The New England Revolution will be forced to make a new head coaching and sporting director hire.
Bruce Arena has resigned from both positions, the club announced late Saturday evening. Curt Onalfo will continue to serve as interim Sporting Director and Richie Williams will continue to serve as interim head coach to close out the 2023 season.
“After much soul searching, I have decided to resign my position as Head Coach and Sporting Director of the New England Revolution,” Arena said in a club statement. “To begin, I would like to thank Robert Kraft and Jonathan Kraft for providing me with this opportunity over 4 years ago. In my time with the Revolution, we have had much success and it truly has been a direct reflection of all the support the organization has provided me. In particular, I also want to thank all the players, coaches and staff at the Revolution as everyone has provided outstanding service and done a terrific job to help elevate the club to where it is today.
I also want to thank everyone in the soccer community at large for their tremendous support during the past 6 weeks,” Arena added. The investigation has been a hard and difficult process, for me and my family, but hearing from so many who have been part of my career truly has been gratifying and has helped make this decision easier.”
Arena had been removed as head coach temporarily on August 1 after he allegedly made ‘insensitive and inappropriate’ remarks. MLS released its own statement, noting that if Arena wished to pursue future employment in the league that he would need to first submit a petition to commissioner Don Garber.
Arena joined the Revs in May 2019 and compiled a 60-31-42 record in MLS play during his time as head coach. He led the Revs to a Supporters’ Shield trophy in 2021, which was the first time in club history that they completed that achievement.
The Revs sit second in the Eastern Conference on 48 points and are 13 points clear of the playoff line.
Word is the Revolution players are furious and refusing to train. I’ll bet the players have a pretty good idea of what was said and think this is ridiculous. But someone’s feelings got hurt….what a joke
1) NER is sitting second and I assume a fair amount of the players signed up for a serious, elite-coach-led effort chasing the title. Arena was gone with 1/3 of the season left and Williams has poor coaching history as a caretaker before. If I was a NER fan or player I would be cranky they aren’t hiring a serious replacement like they are a title contender. I mean, after all, they rapidly ended the Friedel era when it didn’t work and hired Arena mid-season.
2) I think they have to take slurs seriously but I think if they take action on a complaint, at the end, the players and public should have at least a general idea what the issue was. Anti-gay, anti-minority, anti-woman, etc. We’re still stuck back at vaguely “insensitive” like when he was given desk duty. If you’re gonna take his job and throw the team into turmoil put some meat on the conclusions. I say this not even to defend the man — the law firm said they “confirmed” something — but just as basic transparency and fairness. It’s not just for him, it’s for should he coach again, it’s for the players, organization, public. I mean, compared to this, on Reyna, there’s a public report. This is what the Reynas said. This is what Berhalter admitted. This is the behavior standard. We decide he keeps his job. We can then from at least a half informed standpoint decide what we think, and move forward.
3) (Rumor is) Williams can complain about what he wants and if it’s true Arena should get in trouble. But I can also see where if Arena was popular and Williams not, and the organization promotes the one to replace the other — and then there’s not transparency — it looks like a coup or at minimum gross. So this might be like now that a rumor slips out who did this, I am not playing for him. It might be initially presented as “tell us what happened” just to come at it open minded, but I think they have some hints what it’s about and are like if you’re gonna do this, this way, then you can spell it out and then we’re officially not playing for him.
maybe someone in legal thought being overly generous to williams was a lawsuit killer — he can’t sue us if we fire the head and hand him his job — but in practice it’s insane.
the players may also want to know if it’s something that happened last month or like reyna II ie arena doesn’t bring williams back and williams his dutiful player/assistant empties a historical vault of all the stored skeletons over 2 decades and change.
Word also is that his relationships with Williams and Onalfo have been very bad recently and there has been some tension with the fact that he had his contract extended while the rest of coaching staff didn’t. I’ve heard he also made it clear that not everyone was going to be part of the staff going forward (Williams, in particular).
Will anyone ever tell us what was so insensitive and inappropriate to cause an investigation and loss of job?.
I’d imagine something will come out now that the investigation confirmed the allegations true. Kaylyn Kile said on podcast it was “racial” but the next day she tweeted an apology/retraction saying she had no information on what the comments were and had misspoke. Someone on Twitter said she hasn’t been on AppleTV since.
My theory is that he called Jonathan Kraft a [weenie]. And given MLS’s statement, he presumably went on to call Don Garber a [weenie].
Who knows? He’s always struck a potential asshole at work. But as far as I know none of the players have had any criticism of him that would have led to this.
Regardless, this whole situation was handled horribly from every side.
Word also is that his relationships with Williams and Onalfo have been very bad recently and there has been some tension with the fact that he had his contract extended while the rest of coaching staff didn’t. I’ve heard he also made it clear that not everyone was going to be part of the staff going forward (Williams, in particular).
Well we aren’t guaranteed to go to work for warm and fuzzy people all the time. Nobody has ever offered me a happy pill at any of my jobs. Arena is a legend, I hope he enjoys retirement because American soccer lost out today.
I’d assume it goes beyond being not warm and fuzzy but we’ll see.