Why Peter Vermes’ exit traces back to preseason. And what’s next for Sporting KC
The first-floor office that Peter Vermes long occupied at the Sporting Kansas City practice facility now sits vacant. Kerry Zavagnin replaced his close friend in employment but won’t replace him in his literal chair.
There are times when principal owner Mike Illig will reach into his pocket, remove his phone and start to call Vermes, still listed among his iPhone favorites.
But then he remembers.
“Habit,” he says.
What does Sporting’s adjustment to life without Peter Vermes look like after nearly two decades with him?
It’s going to take a while.
In these little moments.
And in the bigger picture.
Illig is still taking stock of the organization’s next steps, he says. On one hand, “I don’t know what that looks like,” he says of a coaching search, because, well, he’s never replaced a coach before.
On the other, for that same reason — that Sporting KC has not been in this spot for nearly two decades — it has Illig thinking bigger.
It has him thinking beyond a manager.
Sporting KC fired Vermes — err, officially mutually parted ways — and replaced him with his longtime assistant, Zavagnin, on an interim basis. The club will use not one but two search firms to find a long-term successor while simultaneously analyzing whether that search should simply stop with Zavagnin. Is he the long-term answer? He’ll have the first chance to make a case.
But the point here, the upshot of a ranging talk with Illig, is Sporting might not stop there.
A year ago, Vermes relinquished the day-to-day traditional general manager duties, which he probably did even before the team hired Mike Burns as sporting director last June on a short-term contract that includes club options. But even after Burns’ addition, which Illig praised in our interview, Vermes remained the top of the soccer hierarchy just the same, owning the final say on all decisions.
Well, that job is now open too, and Illig told The Star this week he is “absolutely thinking” that the club could begin anew a search for the proverbial chief soccer officer. A head coach and and chief soccer officer would each report directly to ownership, just as Zavagnin and Burns are today.
Asked if he considered this an opportunity to hit the reset button on the entire organizational flowchart on the technical side, Illig replied quickly.
“How do I not?” he asked. “I’m doing this club an injustice if I don’t look at it on a bigger scale.”
Why Sporting KC parted ways with Peter Vermes
Last winter, on the heels of another dissatisfying MLS season, Sporting owners elected to bring Vermes back, 20 years into his time with the club and 16 years into his coaching tenure but only two years into a five-year contract. Illig never put much thought into parting ways with Vermes then, he says.
That officially changed after just six MLS games.
Tension, though, had started to build weeks earlier, tracing as far back as the preseason.
Behind closed doors and then eventually in media sessions, Vermes quibbled that Sporting’s spending hadn’t kept up with the rest of the league, leaving a stale roster. And he wasn’t wrong about that.
In the winter, Sporting increased its budget and spent about $8.4 million in the transfer market. Afterward, though, Vermes publicly referred to the 2025 season as a rebuilding year. That drew the ire of ownership.
“I’ve never once said this is a rebuild,” Illig said. “The expectation is still the same.”
The problem: so were the results.
The money came.
The wins did not, at least not immediately.
Sporting opened the year in the CONCACAF Champions Cup but was swiftly swept by Miami. Six MLS regular-season matches followed, with five losses and one tie.
Heck, Sporting failed to even win a single one of its six preseason matches across trips to Miami and California, despite playing a college team and a USL club.
They kept losing.
What bothered Illig most: It looked as though they kept expecting to lose.
Illig began showing up to the club’s training sessions last month, at times unannounced, once prompting Vermes to pace alone outside as Illig waited indoors. Illig wondered if Vermes thought he was getting fired that day.
Vermes has kept a low-profile since his departure, but he has communicated with people inside the organization, who say he remains emotionally invested and clearly rooting for the team, even if now from afar.
Days before Sporting’s trip to Dallas, Illig remarked that the team’s body language at training “looked dejected, like losing before we even played a match.”
“You need to be the spark,” he recalled telling Vermes. “I know everybody’s working hard — that’s not a question — but something needs to change.”
Four days later, he made the change.
Illig didn’t arrive at the decision until 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, the day the team returned from Dallas, and he called Vermes and instructed him to be at the facility at 6 p.m.
The building was empty. They needed to unlock the doors to the place. Illig opened with the news: Sporting KC was moving on.
The conversation paused for two minutes, Illig says, as emotions consumed the room.
After 20 years together, 16 in these positions, the sides were parting ways.
It’s a remarkable, deserved run in professional sports. Vermes brought an MLS Cup to Sporting in 2013 and three U.S. Open Cups, and he sandwiched the first trophies into an era in which the city of Kansas City could seemingly win none of them ... in any sport.
His drive inspired the club to start its academy program, to open a world-class training facility.
Without Peter Vermes, Kansas City is not a World Cup host city. Truly, believe that. There are other people on that list, too. But he’s one.
There is no figure more prominent in Sporting’s history, and it sure helped the team’s cause that he was willing — nay, eager — to serve as a tour guide for the casual fan and media alike, bringing the city along for the ride.
But it was time for that ride to reach its sunset.
Vermes helped build the league into what it’s become today, a level few expected American soccer to reach. But there’s some irony tucked into that. The league grew at such a pace — which he enhanced — that it outgrew the tactics and style of play he implored in Kansas City.
The underdog role, he not only embraced but outright sought. For years, the pride derived from castoffs other teams had tossed aside, plugging them into a system that demanded his players outwork the opposition. The requirement: Sporting Fit, he dubbed it.
He squeezed every ounce of juice out of those teams.
Until that mantra wasn’t enough.
“I do think,” Illig says. “there was some fatigue.”
Who will replace Peter Vermes as Sporting KC coach?
So, what now?
Illig wishes he had a precise answer, but the more mundane answer is the truthful one:
“I’m not in a hurry,” he says.
He’s hired two search firms to assist the exploration. Illig attended the MLS owner meetings in Chicago this week — he sits on multiple committees — and his head coach position was certainly a topic of interest.
There.
And everywhere.
His email has been flooded with domestic and foreign candidates interested in the position. Ballpark, Illig estimated “probably a 70% chance” Vermes’ successor will be someone with experience in MLS, either as a player, head coach or assistant coach.
Knowing Vermes had nearly three years remaining on his contract, I asked if money would be a factor in his replacement. Can the club afford to pay two coaches top dollar concurrently?
“You can’t look at it like that,” Illig says. “I have to get the best guy. Truly, I don’t care what it costs. I want the best guy.”
That’s one track of the search.
The other? It’s happening now, right in front of us. Illig classifies the job as Zavagnin’s to lose, and that evaluation will become more comfortable and more clear as the weeks progress. The trial run began a week ago, when in Sporting’s first match with Zavagnin, it broke a nearly seven-month drought, beating rival St. Louis SC 2-0.
The hard part of that job comes now, though, absent the proverbial new manager boost and the energy it provides. Sporting hosts Portland on Sunday afternoon at Children’s Mercy Park.
Whichever way they go, Illig does have some preferences, and it has little to do with tactics, which he says he’ll “leave to better soccer minds.”
Illig is insistent that the team should invoke more analytics into its philosophies, a point of friction for an owner who regularly attends sports analytics conferences.
“We’re an analytics company by nature,” Illig says. “That’s been a frustrating thing.”
The idea is to implement its data throughout the organization, including with a chief soccer officer, should Sporting ultimately elect to attempt to hire one to sit atop the roster hierarchy. That’s still a maybe.
The timelines for those decisions are up in the air, as mentioned, and the lack of urgency is rooted in the comfort that Zavagnin “massively appreciates and values data,” Illig says.
He has the first crack to implement them.
This should be an attractive job — and it is to both Zavagnin and others. Illig has been “stunned” by the level of interest, which he says includes prominent names. Sporting has elite facilities. There will once again next offseason be the chance to shape the roster. Illig says the search for players has marched on without Vermes, and there could be an addition as soon as this month.
But most of all, there’s the stability. Or there was stability for a long time. Think it took too long to move on from Vermes? That ought to work in their favor now. In any job interview, professional sports or otherwise, it’s prudent to figure out what happened to the last person who held the job.
Sporting has a pretty compelling answer.
He was with us for 20 years.