As Jon reported, and the club announced, yesterday, the Roots have parted ways with technical director Jordan Ferrell. Jordan leaves the Oakland Roots after more than 6 years–essentially as long as anyone involved in the club other than some (but not all) of the principal owners. While I understand many fans’ frustrations with the team over the last several years, and the reasons that blame has been placed on Jordan, what I would like to do in this post is push back on what I think is an unreasonably cruel response by fans to Jordan’s service to the club.
I think that there is a straight-forward team-performance argument to be made for changing course in the technical department. The Roots have underperformed for several years, struggled to find direction in coaching, and ended up with rosters that seem to lack coherence by mid-way through the season. When the coaches keep getting replaced and the performance issues remain, the logical next place to assign blame is the technical director. Whether what is logically sound matches the truth is another question–it’s possible that Jordan was not in charge of all of the decisions for which fans have assigned him blame. The Roots’ technical operations have been frustratingly opaque. People from the team won’t answer questions on-record essentially ever–except Benny at the end of the season when he knew he was likely gone–and won’t even answer off-record very often. So we and the rest of the fanbase are left basically guessing who is to blame for the misses (Dwyer, Damm, Abdi Mohamed) and to credit for the hits (Bettache, Wilson, Doner). The consensus on reddit, the discord, the insta chats, has been to blame Jordan. I am leading with this paragraph as an acknowledgement that the performance has been lacking and that the team does not make it clear who is to blame, so fans have somewhat understandably focused on the technical director.
Just looking at performance, I feel that Jordan’s tenure with the Roots has been fine, if not great.1 The NISA team was good! He built the 2021 inaugural USL team out of the scraps from Reno 1899 and a handful of other USL players willing to move to the most expensive market in the league, and that team made the playoffs and upset the favorites! Recognizing that his future lay in the front office, he moved to the technical director role for 2022 and helped bring in an exciting young coach who had good connections in the Venezuelan soccer community and surrounded that coach with the players the coach wanted, plus a couple USL veterans and some loanees (the last the Roots were allowed to get, apparently). When that coach abandoned the Roots mid-season, Noah Delgado was able to steer the ship that Jordan had helped build into the playoffs and through an underdog win in the first round. Obviously, that’s the end of the fun part of the story. The Roots have played in one playoff game since then and it was not particularly competitive. The lurching from interim coach to interim coach with dubious rosters does not reflect well on the front office generally.
That said, Jordan also deserves credit for the Oakland Soul’s overall success (especially its incredible early success) as well as the success of Project 51O. On that note, I would be very curious to see someone with some familiarity with the league as a whole analyze senior minutes played by academy gradutes over the last 3 seasons league-wide. In Ferrell’s tenure, I count nine players from 51O who have featured for Roots in the league2: Danny Gomez, Luis Saldaña, Etsgar Cruz, Tim Syrel, Javier Mariona, Ilya Alekseev, Tomas Camier, Ali Elmasnaouy, and Kieren Bracken Serra. My quick math totals 9,063 minutes for these players over four years, or 100 full 90s. Most of that is Danny Gomez, and a big chunk of the remainder is Ali Elmasnaouy this past season.
Setting aside the team’s performance, Jordan has always been a pretty nice guy. I think I first encoutered him at the open preseason match against Academica in Turlock. Once or twice during the Hayward days, when he sat with the injured players and youth players about half-way up the stands, I managed to get his attention during halftime to pick his brain about injuries and signings. He wouldn’t give me straight answers, but he always seemed a little pleased that someone cared to ask. He gave some of the best interviews at media day, at least the couple I managed to attend. Players and coaches will always give you platitudes about coming together as a team and feeling good about the upcoming season–emulating the highly media-trained answers you see in locker room interviews on ESPN. Jordan loves to talk ball and I felt you could see him struggle to choose between really getting into the X’s and O’s and trying to play his cards close. Still, he gave in sometimes, and would talk about why the team brought a player in or how he thought the team could function on the field. He is funny in ways that other people that the Roots put out to speak on behalf of the team won’t let themselves be. To be honest, I think Jordan is just cool–a factor that I think the Roots really benefitted from when he was head coach and that they missed the more he went behind the scenes. When he represented the Roots, particularly as manager, I was proud that he was representing my team.
It makes me feel genuinely bad to read people celebrating Jordan’s departure from the club. It makes me feel bad in the same way it did when the fans were booing Tim Syrel’s terrible game at the end of the 2024 season. These guys are part of our community and they are giving every working hour towards making the Roots a successful team. If you think the team needs a new direction, fine, I have personally expressed that opinion myself at times. If you think the team needed a new direction 18 months ago and delayed in making a decision, I also get it. It is a little weird to act like he was a villain.3
All of that is to say that I wish Jordan all the best, and I hope that he lands on his feet at a place where he can apply what he learned with the Roots and thrive. I hope it’s not one of our rivals. I think the Roots are better for Jordan’s time at the club. I really appreciate Jordan’s service for the Roots and for my money he is a Roots legend that I will celebrate if he comes back to visit. I really hope readers will consider if they should feel the same.
- Obviously, if you get to “fine” because it was good to start and became bad at the end, that can justify moving on. This post is not challenging the decision to move on, this post is challenging the reaction to that decision. ↩︎
- I am just counting what is on FBREF, so I am not sure if this will count cup competitions and it’s a pain to confirm. ↩︎
- Sometimes it feels to me like Al Davis and John Fisher broke the brains of Oakland sports fans. ↩︎