The Verde Report: What (and Who) to Blame for Austin FC’s Rough Year

The 2023 MLS season concludes on Saturday with what the league's crack marketing team has branded "Decision Day" so you know it's a pretty big deal. Unfortunately for Austin FC, one of just six clubs with stone-zero chance of making the playoffs, the only decisions to be made involve which bench players will get minutes in an otherwise meaningless game.

The season essentially played out to a worst-case scenario for an Austin club that finished the 2022 campaign second in the Western Conference and made a run to the league's finals. That all feels like a distant dream after the painful year the club is about ready to wrap up, which was dominated by an 81-day winless streak that stretched from mid-July to early October. All we can do now is assess what went wrong. Let's point some fingers, shall we?

Claudio Reyna

If you need a fresh face for your Verde dartboard, let it be Claudio Reyna's. Not only did Helicopter Parentzilla disgrace himself when the entire Reyna family feuded with U.S. men's national team manager Gregg Berhalter at the World Cup and leave Austin FC looking for a new sporting director in the middle of a critical offseason, but apparently Reyna was already checked out even before getting to that point.

"We've now spent two transfer windows with very little additions. Part of that was a sporting director that wasn't in place in November and December, or certainly had other things going on," head coach Josh Wolff revealed in August.

Wolff added further context this month, saying, "We lost players unexpectedly. We had contracts that weren't picked up or weren't completed. We had players drop out at the eleventh hour before the season started. So there was a lot going on."

For those keeping track, that firestorm didn't erupt publicly until early January. So under Reyna's watch, Austin FC lost key players like Ruben Gabrielsen and Moussa Djitté and failed to sufficiently replace them. That dereliction of duty proved to be the hole from which Austin FC could never climb out.

Josh Wolff

There's plenty of fair criticism to be levied against Austin FC's first and only head coach. Wolff's tactics have often looked stale and easy for opponents to thwart, he failed to get the most out of a flawed roster, and his gruff demeanor will never fully jive with the club's (and city's) identity. When things really got sour in late summer, Wolff had no answers and the losses kept piling up. His coaching résumé rightly took a ding in 2023.

There's also a sizable amount of unfair criticism, though. Many have derided Wolff's tendency to feature his son, Owen, in the squad as blatant nepotism. Yep, the same Owen Wolff who is nominated for the league's Young Player of the Year award and recently landed on a 22 Under 22 list of the league's bright young stars. If Owen is not one of the club's key players in 2024, it will have been because a European-based club came in with a multimillion-dollar transfer offer to procure his services.

Designated Players

Sebastián Driussi was dynamite last season with 22 goals and seven assists and became one of the league's highest-paid players (as well as Austin FC's captain) because of it. That production has slashed in half this year, a drop-off the club simply couldn't afford.

However, it still dwarfed the impact of Driussi's countryman Emiliano Rigoni, who managed just five goals and six assists as the club's supposed second star. He's mostly been a bust since arriving in Austin.

Partial credit goes to Alex Ring for manning up and filling a hole at center back when the club dealt with injuries over the summer, but the former captain never truly looked like he wanted to be in Austin this season … though we'll never know for sure since he spoke to the media exactly zero times.