Sporting KC’s holdover veterans dive headfirst into new coach Wicky’s play-style

It’s all in the details, right?

Sporting Kansas City will return 60% of its minutes played in 2025 this coming Major League Soccer season, which is just 25 days away from beginning. And while the club has added to that group only minimally so far, a good portion of those players will be relied upon again in 2026.

The average age of that 60% core is just 24. And of those 10 players, half are under 25. A young nucleus is being built at Sporting KC, and new head coach Raphael Wicky will lead that group in its attempt to bounce back from a dismal 2025 season.

Sporting has been in preseason-preparation mode for just over two weeks (though Wicky has missed some hands-on time with the team while awaiting his P-1 visa).

In an interview with The Star at the start of preseason, Wicky said he takes pride in helping his players take that next step in their development — regardless of age. Perhaps that’s owing to the fact that he, during his own playing days, was a product of that kind of environment.

“I was thrown in at 16 years old in a professional world,” Wicky said. “I had a coach who gave me the chance, and I had coaches that supported me, and I think that is a very important point for me.”

Sporting KC’s core of returning players on the “older” side is led by Daniel Salloi, Dejan Joveljic and Manu Garcia — all in their late 20s. It also includes goalkeeper John Pulskamp, Jake Davis, Jacob Bartlett and Ian James, each of whom is under age 25.

Age-wise, all of this stands in stark contrast to the Sporting’s roster just two years ago. In 2024, Kansas City had eight players over age 30. Just 13 players on that roster were under 25, and nine of them saw less than 1,000 minutes of field time that season.

As the Sporting KC roster stands now, just one player is over age 30 (Stefan Cleveland) — and three of the club’s 18 players are 28 or older.

Overall, when Wicky looks at Sporting KC’s current roster composition, he sees an intriguing group — a mix of DPs in their prime and an emerging young core.

“I’m excited to work with them and start implementing the culture and the style of play you want to do,” Wicky said. “And then slowly all the players will join, and then we integrate them, as well.”

The style of play Wicky wants to install isn’t necessarily limited to a single formation. The coach said he is more interested in adapting to his players’ profiles than molding them into a singular formation for a particular game.

That’s where his principles of play come in.

“We can say we have a 4-2-3-1, but maybe we build up with three (at the back),” Wicky said. “It’s more the animation in whatever we do, and the principles of play that we have. If you talk about principles of play, you can play in any system with these principles. They’re not depending on a (singular) system.”

Through the first two weeks of the preseason, Pulskamp has seen an uptick in the group’s attention to detail — not just from the coaching staff, but throughout the soccer side of the organization.

“I think in the past we’ve maybe lost some of the attention to detail in how we approached the game,” Pulskamp said in a recent virtual news conference. “We’re a team that wants to play with the ball; we want to be in possession. But … a lot of teams say that. What does that actually mean?

Pulskamp rattled off a few hypothetical questions. One of them: How do you achieve that?

“How do you not only keep possession, but also keep possession moving forward on the field, breaking lines?” Pulskamp asked rhetorically. “That’s where the detail comes in, and that’s where we’ve been focusing on.

“(It’s) not just the bigger goals, but actually the details of the road map on how to achieve those goals.”

Daniel Sperry covers soccer for The Star. He can be reached at sperry.danielkc@gmail.com.