Peter Vermes signs extension with Sporting KC — after declining interview with USMNT

About 23 years ago, Peter Vermes moved to Kansas City, not by choice, but more for work reasons—a move that, unbeknownst to him at the time, would change his life forever.

But there’s one story that stands out from Kansas City’s first year that doesn’t accurately reflect the next 22. That’s why he tells them.

The then-Kansas City Wizards — who would a decade later become Sporting KC, the team Vermes now oversees as coach and general manager — traveled to Los Angeles to play LA Galaxy. However, when they arrived at LAX airport, there was no bus to take the team to the hotel. In fact, there was no one at all. In the terminal, Vermes and his teammates waited nearly two hours, and at the time they had an inside joke when things like this happened — they were humming the tune of traditional circus music.

That’s how things were in those early days. But to Vermes? The way things didn’t have to be. When he finally checked into his hotel room and unpacked his things, he grabbed the note on the bedside table and wrote down step by step how this fiasco could have been prevented.

“I remember when I was a teenager I already knew I wanted to start a club,” says Vermes as he wraps up the anecdote. “Sometimes I can’t believe the actual story.”

A story with a few more chapters.

Or at least five.

Vermes has signed a five-year contract extension to remain manager and sporting director of Sporting KC. He was previously slated to enter the final year of his contract in the 2023 season, which begins with a trip to Portland on Saturday.

He’s now committed to staying in Kansas City through 2028, and this time there was an urge to have him elsewhere.

The United States men’s national team called Vermes earlier this month through their search firm Sportsology Group, he said in an interview with The Star.

A Sportsology representative asked Vermes to interview for a job with the US national team. Anthony Hudson is serving as interim head coach and the athletic director is vacant.

Vermes declined to say what job he was being contacted for. He had already started talks with Sporting’s ownership group about an extension.

“I was very direct with them – I told them I’m almost done with a new contract here (with Sporting),” Vermes said. “This is the project I’ve been interested in for a long time.

“I walked in with the new owner. I was given a blank canvas to build it up. I always wanted to be able to do that. I consider myself incredibly lucky. That’s why this project has always been important to me.”

Getting back to the job Vermes stays in because it’s certainly important, but first a little more about the job he chose not to interview. And that’s as far as the request went, to put it bluntly – an interview.

Sportsology initially contacted Vermes via text message “out of the blue” while Sporting was going through its first phase of preseason camp in Arizona. They made an appointment to speak on the phone, and shortly after that subsequent conversation, Vermes expressed his intention to remain in KC.

When asked if they had discussed the potential length of a job with the USMNT – whether there were any plans to at least extend it beyond the World Cup cycle since the tournament is being held in the United States – Vermes said, “We haven’t understood far. They made their intro. I didn’t want them to move on if I already knew (my choice).

“I understand that anyone could see it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I just know this is floating my boat at the moment.”

Before we closed the door, I asked Vermes if He closed the door forever.

“I’m not saying I would never do that,” Vermes said. “It’s definitely an honor to be remembered. It’s the damn national team. I just know that I really enjoy what I’m doing here and I’m committed to it.”

My conversation with Vermes spanned over an hour here in Scottsdale, Arizona where Sporting KC are training ahead of their season opener. Ironically, it’s the same hotel the Chiefs stayed at for their Super Bowl trip two weeks earlier.

When I entered his suite shortly after Sporting KC’s return from a training session, Vermes and Technical Director Brian Bliss were finishing a conversation about chasing a centre-back. Five minutes later, he received a call from the team’s sports medicine doctor, then another from the team administrator. He had plans for dinner with the assistant coaches in a few hours, but to be clear, it was going to be a working lunch. The team’s chief of communications needed time with him before he left.

“You don’t have to spend a lot of time with Peter to know he wears a lot of hats,” said Sporting principal Mike Illig. “I think he exceeds many expectations as CEO of the Sporting player company, in addition to what everyone thinks he is, which is general manager and head coach.

“It only makes sense to us, assuming Peter wants to continue, that we absolutely want him to be our man to continue the project.”

However, we cannot ignore the timing.

Vermes, 56, is entering his 15th season as manager (currently the longest in MLS) but is coming off his worst season. Admittedly, the first-team played without two of the three designated players a year ago, with striker Alan Pulido and midfielder Gadi Kinda both absent for the full season. In a world where there are no excuses, that’s hard to ignore. But so were the results.

Pulido is expected back in the early weeks of 2023, with Kinda perhaps not too far behind. Sporting eventually replaced the two players’ positions with striker William Agada and midfielder Erik Thommy in late summer and promptly posted the second-best record in the league over the final 10 weeks of the season.

That was just enough to put her 12th in the Western Conference rankings, still the worst result of Vermes’ tenure. Vermes has won four trophies with Sporting KC – three US Open cups and one of the more coveted MLS cups, but the last one came in 2017.

How does this treaty account for timing?

“If you look at our league, it’s really difficult to be a perennial favorite,” said Illig. “If you look at our season last year we know why we didn’t fight and plugging those holes made us competitive again. Unfortunately, the damage was already done.

“But there is always something to do and Peter is someone who is never satisfied. He enjoys his work. I can think of (times) when we won trophies and the next day he’s already thinking, ‘We have to win something else.’”

In the 10 years I’ve worked with Vermes on this job, that’s undoubtedly what stands out most – his desire to look forward to the next benefit.

A few years ago, he spent an off-season taking a college course on millennials, hoping it would help him better understand and connect with his players. A few years later, he introduced rewards for winning the small-sided game in training to increase competition.

Overall, however, this is the grand vision he had more than two decades ago while scribbling notes on hotel paper. Under his leadership, the organization has added an academy, a second team and a world-class training facility that ignores no detail.

Because he doesn’t either.

It’s only logical to extend to marriage — you know, as long as the results on the field hold up. Illig called the 2022 season an outlier, and statistically he’s not wrong. The team has made the playoffs in 10 of the past 12 seasons. That’s a statistic that just about every other MLS team would love to have on their resume.

Illig said the ownership group evaluates Vermes based on a set of 11 criteria, which include long-term stability, academy progress, culture, vision for the future, and so on, in addition to results.

Within those boxes, the disappointment of 2022 must be considered, even if outweighed by the rest – and given the long-term history, it should outweigh the rest. But this year and especially the first half of the year encouraged a certain self-reflection.

“Absolutely,” Vermes said. “At the end of each year we go through everything because I want to try and do better than the year before. Well, that can sometimes be a curse too, because maybe you’re doing things the right way, and an tweak will have a different effect. But I just think that you have to constantly try to improve yourself, what you do, how you do it – everything. And that is what drives me all the time.”