A very Sporting anniversary: 20 years of Peter Vermes changing soccer in Kansas City
One of Kansas City sports’ greatest change agents came here 20 years ago because of some other guy’s girlfriend.
We can explain.
The Wizards stunk when Peter Vermes arrived as a defender. They’d won just six of 32 matches the season before, and they suffered all the indignities you’d imagine of a bad club in a fledgling league — once, their star player grabbed a teammate’s water bottle to cool down but ended up pouring vodka on his face.
Anyway, Vermes has transformed a rudderless franchise into one of MLS’ most consistent winners. He has not done this alone. Most notably, Sporting’s ownership group invested and pushed, and Vermes has a terrific support system led by his assistant coaches.
But he is the leader — the meticulous, obsessive, creative, demanding, sarcastic, funny, dog-cussing leader.
He came here first as a converted defender, the type of player everyone knew would become a coach if he wanted, helping the Wizards go from last place to the 2000 MLS Cup.
The franchise stunk again when he signed on as a consultant, then technical director in 2006, and then coach in 2009. Before you knew it the team that played in an empty Arrowhead Stadium and then a cramped independent-league baseball park was MLS champion again at a consistently rocking soccer-specific stadium that changed how the league saw its future.
All of this began when Alexi Lalas, then one of America’s most famous soccer players, essentially walked away from the sport ... and the Wizards.
“I had been burning it hard and fast at both ends for a number of years and I knew I was of no use to Kansas City or anyone else,” Lalas said. “And as is often the case in these stories, there’s a girl involved that ultimately became my wife. So it all worked out.”
Lalas got a wife, and after a year away from soccer, played four more years in MLS.
The Wizards signed Vermes to replace Lalas, which means Kansas City got a man who more than anyone else transformed, personalized and scaled up a city’s relationship with soccer.
KC is home
Vermes has lived here most of the last 20 years. This is his home. This is where he’s made friends, and where he and his high school sweetheart, Susan, sent two kids to school. Vermes is part of Kansas City, and Kansas City is part of him.
He remembers the first time he came here. He was, well, he was less than enamored.
“Man, it was like playing in an oven,” Vermes said.
But Vermes stuck around. The Wizards, like all MLS teams back then, operated less like a major professional sports franchise and more like a semi-pro team full of believers. Players needed maps, because practices jumped from high school fields to small colleges to indoor basketball courts to, for a time, the Sprint campus.
Players also needed gym memberships, because the team had no weight room available.
The 2000 MLS Cup win — goalkeeper Tony Meola played 100 games for the US Men’s National Team and was never better than he was for the Wizards that year — felt nice in the moment but failed in the broader mission of spreading appreciation and stature for the sport.
In 2000, the Wizards averaged 9,112 fans. The next season, 10,954 — an improvement, sure, but still fewer than their first season.
“It was like a drop in the ocean,” Vermes said.
The change came slowly, and not before MLS commissioner Don Garber was so certain Kansas City would lose the franchise that he gathered Wizards players in the Arrowhead Stadium press box and told them to expect a move.
“I remember that vividly,” said Kerry Zavagnin, who came here with Vermes in 2000 and now serves as an assistant coach. “The team was going to move to Houston or Philadelphia, I believe. And if that information is being shared with the players, that in my mind means we were very, very close to moving this franchise.”
The first step was perhaps the most crucial, because without it this story does not exist. Lamar Hunt did more for Kansas City sports than anyone before or since, but this is often overlooked:
He helped found MLS and the Wizards when advisers and the data told him it was a bad idea, wearing years of financial losses, then as his final gift targeted a group of local and civically minded businessmen to lead the franchise forward.
That group, led by Cerner founders Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig, took over in 2006 and at first they changed ... well, basically nothing.
They stayed at Arrowhead that next season, and then spent three years at CommunityAmerica Ballpark, a comically awkward fit that had players using porta-potties off the field and playing around the pitcher’s mound on it.
But away from the field, they planned. They built. Instead of quicker and smaller changes, they wanted the transformation to wait for the right moment.
It all centered around the opening of what is now known as Children’s Mercy Park, a gorgeous facility that MLS has used as a model for other soccer-specific stadiums around the league.
“They realized that this was their home,” Vermes said. “Because we didn’t have a home. We were always a stepchild. That’s how our fanbase really, really took off.”
Those are the broad strokes, but for this thing to work — for the Wizards to go from a presumed relocation to Sporting KC gear on cars and T-shirts around the city — the on-field product had to match the stadium.
That’s where Vermes lifted his sport in his adopted hometown. That’s where our story focuses.
Here’s a story ...
You want to know what kind of man Peter Vermes is? You want to know what kind of obsessive, results-centric, competitive cuss has been leading Sporting Kansas City from irrelevance to model franchise?
Before he assumed soccer control of Sporting, before he played in World Cups and before he became an early star in this country he was — wait for it — the underneath mechanic in the East Coast’s No. 1-performing Jiffy Lube bay.
This is a true story.
“Those cars used to come in hot,” he said. “That’s real.”
A strong work ethic has defined Vermes’ professional life and is represented every day with his soccer team. Vermes is the team’s manager and sporting director, officially, which means he is in charge of both personnel and coaching.
Different teams use different titles, but former USMNT head coach Bruce Arena is the only man in MLS with a similar setup. Some teams employ three and even four people to cover Vermes’ responsibilities, which also include Sporting’s work with grassroots soccer and its academy system.
“The things he does is not built for one person,” Zavagnin said. “And he does them, and does them on a consistent basis.”
The profit is made by walking this precious balance: never sacrificing long-term decisions for short-term results, trusting that what’s been done before will help the present and what’s done today will help the future.
That’s pretty straightforward to say, and often prohibitively difficult to do.
At least two major factors help, without which we’d be having a different conversation.
First, Vermes and the people he works with have maintained exceptional discipline to the task. He and Zavagnin began talking of how they’d run a team if given the chance shortly after they met as Wizards teammates 20 years ago.
Those talks included everything from style of play, traits they’d want in players, how practices would be run, how meals would be served, and how the team would load from the bus to the plane to the bus to the hotel.
The plan has adjusted — there is a line to walk between consistency and stubbornness, and Sporting has changed its style of play based on personnel. But they’ve maintained a productive stability.
“He’s one of the great thinkers in our game,” Lalas said. “The creative way he thinks about evolving and progression the game both on and off the field is something we have too little of.”
You can see this everywhere, but maybe the best example is the stadium itself. Sporting’s reach grew when it targeted a broader base. The transition from clumsy baseball park to best-in-class soccer stadium coincided with a rebrand that went from focusing on soccer families to reaching young professionals.
They went from selling to youth teams to creating an event, basically.
“That was all planned,” Vermes said. “That was not by chance. It was all planned.”
Second, Sporting’s ownership has continually supported Vermes. He could have been reasonably fired a few times by now, particularly in the early years, and notably when Sporting went winless nine straight road matches over more than two months before the new stadium opened in June 2011.
But ownership continued to trust, and continued to champion. None of this should be interpreted as a template for any or every other franchise. Sometimes coaches need to be fired. Smart management knows the difference. Sporting’s has proven to be smart.
“We’ve had success but also we’ve had longevity in one location,” Zavagnin said. “We’ve been given the opportunity to execute that plan. So you have to be incredibly fortunate and have people that believe in you.”
Here it’s worth noting that Vermes is confident more success is on the way. He and the organization have spent much of the last decade building and fortifying an academy system to achieve at least two goals.
First, and most obviously, the improvement of the quality of soccer in and around Kansas City. This can be done by producing MLS talent, sure, but also by being a place where coaches and referees are trained and then spread throughout the local soccer community.
Second, everything done to improve soccer here will in turn help improve Sporting. In the same way Sporting has benefited from but also outpaced the growth of MLS as a whole, the organization hopes to do the same with these grassroots efforts.
“I don’t know if it’s luck, or is it coincidence, or just the right parties coming together to form the partnerships you have to form?” Vermes said. “But then the challenge becomes not just keeping it going, but growing it, and to do that you have to continue to be creative.”
This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 1:29 PM.