Charlotte FC's new coach is a fan at heart
The other Dean Smith brings a Premier League pedigree and a humble nature to the Carolinas
This is a special off-season edition of Fútbol Friday examining Charlotte FC’s new coach, Dean Smith. Fútbol Friday is The Charlotte Ledger’s weekly newsletter getting you up to speed on Charlotte FC and is regularly published during the season.
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New coach Dean Smith is praised as a ‘good guy’ and a perfect fit for Charlotte FC; working-class roots, drops into pubs, enjoys golf, son plays pro soccer in Greenville
Charlotte FC’s new coach, Dean Smith, gets a tour of Bank of America Stadium. (Photo courtesy of Charlotte FC.)
Dean Smith — the new Charlotte FC coach, not the basketball coach — couldn’t resist pulling out his phone and snapping a picture of the enormous image of himself adorning the jumbotron at Bank of America Stadium on Tuesday during a tour of his new workplace.
In one small gesture, he lived up to the reputation he built in England while coaching his boyhood team, Aston Villa, to promotion into the English Premier League — that he is still a man of the people.
“At heart, he’s just a football fan,” said ESPN’s international soccer commentator Luis Miguel Echegaray, who latched onto Aston Villa as a fan himself when he moved from Peru to England at 11 years old. “I don’t think you get that all the time with managers, or at least they forget it at some point. You never forget that with him. He’s a working-class guy that’s just worked his way up, and I don’t think that’s ever left him.”
Watching soccer at bars: Smith has been known to drop into a pub in Great Barr in the northwest section of his hometown of Birmingham, England, where his parents Ron and Hilary were regulars. While on vacation in New York City last weekend, just before traveling to Charlotte to sign his multi-year contract (reportedly two years with an option for a third), Echegaray said a buddy of his ran into Smith at Football Factory, a soccer bar in Manhattan, that’s home to more than 30 supporters groups. He was there to watch Aston Villa play Arsenal.
“He was just there, having a drink with everybody, doing interviews with people,” Echegaray said. “He’s just that kind of guy. He’s a good guy. And I think that's the perfect person you need in a place like Charlotte that’s young and thriving, and really just wants the soccer community to grow.”
Charlotte FC’s inaugural coach, Miguel Angel Ramirez, had a great rapport with many Charlotte FC fans, though some came away skeptical of how authentic it was, pointing to the public relations team Ramirez brought with him.
Ramirez’s replacement, Christian Lattanzio, never prioritized endearing himself to the fans. Bringing in a coach who could build a strong rapport with fans was just one of the many qualities Charlotte FC’s front office was looking for in this hire. But it was important for a club looking to improve its image after a tumultuous season off the field last year. It started with the tragic death of defender Anton Walkes in a preseason jet ski accident and was amplified with the departure of Andre Shinyashiki and Nuno Santos after the two players were linked to a sexual assault case.
Connecting with fans: “A priority for our club remains progress both on and off the pitch,” team president Joe LaBue said in the statement Charlotte FC released upon Smith’s hiring. “Dean has a strong track record of winning results, authentically connecting with supporters and ingraining himself in the local community, which are all important responsibilities for our head coach.”
Charlotte FC released an eight-minute video segment Monday in which broadcaster Eric Krakauer, who works for Apple TV but is still contracted to produce content for Charlotte FC, interviewed Smith. But neither Smith nor members of the front office were expected to be available to the media until a press conference Monday at their new headquarters in east Charlotte, Atrium Health Performance Park.
So we turned to some other Brits for insight.
Smith capturing a moment, during his tour of Bank of America Stadium on Tuesday. (Photo taken from Charlotte FC video.)
Through writer Ashley Preece, who covered Smith and Aston Villa at the Birmingham (U.K.) Mail, we learned that Smith’s father worked as a steward at Villa Park, the stadium where Aston Villa plays, for 25 years. Echegaray added the detail that Smith’s father used to usher club owner Sir Herbert Douglas Ellis to his seat. As a kid, Dean cleaned stadium steps while his father worked.
“He likes the simple things in life. He likes to play a lot of golf,” Preece said. “And he’s big into walking his dog, Charlie (a King Charles Spaniel).”
Smith — who has a wife, Nicola; son, Jamie; and daughter, Katie — played professional soccer in England for 16 years. As a coach, he endeared himself to local fans as he rose through the ranks from England’s third-tier League One with Walsall to the second-tier English Championship with Brentford.
Promotion to Premier League: Then, in his first season after landing with his boyhood team in Birmingham, Smith took Aston Villa from 15th place in the English Championship and in danger of being relegated (or sent back) to League One to a Premier League promotion instead. His crowning achievement was a 2-1 win over Derby County in the English Championship final in 2019 at storied Wembley Stadium in London.
Smith led Aston Villa to 10 consecutive wins that season, to break a 109-year-old team record, in his first of three seasons there.
After struggling to keep pace in the Premier League, he was fired from Aston Villa in November 2021. He went on to even harder reclamation projects in the bottom of the Premier League standings — with Norwich City, which was ultimately relegated to the Championship League; and Leicester City, where he had eight games to try to save the club from relegation. Overall, Smith has coached 123 games in the Premier League with 34 wins, 64 losses and 25 draws.
At age 52, Smith was back on the job market this winter, when Charlotte FC convinced him to come to Major League Soccer and reportedly beat out last-hour pursuit by Stoke City of the English Championship.
“Professionally, (the move) was a little bit surprising,” Echegaray said. “I (would have thought) he probably would have stayed a little bit longer to give maybe another Championship team another go, maybe see what happens after Christmas and give a team in the Premier League another go. But I think the personal came into this one for him.”
Carolina connection: Smith’s son playing locally
Smith started coming to the Carolinas six years ago, when his son Jamie joined the soccer team at Limestone University in Gaffney, S.C. He’s been coming back ever since, after Jamie transferred to N.C. State for his final three years of eligibility, played semi-pro in the summer for Asheville City FC and most recently joined the Greenville Triumph of USL League One. Smith bought a vacation home in Myrtle Beach, where he can enjoy his other big sporting love: golf.
On one visit to the Carolinas during the summer of 2022, Smith and his son took in a Charlotte FC game against the New York Red Bulls at Bank of America Stadium. It just so happened to be Christian Lattanzio’s first win (by a 2-0 score, with goals by Ben Bender and Derrick Jones), after taking over as interim coach for the newly-fired Ramirez.
Smith couldn’t have imagined he’d be back as head coach just 18 months later.
A dedicated Mint City Collective member, Darrin Kiser, used the FanCam from last June 22’s game against the Red Bulls to find this image of Dean Smith and his son Jamie sitting in a suite at Bank of America Stadium. (Photo courtesy of @WestwoodTeaGang on X.)
Lattanzio won over the players in that first stretch of games — something Ramirez had failed to do — and this season, he took Charlotte FC to its first-ever playoff appearance. But after the team was knocked out 5-2 by the New York Red Bulls in the opening round of the playoffs and after taking into consideration six blown leads in the final 10 minutes of games during the regular season, owner David Tepper and the Charlotte FC front office fired Lattanzio.
Smith comes to Charlotte with the reputation for being a “man’s manager” — which, when translated into an American cliché, means “a player’s coach.”
“Everyone who I have spoken to who worked for him as a player and staff have not had a bad word to say,” said Charlotte FC captain Ashley Westwood, who’s been busy reaching out to people from his offseason home in England. “Everyone has said the same. He is a great guy, and most importantly, the lads who played for him said he was amazing … Jack Grealish is a huge fan of his, I know that.”
Westwood used to play for Aston Villa but never played for Smith. He had moved on to Burnley FC by the time Smith got there. It was in Smith’s first year at Aston Villa when he named soon-to-be English superstar Grealish a captain as the dynamic winger rose to stardom in the Premier League. Grealish left Aston Villa in 2021 to sign a £100 million contract ($127 million) with Manchester City, where he stars in between stints with the English national team.
Westwood had not yet spoken with Smith as of early this week.
“I think it’s a great appointment and credit to Mr. Tepper (and front office officials) Joe (LaBue), Zoran (Krneta) and Bobby (Belair) to be able to get him,” Westwood said. “I know there are big clubs in the U.K. that wanted him, so it’s a testament to how far this club has gone in just a short space of time. Every team he managed — they were very organized and attacked at speed. Brentford are where they are now because of the foundations he set in for them. He got Aston Villa promoted. … He comes with a lot of experience and is very well respected in England. Hopefully, it’s a very exciting time to be a Charlotte fan.”
Plenty of roster questions ahead for Smith, Charlotte FC
Charlotte FC figures to play with a similar style under Smith as it did under Lattanzio. He is known for running the same 4-3-3 formation as Lattanzio and favoring an aggressive mindset that values possession. He is expected to play a little more straight forward on defense, though, when it comes to how he likes to position his backline. Lattanzio liked to gamble with overlapping fullbacks, who would push ahead of the wingers, and deep runs from his center backs.
The pieces Smith will have to use within that system are bound to change, though. Smith arrives to a roster in flux, where designated players Enzo Copetti and Kamil Jozwiak have underperformed and star player Karol Swiderski has requested a transfer to Europe. With the MLS free agency window open now and the international transfer window set to open in January, Smith and Krneta, the sporting director, have plenty to do, most likely starting with a conversation with Swiderski.
Echegaray, for one, thinks this is a build where Smith figures to be successful because he’s got the full offseason to make his mark.
“There’s a lot of similarities with MLS and the (English) Championship, in terms of at the very least the physicality of it,” Echegaray said. “It's very fast, it can be raw, but there’s a lot of great talent, and (Smith) is very good when the chips are down, like when he took on Villa. … We just plugged away in that first season, we came back to the Premier League. Even though it’s going to be different from a cultural standpoint in MLS — there’s no relegation — there’s still going to be this need to win and be better. And I think when you enter a club that’s still trying to figure out who they are, it’s great to have somebody like Dean Smith because he’s going to uplift you no matter what.”
News and Notes
Charlotte FC announced Thursday that it has traded winger McKinze Gaines to Nashville SC for a second-round pick in the upcoming MLS SuperDraft. Gaines is a speedster who has given Charlotte FC plenty of bright spots but never broke into the lineup consistently. Gaines scored one goal and added one assist in 18 games (eight starts) last season, while missing significant time down the stretch with a minor knee injury. Charlotte looks to continue its trend of finding good young talent in the college ranks, after picking up Ben Bender, Patrick Agyemang and Andrew Privett in the past two drafts.
Charlotte FC made its first big splash of the offseason earlier this month when it was named the host city for the semifinal and third-place games of the Copa America July 10 and 13, respectively. The Copa America is the South American championship and is considered one of the top tournaments in international play, behind the World Cup, Champions League and the European Championship. The tournament features powerhouses like defending World Cup champion Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, as well as special invitees for 2024, the United States and Mexico.
Charlotte FC season ticket holders are getting a new perk for 2024: The club announced this week it would be offering season ticket holders tickets to one road game of their choosing for the upcoming season. The club said further details are coming in January.
Carroll Walton is a longtime baseball writer with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution now cutting her teeth on soccer and the Charlotte FC just as fans in Charlotte do. She would love to hear from you. E-mail her with questions, suggestions, story ideas and comments!
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