After lengthy and wide-ranging comments from Kevin Payne today, D.C. United general manager Dave Kasper echoed some of the sentiments, but I thought it was important for him to also get a chance to speak the criticism surrounding the way the team’s roster is currently built.
“We believe in the players in the locker room on this team, and we believe that we’re going to turn this thing around,” said Kasper. “We’ve got to play a consistent 90 minutes, and at this point, we’ve got to fight and scrap and grind out a result. That’s what’s needed right now.”
I also asked him about the international recruitment of players, and whether or not other MLS teams have caught up to United and are making it harder for them to succeed.
“When we brought Christian Gómez here,” said Kasper, “he was maybe the first significant Argentinian player. Now you look, there’s close to 20. When we scout there, there are two or three other MLS teams there at the same time. It makes it more challenging to find players, and certainly we’re expanding our scouting reach. Next week, we’re sending [technical director] Chad [Ashton] to Europe, and then he’s going to go on to Ghana. That’s one of the reasons we brought Chad on, we’re going to expand the amount of scouting that we do.”
Ashton, who just returned from a 15-matches-in-two-weeks trip to Argentina, said the team is trying to figure out its hierarchy of a wishlist and that costs of salaries and transfers are very different despite the dearth of talented players.
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