Blame Pep Guardiola: A conversation about Austin FC with Joe Lowery

To preview the Austin FC match against the Colorado Rapids a different way, I got on a Zoom with Joe Lowery, founder of Backheeled, co-host on the Total Soccer Show, and a great all-around expert on tactics — especially when it comes to MLS. We talked ahead of Saturday's match between Austin FC and Colorado Rapids (7:30 p.m. CT, MLS Season Pass). 

(Note: This interview is edited for clarity and length.) 

Phil West: So, I was hoping to get your expert opinion on Austin FC and what they're doing this year ... essentially there's kind of a formational shift that they've been doing from their 4-3-3 from last year, more of a 3-2-2-3 where they have a fullback playing up higher as a winger and then they're kind of rotating other players deeper.

First of all, I wanted to get your impressions of the team overall this season, compared to last, and then what you see them doing with this, this new wrinkle and if it is really a new wrinkle in your opinion, or if it's just kind of an outgrowth of what they did last year. To me, it feels different, but what is your take on it?

Joe Lowery: To start with the team in general, I think it's been a disappointing start to the year for Austin fans in a lot of ways, with CCL obviously being the biggest one. Losing to Violette is a ridiculously crazy, insane thing that nobody ever thought would happen. It's also one of the best soccer stories in this region for a long time, but it's unfortunate for Austin that they're the victims of this. It's difficult to balance CCL and MLS play. You know, I think LAFC did it really well, but their depth and quality is really unmatched in this league right now. Austin doesn't have the resources and doesn't have the current roster makeup to really do something at that level.

It's difficult to navigate those things, and to sort of be sitting on six points through four games ... doesn't feel really all that bad to me. The results have been disappointing in some ways — to lose to St. Louis how they did is tough, it was a good win against Montreal, then you had the whole CCL debacle, a nice win against RSL and then losing to Houston in a mediocre performance last week. It looks like this team is still finding their footing. Some of this regression seemed like it was coming before; I think there was a lot of pressure on [Emiliano] Rigoni to be an elite player for Austin to continue their trajectory. And I think he's looked fine this year ... but he doesn't look like a consistent game-changing player and that's a little unfortunate as well.

Another concern for me is how Gyasi Zardes and Sebastian Driussi function in the same team. Because Druissi — he's wearing the number 10 this year, which still catches me off guard that it's Rigoni with the 7 and Driussi with the 10; it's just really weird. But he's not a classic Lucho Acosta-type number 10 or a Carlos Gil-type number 10. He's a goal scorer. He's absolutely a goal scorer. And so that's what Zardes is too, and I think they can work together. But both of them need service rather than providing service and Diego Fagundez had a really good year last year. He hasn't played at that level this year so far. It's too early to say that last year was the outlier. 

As far as the shape change, to me from what I saw from this team last year it does look new and different. So you've got either Nick Lima doing it on the right side, and we've seen Zan Kolmanic do it on the left side now; they will keep one fullback deeper to form a back three with the two center backs. And then they'll push the opposite fullback higher and tuck in that winger inside and it's usually some combination of Driussi and Rigoni. I think that's what it was against Houston with those two players in the half-spaces, and then Fagundez was a little bit wider on the left side — not a true with provider, but he was doing some of that stuff because Kolmanic was hanging back. And then you had Jon Gallagher, who I really liked by the way, high on the right side. So it can be flipped depending on the personnel and what [head coach Josh] Wolff wants to do. But I liked the look. 

It's a look that we're seeing a lot of teams across MLS go to. Houston did a very similar thing. We've seen it from Charlotte, San Jose, I mean, you can almost like run down the list of teams, almost everybody — that's a bit of an exaggeration, but a lot of teams are doing that kind of thing. I like it. Wolff talked about how they're trying to become a little bit better in defensive transition. And when you keep a fullback a little deeper and a little narrower, you have a natural defender in that space and you have the tighter structure and midfield ahead of them. So I think a lot of that stuff makes sense. I'm not sure that it's paying massive dividends right now. But it's it's still early in the year right and so it is absolutely something to watch to see if it helps Austin at the end of the day, by the time the season wraps.

PW: It could be kind of a just a learning curve thing right now, right? 2021 was kind of like a season-long learning curve for Austin ... and then that paid dividends in 2022. 

JL: I think there's something to it, and I ran the numbers on this recently for a piece for Backheeled. There's absolutely something to the fact that it takes teams time to like relearn that stuff. You know, as good as Austin's season was last year, they come in this season and it's always a reset when you start a new year. Looking at data from the last two seasons, it took into the middle fifth of both of those seasons for xG per game to hit its peak across the league. So I think there was something to this idea of sharpness and preseason sharpness and trying to get the rust off. Those are all sports cliches, I think we know they're true when we watch it, but I think the data supports that idea as well. 

Especially for a team like Austin that wants to play with the ball. It's gonna take them longer. The data I looked at was for a piece on St. Louis; it's going to take Austin longer to get up to 100% than it is for St. Louis to get up to 100%, or a pressing team that's about direct play and they want to go, go, go. The less you can be using the ball earlier on in the year, the quicker you're going to get up to your peak. Whether that's the right way or wrong way to play, I don't know. I'm not sure that soccer has told us that yet. But yeah, I think Austin is very much still in the learning phase of this new season. 

PW: You mentioned that a lot of teams are doing what Austin's doing, with the three in the back shift and putting a fullback up high. Is there a place where that's originating? Is there one place in MLS where that started and everybody's replicating it? Is it, like, we all want to be Pep Guardiola?

JL: I think it's more the latter. We've seen it in stretches in the past. Atlanta did it for stretches last year. It's not a new concept. I think you can go through and see that this stuff has happened before. I want to talk to more people about this, the people themselves are making these calls, but my my guess would be it's them watching like Champions League games, Premier League games and seeing this is a trend that probably swept Europe, maybe two seasons ago. 

Juventus are doing this a lot, where they have a fullback come and hang deeper ... Now we see it with Man City, where it's almost always the right back or left back that tucks inside. Nothing's new under the sun right in in this sport, basically. But in MLS, it seems like everybody saw it real early on in the year and thought, yeah, okay, let's let's give this a shot. We can maybe maximize our personnel with this approach.

PW: In the last press conference, after the Houston match, I alerted Josh — I mean, I'm sure he's aware — I said, 'I did some math, 42.5 goals, if you extrapolate over the season, that's kind of more like '21 than '23. It's 35 goals versus 65." He said, "Yeah, a small sample size but appreciate the stats."

JL: (laughs)

PW: I mean, is four games too small of a sample size to really kind of gauge where this is going to go, or is it an indication right now that they might be in trouble — they might have difficulties generating the offense that they need to? The eye test is showing that right now ... it just doesn't seem like the offense is clicking in the way that it did versus the first two games last season. They scored five goals in each game and they were off to the races.

JL: So we'll start with the sample size. I think four games are too small to draw a ton of conclusions. I'm used to watching the game and parsing through the numbers and learning stuff. It's not like these games are useless. But I think most folks, myself included, feel a lot more comfortable making bigger conclusions after eight, 10, 12 games. That's really when I think the status of various themes across the league starts to feel more real and starts to be more real. That's that's one piece of this. I will say, though, for Austin, it doesn't seem like it's just a four-game sample here ...

Austin was really hot last year, and it made for great TV and I'm bummed I didn't make it to a game in Q2, because that place looked like it was bumping every single match. I'm sure it was amazing to be there. But I'm not sure that their production was ever going to be sustainable. I was mildly shocked that it kept up for as long as it did last year and again, it made for great TV and for a fun team to watch and I still really enjoy watching Austin because I liked the stuff that Wolff was trying to do. But it feels to me like there was always sort of a regression coming in.

I'm not saying that that's all the way where we are in Austin right now again, it's only four games, but you know maybe it's less like four games and more like four plus 34 games so when you factor in last season. If I were Josh Wolff and in thinking about the game how I do — though he has way more experience and way better experience than I do, is much more qualified in this space — I would be concerned in some ways. 

PW: One thing I noticed in the St. Louis game is, obviously, Driussi's gonna get a lot more attention now defensively, because people are aware of what he's doing. They were kind of pushing him out, he kind of had to be more of a wide playmaker, and that just didn't really seem to work. And I was noticing in the Houston game that he just seemed kind of disconnected — one of the hallmarks of his game last year was that he was so in the right position in so many situations. A lot of his goals and assists came from reading really well where he needed to be on the field, and his movement off the ball was excellent. And it just seems like there's something in that that's lacking this year. And I don't know if it's just a combination of new parts, new style, trying to learn things, or if there's maybe a bit of a malaise and it's just a bad patch and it's not attributable to any sort of tactical shift.

JL: I would put less of Driussi's early struggles — he's got one goal so far in MLS play this season, right? 

PW: Yeah, he had that chip in the opener. 

JL: Right. Just filthy, right? Absolutely filthy. So you can see his quality; it's so clear when you watch him play. And that's sort of the theme I would carry here, for me, it's less about Driussi falling off and more about the service into him falling off. For Rigoni, it's still not all there for him. I think he can be a good provider, but he still doesn't have the threat on the right side as you really hope that he'll develop. 

The other factor is Fagundez. I look through some of his numbers and his chance creation numbers, and even when you watch him play — and with Josh Wolff, there's sparks here right now, not the good kind of sparks, you know more about that than I do. But Fagundez hasn't been the same player. For how they want to play and set up Driussi, their bread and butter last year was Fagundez in the left half-space, finding Driussi in the box after [Maxi] Urruti clears the path. That was the method for this team. And it worked really well. If Fagundez, who's like the origin of that pattern, if he's not starting those moves, it's not going to be the same Driussi this year.

That's part of the challenge for Austin early on, and there's plenty of time for this stuff to get figured out. But yeah, I would say it's more about Fagundez and the pieces around Driussi still not quite fitting together more than it is about him. I think he's absolutely got the ability to be a 15-goal scorer year after year. 

PW: So, does playing Colorado on Saturday help that? 

JL: It should. It really should. Jack Price is out now, Diego Rubio and Darren Yapi are out on international duty. Colorado are rough right now. They're in rough shape. So if you're Austin, you're looking at this game and thinking this is three points we should go out there and expect ... if we are at the level that we showed last year and the level that we want to be, this is a game that you go out there and you absolutely prove that to yourselves and prove that to folks that around this landscape. Austin have more talent, they have better players and they have been in better form this year than Colorado as well. So yeah, should be a helpful game.