What happened with Nico Estévez and FC Dallas

He was the right person for the job initially — but then the job changed

Something I liked to remind people: Just because you have the answers to this set of questions, that doesn’t mean you’ll have the answer to the next set.

And if you boil it down, that’s what happened to Nico Estévez at FC Dallas.

He’s a smart guy and a hard worker. I believe he prepared his teams well and cared for his players. He was a good choice when hired before the 2022 season — but when circumstances changed and a new set of questions needed to be answered, well, the glove no longer fit.

There are other reasons, and we’ll get to them. But that’s the bottom line. He wasn’t finding the right bandages for cuts and scrapes that just kept coming, wasn’t solving the riddle of 2024.

Estévez was dismissed Sunday with just one win in six MLS matches since April. His record since May of ‘23 in MLS play: 8-14-13. The home record since late last season (when the issues started metastasizing) was a highly concerning 3-2-7.

Show me a coach who wins just 3 of 12 home games and I’ll show you a coach who will probably need to update the resume.

The big reason 

I have thought about this a lot in 2024 as it relates to Estévez — but also to coaches in general. About how a manager – in some cases a very good manager — can be well equipped with answers to one set of questions but come up blank on solutions for a different set of questions.

That’s why someone like Graham Potter can be the talk of the Premier League at Brighton, but completely flame out months later at Chelsea. Potter was hired at Stamford Bridge in September of 2022 having built an impressive resume at Brighton, only to be dismissed at Chelsea the following April. It’s not because he suddenly forgot how many players to put on the field. It’s because he was the right fit for a particular spot, but not the next. Or put another way, he didn’t have the right set of answers for the next, very different set of test questions.

As Estévez took over at Toyota Stadium in 2022 he found a bunch of players beaten down by circumstance, and not necessarily the right fit for the way former manager Luchi Gonzalez wanted to play. Without getting into the tactical weeds, FC Dallas wasn’t great at defending and was a complete disaster in transition defending.

So Estévez had a tactical fix for the problem. And he did fix it. FCD finished third in the West, having improved by 20 points over the previous season. That’s a hell of a turnaround. The media and the masses applauded.

By the middle of his second year, Estévez and his staff were facing a completely different set of questions, many of them related to injuries.  None the issues of late 2023 — mostly an attack that looked broken and deficient in confidence, unable to generate a sufficient supply of quality scoring chances — appeared to move toward improvement in 2024.

The record suffered and, at some point, tactical ideology needed to go out the window. At some point, Estevez and his staff needed to find ways to win games, by hook or by crook, as we sometimes say. Rather, Estévez struggled to adjust.

He couldn’t light enough fires under enough players. Veterans underperformed. Too many of the younger players stalled in progress or regressed. Too many players repeated mistakes, Estévez and staff seemingly unable to “coach it out of them.” Not all of this is on the management staff, but some of it surely is.

The personnel issues

Some of the team’s poor performance — Dallas sits 13th of 14 teams in the West, with just 3 wins in 16 matches — is on the staff. But this must also be said: FCD’s 2024 roster, assembled by the technical staff, simply had too many “well ifs.”  That is …

• “Well, if Paxton Pomykal can stay healthy…” 

• “If the team’s best midfielder, Asier Illarramendi, can stay healthy over a long, hot season at 34 years old…”

• “If the team’s new record signing striker Petar Musa can perform at record-signing level…”

• “If Jesus Ferreira can rebound and be the 2022 version rather than the late 2023 version…”

• “If Bernie Kamungo continues to progress and doesn’t suffer a sophomore slump...”

• “If Dante Sealy could suddenly turn all that raw talent into bottom line productivity…”

• If the team can find enough cover from reserves until Alan Velasco and Geovane Jesus can recover from long term injuries…”

• “If veterans Paul Arriola and Sebastian Lletget can rebound from sub-par seasons…”

You see the issue. Sure, if all of those things happened, FC Dallas would probably be in good shape. Maybe not ready to challenge LAFC or Real Salt Lake for Western Conference supremacy, but they could certainly muster more than 10 shots against a Minnesota team missing half its starters. Rather, uncertainty enveloped all of those elements.

Meanwhile – and this is where we all shrug our shoulders – this roster wasn’t suited to the way Estevez wanted to play in 2024. Having watched his team’s 4-3-3 get stuck way too often 35 yards from goal, he opted for a 3-4-2-1 with similar, but slightly different principles of play. 

When did the critical, necessary conversations take place between Estévez and technical director Andre Zanotta? Only they could say. Did Estévez lay out the kind of roster turnover he needed to play a different formation, and Zanotta couldn’t deliver? Or did the coach sign off on the roster, with all the bullet points of uncertainty? Shoulder shrug.

But something happened there, some kind of disconnect. Either that, or they both just badly miscalculated how bad a fit the roster was for the new way of play. There is insufficient cover at wingback and at center back. And probably at the defensive midfield position, too.

That gave Estevez a lot of problems to solve – problems exacerbated by the ongoing injury crisis.  Solutions needed to be plotted, adjustments made. Whether that was trashing the new tactical scheme or getting players comfortable in their new roles or just getting the players to compete harder, Estévez struggled to adapt and improvise. 

A players coach

I couldn’t say for sure, but I believe the players generally liked Estévez. And why wouldn’t they? He was a “players’ coach” in most ways. That is, he didn’t berate or blame. When players struggled, he generally tried to show them videos of things they did well while also showing them love in the figurative sense. He never “threw players under the bus” the way we see some under-pressure managers do.

But all of that dripped thick with irony when you watched FC Dallas attackers look so timid, so consistently unable or unwilling to make the bold choice. Even when arriving into good spaces, they were hesitant to make the risky pass or take the aggressive course of action. Rather, they circulated the ball safely — which is why the team is near the bottom of the league in goals, expected goals and shots.

Finally, this

I can’t say what has happened between Estévez and Nkosi Tafari, the team’s top defender. It doesn’t appear to be a personal clash. I think this is simply Estévez’s fix for a player who wasn’t performing at his best.

I don’t know what has happened to Ferreira, who simply hasn’t been the same since he returned from U.S. national team duty last summer.

I don’t know if Musa can be an elite striker in MLS. He hasn’t been as yet, on track for about 11 goals in 2024. That total would be a good, solid “OK” but certainly nothing to stop and tell the neighbors about.

I don’t know why Lletget, one of the team’s higher paid players and still a solid building block, can barely get on the field right now.

Some of this is surely on the individuals. But at some point, as these personnel issues stack up and overlap, the coach has to show he can help solve … some of them?

There are lots of questions to answer around Toyota Stadium right now. Estévez wasn’t turning up enough answers. That doesn’t mean he won’t be successful somewhere else. It just means he wasn’t the guy who could find the answers here.