When Austin FC lost to the LA Galaxy two Saturdays ago, the club found itself near the end of a second consecutive losing season. With a dismal record of ten wins, nine draws, and fourteen losses, another defeat wasn’t surprising. For some, the only surprise was that what happened next hadn’t happened earlier.
Just a few hours after flying back from Los Angeles, head coach Josh Wolff was summoned to an early-morning meeting with Austin FC’s sporting director, Rodolfo Borrell, and majority owner, Anthony Precourt. A few minutes later, the franchise started searching for a new head coach.
This Saturday will mark the club’s first game without Wolff, who had been on the payroll since Austin’s Major League Soccer debut. It will also be the final game of a dreadful 2024 season. Davy Arnaud, Wolff’s longtime assistant, will replace him on an interim basis for the match against the Colorado Rapids. The Verde and Black are in lowly tenth place, out of the playoffs, and were eliminated from the Copa Tejas—an unofficial in-season competition to crown the best Texas team (congratulations, FC Dallas fans, wherever you are). To add insult to injury, the normally raucous Q2 Stadium will likely be quieter Saturday, with the Texas-Georgia football game kicking off at about the same time. Festivities from the Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix will also steal some of the spotlight.
Austin FC has hit rock bottom so hard that the bounce might be the best thing to happen to the club in ages. It’s hard to believe this is the same team that reached the 2022 Western Conference Final in its second season.
But whose fault is it? Will everything turn around now that Wolff is gone? Did a Barton Springs salamander curse the club? Does Minister of Culture Matthew McConaughey (yes, that’s his real title) need to minister harder? Can we pin the blame on someone else? Let’s go through the prime suspects.
Former Sporting Director Claudio Reyna
Reyna, a former USMNT star, faced criticism over several confounding moves he oversaw while running the club. And the fallout from many of those decisions is still dragging the club down.
For example, three of the five players Reyna (who shares responsibility with Wolff and the rest of the team’s decision-makers) drafted in the 2020 MLS Expansion Draft never played for Austin. The other two, Danny Hoesen and Jared Stroud, didn’t fare much better. Hoesen, who was released last year, was injured for most of his time in Austin. Stroud scored one goal and managed four assists before being let go. When he returned to town with St. Louis City SC, he transformed into one of local fans’ biggest villains after tricking an Austin player into an embarrassing turnover directly in front of the supporters’ section, then scoring an easy goal.
Reyna resigned as sporting director a month before the start of the 2023 season, but not due to Austin FC’s performance. Reyna and his family had become embroiled in a messy conflict between former USMNT head coach Gregg Berhalter and Reyna’s son Gio, a rising star for the national team. In an attempt to get Berhalter fired, Claudio Reyna’s wife, Danielle, leaked evidence of Berhalter kicking his now-wife, Rosalind, while they were in college. Both Berhalters confirmed the incident and said it had not been repeated.
As a result, Wolff served as both head coach and interim sporting director for the first four months of last season. The club has kept quiet about the Reyna–Berhalter drama, but the unseemliness of it all could have affected the team, and it’s hard to imagine that the controversy didn’t distract Reyna during his final months leading the club.
Emiliano Rigoni
Ultimately, Reyna’s personnel decisions will loom larger over his legacy with Austin FC than his personal drama. When I asked Phil West, founder of the Austin FC newsletter Verde All Day, to explain the club’s struggles, he was quick to name Emiliano Rigoni. The right-winger joined the club in 2022 as its second-highest-paid player, behind 2022 MVP finalist Sebastián Driussi. Over 51 league games with the team, Rigoni contributed just six goals, and he struggled to make the starting lineup.
A single highly paid, underperforming player can throw a franchise out of whack for years—even after their departure. Almost halfway through this season, Rigoni was shown the door. “There was a provision in his contract where Rigoni was going to be auto renewed if he had twelve appearances [this season],” West said. “He was one shy of that when they decided they needed to do something.”
MLS teams are allowed to buy out one player per season, and Austin FC used its buyout to get rid of Rigoni. That also opened up the valuable designated-player slot he had been occupying. “The way MLS works,” West said, “is there’s three designated players that only count a certain amount toward the salary cap. And those are generally players that you count on to be your best performers and your most productive.”
Rigoni never lived up to the designated-player tag, and ditching him allowed the club to sign Osman Bukari from the Serbian club Red Star Belgrade. Since his arrival in Texas, Bukari has been one of the club’s lone bright spots. Although he’s only scored one goal in nine appearances, hopes remain high that he’ll help the team rebuild next season.
Sebastián Driussi
Driussi has been dogged by nagging injuries the past two years. He missed seven games this season and hasn’t looked like the player who scored 22 goals in 2022 and almost won the league’s MVP award. Whether it’s due to an injury, frustration with Josh Wolff, or struggles with the Texas heat, Driussi’s production has slipped. A lot. In 2023 he notched 11 goals, and this year that number was down to 6.
But Driussi isn’t the only player struggling to find the back of the net. With only 36 goals all season, Austin FC is third from the bottom in the league in goals scored.
Michelle Sánchez, a freelance journalist and producer for MLS Season Pass, said the lack of goals is rooted in deeper issues. “Maybe you can also argue the lack of chemistry between the players,” Sánchez said. “There were a lot of new players that have joined the club. There were a lot of new faces that Wolff was rotating in, and when you change the lineup from week to week, you hurt yourself or you can hurt the team.”
After a deep playoff run in 2022, the club has never been able to regain its winning form. “The vibes were not good in 2023,” Phil West said. In 2024, they haven’t been much better. Fans have noticed Austin FC teammates apparently charging at each other after matches. The captain’s armband has bounced around the roster, and fewer players come to the supporters’ section to acknowledge fans after a loss.
“When you look back to 2022, you saw that there was a chemistry,” Sánchez said. “You even saw on social media where [players] were having asadas on the weekends, not even at the club—it was at everyone’s home. There was a connection.”
Josh Wolff
After Austin FC parted ways with Reyna and Rigoni, the head coach was next on the chopping block. But was the club’s swoon really Wolff’s fault? After all, Wolff didn’t miss penalty shots in back-to-back matches this season (that was Driussi).
Wolff’s critics say he lost the players’ trust because of his tactical inflexibility and his inability to connect with or inspire the locker room. “Something we noticed is [Wolff’s] unwillingness to take the blame,” West said. “Some coaches in situations like this say, ‘Yeah, this is on me.’ ”
Instead of shouldering the burden after a loss, Wolff would often issue vague comments to the press about missed chances, praise small bright spots such as possession rate, or shift the blame to specific underperforming players. “Players, I’m sure, pay attention to that,” West said. “And I think fans hear that, and rightly or not, they conclude this is somebody who’s not taking accountability for how the team is doing.”
Earlier this season, worried that Borrell and Precourt might be tempted to stick with Wolff despite another underperforming year, a group of frustrated fans took their message to the skies. Before Austin’s July 13 home match against Seattle, a plane flew above Q2 Stadium trailing a banner that read “Austin Deserves Better #WolfOut.” Aries Silva, Austin FC superfan and coordinator of the stunt, said the pilot misspelled Wolff’s name.
The same crew of fans struck again in September, when it hired a mobile advertising truck with almost the same message to circle the stadium during a match against Real Salt Lake. That game turned out to be Wolff’s last in Austin. “We raised almost four thousand bucks,” Silva said. At least 120 people gave anywhere from a couple dollars to more than a hundred to support the message.
Although some supporters didn’t appreciate the demonstrations, Silva said reaching casual fans was never his group’s goal. “Our plan was to aim the protest squarely at two people: Precourt and Borrell,” Silva said.
Wolff’s distant relationship with Austin’s deeply engaged fans could wind up defining his time with the club. Q2 Stadium’s supporters’ section is among the most passionate in all of American sports. Fan-led band La Murga de Austin leads the crowd in songs and chants that start before the opening whistle and continue after the match ends. The club’s marketing efforts have long focused on the atmosphere the fans create, but the #WolffOut demonstrations showed that the supporters weren’t there only for a party. They wanted to win.
Saturday’s match, the final outing of a doomed season, might wind up being one of Austin’s best for both the squad and the fans. With the playoffs out of reach, the players will be playing only for pride, and the diehards will be there—even if the Longhorns game might mean they have more elbow room than usual.
When it’s over, the Austin FC faithful can start getting their hopes up again. The offseason is a losing team’s haven—fans, media, and club officials can all find reasons for optimism. But how long will it last? This year has shown that fans expect Borrell and Precourt to deliver more than mediocrity. Austin FC’s supporters put in their work, and they expect the club to reciprocate.
