Catanese: Potential Mitrovic Hire Proves Revs Correctly Identified Their Biggest Problem
A seemingly outside of the box hire means that the New England front office was looking for the right man to solve the right problem for the Revs.
Yes, winning first-team games is always a major goal for every sports team. I am not here to disprove that notion or say the New England Revolution won’t be trying to win games next year.
Despite the Revs’ tactics under Caleb Porter the last two years being absolutely horrid and ill-fitting of the roster he inherited in 2024 and allegedly was built for him in 2025, New England has suffered from a major organizational failure not from top to bottom…but rather bottom to top over the last few years. A failure that a single head coach is not going to fix, hence why I was big on Jim Curtin taking over the reins as a technical director type.
New England needs more than a head coach. It needs a complete organizational builder.
It needs the opposite of what Caleb Porter was so boldly hired to do two years ago, which was to almost solely focus on the needs of the senior MLS roster only in hopes of regaining the momentum lost from the Supporters’ Shield run and Bruce Arena era. Given the lack of minutes and opportunities for youngsters in 2025 outside of Peyton Miller, it almost felt like Revs II was a separate entity from the MLS side this year.
Not only that, this organization needs someone who can carry on the recent ideals that the New England Revolution are the premier selling club of MLS. A team that can develop and move on from players that enhances the attractiveness of young and/or U22 Initiative type players who want to come here. If you hire an MLS coach, you solve MLS problems…which is not the only issue the Revolution are facing right now.
Assuming the Revs are converting Matt Turner into a TAM-level player in 2026, the Revs can adopt the 2 DP / 4-U22 model, and that’s before even figuring out what to do with wingers Tomas Chancalay and Luca Langoni if they switch to a two-striker setup with Dor Turgeman and Leo Campana up top. So while there’s a ton of things to do at the senior roster level, there’s a lot of work, if not more to do at the levels below as well.
Enter one U20 USMNT coach Marko Mitrovic, who as reported yesterday by the veracious and indomitable Tom Bogert, is set to be named as the next Revs head coach. Immediate comparisons to his national team compatriot Mikey Varas who took over and had immediate success for expansion San Diego FC will be made but truly these are two very different situations.
However, Mitrovic’s experience as a wheel in the cog of the USYNT development setup is the exact perspective New England needs for their organization. Someone who can repair the bridge from the Revs Academy and Revs II to the backend of the MLS roster…because only then will anything at the major league level truly have a chance at being successful.
Yes the Revs are in dire need of a playing system that works with their first team personnel, but more important than that they need a revamp of how this team operates from the bottom of the roster towards the top. As I’ve said many times, New England has never had problems identifying talented players, getting said application of talent to translate on the field is another story but the injury bug has exposed the depth on this roster the last few years.
There are two major reasons for this. First, aside from blue chip academy talent like Esmir Bajraktarevic, Noel Buck, and Peyton Miller…first team minutes for homegrowns have been hard to come by. Jack Panayotou has been toiling in the USL the last two years, Olger Escobar’s breakout Gold Cup campaign with Guatemala technically happened with Montreal, and Eric Klein and Sharod George barely had a cup of Gatorade off the bench on short-term agreements this year.
Allan Oyirwoth was a full senior roster signing at the age of 18 and finally started getting MLS minutes late in the year (there might not have been an Int’l roster spot for him early on), but it was something I was hopeful to see under Pablo Moreira. But it’s hard to believe that there weren’t a lot more minutes available for him, Jordan Adebayo-Smith, Malcolm Fry, or Noel Buck over the last two years. That is, if there was anything resembling a plan for developing the youngsters instead of haphazardly casting them off on loans or cheap Garber Bucks deals.
Academy shortcomings aside, recent SuperDrafts have netted almost no MLS production from the last few classes. Donovan Parisian did some fine work as the Revs #3 keeper in NextPro but for a team with significant holes at the back of the roster a third keeper seems wasteful in the first round especially when the Revs had did that fairly recently.
The Revs punted on the 2024 Draft selling everything to Minnesota and to get Ian Harkes from DC United, and could have gotten current RIFC defender Hugo Bacharach in the first round. Edward Kizza, Josh Bolma, Jacob Jackson and Ben Reveno are the notable selections from 2021-23 stretch…none of them are still around either.
Gone are the years when you can reliably find MLS contributors outside the first round of the draft, but the Revs haven’t hit on a first-round pick in a while, and it shows. If you can’t identify and develop the first round talent, you have zero shot at the lower round guys.
When the New England Revolution have historically been at their best — the Steve Nicol era, the 2014 MLS Cup run, and the Bruce Arena Shield run — they had a fantastic roster bolstered by strong draft classes. Taylor Twellman, Clint Dempsey, Mike Parkhurst, and Shalrie Joseph all came up through the college draft ranks. AJ Soares, Andrew Farrell, Kelyn Rowe combined with homegrowns Diego Fagundez and Scott Caldwell and superstars MVLee and Jermaine Jones for half a season of magic. Henry Kessler, Tajon Buchanan, DeJuan Jones, Brandon Bye were stalwarts of the Revs rebirth and Shield run.
Okay fine, we’ll give an honorable mention to undrafted Matt Turner but I’m not mentioning his Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference school by name. Or that he’s going to be in their Class of ‘26 Athletics Hall of Fame, no self respecting former Rider Bronc would do these things.
So it doesn’t surprise me at all that with minimal returns out of the draft in recent years, the Revs have struggled with their depth. Add in selling fairly low on some mid-to-good prospects out of the academy, and you end up with a top-heavy roster and no minutes for your developmental players.
Mind you, there absolutely were minutes available and Caleb Porter hated substitutes but I don’t think coach Mitrovic is going to have that issue. There’s a tremendous gap that needs to be bridged from the Revs II/academy setup to the MLS first team and I thought Jim Curtin was the guy for that job.
But instead of hiring another “generic veteran MLS coach” after failing to land Curtin, New England kept the focus where it should have been: hiring someone to fix the biggest problem. No disrespect to finalists Vanni Sartini and Josh Wolff who only have MLS coaching experience and I wouldn’t have hated as hires…but they would have been relatively safe and in my opinion, overly MLS-focused choices likely focused on solving only the first team tactics problem.
Which is what makes the Mitrovic hire so incredibly intriguing from a New England standpoint. Yes, the Revs have tapped into the USSF ranks before with Arena and even Brad Friedel, but it was all but assumed that New England would go after a known MLS quantity like Curtin, Peter Vermes, or Gio Savarese. New England is on the verge of making a hire of such sound rational quality that it almost seems completely outside of the box when it really isn’t.
Mitrovic was so under the radar that in every brainstorm I could recall on the Revs coaching search I never recall hearing his name…Thomas Pinzone had higher odds on Sean Dyche and Jesus himself. Shoutout Jeff Z by the way who called this the day Porter was fired and weeks before the USA bossed France and Italy 3-0 at the U20 World Cup which certainly helped shorten the odds on Mitrovic landing the job. Previous relations with Matt Polster as an assistant in Chicago and with Peyton Miller at the USA U-20s might lead to some immediate adaptability for the first time first team/senior-level club coach.
In New England’s last coaching search, it was looking for the best resume and it backfired spectacularly. Yes, they swing and missed at the home run hire in Jim Curtin but despite that continued forward on a mission to bring in more than just a first-team coach. Perhaps Curt Onalfo or Brian Bilello or someone in the Revs front office remembered the old Herb Brooks adage:
We’re not looking for the best coach, we’re looking for the right one.
I think the Revs found the right one. Whether it works out in the long term remains to be seen. A World Cup summer break and potential calendar switch, along with a full organization rework, is not something that will likely happen overnight or over the next 18 months. Hopefully there will be some significant MLS improvement in the short term during that timespan, but a hire like Mitrovic seems to imply a more long-term goal orientation, which is a good thing.
The Revs need to rebuild a foundation for not just the MLS team but their whole organization, and there aren’t a lot of people who I’d have a high amount of confidence in doing that, just based off the initial hire. But that inclination was based on the assumption that New England was going to hire a known quantity MLS veteran head coach.
But they have surprisingly not done that and are incredibly wise in my opinion for doing so. Now we still need to see the new Revs II and MLS coaching staffs to be filled out, perhaps a spot for Moreira is deserved in there somewhere, but merely the concept of going after Mitrovic initially is a tremendously good and unexpected beginning.
Let’s see what other good decisions the Revs can make in the coming months.
Good analysis!
Jim Curtin said he denied the Head Coach position due to a “Family Issue”, I believe it was a Kraft Family issue!