We're at the end of Lagerweek. Over the past few days we've taken a look at a few points of Garth Lagerwey's soccer and soccer-adjacent life that led him to becoming a part of multiple MLS front offices. That includes his time as a DnD playing goalkeeper for the Dallas Burn, a lawyer at one of the world's largest firms, and a color commentator for D.C. United. Today we'll take a look at what he's most known for—winning trophies as one of the league's most successful front-office execs.
Garth Lagerwey took over as general manager of Real Salt Lake in September 2007. He remains one of the youngest general manager hires in MLS history, being 35 when he took the helm. That alone might have been a reason for skepticism from the folks actually paying attention to RSL back then, but age didn’t even top the list. Lagerwey had spent the last seven years earning a law degree and working as an associate at Latham & Watkins in D.C. — where, through a deal to sell a stake in the NHL’s St. Louis Blues, he developed a relationship with RSL owner Dave Checketts. Yeah, he did some broadcasting with D.C. United from time to time, but giving insightful commentary and delivering reaction calls like “sweet creamery butter!” aren’t traits necessarily indicative of front office success.
That being said, It’s not like RSL were aware of what success looked like at that point.
'We weren't just bad. We were spectacularly bad,'' Lagerwey told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2008. ''There was a real sense of hopelessness there, even though the support was there from the community.''
RSL had won just 21 MLS games in their first three seasons. Lagerwey arrived at the end of the third. His former MLS teammate, Jason Kreis, had taken over as RSL head coach earlier that season.
The pair were able to turn things around in a hurry. RSL made the playoffs in 2008 and won MLS Cup in 2009. In just a year under Lagerwey and Kreis, they went from “spectacularly bad” to the league’s best team.
”They were kind of the perfect foil for each other,” longtime RSL broadcaster Brian Dunseth said. “Garth had his identification and how he wanted to handle his business and how he wanted to shape teams. And Jason had a very specific style of play. So on the field, you saw what at times was most definitely a collaboration and other times was a product of bumping heads to make sure they were both on the same page.
“When Garth came, it was about identifying the weaknesses in the roster, using his ability to manipulate the salary cap, which was always fantastic. And then, in conjunction with Jason, fitting the playing style of Jason is probably most well known for — the 4-4-2 diamond.”
That partnership not only led to an MLS Cup, it also led to four straight seasons with 53 or more points from 2010 to 2013. That included a run in the 2011 Concacaf Champions League that saw RSL make the CCL final. Even after Kreis left before the 2014 season, Lagerwey and RSL put together a fifth-straight season eclipsing the 50-point mark.
Lagerwey left for Seattle following that 2014 season. Since then, RSL, always a small market team with a limited budget, finished with 50 points or more just once.
“They were savvy in what they were trying to do," Dunseth noted. "So they were acutely aware of what they wanted, and what they were looking for in a player profile. But then I think it certainly became even that much more important that the personality had to match the playing ability because they just didn't want assholes in the locker room. And for the most part, you go through all those teams, there weren't a lot of assholes. You got a bunch of personalities but you had guys that realized that the collective was more important than the individual.”
Lagerwey arrived in Seattle joining a club in a very different moment than what he came to in Salt Lake. Seattle was coming off its best season ever. The Sounders, thanks in part to a midfield pairing of Gonzalo Pineda and Ozzie Alonso, won the U.S. Open Cup and the Supporters’ Shield. Appropriately, Lagerwey spent his initial season doing his best to avoid the urge to fix what wasn’t broken.
“Garth, he empowers people. That's kind of what his MO is like, hiring people and then give them [free] rein. He’ll hire you and say I will help you and I will question you, I will challenge you, but you are supposed to do the job,” former Sounders VP of Soccer Analytics and Research, Ravi Ramineni, said.
“I think when he joined, when he was in the first season, I think he just observed like six months and he just saw how he does what he can do to help different people. Let’s see how what everyone is doing and where everybody fits. He’ll say there needs to be a little bit more here or they need to pursue more and add more resources here. He'll do all that and then say I think this is a place where I think you'll do really good here or you’ll do great over here.”
In this case, Lagerwey spent his initial time with the team letting folks MLS coaching legend Sigi Schmid and former Sounders sporting director (and future Inter Miami chief soccer officer) Chris Henderson steer the ship.
“He was very deferential to them; it was really clear for like for the most part he was doing what they asked him to do,” Sounders beat reporter Jeremiah Oshan said. “Like they really wanted Christian Roldan in the SuperDraft. When the opportunity presented itself to trade up to get Roldan, Garth basically used his connections at RSL to swing a deal that effectively worked for both teams. In 2015, he signed Erik Friberg, Nelson Valdez and Andreas Ivanschitz and those were all players that either played here before or were players that they had previously like come close to signing. It was like he, he just like went into action to execute moves that the existing people wanted.”
Over time, Lagerwey began to exert more influence over the team’s decision-making. In particular, Lagerwey pushed for a change at manager that eventually saw Schmid leave Seattle midway through 2016. Brian Schmetzer took over as manager and Seattle won its first MLS Cup.
But even as Lagerwey became a little more hands-on, he still defered to folks like Henderson, who Lagerwey repeatedly credited for Seattle’s success in talent identification.
“He always saw himself sort of more as a manager of people than as a general manager,” Oshan said. “He obviously had a lot to say over the roster, but it seemed like he was more about like closing deals and getting trades done. Like, ‘You tell me who you want and I'll figure out how to get them.”
He may not have wanted much say over which players Seattle wanted in particular, but Lagerwey did want say in the process of how those players were selected. Part of that process involved taking Ramineni, a former Microsoft employee working on the sport science side for Seattle, and giving him the influence within the club to lead one of the most successful analytics departments in league history.
Ramineni took over as Seattle’s Director of Soccer Analytics in 2017 before becoming the club’s VP of Soccer Analytics and Research in 2021. In his time with the club from 2013 to the end of the 2021 season, he went from assisting with sport science data to heavily influencing the club’s scouting philosophy to a role that allowed him to handle the club’s salary cap decisions.
“In general, he loves analytics. He’ll put a lot of emphasis on it. He asks a lot of questions and asks, ‘What does this mean?’” Ramineni said. “For example, I would handle the salary cap as well for the team. And so I spent a lot of hours and hours of time with him and had a lot of conversations with him and we used to argue a lot. Not in negative ways but just trying to get to truth of the matter and trying to go as far as you can with a certain piece of information and see what is missing.”
To simplify things a bit, analytics fit into Lagerwey’s Seattle teams like this: The team would collect players from outside agents, from their own scouting department, and from Ramineni’s analytics department. From there, Ramineni would begin culling that list through the data at hand. Although analytics is often a process that Ramineni described as “scouting 1000 players to sign none," the process would generally end with four or five players. You find the players that fit what you’re looking for on paper then use tape, interviews and every other available resource to fill in the blind spots left by the numbers. Once the list is down to those four or five players and the blind spots are filled in, the team would select players based on the best fit tactically and monetarily.
It has clearly been an effective process. A process that some teams, either due to lack of resources or lack of interest, don’t have. But Lagerwey didn’t just want that process to be possible. He wanted that process to be at maximum efficiency, even if it won’t ever quite be perfect.
“Ultimately it's all about the decision-making process," Ramineni said. "He would streamline that process and he would want to set up a repeatable process for how decisions will be made on players.
“The reason this is all difficult and complicated is because you have to make decisions based off of imperfect information," he added. "Because if you have perfect information, the player’s career has gone long enough to where it’s probably over. That's a constraint that always exists. And you're always making these calls with imperfect information. So the goal is to minimize the chance of error. Even if it’s not probably never eliminated 100%”
Seattle’s commitment to analytics goes hand in hand with Lagerwey’s lawyerly need for objective proof. And you can expect a similar commitment in Atlanta.
"I'm a big believer in objective evidence. I'm a big believer in data. It's one thing for me or anybody else to have an opinion but again, the lawyer in me is always going to say, 'Well, why'? When you're in law school, you get evaluated, you get asked a question that you have to argue for and against. You have to argue both sides of every question. That's what a law school answer is. And I think that that's the culture that I want to promulgate here," Lagerwey said at his introductory press conference as Atlanta United president.
That same culture coincided with Seattle becoming the most successful MLS team of the last decade. Now, with an increase of resources at his disposal, Lagerwey will attempt to bring that same success to Atlanta. It might take a moment to get everyone in the best place to succeed, but after sitting back and taking things in for a while, Lagerwey’s past seems to indicate that big things are on the way — bigger things than what Lagerwey has already done in MLS.
“He actually told me at one point that the Sounders were never really likely to have a season like Atlanta or LAFC could where they put up 70-odd points and have these great goal differences,” Oshan said. "Their roster philosophy was just not as conducive to having that sort of season. They would purposely build their roster around being at their best for certain parts of the year, not necessarily being good at every moment.”
Atlanta will have the chance to be good at every moment — in part, because Lagerwey learned how to turn around a team and find players that fit within a system in Salt Lake; in part, because Lagerwey perfected setting up the best possible people within an organization to succeed in the best possible way in Seattle; and, in part, because he simply seems to be a genuine product.
“I will go to bat for Garth every step of the way," Dunseth said. "I just think he's an extraordinary human being and I think sometimes that gets lost in these conversations when we're talking about people. He’s never gonna make everybody happy. Inevitably people are gonna going to hear what he's trying to do and it might not include them going forward. But you can never accuse Garth of not being genuine when it comes to how he handles this profession and this job. He's one of the most straightforward, honest individuals that I've come across and I think that's one of the reasons why he’s had success.”