Why Kansas City Current thinks longtime MLS coach Chris Armas is the perfect fit
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- Kansas City Current named Chris Armas head coach on Wednesday.
- Ownership chose Armas for tactical alignment, player development and stability.
- Armas brings MLS, Premier League experience and coaching empathy to Current.
On the surface, anyway, Chris Armas might seem like a curious fit to coach the Kansas City Current — a hiring that became official Wednesday morning.
While Armas had a stellar playing career — he was inducted in the National Soccer Hall of Fame last year — and a wealth of coaching experience, it’s been largely on the men’s side:
He was the head coach of three MLS clubs and had stints with Manchester United (as an assistant coach) and Leeds United (including as co-interim head coach) of the Premier League in England.
The last time he coached a women’s team was at his alma mater, Adelphi University, from 2011-2014.
But Armas gained an inside track in November shortly after then-coach and sporting director Vlatko Andonovski’s role shifted to global sporting director — a move made to embrace and enhance the club’s broader vision, including its acquisition last year of the Danish soccer club HB Køge Women.
It started with a phone call from co-owners Angie and Chris Long to Jesse Marsch, a trusted friend from their days at Princeton whose accomplished career includes now coaching the Canadian men’s national soccer team.
About as soon as they began describing what they were seeking in the job, Chris Long said in an interview with The Star, Marsch immediately said, “I know the guy … Chris Armas.”
As Marsch went on about the appeal and strength of Armas, with whom he’d worked at several stops, the Longs were intrigued.
And while they ran a full search process, Armas was at the top from the time they began getting to know him and absorbing for themselves why he’d be compatible with a groundbreaking operation intent on both expanding its own ambitions and furthering the game itself.
Or as Armas put it, he’ll be jumping on “while the train is moving pretty fast” with a club that set a global tone with the first stadium purpose-built for a women’s professional soccer team, among its other developments, and winning the NWSL Shield in 2025 with the best regular-season record in league history before a stunning first-round playoff loss.
With so much around him remaining in place, including the culture and assistant coaches and even Andonovski’s presence while his job has expanded, the Longs see Armas as a snug fit for their needs now. That’s bolstered, they say, by the fact that Armas and Andonovski and other staff members see the game much the same way and that Armas has experience working with a sporting director — still a rarity in the NWSL.
“So when you look for ways for us to grow and build within Kansas City and also globally, it’s pretty important, from our perspective, that we’re bringing in new DNA into the organization that can help us grow (with) the expertise to make sure that we’re actually thoughtfully growing,” Angie Long said. “And player development’s a big, big piece of that. And yet you have to find someone who’s complementary to everything that’s working with the Current.
“We didn’t need a revamp. We needed the next level of building block.”
In the process, Armas will be the fifth coach the Current has had (including interim coach Caroline Sjöblom in 2023) since it began play in 2021. But because of continuity around him, the Longs believe his integration into the organization will be “pretty seamless.”
“Stability is the important part, right? The stability of the organization, the stability of the overall coaching staff,” Angie Long said. “So I really don’t think of it as so much of a change as an addition.”
As for the matter of his experience coaching women, Angie Long said “finding the best coach (was) hands down by far the top priority.” She also pointed to the rapid evolution of women’s soccer (“technically, tactically, physically, athletically”) toward the strength and pace of the men’s version with which Armas most recently has been engaged.
“And so we’re trying to really look forward in that,” she added.
Beyond the technical elements, the Longs are taken with who Armas is as a person: a coach who has maintained many long-term relationships with former players and whose ability to engage and empathize makes him stand out.
For his part, Armas believes his “superpower, if you will” is compassion and going through some “tough” experiences — including some jobs cut shorter than he expected and injuries and sheer timing that kept him from playing in World Cups and the Olympics.
But he very deliberately calls those times “tough” instead of “bad.”
“Because,” he said, “each of them have made me better.”
That includes how he views his last job with the Colorado Rapids, which ended in October when his contract wasn’t renewed despite taking the team to the playoffs in 2024 and remaining in postseason contention into late 2025. Extension talks fell apart, he said.
As a coach, Armas, 53, characterizes himself as patient but demanding. No doubt the latter is connected to something else he considers part of himself: “the gift of competition.”
By way of example, he pointed to how he could win a race when he wasn’t faster than the competition: “I was more focused on the start, and I got a quicker jump.”
As for this jump back to coaching women, Armas says he sees it as “coaching human beings” and harkens back to his first head coaching job — the one that made him want to make a career of this because he found it so fulfilling.
When Marsch called the six-time MLS All-Star to offer him a job with the New York Red Bulls in 2015, Armas wasn’t immediately sure he’d accept the offer because he loved the Adelphi job so much.
So perhaps it’s only appropriate that another call from Marsch figured in his return to the women’s game.
Certainly, the Longs have conviction about the journey that led to the result.
“I think,” Chris Long said, “we’re going to crush it with this.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2026 at 10:00 AM.