plan as well, to develop players and at one point helping them to make the next step, [and] the next step often is a transfer,” he noted. “A transfer is money for the club, which you can then really reinvest again into the club. So that is part of what we want to do here as well.
“But I believe that you can get better when you're 30, when you're 32, when you're 28, not only when you're 17, 18, and that is also part of my job.”
Everything is possible
Beleaguered by injuries, Wicky played just five games for Chivas USA. And his time in Chicago, which followed a stint in charge of the United States U-17 men’s national team, was difficult: the COVID-19 pandemic hit several weeks after his arrival, the Fire narrowly missed out on the 2020 Audi MLS Cup Playoffs, and he would leave Chicago with a 12W-25L-14D record.
Yet he’s found both MLS and North American life intriguing. He kept an eye on the league over the years as many of his old Chivas teammates, like Jesse Marsch, Jim Curtin and Paulo Nagamura, moved into coaching. His ties to North America grew when he met his future wife, Laura, a Californian, at the Puerto Vallarta airport. The couple welcomed their first child last year, which adds a new facet to the process of settling into their new community.
Wicky was drawn first and foremost to Sporting KC, rather than the league itself. That said, he’s enthused by the sense of possibility present in MLS – even for struggling teams – and absent from so many competitions elsewhere.
“You have coaches from all over, from a lot of different cultures. So it is a very, very interesting league – and I also know that everything is possible in this league,” Wicky observed. “That's what makes it extremely different from, for example, Europe or South America.”
He cites the example of the LA Galaxy missing the playoffs entirely in 2023, then storming to an emphatic MLS Cup triumph a year later, only to backslide out of the postseason entirely the year after that.
“That doesn't happen in Europe. Bayern Munich is not going to be relegated, then come up and then be relegated again,” he added. “This league is different. You need to be really good, and every puzzle needs to go into the other to win trophies. But it's possible here.”
