The Interview: Pablo Mastroeni
Real Salt Lake's Interim Head Coach on His Team's Amazing Playoff Run, Deciding to Continue His Coaching Career and Mysticism and Existentialism in Soccer and Life
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Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is the interim head coach of MLS's best playoff story in years. Pablo Mastroeni has Real Salt Lake one step from the MLS Cup final ahead of its game at Portland on Saturday at 6:30 pm Eastern on FS1 and Fox Deportes. Pablo, It's great to see you. Congratulations on everything you've been doing.
Pablo Mastroeni:
Thanks Grant. I'm really enjoying it. It's been a lot of fun and hoping that we can continue on.
Grant Wahl:
I mean, there's so much that makes your team a great story. You've had all the uncertainty of not having a team owner, you've had head coach Freddy Juárez leave mid-season for an assistant’s job in Seattle, a team you ended up eliminating in the playoffs. You needed a last-second goal in the regular season finale just to get into the playoffs. And now after advancing past Seattle and Kansas City on the road, you've got Portland being the last barrier to reaching the MLS Cup final. What has stood out the most to you about this remarkable run that you've had?
Pablo Mastroeni:
Really, I think it's been the players, the culture. We've really doubled down on being a great group, working hard for each other, almost a brotherhood, and believing in ourselves when very few people did. And that's kind of been our war cry from the beginning. We've understood that at times things didn't go our way. Yet we found ways through our resiliency to overcome and persevere. And I think if you do that enough, that just becomes second nature, you're not thinking about, "Are we still in this game?" You know you're in this game because you've done it many times before. So it's been a fantastic vibe within the group that I think has really propelled us to this point.
“When I found out [Freddy Juárez] was leaving, all of a sudden I started thinking about, "Man, I might have to get on the sidelines again." And the reason why I came was to be an assistant coach, to backfill the void that was there for me going from playing to managing. And so I couldn't have been happier in my role. When he told me, my head started just spinning, and then quickly realizing that I’ve got to quit feeling sorry for myself, because life doesn't happen as you want it to, you have to react the right way.” — Pablo Mastroeni
Grant Wahl:
So looking ahead to Portland this weekend, are you planning on having Albert Rusnak available? And how are you planning to approach this game: potentially more like you did against Kansas City or more like against Seattle?
Pablo Mastroeni:
Well, I think Albert will get tested this morning and he should be available with us tomorrow. And I think a lot of that has to do with where he’s at from a physical perspective. Obviously this COVID affects people in different ways, but he's been doing a little bit of work at home, and we'll see where he's at. And again, if he's in a good way, Albert's been an integral part of this group both on and off the field, and his leadership and his play will definitely be needed if he's available to beat a very good Portland team. And that has a lot to do with the way I think we'll kind of shape up for this game. But I think against Seattle we didn't necessarily sit out to bunker in, I think their ability to build momentum through the course of the game outpowered our ability to beat them in transition and back them up.
Whereas in Kansas City, I think we did a really good job of imposing ourselves on the game and really minimizing their transition moments to keep them kind of pinned in and dictate the game. So Portland we know, we've seen it three times where we've been just beaten on the counter. And we played some expansive stuff. It was fun to watch. And again, we won the stats game against them, but we lost the scoreline against them every time. So for us, it's going to be, I expect another organized, disciplined performance, and we'll start tomorrow on looking at how we want to break them down and figure out our best opportunities with the players available to find a way to hopefully get a great result.
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Grant Wahl:
Is winning the stats game overrated? I mean, you happened against Seattle to have an all-timer, right? With zero shots on goa andl you advance. Is it overrated?
Pablo Mastroeni:
What I like to say is, for me what matters the most are the moments in real time during the game. And so what I talk about after performances, win or loss, were the critical moments, and they appear all the time throughout the course of the game. They're moments, so they're essentially depending on how you want to break it down, there's a ton of them. And how can these moments affect momentum to put us in a great position to either score a goal or deny a goal? And so that's what I talk about is, in real time finding solutions and solving problems that are going to after the fact, you have the stats that basically portray what the overall game looked like, but those stats can't help you win or lose a game.
They just tell the story. What helps you win and lose games are the moments that you overcome and do well with. Because again, everything's in real time. So are they overrated? It depends on if you think that those stats would've helped you win a game, but really what helps you win a game is blocking that cross or putting your body in front of that shot or denying central penetration, or crossing that ball to the top of the 18 instead of across the six. Those are what we talk about. Because those are the moments that you can affect. And at the end of the day, those are the ones that dictate the scoreline.
“I jumped into this trench and they threw me a spade … I was working from nine to five, and I was coming home every day just exhausted and tired …And I remember after like week three, I had this epiphany. My brother calls me, and he said, ‘Pablo, you excited about work today?’ And I said, ‘No, I just thought of something. I'm in pain going home every day, and I'm literally working in these trenches and I'm getting paid commensurate to my level of experience in this profession. If I want to get back to work, I'm considered a professional in this other field.’ And it was in that moment that I decided to get back into coaching.” — Pablo Mastroeni
Grant Wahl:
So what was your very first reaction, if we go back in time a little bit to when you learned that Freddy Juárez was leaving the team mid-season for Seattle?
Pablo Mastroeni:
I was shocked, to be fair. We were in a good way. We were I think seventh or eighth in the West. Freddy was I felt like doing a fantastic job with the group. And we'd built a really good group of players that believed in the project and believed in the direction. And then when I found out he was leaving, all of a sudden I started thinking about, "Man, I might have to get on the sidelines again." And the reason why I came was to be assistant coach, to backfill the void that was there for me going from playing to managing. And so I couldn't have been happier in my role. And so when he told me, my head started just spinning, and then quickly realizing that I’ve got to quit feeling sorry for myself, because life doesn't happen as you want it to, you have to react the right way. So quickly started putting on my managing cap again and really reaching back on my experiences in Colorado and thinking about the things that I felt I did well and those things that I felt I didn't do so well because of a lack of experience, and really drawn on that experience to kind of lead me forward and help lead this group.
Grant Wahl:
It's really interesting that you say that to me, because it's this old adage that every assistant coach wants to be a head coach. But what you're saying to me here appears to be something different, that when you came to Salt Lake, you didn't have the ambition to become a head coach again as quickly as possible. Is that accurate?
Pablo Mastroeni:
Yeah, that's accurate. No, I think in order to be a great coach, a great manager, I think you have to understand what the roles and responsibilities of an assistant coach is, and how you feel as an assistant coach, given the different coaches you work under. Because again, sometimes if I just go on what I knew as a manager, that's all I know, I've never had the experience of being an assistant and dealing with what feels like to maybe have too much responsibility, not enough responsibility, areas of the game that I'm like, man, I'm deficient in this area.
How can I reach these players? Because the manager's busy with media and everything else he's got, how can I take this individual player and really help him work on an aspect of his game that could help the group? And so there's so many positives of being an assistant coach. And I think the allure is the limelight, but in my case, going from playing to coaching, I was learning on the fly and that limelight is scary when things aren't going your way and you don't have enough experience. And so I was, like I said, I was really enjoying my role here. And I was shocked when Freddy told me he was leaving.
Grant Wahl:
It's interesting because you've been a head coach with Colorado. You took a Colorado team to the final four of the MLS playoffs, where you are right now with Salt Lake. I remember when Jesse Marsch had his first head coaching experience, which was with Montreal in MLS, and it was up and down. There were some good moments, some not great moments, he left after a year. And he took some time off from coaching for a little while after that. And he even took his family on an around the world trip, which was really interesting, I thought. And then he restarted his coaching career. And now he's coaching at Leipzig in Germany. Like, what did you do? Because didn't you have a couple of years off from coaching after your Colorado experience? What were you doing during that time?
Pablo Mastroeni:
Yeah, so, great question. I spent the first six months blaming everyone at Colorado for my dismissal. And then I took the next six months of owning a hundred percent of my dismissal in Colorado and accepting the fact that unfortunately experience hurts. And this is a part of your development as a coach. And when you accept a hundred percent at that moment, you can start to affect change. And so then at that point, I started thinking about everything from my management style to the way I expressed my tactics to the culture of the group and everything in between. And I literally spent a year filling out journals, watching games, studying games on TV, and just went all in on my own studies of the game and myself and all the different ways I could get better as a coach.
And so I did that. My biggest problem was my family was in Colorado. My kids were getting into high school age. And I realized that if I want to continue coaching, I'm going to have to leave the house. And so I spent another six months trying to figure out how I could coach a professional team in Colorado without leaving Colorado. And the truth is that there are no options. So then I knew that being in the house all day wasn't good for me at this point. And I have a buddy that owns a water company, and he says, ‘Pablo, listen, you've been telling me you're free. Would you like to come and help me? I have a project that's going to take about three and a half weeks.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I need to get working. And I need to get out of the house. I need to start feeling alive again. And I'm, let's do it.’ So I showed up at the shop and got the rubber boots and the truck. And I had no idea what I was in for, but we were literally laying a thousand feet of a water main.
Grant Wahl:
Wow.
Pablo Mastroeni:
And so I jumped into this trench and they threw me a spade. And I was basically making sure that we weren't cutting into any electric, any gas or any other water lines hooked up to the houses. And I was working from nine to five, and I was coming home every day just exhausted and tired. And he was paying me, he's like, I know I'm going to pay you really well. He was paying me like 18 bucks an hour. And I remember after like week three, I had this epiphany, my brother calls me.
And he always called me when I was going into work with the work truck. And he said, ‘Pablo, you excited about work today?’ And I said, ‘No, I just thought of something. I'm like in pain going home every day. And I'm literally working in these trenches and I'm getting paid commensurate to my level of experience in this profession. If I want to get back to work, I'm considered a professional in this other field.’ And it was in that moment that I decided to get back into coaching. And literally a week later I got a call from MLS, and they wanted me to come into the studios and help with some playoff stuff. And then a week after that, Tab [Ramos] called me and asked me if I wanted to join him in Houston.
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