SAN JOSE, Calif. – After a difficult season in which the San Jose Earthquakes won just four of their first 28 games, things finally came to a head following a 5-1 defeat to Sporting Kansas City on Saturday that saw many of the announced 16,682 in attendance at Avaya Stadium leave well before the final whistle.
Even as the writing on the wall became clearer, there was a hope that first-year coach Mikael Stahre would be allowed to see the end of the season through. But the Earthquakes dismissed Stahre with six games remaining on Monday.
“We came to this conclusion without wanting to,” Earthquakes general manager Jesse Fioranelli said on Tuesday. “We didn’t come into this with a plan to part ways at this point in time, we hoped that we could bring it to the end of the season.”
“We had made a determination that we were going to go a different direction for next season,” added Earthquakes president Tom Fox. “The question then becomes ‘what do we do with the remaining time this year,’ and that’s why we came to the decision right now. We’ve got six games left in the season and there’s an opportunity to start understanding what we have and take a different look at the squad for next year.”
Following their first playoff appearance since 2012, the Quakes entered the season with high expectations, buoyed in large part by the signing of Stahre and fellow Swede Magnus Eriksson as a Designated Player. While these new acquisitions brought some excitement to San Jose, the team did not address the fact that, despite making the playoffs, they did so with a -21 goal differential.
“Making the playoffs last year was a bit of a false dawn,” Fox said. “We knew that we still were not yet done with the squad. We knew that there were other players that we still needed to move on and there were other positions that we needed to fill. We couldn’t do it all last offseason.”
After an impressive preseason, the Earthquakes came out sharp in their home opener, leading 3-0 through 80 minutes before allowing a pair of late goals in a 3-2 win over Minnesota United. The last 10 minutes of that game seemed to set the tone for the rest of the 2018 campaign.
“If you watch the first 60-70 minutes of that game, we did things that we weren’t asked to do because we had confidence and we made a commitment to things that were important to [Stahre]. He called them the bearing walls,” Fioranelli said. “Unfortunately his bearing walls started to crumble over the course of the season. That’s not because of [Stahre], that’s because of a shortcoming that all of us have to accept.”
Assistant Steve Ralston takes over as interim coach for the remaining six games, starting Wednesday (11 pm ET | UniMás, Univision Deportes, Twitter — Full TV & streaming info) when Atlanta United makes a first trip to Avaya Stadium.
