Tuesday brought the official announcement that FC Cincinnati will be joining Major League Soccer for the 2019 season, but the hard work to get the club ready on the pitch for MLS began a long time before that. Leading the lengthy to-do list from that perspective has been current head coach Alan Koch.
The South African – who previously worked for the Vancouver Whitecaps, where he led that club’s USL side from 2015-16 – will be making the jump to the top flight next year after his first year at the helm saw FC Cincinnati reach the semifinals of the US Open Cup. That cup run garnered interest from other clubs and earned him a contract extension to ensure he was the man to lead FCC into MLS.
Koch has been tasked with trying to land the club an USL championship, while also laying the foundations for making the team competitive from the get-go in their first season in MLS. Cincy brought in 18 new players for this year, many of them with previous MLS and overseas experience, and all of them hoping to be part of the club's first MLS roster.
"The players [we brought in] could see where this club was going," Koch told MLSsoccer.com this week. "Obviously there was no certainty as to were we going to be in MLS and when would we be in MLS, but our players wanted to come and be part of a special journey. We used that as our biggest recruiting tool – let's go and compete and try and win."
Koch's message to those players is now a simple one. They have the opportunity to show they're deserving of an MLS deal come 2019, so they need to go out there and perform in the USL to earn it.
But now that the MLS move is official, FC Cincinnati will be the team that everyone else in USL wants to knock off, with opposition players also out to impress Koch and his management team with an eye on next season – especially those on MLS reserve sides.
Alan Koch during his time at Simon Fraser University | Ron Hole/SFU Clan
"We have a huge target on our back," Koch said. "We have to be ready for that … Those young players are fighting for spots in their first team, but they're all realists. They know there's only a certain number of guys that get signed to the first team, while the rest of them will try and get jobs somewhere else.
"They know if you're playing against a team that's going to MLS, this is the time to put your best foot forward. It's motivating for our players, but it's also equally motivating for the opposition too."
Koch will spend the next few months casting an eye over players already in the league and those in college, with an eye on both the expansion draft and SuperDraft. With just over nine months until their MLS opener, Cincinnati's 2019 squad-building now cranks into high gear.
"Like anybody, in a league like MLS with all the different rules and regulations, we've got to be incredibly creative, incredibly resourceful, in terms of putting this roster together," Koch said. "We know we'll have a decent budget, one that will make us competitive."
Koch isn't ruling out making some plays for MLS players now, depending on what the rules allow, possibly bringing them in for the rest of the current USL season with a view to making the jump with them back into MLS next year.
"We're definitely open to that," Koch noted. "We've been talking to a couple of clubs about loan-to-buy type of options. We've obviously got to regulate things with MLS and make sure we and them are completely on top of how the rules are going to work as things unfold. But we're definitely open to trying to do something in the summertime and then we'll have the winter window, too."
