Celtic’s French head coach Wilfried Nancy gestures from the touchline during the UEFA Europa League league stage football match between Celtic and Roma at Celtic Park in Glasgow last Thursday.
AFP via Getty Images
To put it lightly, things have not gone well in Wilfried Nancy’s start to life as the Celtic FC manager.
The traditional Scottish power have lost Nancy’s first three matches in charge, marking the first three-game slide of any sort for the Glasgow club since 2020. And after Nancy was already controversial appointment before taking over for interim boss Martin O’Neill, there is chatter he could face an imminent exit if things don’t improve quickly.
Nancy made the move after five largely successful MLS seasons, the first two with CF Montreal followed by three with the Columbus Crew, where he won the 2023 MLS Cup and 2024 Leagues Cup, and reached the 2024 Concacaf Champions Cup final. And although Nancy is not North American-born, the Frenchman’s Scottish stumbles have some questioning the quality of MLS coaching in their entirety.
The idea that no MLS managers can succeed in Europe is absurd and easy to refute based on a list of those who have come to MLS already with European credentials and found the league challeng. Among them: Dean Smith, Owen Coyle, Dome Torrent, among others.
That said, it would be dishonest to say that Nancy’s MLS experience left him well-prepared for the challenges specific to his first European post. And that’s because MLS rewards different managerial traits more handsomely than some of Europe’s pressure-cooker jobs.
The Big Picture Dominates
Firstly, the league’s format – in which its most prestigious honor, MLS Cup, is determined by a postseason tournament with forgiving qualification standards – rewards managers who skew toward big-picture thinking and an ability to develop teams toward an end-of-season peak. And when it doesn’t work out, the urgency to fix the situation quickly is seen as secondary to getting the next hire right in the long term.
Of the five clubs that fired their managers this season, only D.C. United installed a permanent replacement relatively quickly. A sixth – Atlanta United – allowed another former Celtic boss Ronny Deila to coach out the string with the Five Stripes knowing the playoffs were already beyond reach for several weeks, only making his departure official after the final matchday.
That doesn’t make the format explicitly bad. In fact, Minnesota United manager Eric Ramsay, who came to MLS with experience as an assistant for Manchester United and the Wales national team, said he thought that the emphasis on bigger picture thinking was beneficial for his own managerial development.
But it can potentially make those who are heavily process and system oriented – qualities that obviously define Nancy – ill-equipped to deal with the scenario he inherited at Celtic, where the expectation is for the team to quickly return to the top of the SPL table, regardless of the tactics or aesthetics used to get there.
No Media Savvy Required
The other major difference is only a few clubs (Atlanta, both Los Angeles teams, Portland, Seattle, Toronto) exist in the kind of media environment where the opinions of heavily invested fans can easily sway a club’s direction.
While MLS average attendances are strong, the majority of fans interact with clubs on a more casual basis. Most managers can live a relatively anonymous life off the field, and when they do get critical questions from reporters, it’s often not a reflection of the feedback they get from fans in the community.
The result is managers who only have coached in MLS can be defensive to critical questions without compounding their problems. You saw this a bit in 2024 with Nancy’s explanation of his decision to bench potent attacker Cucho Hernandez. You see it in other MLS-only managers both young and old, and even from the league’s most decorated head coach, Bruce Arena.
By contrast, the Gerardo Martinos and Dome Torrents of the world, who came to MLS with far more diverse experiences, do a far better job of absorbing critical questions by de-escalating the situation rather than sparring with reporters. Because in their other coaching experiences outside MLS, doing the latter would’ve only heightened the pressure on their team.
Nancy’s post-game remarks after Sunday’s 3-1 defeat to St. Mirren in the Scottish League Cup final don’t suggest someone who understands de-escalation is part of his job now. Even if Nancy privately remains more focused on the long-term process of installing his philosophy, he can’t take that tack publicly without massive negative consequences. But in the scantly covered MLS, that never caused much trouble.
Hiring The Wrong MLS Managers?
More broadly, perhaps the MLS managers with the best potential European adaptability might not the ones who get the most attention.
Orlando’s Oscar Pareja has won more than he’s lost at three different MLS clubs while also showing a lot of tactical flexibility, and yet he’s rarely talked about as an elite coach in part because of repeated postseason failures. Houston’s Ben Olsen has also shown tactical versatility and an ability to get clubs to punch above their roster quality, a trait that could be more useful in the bottom half of elite European divisions than in MLS where relegation doesn’t exist. Gary Smith’s pragmatism eventually wore out its welcome at Nashville SC, but it would probably be embraced at a club like Celtic – at least in the short term – if it came with results.
And in Nancy’s defense, his behavior and demeanor and Celtic is exactly what close watchers of MLS have always known and often admired. That they fit so poorly with the moment Celtic finds itself in is as much of a reflection on the hiring process as on Nancy’s long-term viability as a manager in any particular league.
