It won’t be long now until San Antonio FC begins with a clean slate in 2023, confronting new challenges and questions as it sets aside the immense successes of last year.
2022 was easily SAFC’s best year yet, and among the best in league history, as it won almost every title it competed for: USL Championship Final, regular season title, Copa Tejas and the Copa Tejas Shield. However, the successes of last year now come with greater expectations for this year, even as SAFC tries to set last year aside and everybody has to start from square one.
“We achieved some big things last season, but in a new season, nobody gives a [damn] about the last season, it’s like ‘What are you going to bring this season?’” SAFC defender Fabien Garcia told The Striker. “I was saying to the guys, ‘You can be a good player for one year, but the best players, they play consistently for 10 years, that's what's going to make the difference between one good player and a great player.’”
While SAFC obviously has a very solid foundation to build from for 2023, no team is immune from a bit of uncertainty or skepticism — not even the defending champion.
Who’s going to score the goals now?
It’s a common saying in soccer that goals change games, and while a large part of SAFC’s success last year was built off of its defense, it will need the odd goal here or there to get wins. While the defense is nearly unchanged, top goalscorers like Santiago Patiño and Sam Adeniran have moved to other, bigger stages, leaving a vacuum up top.
For what it’s worth, creating chances shouldn’t be an issue for SAFC. They retained talented box-to-box players like PC and Connor Maloney, as well as more creative attacking midfielders like Cristian Parano and David Loera. Indeed, some of those players can get forward and put the ball in themselves, with Loera already scoring a beautiful curler in preseason, but the burden of finishing chances shouldn’t fall primarily to them, no matter how much head coach Alen Marcina or any player will tell you every player gets in on the attack.
He’s a beast, baby ☄️🚀 #Defend210 pic.twitter.com/20kdvyF0JU
— San Antonio FC (@SanAntonioFC) March 4, 2023
SAFC has tried to compensate for the big attacking losses in the offseason by bringing in players with MLS experience like Niko Hansen and Kimarni Smith. Players such as Adeniran, Kortne Ford and Sebastian Ibeagha moved to SAFC for a season before an MLS team gave them a second chance; Hansen and Smith will be hoping to do the same.
Although SAFC seemed to divulge less than ever about its preseason matches, we can tell that as can be expected in preseason, different players and combinations were given a chance and SAFC never scored more than a single goal in a preseason match.
It’s always risky to read too much into preseason, but at least from what we’ve seen so far, nobody has stood out from the pack as SAFC’s new talismanic striker. Sure, Justin Dhillon scored one of the goals in preseason, has two years of experience in Marcina’s system and scored six goals last year, but his best qualities seem to be pressing defenders and setting his teammates up.
Understandably, it might just take a little while for somebody like Hansen or Smith to click into place and become SAFC’s newest go-to goalscorer, or it might take a few months until SAFC picks up another MLS player seeking more playing time – or somebody in a similar situation – like Adeniran last year. Marcina has proven he can find a diamond in the rough (or several) a few months into the season, but it would be easier if the right striker is already there.
Has the team found ways to innovate and stay ahead?
The way SAFC played last year proved to be the most successful in the league, so it arguably has the least need for improvement and refinement of any team. SAFC needs to find ways to fine-tune the system so that other teams don’t catch up, but Marcina and his team won’t be making wholesale changes.
“[We’re] just going to keep doing the same as what was winning the last season, keep the same mentality, keep the same energy on the field,” Garcia said. “People cannot match with us when we apply this pressure on them. The same intensity we put in last season, we're going to put in this season even more.”
So, that’s it? SAFC’s just going to crank the winning formula up to 11?
Marcina said it’s not that simple, that SAFC is always looking to evolve, championship or not.
“We always have the foundation set, the structure is set, but we always look to grow and evolve, so there's added game model principles,” Marcina said. “We provide the framework in terms of the standards, and then the players collectively – returners and new players – decide the behaviors and actions behind the concepts that we provide.”
How different will this SAFC team really look, though, if the group deciding on how to implement those principles is mostly players from last year?
Additionally, when talking about the handful of new signings the team has made so far, Marcina mentions a lot of the same things he has in previous years, like a commitment to pressing actions, working on both sides of the ball and verticality in terms of both player and ball movement – all trademarks of SAFC’s style in recent years – so how will the team evolve?
Again, SAFC arguably had the least to change and improve of any team, but it needs to figure out at least a few ways to evolve so that it doesn’t get caught by the 23 teams who will be chasing it with more motivation and hunger than ever.
What happens when SAFC falls short of 2022?
While all of 2022’s success was great for the SAFC community and will live on in its memory forever, that now raises the expectations very high for this year. There was always a sense around the league that SAFC could be an elite team and compete for titles, now it has managed to do so and brought out the double-edged sword which comes with that.
Marcina often says his team loves and embraces challenges, so it should be overjoyed with the year ahead. While the motivation might differ slightly, he says it’s still high among the squad this year.
“I think [the players] are equally as motivated, because now it's the opportunity to defend a title,” Marcina said. “Last year was about the opportunity to earn the right to say ‘Hey, we won a championship.’ Now, you earn the right to say ‘Hey, we went back-to-back.’”
"I'd like to take this moment to apologize to NONE of these teams that disrespected us, not one of these teams!"@MitchellTaintor, USLC Defender of the Year and mentality monster, taking no prisoners and being the first player to talk back-to-back. 👀🏆2️⃣ pic.twitter.com/zmlrhhlecR
— Jonathan Check (@checkjfooty) November 16, 2022
SAFC is talking the talk, but it’ll need to walk the walk. Even a successful year by most standards, such as winning the league championship but not the regular season, might feel like a bit of a letdown after everything 2022 brought. The only areas for improvement are a deeper run in the U.S. Open Cup and setting league records outright rather than sharing or falling just short of them.
As much as devout SAFC fans would like to repeat or even build on last year, many probably know it’s an even taller order to win everything it did again with the heightened expectations. While SAFC has to answer the first two questions, answering this one will depend more on the fans, for multiple reasons.
“The crowd is going to push us, people get excited from the last season and I think they're going to bring more energy to us this season,” Garcia said. “A lot of people, they love what happened last season and more [people are] coming in, I think it’s going to be even better for this season.”
There may be a small, unrealistic minority who see anything less than a multi-trophy season as a disappointment now, but defending titles is probably much harder than winning them in the first place. To adapt a popular saying from Alfred Tennyson, ‘tis better to have won trophies and had trouble defending them than never to have won trophies at all.