For soccer coach Marc Dos Santos, the task of building a team from scratch must feel like an easy feat after being called a donkey by the Brazilian media and dealing with horses running across the soccer field during practice.
Starting fresh is exactly the challenge ahead for Dos Santos after the San Francisco Deltas announced today that he would be the first head coach for the NASL expansion team that will start play in 2017 at Kezar Stadium.
“I am honored to be named the head coach of the Deltas,” said Dos Santos. “I’ve been in clubs all over the world, and I believe this is different. I believe we’re going to be able to bring players that want to be part of the city, part of the organization. I believe the team that is behind this has a new way of thinking, so this makes me believe big time that this is going to be a successful story.”
Dos Santos is very familiar with the league, having coached the Montreal Impact and the Ottawa Fury; he led the latter team to the Championship Final and was named NASL coach of the year in 2015. He currently coaches the USL’s Swope Park Rangers, the MLS affiliate club of Sporting Kansas City, and will continue in his role through the end of the club season before officially joining the Deltas.
RELATED: Q&A with San Francisco Deltas head coach Marc Dos Santos and CEO Brian Andrés Helmick
A dual Canadian and Portuguese citizen, Dos Santos boasts a diverse coaching resume. He started his career in 2007 as the reserve team coach of the Montreal Impact, working his way up the ladder to become the head coach and lead the team to the USL First Division title in 2009. In 2012, Dos Santos decided to challenge himself and become a coach in Brazil, one of the most soccer-mad countries in the world.
“You always have to win if you are a foreign coach in Brazil because they are very, very hard to foreigners there,” he explained. “They are very proud of what they have so they are protective of it.”
In his first position as coach for FC Primeira Camisa (U-20’s), Dos Santos quickly realized how different the experience would be from coaching in Canada.
“When I arrived in Brazil I lived with the players in a city called São José dos Campos. I was coming from the Montreal Impact, and I was very comfortable there. My ego was put aside completely when I arrived at this small club in Brazil. I slept in the same place the players slept. I had ants every night piled on top my face. There was no A/C, and it was very, very warm in the room. The team’s red jerseys had already turned pink from how many times they had been washed. And at my first training session at Primeira Camisa I’m putting the cones on the grass and a horse, literally a horse, went through the field. That was my first experience in training in Brazil.”
Dos Santos later moved to SE Palmeiras, one of the most successful teams in Brazil, to coach their Under-15 side. “When I arrived in Palmeiras, someone from the media put an image on their article of a donkey saying 1+1 = 3. The title of the article was ‘Palmeiras hires a Canadian-Portuguese coach to coach in their academy.’ So right away, before giving even one training session at Palmeiras, I was already put under a lot of pressure.”
Dos Santos ended up leading his team to the Copa do Brasil U-15 championship.
“There were so many things in Brazil that stretched me to be the best I could be every day,” he said. “I was very ambitious, and I wanted to prove to everybody that foreigners could be in Brazil and do well because soccer is a universal sport. I was very happy with the success that we were able to have there.”
“Marc’s time in Brazil was a big factor for us,” admitted Deltas CEO Andrés Helmick on why the team chose Dos Santos. “I really cared about someone that could deal with adversity.”
The search for the Deltas head coach started after the hiring of Consulting General Manager José Carlos Brunoro in May.
“Before we started talking about any names we asked, who are we? What are our values to build our club philosophy first?” explained Helmick. The team focused on candidates with a proven track-record of being a leader, open-minded, transparent and well respected. “We measured every candidate against those traits. It was a long list that we went through in an organized fashion, and Marc was one of those people on the list.”
The Deltas first interviewed Dos Santos in person and online in June and his decision to accept the head coach role for the expansion team came down to three reasons: the challenge of building a startup club, the passion of the Delta’s staff, and the city of San Francisco. “It’s an extremely special city that I wasn’t expecting to see with all the traits San Francisco has,” he shared. “It became quite obvious to my family and me when making the decision.”
Dos Santos already has experience building an NASL team from scratch as coach of the Ottawa Fury in their first year of existence in 2014. “It’s not always easy to build a team from scratch when you don’t have one player on your list. There is no history of the club. There is nothing; you’re starting from zero,” He explained.
With Dos Santos in place, the team will immediate begin looking to add players. He said the Delta would play an aggressive style, fast in transition, and quick going to goal. “You only recruit well if you have a very clear idea on the style you want to play and then it becomes easier. It’s important to mix the players you want to develop with experience. You don’t develop good players if they are not around experienced players that could help them.”
“Marc is 100% percent authentic, very genuine,” asserted Helmick. “Seeing how he dealt with adversity… It was a no-brainer… I feel super blessed that Marc decided to hug this project and make it his own as well.”
RELATED: Q&A with San Francisco Deltas head coach Marc Dos Santos and CEO Brian Andrés Helmick
The appointment of Dos Santos as the head coach is the first significant announcement from the Deltas in several months, but won’t be the last.
“This might be a really big month in terms of announcements,” Helmick teased. “We have some things that we want [to make sure] all our ‘Ts’ are crossed and ‘Is’ are dotted before we announce it.”
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