Back in May 2023, when San Diego was officially awarded an MLS expansion team, Mikey Varas immediately sensed he’d be part of the league’s 30th club.
“I just started feeling this gut feeling that this project was calling my name,” Varas, then-manager of the US U-20 national team, told club media as he was announced as San Diego FC’s inaugural head coach on Monday.
With that prediction now a reality, Varas spent much of his unveiling on Tuesday explaining his latest vision: how SDFC will play during their 2025 debut season and beyond.
“The team is going to have a fighting spirit about them,” Varas told reporters at the club’s home of Snapdragon Stadium and those attending via virtual teleconference.
“So every time that the team steps on the field, they know that they’ll leave everything on the field – not just for themselves and for their families and for each other, but for the community as a whole.”
On a more tangible level, the 41-year-old promised a “style of play that’s balanced between structure, in terms of having discipline for a structure, but also freedom within that structure to be creative and to be expressive as unique individuals.
“With the ball, we’re going to be brave. We want to control games with purposeful verticality, creativity, being dynamic and, at the same time, we wanna be front-footed when we don’t have the ball, pressing as high as we can while knowing that you play against an opponent that also wants to dictate what happens in the game. And being willing to sacrifice as a team and defend the goal when needed with everything that we have.”
Academy mindset
That’s music to the ears of San Diego FC club brass, including CEO Tom Penn, who called Varas the “orchestrator” in charge of making the club’s ambitions a reality sooner rather than later.
“The charge here is to win now and to make it sustainable,” Penn said while underlying SDFC’s unwavering commitment to their Right to Dream Academy. “You know that so much of our project is about youth development and the investment in the best players in America and Mexico coming right here to San Diego. And Tyler [Heaps, sporting director & GM] and Mikey are leading our efforts to turn that into first-team excellence.”
With ample experience coaching at various youth levels, including FC Dallas’ U-16 side from 2017-19 and the aforementioned US U-20s, Varas is prepared to make the most of the players coming through Right to Dream.
“One thing that I know that I have strong convictions about is you can play with young players,” said Varas, who most recently served as interim USMNT head coach before Mauricio Pochettino’s appointment last week.
“You can play a proactive, entertaining style of play and you can do that and win. And it takes a certain amount of work and dedication and conviction, and it takes some time. But all of those things are possible, and we should not limit ourselves to any status quo.”
Chucky and beyond
While young, unproven talent will be a priority, San Diego aren’t shy about working with global superstars either. Case in point: the marquee summer acquisition of Mexican international Hirving “Chucky” Lozano, who’ll report for duty after playing with Eredivisie champions PSV Eindhoven through the end of the year.
“Hirving is an incredible player. I don’t think there’s anything I can say that people haven’t seen,” Varas said of the team’s first-ever Designated Player. “He’s a proven winner, he has a warrior mentality in terms of helping the team win in any way and he’s a high-level talent, in terms of creating goals, scoring goals. And he’s done it at the highest level.
“On top of that, he’s Mexican, which is an incredibly important part of the project, due to the community we live in. He’s gonna resonate a lot with the Latino and the Latino-American community.”
Lozano is one of the club’s six signings to date, meaning Varas and Heaps have practically an entire roster to build from scratch with roughly six months before San Diego make their MLS debut.
“It was very apparent to me early that we saw eye-to-eye, that we shared those same values that he speaks about and that we see football in the same way,” Heaps said of the work that awaits him and Varas. “And I think that, in my role, with Mikey, is extremely important so that we’re aligned with the players that we’re bringing here – not only as footballers, but also as people.”
Before bringing in any new players, however, there’s a more pressing need for Varas.
“The next step for the two of us is to build up Mikey’s staff,” Heaps said. “We’re already having that conversation. Obviously a head coach is a singular entity, but we need to now fill Mikey with a staff that will allow him to be successful."
More than a club
Personnel movements aside, Varias considers himself part of a project that transcends any singular star, figure or leader.
“Style of play, values, game model. That’s what made this such a dream project for me,” Varas said. “When you look at a project as a coach who works at the national team level – you know, it’s not easy to leave the national team. But when you see what Right to Dream, what San Diego as a community, the ownership group and what this project represents, you realize, wow, this is going to be special.
"... The people, at the end of the day, are the most important driving factors in any project. And the people within a community have their own uniqueness to them," Varas said. "And so what we'll do is we'll bring a vision for the style of play, for the values, for how the club is going to run, and then we're going embed with the community.
"And from that, something very unique: it will be Right to Dream, but it will be uniquely San Diego as well."
