Sporting KC is making a flurry of roster moves. The intrigue is what comes next
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Sporting KC trimmed roster drastically, leaving only 12 players under contract.
- General manager David Lee executed a first wave of moves to remake roster.
- Club signals long-term pivot: future depends less on signings than strategic direction.
The start of this column is going to seem as though it could have been copied and pasted from exactly a year ago: The MLS playoffs are underway, and Sporting Kansas City is instead in full offseason mode.
We can bring up the same silver lining. Sporting’s roster allows flexibility for change, and there’s evidently going to be a lot of it.
As of this week, Sporting KC has just 12 players under contract for 2026 — 12! — after David Lee’s first wave of moves as the club’s newly hired general manager. That’s barely enough to put a team on the field, which is probably as a good thing, given the team they’ve put on the field for the last two years.
It’s easy enough to arrive at the sweeping trims they made, easy enough to determine a last-place roster that allowed an astounding 70 goals needs to be overhauled. There were likely some emotionally difficult decisions to be made, but some professionally obvious choices, too.
Like I said, same as a year ago, right?
But at last, here’s where we depart from the symmetry.
While much attention will follow the roster additions made in Kansas City, the team’s long-term future will pivot on something else:
How those additions will arrive.
For nearly two decades, Sporting KC left the final say to the desk of Peter Vermes, and let’s be honest about it: This workflow sparked more than a bit of success. The club lifted four trophies with Vermes.
But as a rapidly growing league continued to push forward — to its 3.0 version, if you will — Sporting KC had been far too content to ride the system that drove its past success. And then the rest of the league rode right on past.
A transition from Vermes to Lee as the lead decision-maker in Kansas City is not simply an organization opting for a new set of eyes.
It is opting for a new method.
In this case, that’s a data-backed, even a data-driven method. Sporting’s GM search process ultimately settled with Lee, whose introduction to the league came in the analytics field. But before the club landed on a decision to fill that role, it first needed to make another decision — that it should hire anyone at all.
The past six months included ownership interviews with a dozen candidates, including four finalists (two domestic and two abroad). But that process first entailed an internal evaluation. A “huge” part of that evaluation demonstrated not only who they needed but what they needed.
“A massive strategic rethink,” Sporting principal owner Mike Illig told The Star. “I’ve been a baseball fan for a long time, and you’ve seen how baseball has been revolutionized by analytics. We have a continuous sport, but the technology is there.
“David is a happy balance. He relies on his scouts. He relies on his coaches. But he will make evidence-based decisions. That’s who we are and who we need to be.”
You know I’m keen on the details. This is the part where, frankly, they’re probably going to be lacking. For now. It’s not standard procedure for an organization to open up a new blueprint and say, hey, this is how we’ll gain a leg up on our competition; come take a look.
The next couple of months will be revealing, but the next year more so.
I can say this: The plan is for the data to more significantly impact decisions for player identification and recruitment, along with how players fit a coach’s system and individual game plans and, most importantly and immediately, whom Lee will tab be the team’s next coach.
“How are we making those decisions? What information are we using to help make those decisions? How can we create models that can help us make those decisions?” Lee said. “Really, over the last 10 years, the advent of analytics has grown. It is going to grow even further with AI, and we have to figure out how we can be ahead of the curve in innovation. But I really want to make sure that we use information data to help make more informed decisions throughout the entire club.”
That would be a welcomed change, but that’s not the only portion of his answer to highlight. Lee noted that world is constantly changing.
Sporting KC used to be ahead of the curve. But maintaining a position there requires, well, not simply maintaining. It requires constant analysis.
Lee told an interesting story in his introductory new conference. In his previous role, he hired Pascal Jansen as the New York City FC head coach. That was less than a year ago.
“I was really proud of that process,” Lee said ... and yet shortly after it concluded, he created a list of things he’d do differently.
“I just think there’s never going to be a perfect process,” he said. “And so for me, I think there’s always things to learn.”
And what do you know, a head coach decision awaits his next stop in KC. He will include more psychological profiling than he did months earlier with New York City FC.
Sporting KC is yet to build out an analytics department. Lee estimated that process could require another 14 months. He wants to get it right. As he’s confronted with decisions in the immediacy, Illig said the team is using an analytics consultant.
It’s not as though the club has ignored the data completely — there shouldn’t be an assumption every sentence here is brand new.
But Lee is bringing the impact of that intelligence from the back of the room to the front of the room.
“I’m experienced using data as well myself, so I can add to that process as well,” he said.
It’s a glimpse of his interview process for the job.
After the first cycle of interviews, one member of Sporting’s leadership team turned to another and said, “I don’t know how he’s not our guy,” as Illig recalled.
But Illig made a list anyway, featuring 61 criteria, each of them carrying different weights. Every member of the leadership team ranked the candidates. You know what that process landed, but the point here is the process itself as much as the result.
They thought they’d had their answer from the jump, yet they wanted to send it through a more thorough examination.
That’s the idea, right?
This story was originally published October 26, 2025 at 5:30 AM.