Analysis: Minnesota United’s Khaled El-Ahmad ready to make his mark during MLS transfer window

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Khaled El-Ahmad, Minnesota United’s first-year chief soccer officer and sporting director, knows what he wants for his club.

Specifically, the total elimination of disposable plastic water bottles. He wants those gone. Yesterday, if possible.

El-Ahmad’s green credentials cannot be questioned. He bikes to work every day, and knows the exact distance in kilometers. He’s getting a bike rack installed at Minnesota’s training facility, even though he might be one of the few people arriving every day on two wheels. He’s got the team cafeteria growing its own vegetables on-site.

These things have nothing to do with soccer, but they’re representative of how El-Ahmad wants to run MNUFC. He sat down with print reporters this week to detail his vision, and two themes emerged.

First, he is focused on continuous improvement, not only on the field but in every part of the club — even, yes, down to the vegetables in the cafeteria.

Second, this whole process is probably going to take longer than Loons fans might like.

The current MLS teams he namechecks as models for his team — Philadelphia, Colorado, Real Salt Lake — are not the league’s big spenders. Atlanta and Inter Miami may throw bags of cash around, LAFC can continue bringing in big names from distant shores, but El-Ahmad’s models are the ones that he calls “smart clubs, efficient with their investments.”

Said the CSO, “We’re in that sphere. And I don’t necessarily just look at spend. I look at us — our style of play, the culture, what are we actually competing with.”

The league’s transfer window opens next Thursday, the official beginning of El-Ahmad’s first chance to build his squad with the basics — like a coaching staff — already in place. And it comes at the low ebb of his team’s season. Minnesota heads into Saturday’s game at Houston amidst a six-game losing streak on the heels of the team’s best start in franchise history.

This window is not going to be a one-off attempt to rebuild the team on the fly. “When a new GM comes in, they say between three to five windows, sometimes even six depending on the contract length of the players when you arrive,” he said. “I look at it as every window gives me an opportunity to start improving and adding pieces. ... We will do it in the summer, we will do it in the winter, and we’ll do it next summer. And the goal is every window to continue to get better.”

While the team is currently on a historically bad run, El-Ahmad is keen to point out some success stories. Tani Oluwaseyi started the season as a depth striker; he’s now playing important minutes for Canada at the Copa América. Carlos Harvey and Alejandro Bran, both offseason acquisitions but neither of them splashy, did the same thing for Panama and Costa Rica.

Even Kervin Arriaga, sold to Serbian standouts FK Partizan, counts as a success story to El-Ahmad. He’s proud of turning a profit on Arriaga, who came to the club for $100,000 in salary cap space and left for a fee of at least five times that.

El-Ahmad said he tried to extend Arriaga’s contract, but the Honduran center back wanted to move.

“I said from the beginning, I want us to also be a club that can develop and move players on,” said El-Ahmad, who noted the team would have lost Arriaga for nothing at the end of the season.

The CSO also has a hand in how things look on the field, and his verdict after nearly two-thirds of the year is that the team is moving in the right direction.

“I want us to be high pressing, which we haven’t been in certain situations,” he said. “Which you can’t be, if you don’t have the right pieces to high press. The coaching staff didn’t have the full preseason. I came in late. So, slowly but surely.”

It’s what El-Ahmad referred to as “hybrid” mode, as he finds the players to fit his vision of how he wants the team to play.

The club is also building out its scouting capabilities: they’ve hired additional scouts in Europe, as well as a team of “video scouts” that can scour for players from anywhere. And they’ve added more data analysts — evident from the number of metrics El-Ahmad cited, including measuring how compact his team is defensively.

The same day as the sit-down, El-Ahmad was hosting what he called the “Q2 review,” including the team’s entire sporting staff as well as a number of front-office staffers. It’s not just about how things look on the field. The schedule that day was set to include a discussion of the saga of center back Victor Eriksson — a Swedish international who struggled mightily in Minnesota, but immediately returned to Hammarby, one of Sweden’s biggest clubs, and played a full 90 minutes.

El-Ahmad wants to know: how can the club do better with a player like Eriksson? “Just like I want us to improve on the players, we as a club have to look,” he said. “How can we improve on everything around here?”

If there’s anything that defines where Minnesota is at right now, and El-Ahmad’s plans for MNUFC, it might be that. All they want to do, all they have to do, is improve — on everything.