Late this afternoon, New York City FC held their first two press conferences of the 2025 season, one with Sporting Director David Lee and another with new Head Coach Pascal Jansen.
Below are seven takeaways from the conversation with Lee, who answered questions from members of the press. You can find takeaways from Jansen's press conference here.
Note: The following statements were edited for length and clarity.
1. Pascal Jansen "had been on our radar"
As we get to the end of every season, I think there's a natural point to evaluate where we are as an organization, where we are as a club. And most importantly, how we see what we think is the best path to move the organization forward in the coming years.
And so, as we ended the 2024 season, we felt like there was an opportunity to make a change at head coach, that we could see an improved performance level, and we could maybe see some improvement also in the development of some of our young players. Which ultimately will also help us win more games and, and hopefully show a little bit more consistency than we saw in the 2024 season.
Once we made that decision, we felt like it was the right thing to make that decision as quickly as we possibly could to then give us enough opportunity to go through an extensive coaching search, to make sure that we could bring the best candidate forward.
We're really pleased that we were able to get Pascal appointed and hired, and able to start working with the group, early into the preseason.
Part of the work of any sporting director is to always be aware of potential opportunities. So, even though you're hopefully never in the need to make coaching changes, part of our work is to constantly monitor coaches. Pascal was somebody that actually been on our radar from City Football Group for a very long time.
We hadn't had any conversations with him, but he was somebody that, from his profile, we felt like was really interesting given what he'd done at AZ Alkmaar in terms of his performance on the pitch, his development of young talent, the style of football that he played.
The head coach is the most important person in the building. He needs to set the tone for the environment. Pascal has almost 200 games of experience of running a running a team, and he's got a really good demeanor with the players.
Once we made the decision to part ways with Nick, we then went to our database of coaches that we've been tracking and following, obviously getting a lot of inbound interest in the role given who we are in MLS. Being part of City Football Group was really attractive to an awful lot of candidates.
Pascal was part of that process. It's important to say that Pascal was in a really good job prior to coming to New York, and so we wanted to make sure that this was something that he really wanted to do.
I was really pleased and proud after we'd spoken to him, had those conversations that moving to New York and being part of New York City FC was something that he was just as interested in doing as we were interested in bringing him to the club.
Ultimately, that decision is mine. It's my job to make a recommendation to both the City Football Group on the football technical side, and then our ownership. So the interview process is run collaboratively between both New York and City Football Group because we work so closely together.
Andrew Leigh
2. Expectations remain high
I think there were a number of factors that made Pascal interesting. We have assembled a roster that has a lot of young talent, but also talent that we think can improve and develop. And so we wanted to find somebody that had trust and faith in playing young players, to develop young talent as part of a winning philosophy.
The track record Pascal [has] in young player development is outstanding. The number of players that left AZ Alkmaar to play at the highest levels in Europe is something that was also really attractive for us.
We have a way of playing that we believe from the ownership group all the way down that we would like a New York City FC team to play. And we think it's really important that any head coach is philosophically aligned to those ideals.
Philosophically, we want to be a team that controls the game by possession, which means we're going to need to be aggressive out of possession. We want to create chances and score lots of goals. Pascal has proven to play in a style that is similar to what we would like to see in our team.
The head coach is the most important person in the building. He needs to set the tone for the environment. Pascal has almost 200 games of experience of running a running a team, and he's got a really good demeanor with the players.
He's really demanding. He has really high standards, but equally, he's got a really good feel. [He wants] to get to know the players, and be close to the players, and understand them as people, which we believe is also really critical to maximizing their development.
3. 2024 was inconsistent
I felt like we were, we, we were a really inconsistent group last year, and we saw periods of what was an absolutely top-performing group in MLS, particularly that period, April, May, where we won eight of nine.
We got 24 points in those nine matches in April and May. And we got 26 points in the other 25 matches in the whole season. That was just a sign of real inconsistency.
There is a soft side. There is a gut feel. There is an environmental factor that you can only really sense and feel if you're in the environment every single day, and you try and take all of that into account, you try and take into account the resources that they've had available.
You know, in 2023, we did not make the playoffs, but we didn't change head coach at the end of that season because we knew that we were going through a period of rebuilding that team, and we didn't feel like that was the right decision at that point. As we made that decision at the end of 2024, we came to a different conclusion.
4. Development is the name of the game
Our organization's expectation is to be competitive, to win as many times as much as we possibly can in as many competitions as possible.
We know in MLS that's not easy.
The last three MLS Cup winners did not qualify for the playoffs the year before they won. It is inherently difficult to be consistently successful. Even if you look at the top seven teams in the Eastern Conference from 2023 to 2024, there were only three teams that were in the top seven both years.
So just repeating and maintaining that consistency is not easy.
Ultimately, we want to win trophies for our fans. So, the expectation of what we're, what we want to do is we want to be competitive to win as many trophies. What that looks like with US Open Cup, what that looks like with Leagues Cup, I think will depend on where the roster is, injuries, all those pieces.
As I say, we've got a group of really talented young players that also need opportunities to develop and play.
There's a focus on young players, of course. We have assembled what we believe is a group of really talented young players.
We're almost never going to sign perfectly finished players, and they're going to need to improve and develop, and that's something that we are looking forward to seeing during this season and beyond.
This is our approach to how we believe we can be most successful by winning — you know, we want to win trophies. We believe part of that strategy from our ownership and from everybody connected with New York City and City Football Group is to do that via developing young talent. The better players you can develop, the more chance you have of winning games of football.
Developing players is a core component for us and absolutely will be part of how a head coach is assessed, and how they develop all of the players that are in the squad.
Not just the young players, because more senior players can develop as well. We're almost never going to sign perfectly finished players, and they're going to need to improve and develop, and that's something that we are looking forward to seeing during this season and beyond.
5. U22s: Risk vs reward
When you acquire any young talent there is inherently, in my opinion, slightly more risk because young people develop at different rates.
And so there is slightly more risk associated with signing younger players. I probably wouldn't disagree with the sentiment that U22s can be risky investments. I think there also can be huge positives and upsides to those players, you know. And the opportunity to develop a young player, to sign a player that previously probably you wouldn't have been able to afford or you wouldn't have been able to afford within a salary cap, now is available to you with the U22 initiative.
That opens up a group of players that you hope and you believe can improve and develop, and become even more important players for you over the longer term. Our strategy is: We want to acquire the best talent that we possibly can, using as many roster mechanisms, and using as much financial resources as I'm given to be able to spend between discretionary investments possible, to try to bring as many good players.
We do believe – philosophically, organizationally – across the group in acquiring and developing young talent. And so the U22 initiative is a way that we believe you can acquire good young talent, develop it, and, ultimately that can help you on the pitch and it can help you from a business perspective in generating revenue for our business.
That's something that we believe is an important avenue. Of course, there are elements of risk with any signing, maybe slightly more so when you when you talk about young players, but it's our job to do the work and due diligence to try to reduce that risk as much as we possibly can.
There's been some really good successes with some of those players already. I believe we have two really, really, really talented U22 players in our roster right now in Juliáin [Fernández] and Agustín [Ojeda]. I believe hopefully we'll see important roles for them coming up this season.
5. Transfers might be incoming — just not yet
Yes, we certainly expect that.
One thing we want to do is we want to give Pascal an opportunity to work with the group. In MLS, it doesn't make sense to acquire players that then block the pathway of somebody that might emerge as somebody really important for Pascal.
We've obviously been looking at players, and we have targets in mind, and the window is still open for quite a long time for us right now. We certainly anticipate signing players before the close of the window, but in my experience, having gone through a couple of coaching changes as sporting director, there are always players that emerge when you change your head coach, that become really important players that maybe you hadn't expected.
"We've got a pretty complete squad. We've lost, in terms of really important players that, or players that played maybe significant minutes last season, we've had obviously James depart, we had Christian McFarlane, we had Jovan leave. We've got three open roster spots as it stands right now."
Similarly, there are players that maybe had a really important role under a previous head coach that may not under the new head coach. And so, you know, trying to give Pascal the opportunity to work with a group and get his feel for the players – and ultimately try and also get some experience in MLS – I think is an important part.
We've got a pretty complete squad. We've lost, in terms of really important players that, or players that played maybe significant minutes last season, we've had obviously James depart, we had Christian McFarlane, we had Jovan leave. We've got three open roster spots as it stands right now.
We still have quite a full roster when you look at it in totality. So we're trying to be really strategic with making sure that the additions that we do make are the players that are going to come in and improve what we think is already a strong and deep overall roster.
6. Cash transactions in MLS are a welcome evolution
I think it's a great development. I actually think it's one of the bigger rule changes that MLS has seen in the last few years. I don't think that we collectively as a league will see the full effect of the rule change probably for another window or two as teams get familiar with it.
I think we're all still learning exactly how it works because it's been implemented a little bit on the fly, but, obviously, [we] already started to see some transactions happening.
In MLS, there was essentially a group of players that were completely unobtainable to move inside MLS because you could only trade your allocation money, and every team has a limited pot of allocation money. Now you can open the door to essentially recruit from inside MLS. That really was quite challenging before – to assess the right value, how much allocation money you had – and now being able to use cash for those players opens up obviously the possibility for DP investments and acquiring DPs from other teams. I also think it opens up possibilities for players within the salary cap as well.
We'll certainly explore it. We're certainly looking at it to see if there's a right fit within the league.
7. Jovan Mijatović's departure wasn't a surprise
We had an honest conversation with Jovan at the end of last season. I think it's quite clear the year didn't go how Jovan expected, how we expected last season. Those things are unfortunately part of the life in professional sports and it didn't work last season how we all hoped it would when we signed Jovan. There are a lot of factors involved in that, but ultimately, Jovan's a 19-year-old boy still with a huge amount of potential.
My job is to try to make sure that we ensure that he has a pathway to continue developing. And so we have to look at our roster and say, okay, do we really see him playing? You know, starting the season as our No 9 based on where we were at the end of last season? And probably the answer to that was no, given how well Alonso [Martínez] had done at the end of last season.
Ultimately, Jovan's a 19-year-old boy still with a huge amount of potential.
Maybe it made sense for all parties to try to find a solution that will enable him to play more regular football. We think this opportunity in Leuven is a good one for him. It's a loan through the summer so he can get adjusted and adapted.
I think it's also fair to say that Jovan expressed an interest to be back in Europe as well. You know, it's his first time moving away from home — for a 19-year-old those things are not easy.
Of course, we all want instant success. We do have to remember sometimes these are young men, young people, and we've got to help support them on their journey and development. We felt like it was the right thing to try to give him a platform where he had a better chance of playing more regularly.
We've invested significant money in him. We still believe he has an absolutely fantastic future and potential in world football. Our job now is to try to help him on the next steps in his journey. We felt like a loan would be the right situation, maybe not hugely dissimilar to the decision that we took last summer when Talles Magno wasn't playing.
