St. Louis City SC fired sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel on Monday as it looks to get the club back on track following what has been back-to-back seasons outside of the playoff picture.
Pfannenstiel has served as sporting director since the summer of 2020, several years before the club started play in MLS in 2023. Pfannenstiel helped to build out the club’s sporting infrastructure, academy and MLS Next Pro team, as well as its training center and the expansion roster. St. Louis had a surprising and historic first season in MLS, finishing atop the Western Conference with 56 points.
It has been a struggle since that year, however, with the club finishing 12th in the conference in 2024 and currently sitting 14th this year, 14 points off the playoff line (21 points in 27 matches). That has led to multiple coaching changes in St. Louis, but the results have not followed.
St. Louis City president Diego Gigliani told The Athletic that he feels this is the natural end of a five-year cycle under Pfannenstiel, and that the poor results in the past two years are a sign that the club was in need of a new vision for the next iteration of its growth.
“We need stability on the sporting side to be able to get performance, and we haven’t had that in the last two years,” Gigliani said. “Some of that has to do with head coach changes. We’ve had a natural and positive evolution of our squad, more and more investment as well, but we just haven’t seen results improve at all over those couple of years. So as we get to the end of that five-year cycle, we now want to start planning a new five-year cycle. And so we look out, and we look at 2030 and we say: What are the goals that we want to achieve in the next five years? And how do we put ourselves on the best path to be able to achieve those? And we feel that a change in sporting leadership will help us to be able to start this next five-year cycle.”
Thomas Müller’s penalty deep into stoppage time – following a spotty call – dealt another defeat to St. Louis City Saturday night (Anne-Marie Sorvin / Imagn Images)
St. Louis has been one of the league’s success stories from an off-field perspective. The club’s downtown stadium is considered one of the gems of the league’s latest era of expansion, and City has sold out every home game in its MLS history.
Gigliani said the goal has to be to put a team on the field that can reward that type of fan support.
“What I can confirm for sure is the level of ambition and commitment that exists at the ownership level to be higher performing, or to really be as high performing on the pitch as the club is off the pitch,” Gigliani said. “And I think that ambition and that vision is really, really critical to then taking all decisions in unison with that big goal. So as we are having these conversations, we talk a lot about winning trophies in this (next) five-year period. We talk a lot about developing St. Louis born-and-bred talent, and those things are really important to our ownership. We’re in the process of committing to those goals and setting the right set of strategies to deliver on those goals.”
Gigliani and technical director John Hackworth will work with the team’s current sporting staff on ongoing roster management and construction, including player contract negotiations, while the team searches for a permanent replacement.
One interesting wrinkle to this hire—and any other like it in the next two years—is what feels like the inevitability of change in MLS. Those changes, which include flipping the calendar to a fall-spring set-up to mimic the European season and optimize transfer windows, as well as potential significant changes to the roster regulations, means the profile for an MLS sporting director may start to shift.
Whereas the current league set-up puts a huge premium on understanding MLS’s complex roster rules, many of which are vastly different to the global game, the next era of the league may place more emphasis on understanding and operating in the global ecosystem.
“I’d like to assume that [changes] will bring more correlation between spend and performance as exist anywhere else in the world, outside of the MLS, and it will start looking a bit more like a lot of those South American or European leagues,” Gigliani said. “Where your ability to think long term and make the right decisions, find the right talent, create the right organization and building blocks, all those things will be as important here as they are in any of those other European or Latin American teams. So we will still be open to both international and MLS profiles for a sporting director. And regardless of which we end up choosing, we know that we will need to have, in the organization, the right skill set of the other. Because we will not be able to be successful if we just focus on MLS backgrounds, sporting directors, head coaches and coaching staff—or the opposite. We need to have that combination to be successful.”
Gigliani said that Hackworth, if interested, will be considered for the full-time sporting director position, along with other candidates.
(Top photo: Scott Rovak / USA TODAY Sports)