KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Some 23 years ago, Peter Vermes moved to Kansas City, not by request but rather by trade — a move that, unbeknownst to him at the time, would forever alter his life.
But there’s a story that sticks out about the initial year in Kansas City, and it doesn’t exactly mirror the next 22. Which is kind of the point in why he’s sharing it.
The then-Kansas City Wizards — who a decade later would become Sporting KC, the team Vermes now oversees as a coach and general manager — were traveling to Los Angeles to play the LA Galaxy. When they arrived at LAX Airport, though, there was no bus to transport the team to the hotel. In fact, there was no one at all. Inside the terminal, Vermes and his teammates waited for nearly two hours, and back then they had an inside joke when these kinds of things happened — they’d hum the tune of traditional circus music.
The way things were in those early days. But to Vermes? The way things didn’t have to be. When he finally checked into his hotel room and unpacked his belongings, he grabbed the pad of paper on the nightstand and wrote a step-by-step process to document all the ways that fiasco could have been prevented.
“I remember back when I was in my teens, I already knew I wanted to build a club,” Vermes says as he concludes the anecdote. “Sometimes I can’t believe the actual story of it.”
A story with a few more chapters to go.
Or at least five anyway.
Vermes has signed a five-year contract extension to remain the manager and sporting director of Sporting KC. He had previously been set to enter the final year of his contract in the 2023 season, which begins with a trip to Portland on Saturday.
He’s now inked to stay in Kansas City through 2028, and this time there was a pull to have him elsewhere.
The United States men’s national team called Vermes earlier this month through its search firm Sportsology Group, he said in a sit-down conversation with The Kansas City Star.
A representative from Sportsology requested that Vermes interview for a job with the U.S. national team. Anthony Hudson is serving as interim head coach, and the sporting director is vacant.
Vermes declined to say which job for which he was contacted. He had already begun discussions with Sporting’s ownership group about an extension.
“I was very direct with them — I told them I was almost finished with a new deal here (with Sporting),” Vermes said. “This is the project I’ve been interested in for a long time.
“I came in with the new ownership. I was given a blank canvas to build it out. This is always what I’ve wanted to be able to do. I consider myself incredibly fortunate. That’s why this project has always been important to me.”
We’ll get back to the job in which Vermes is staying, because there’s certainly importance to it, but first a bit more on the job in which he opted not to interview. And that’s as far as the request progressed, to be clear — an interview.
Sportsology initially reached out to Vermes via text message “out of the blue” while Sporting was going through its first phase of preseason camp in Arizona. They set up a time for a phone call, and quickly into that subsequent conversation, Vermes expressed his intent to stay in KC.
Asked if they discussed the potential duration of a job with the USMNT — if there were plans for it to extend through at least the World Cup cycle, given that the tournament is in the United States — Vermes said, “We didn’t get that far. They did their intro. I didn’t want them to keep going when I already knew (my decision).
“I understand that everybody might look at it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but I just know that right now this is what floats my boat.”
Before we closed the door on that, I did ask Vermes if he had closed the door on it for good.
“I’m not saying I would never do that,” Vermes said. “It’s an honor to be thought of, for sure. It’s the freaking national team. I just know that right now, I really enjoy and am committed to what I do here.”
My conversation with Vermes spanned an hour here in Scottsdale, Ariz., where Sporting KC is training ahead of its season opener. Ironically, it is the same hotel in which the Chiefs stayed two weeks earlier for their Super Bowl trip.
When I walked into his suite shortly after Sporting KC returned from a practice, Vermes and technical director Brian Bliss were wrapping up a conversation about the pursuit of a central defender. Five minutes later, he received a phone call from the team director of sports medicine, and then another from the team administrator. He had dinner plans with the assistant coaches in a couple of hours, but to be clear, it would be a working dinner. The team’s chief communications officer needed time with him before he left.
“You don’t have to spend much time around Peter to know he wears a lot of hats,” Sporting principal owner Mike Illig said. “I think he exceeds many expectations as the CEO of the Sporting player enterprise, in addition to what everyone thinks he is, which is the general manager and the head coach.
“It only makes sense for us, assuming Peter wants to keep going, that we would absolutely want him to be our guy to continue the project.”
We can’t ignore the timing of it, though.
Vermes, 56, is entering his 15th season as manager (longest in MLS currently), but coming off his worst. Granted, the first team played without two of its three allotted designated players a year ago, with striker Alan Pulido and midfielder Gadi Kinda both out for the entire season. In a world of make-no-excuses, that’s a hard one to ignore. So too were the results, though.
Pulido is expected back in the opening few weeks of 2023, with Kinda perhaps not too far behind. Sporting did ultimately replace the two players’ positions late last summer, with striker William Agada and midfielder Erik Thommy, and promptly compiled the league’s second-best record over the final 10 weeks of the season.
That was only enough to move them to 12th in the Western Conference standings, still the worst finish in Vermes’ tenure. Vermes has won four trophies with Sporting KC — three U.S. Open Cups and one of the more coveted MLS Cups, though the most recent came in 2017.
How does this contract account for the timing?
“If you look at our league, it is really difficult to be a perennial contender,” Illig said. “If you look at our season last year, we know why we weren’t contending, and when we plugged those holes, we became competitive again. Unfortunately, the damage was already done.
“But there’s always work to do, and Peter is someone who’s never satisfied. He enjoys the work. I can reflect on (times) when we’ve won trophies, and the next day his mind is already onto, ‘We got to go win something else.’”
In my 10 years interacting with Vermes in this job, that’s undoubtedly what stands out most — his desire to look forward for the next edge.
Several years ago, he spent an offseason taking a college course on millennials, hoping it would help him better understand and therefore better connect with his players. A few years later, he instilled rewards for winning small-sided games in training, a way to increase the competition.
In totality, though, this is the big-picture vision he had more than two decades ago, scribbling notes on hotel paper. Under his leadership, the organization has added an academy, a second team and a world-class training facility that ignores no detail.
Because he does not, either.
It’s only logical to extend to marriage — you know, as long as the results on the field follow suit. Illig called the 2022 season an outlier, and statistically speaking, he’s not wrong .The team has made the playoffs in 10 of the past 12 seasons. That’s a statistic that almost every other MLS team would love to have on its resume.
Illig said the ownership group evaluates Vermes on a set of 11 criteria, things that in addition to the results include long-term stability, progression of the academy, culture, vision for the future and so on.
Within those boxes, the 2022 disappointment has to be accounted for, even it’s outweighed by the rest — and it should be outweighed the remainder, given the long-term history. But that year, and particularly the first half of the year, prompted some self-reflection.
“Absolutely it did,” Vermes said. “At the end of each year, we’re going through everything, because I’d like to try and do it better than we did it the year before. Now, that can also be a curse sometimes, because maybe you’re doing things that right way, and a tweak has a different effect. But I just think that you have to constantly try to improve yourself, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it — just all of it. And so that’s what drives me constantly.”
