Oakland Roots introduced Benny Feilhaber as their new head coach on Monday following a tumultuous start to the season under Gavin Glinton. Feilhaber inherits a side that currently sits 11th in the USL Championship Western Conference at 3-1-7, and sixth of seven teams in the USL Jägermeister Cup with two matches remaining in the group stage.
In the club’s press release, president Lindsay Barenz said they are bringing in Feilhaber “through the end of the season,” making his future past 2025 unclear. With that, the club’s particular goal for him remains a bit ambiguous.
When appearing on USL All Access, Feilhaber gave some clarity to their objective for the remainder of the year.
“I think at a bare minimum, you want to make the playoffs,” Feilhaber said. “That’s always the case in American soccer. With eight teams out of 12, you expect to make the playoffs if you do a good job and the coach is getting the best out of the players, and putting them in a position to succeed. With the roster that we have, we should make the playoffs.”
But as things proved with Glinton at the end of 2024, playoff positioning doesn’t always tell the full story about a team. Feilhaber understands finishing in any of the final playoff spots isn’t as important as putting a good product on the field with its own identity.
“I think where we land is kind of hard to say, whether it’s somewhere around eighth or in the top four with a home playoff game. Yeah, that would be great. But I don’t think finishing in fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth is not necessarily successful,” Feilhaber said. “I would love more than anything, other than making a run in the playoffs, is to have a way about us. The way we want to play and that we understand there is a style that we want to play, that our fans can start becoming acquainted with and understand.”
Those are words Roots’ fans can fall in love with.
Under Noah Delgado and Glinton, Oakland always seemed to focus on building a cast that could adapt to opponents and switch styles on any given game day. Roots haven’t had a visible system or philosophy since Juan Guerra in 2022, who made clear his scheme thrives with the ball at their feet.
For the past two years, Roots struggled to establish a noticeable ideology for how it operates. Feilhaber’s plan is to change that, saying he wants their fans to get accustomed to a certain style.
“I would love for fans to be able to talk about our team and know what they’re talking about. As opposed to one game it looks like this and the other game looks like that,” Feilhaber said. “[We want] a style of play… In a perfect scenario, we want to be entertaining. We want to be high energy. We want to have the ball and be able to control certain aspects of the game, especially at home.”
Perhaps building a structured system like Guerra established in 2022 will be a benchmark in Roots’ list of goals.
“At the end of the year, I would love to look back on it and say we made the playoffs, we competed for a championship, and we built a real way of playing,” Feilhaber said. “I want somebody to say, ‘Oakland Roots play this way.’ I think that would be a success story.”
As for how Feilhaber’s system may operate, Oakland has run three different formations so far this year, including the 4-3-3, 3-5-2, and 3-4-3–all of which the new gaffer mentioned. He hopes to quickly identify the areas Roots can excel before making any final judgments.
“It’s not necessarily, ‘Hey, this is my system,'” Feilhaber said. “I do have an idea of how I want to play and maybe a formation, but you’ve got to find out what kind of players you have and how they are best put together. Whether it be a 4-3-3, 3-5-2, or 3-4-3, or what kind of style you’re going to play. Is it going to be high pressing? Do you have to sit more and counterattack? Do you have the speed to do that? Do you have the organization and communication in the back to be able to do that?
“That’s something that I was very clear with the players about. I do have ideas and the picture-perfect scenario, but I’ve got to get to know these players first and then figure out what works best with the guys we have.”
As of today, June 4, Feilhaber is wrapping up his second day at the helm. He’s now tasked with learning each player available on the first-team roster.
With 19 games left in the regular season, there were already signs of players getting phased out under Glinton. People like Gagi Margvelashvili, Abdi Mohamed, and Justin Rasmussen already looked like they were at the bottom of Glinton’s depth chart. There were even clues the former coaching staff was cooling on Panos Armenakas after being a marquee offseason signing.
Feilhaber wants his players to know they have a “clean slate” with his arrival, and it’s time for them to prove themselves.
“It’s a clean slate, not only for myself, but also for the players. I told them right off the bat, I don’t really care how you played or if you have or haven’t played,” Feilhaber said. “Show me who you are as a player. I’m going to evaluate you guys on how quickly you can adapt to the ideas that I put out there and how you fit into the way I want to play.”
Feilhaber comes to Oakland from Sporting Kansas City II in MLS Next Pro with a fairly even record at 32-15-33. It’s a level of soccer that’s hard to evaluate, knowing it’s a developmental league used to bolster MLS first teams.
He’d often have players who arrive at SKCII just a day, or even hours, before a match. The fast-moving nature of MLS Next Pro gives him experience preparing on the fly, which could prove useful after joining the USL Championship in the middle of its season.
“It’s something that obviously I’ve been really looking forward to, being able to coach at a first-team level. I learned so much at SKC II, but you’re not what I would fully consider the coach,” Feilhaber said. “You’re adhering to other people’s ideas. You’re trying to develop more so than win. You don’t necessarily have that full roster day in and day out in training, so it’s virtually impossible to evaluate yourself as a coach. So, I’ve been craving this opportunity.”
Sporting KC also gave him a chance to scout the market for players at the Division 2 or 3 level who “fell through the cracks.” Working knowledge of the landscape is surely something intriguing to the front office, should Feilhaber prove he’s the man for the job.
“[Former Sporting KC manager] Peter Vermes put me on a project to find up-and-comers,” he said, “guys that fell through the cracks of MLS in the USL championship or League One that might be worth bringing in to MLS Next Pro, or even the first-team MLS side.”
Feilhaber has just a few more days before his debut as Roots’ head coach against El Paso Locomotive. It will be a tough task against the Western Conference’s second-place team under veteran head coach Wilmer Cabrera, who is in his second year as head coach after similarly being brought into the fold during the 2024 season.
For Oakland fans and front office alike, creating stability is the ultimate goal following a second straight mid-year coaching change.
If Feilhaber can mold an identity out of a label-less bunch, the club may have finally found a candidate who can create a brand on the field that matches the one off it.