Perhaps one of the more self-serving theories espoused by now-departed Red Bull soccer guru Ralf Rangnick, a veteran Bundesliga manager with Stuttgart and Schalke among other teams, was that the coach rather than a star player should be the highest paid person at a club. Indeed Rangnick valued the position enough that for both the 2015-16 and 2018-19 seasons, the jet-setting executive of the global soccer empire also moonlighted as the day-to-day head coach of RB Leipzig rather than pass the job off to someone he couldn’t trust.
While he didn’t appear to have the same urgency about the situation with his Red Bull club in New York when he allowed the largely unproven Chris Armas to take over the managerial role in 2018, it is clear through the hiring of new sporting chief Kevin Thelwell and Armas’ eventual replacing that an evaluation has been slowly but surely made.