The Coach From Catalonia

MLS head coaching searches always fascinate me. Since the league is completely unique in the global soccer landscape, a very diverse coaching pool can be found. From Scandinavia to mainland Europe to South America and North America, coaches from all over the world come to Major League Soccer to challenge themselves. When the Portland Timbers’ head coaching position became vacant in late May, general manager Ned Grabavoy embarked on a global search to find Phil Neville’s successor. Two things had to be non-negotiable: a willingness to start as soon as possible and holding up to the data test.

Candidates were interviewed, the field narrowed, and finalists began to emerge. The Timbers weren’t exactly racing against the clock, but they did want to get their guy and they wanted it done in a timely manner. As the season got closer and closer to resuming, the Timbers held pat. They’d done their work and they just needed confirmation. Interim head coach Jack Cassidy would take charge of the first game back against Seattle. Their ducks were in a row. In the wake of a 5-1 destruction of their greatest rivals, all that remained was a simple announcement.

KGW produces a weekly program called “Timbers 360.” This half-hour long show acts as a catch-up for the previous week with a couple of exclusive interviews. Halfway through the show on July 18th, the news was broken by a complete accident. It’s official: Spanish native Marti Cifuentes is the new head coach of the Portland Timbers.

Two years ago, in the winter of 2024/25, the West Bromwich Albion job was open after departed head coach Carlos Corberan got an opportunity he simply couldn’t refuse: a return to his native Valencia. Tony Mowbray was hired a month later, but his return to The Hawthorns was disastrous. Four months later, Mowbray was sacked and the head coaching position was open again. More coaches were interviewed for the vacancy. One of them was Marti Cifuentes.

As a West Bromwich Albion fan, I immediately perked up when Cifuentes’ name was mentioned. His preferred style of play resembled the departed Corberan; a head coach who pulled a relegation-threatened Baggies out of the basement of the Championship behind a commitment to strong principles of play with an emphasis on a strong structure. The “eating paella” and “drinking Estrella” chants could be repurposed! Some level of continuity could be achieved!

That commitment to structure is probably a reason why the Timbers found Cifuentes as a worthy candidate. His track record with lesser clubs in European leagues also worked in his favor. Cifuentes’ first top-tier head coaching job was with Sandefjord. He took over mid-way through the 2018 Norwegian season. The Norwegian club was having a miserable start to the season, with 5 points through 12 games when Cifuentes took over. He was unable to avoid relegation, but the club bounced right back up to the first tier in his second season. His final season in charge saw Sandefjord finish with their best-ever result in the Norwegian league.

The next step up was Aalborg in Denmark. He took over on January 1st, 2021 with a two-and-a-half year contract. He did not see the contract out to completion though. The release clause was activated in January 2022 after only one full calendar year in Denmark. Aalborg was 4th in the table after 17 league games at the time of Cifuentes’ departure.

Now Cifuentes was at Hammarby in Sweden and embarked on the most successful period of his coaching career. He reached a cup final for the first time (the 2021/22 Svenska Cupen) but lost on penalty kicks. Cifuentes guided Hammarby to their first continental soccer qualification in their history: finishing 3rd in the Allsvenskan and earning a spot in the 2023/24 UEFA Europa Conference League. Their European voyage ended in the second qualifying round with a 2-1 aggregate defeat to Dutch side FC Twente. Two months later, it was time for Cifuentes to climb the football ladder again. Queens Park Rangers were calling.

Technically a job in the EFL Championship is moving up the ladder. But QPR had just sacked Gareth Ainsworth after the Hoops plummeted to 23rd in the table. Cifuentes was able to keep QPR in the second tier at the end of the 2023/24 season, securing their survival in late April. The Hoops are far removed from the days of Loic Remy and Julio Cesar (mostly the investment required to bring them to Loftus Road) so their squad strength at the start of 2024/25 was closer to a relegation battler than a playoff hopeful. Cifuentes guided QPR to 15th place in the league with 56 points. They matched their expected points as well (due to some offensive overperformance and defensive underperformance). 

Now we’re caught up to Cifuentes’ fateful interview with the biggest club in the world: West Brom. The Baggies decided not to move forward with Cifuentes as a candidate; a decision that led to them hiring Tottenham assistant Ryan Mason “based on the data.” That led to a relegation fight and surviving in the Championship by the skin of their teeth. QPR didn’t take too kindly to Cifuentes’ desire to eat paella and drink Estrella in the Black Country, so they put him on paid leave for the final game of the season. Cifuentes and QPR mutually parted ways in June 2025. That cleared the way for Cifuentes to keep climbing. Leicester City was calling, and the Catalonian head coach picked up the phone.

What happened next was a whirlwind. Cifuentes took the Leicester job in mid-July. Now we have to talk about Leicester; a club that I despise. It was very cool when they won the league in 2015/16, and that achievement can never be taken away from them. However, the sudden windfall of cash they received from competition achievements and the subsequent sale of star players N’Golo Kante, Danny Drinkwater, and Riyad Mahrez was very poorly reinvested. The club was able to remain in the tier below the Big Six, and they even won the FA Cup in 2020/21. However, complete mismanagement caused them to fall from 8th place in 2021/22 to a shocking 18th in 2022/23. The exact same situation happened to West Brom between 2016/17 and 2017/18 (well, the Baggies didn’t win a single trophy during their time as an established Premier League club). Leicester was relegated because they couldn’t defend at a Premier League level. 

Then they fell into the Championship and were basically Sharpied into the automatic promotion slots. Those players who couldn’t cut it in the top flight ran circles around second-tier regulars like Watford, Blackburn, and Stoke. With Enzo Maresca at the helm, Leicester secured automatic promotion by 7 points and won the league. This was accomplished by breaking the Profit and Sustainability rules. To avoid any penalties, the Foxes simply had to avoid a quick return to the second tier.

They rejoined the Premier League in 2024/25 alongside Ipswich and playoff winners Southampton (another bunch of cheaters). All three clubs were instantly relegated. The defensive bottom fell out in 2022/23, but the entire squad wasn’t top-flight quality in their quick return. Maresca took the Chelsea job prior to the start of the 24/25 season, and replacement Steve Cooper was sacked after 12 games. Interim boss Ruud van Nistelrooy couldn’t steady a sinking ship full of players who were probably better than relegation. But they were back in the Championship again by the end of the year; 13 points behind 17th-placed Tottenham. They completed the full yo-yo. An admirable achievement.

This is where Cifuentes re-enters the picture. Leicester began the 2025/26 season with a 4-5-1 record in their first 10 games. They looked like a mid-table club, which was pretty spot-on considering some of the holes in the squad. Club legend Jamie Vardy left before the season and wasn’t properly replaced, while winger Stephy Mavididi failed to reach the heights of the 23/24 promotion season. It seemed like most of the squad was downing tools. The Foxes were inconsistent above all else, which led to the inability to gain any momentum from positive results. For example, Abdul Fatawu smashed home a late winner against West Brom on January 5th despite the Baggies putting in a performance worthy of all 3 points. It would be the last league game Cifuentes won at the club. A loss at league-leading Coventry followed (courtesy of a Haji Wright late winner) before Jannik Vestergaard rescued a point at Wrexham. Relegation-battling Oxford United beat the Foxes 2-1 at the King Power four days later. After that horrendous loss, Cifuentes was sacked.

At the time of his firing, Leicester were in 14th place; 6 points behind the playoff places and 9 points clear of the bottom three. Here’s where the outside factors come into play. A return to the Championship put Leicester back in the crosshairs of PSR (Profit and Sustainability Rules). To compensate for the massive losses incurred from the promotion season, some of Leicester’s top talent had to be sold in the summer as Cifuentes was arriving without a single dollar put towards any transfer fees for replacements. When Cifuentes was sacked, he was coaching a squad of players who “didn’t want to be at the club.” The threat of a points deduction still loomed over the King Power. A poorly run club ran off the manager after giving him a pile of scraps to work with due to their own mismanagement, all of which occurred before Cifuentes even arrived.

The bottom quickly fell out after Cifuentes’ firing. Leicester only won two games over the remainder of the season, but the standard of the league allowed them to remain above the relegation line. Until a deduction of 6 points was levied in April, and the club suddenly had to fight for their lives.

TANGENT: I Hate the EFL

This is an article about Marti Cifuentes, the new head coach of the Portland Timbers. If you’re not interested in a tirade about how stupid PSR is, please skip to the next section. If you’re still here, buckle up.

Leicester’s deduction of 6 points was assessed after the club posted a loss of £103.8M over a three-year period ending in 2023/24; £20.8M over the limit. This is why their initial relegation was so catastrophic. The financial rules for Premier League clubs allow for much higher limits on spending. For a club like Leicester, who kept spending like a big club as they kept finishing in the top 10, their one disastrous season in 2022/23 should have led to a fire sale to balance their books under the new financial restrictions in the Championship. Instead of raising the capital through player sales, Leicester’s boardroom decided to take a gamble. They willingly flouted the financial restrictions as they hoped and prayed that the relegation was a blip on their otherwise consistent record of being a top-half Premier League team. “Why try to follow these rules that will become irrelevant when we get promoted again?” they probably thought. “All we have to do is not get relegated within a three-year period of our instant return to the top flight!”

That’s not what happened at all. The Foxes bounced straight back down and the EFL was eager to punish them for their unlawful gamble. When news of the deduction broke, many were surprised. They thought it should have been harsher than only 6 points, especially when the attitude of Leicester’s decision-makers was taken into account.

One of those people was me, who was ready for my version of comeuppance after watching Vardy score every single goddamn time he showed up at the Hawthorns. West Bromwich Albion were also in a relegation fight after the disastrous appointment of Eric Ramsay couldn’t dig the club out of the hole provided by the initial disastrous appointment of Ryan Mason. Leicester’s deduction didn’t immediately doom them to League One (not like Sheffield Wednesday, who were deducted 18 points at the start of the season and promptly spent the entire campaign trying to get back to zero) but it did increase the stakes of the relegation fight. 

Folks, last year’s Championship was the worst professional soccer division I’ve ever seen. Every team except Coventry was some form of bad or mid. None of those teams actually wanted to get promoted, except for the cheating scum at Southampton (and even they were denied when the EFL actually did something right in the playoffs and forfeited their semifinal victory over Middlesbrough). West Brom’s struggles continued, but soon they had to deal with a points deduction of their own.

The Baggies ended up exceeding their permissible loss (a different figure than Leicester due to three consecutive seasons in the second-tier) and the EFL decided that any breach was due a deduction no matter how serious the breach was. Former owner and noted rat Guochuan Lai was responsible for the financial mismanagement, and new owner Shilen Patel (a swell guy who is still learning how to run a football club, I believe in him) was saddled with the sins of his predecessor. He even enlisted an EFL-approved regulator to help him with the club’s finances to ensure that the books would look good when accounts were due. Lo and behold, the EFL found that West Brom went over their acceptable loss by £1.97M This was after the original figure was reduced due to the EFL’s failure to properly deduct the club’s expenses for charity and community spending, all of which can be written off from the PSR calculation. It’s not Todd Boehly buying a goddamn hotel or selling the women’s team back to the club (other dodgy ways that Premier League teams have avoided serious penalties for financial improprieties). But West Brom’s <£2M breach was enough for the EFL to throw the book at them with a 2-point deduction; assessed when the season was two weeks away from ending.

The relegation scrap was already a reality; now relegation looked almost certain. However, the Baggies (motivated by former player James Morrison, now the interim head coach) locked in and secured safety on the penultimate day of the season with a 0-0 draw at home against Ipswich. On the previous day, Leicester allowed a late winner to Millwall’s Macaulay Langstaff (shoutout Notts County). The Foxes were relegated a week earlier after drawing 2-2 at home to Hull City (who would go on to win the promotion playoffs). With obscene chants directed at the EFL ringing out from the Hawthorns and Leicester fully in the mud, nothing could spoil the end to the Baggies season barring some further nonsense from PSR. None came. The Baggies finished the season with a 2-1 loss at Sheffield Wednesday, which brought the Owls all the way back to 0 points. 

The penalties imposed on West Brom and Leicester resulted in a difference of only 4 points. One team willingly broke the rules and thought that they would be good enough to escape punishment. The other tried their hardest to comply and fell just short. The Baggies did not deserve any sort of points deduction, with their two missing points averaging out to a “breach value” of £985K per point. Leicester’s breach of £20.8M averages out to £3.46M per point. Under the current regulations, and given that a breach of £2M or more would have automatically given West Brom a 4-point deduction, Leicester should have been docked 41.6 points based on that penalty. But that’s not how the EFL and PSR works. The previously mentioned Sheffield Wednesday was only assessed a points deduction of 12 for going into administration. An additional 6 points were added after the club failed to pay wages of players and staff on time. These rules overpunish the undeserving and underpunish the deserving. What a joke. I hate the EFL.

Cifuentes, Continued

That was a long way of illustrating just how little control Cifuentes actually had over the situation at Leicester. His old club is now in League One (where they belong) and Cifuentes is now in Portland. So what can be expected of a coach who kept climbing the ladder until the ascent stopped at one of the worst-run clubs in England?

Cifuentes, first and foremost, sets his teams out to be organized. You cannot use any of the Leicester tenure as evidence because of how uniquely screwed the Foxes were. But at QPR, he had his teams punching above their weight. Just the base level of organization he demands is enough to raise the floor of this team.

You’re probably expecting a tactical breakdown at this point. But Cifuentes has said that the players at his disposal inform the system he’s going to play. Instead, I think looking at his principles can provide a roadmap. After the historic win in Seattle last Thursday, Kamal Miller mentioned that interim head coach Jack Cassidy has a list of “non-negotiables” that every player has to work towards. What are Cifuentes’ non-negotiables?

He prefers a 4-3-3 shape; the exact same structure the team used to beat the crap out of the Sounders last week. That’s a good start. The Timbers have plenty of players who can be utilized in that structure (and are definitely natural fits, hello David Da Costa). Cifuentes wants to force opposing teams to shift towards one side of the field through overloads and utilize cross-field switches to rapidly change the point of attack. Look at Kevin Kelsy’s diagonal to Antony in the 23rd minute of the Seattle demolition. Speaking of Kelsy, Cifuentes is going to want him to drop to open up space in behind for the “attacking midfielders” to run into. Da Costa and Bassett were doing an awful lot of that in the Seattle game. I’m starting to notice a pattern. He also is a fan of the “wide triangle”: a shape created by the fullback, attacking midfielder, and winger on each side of the pitch. The Timbers were utilizing those triangles a lot against the Sounders. Bassett, Lassiter, and Bye seemed to have excellent positional understanding with each other. So many of the things that Cifuentes prioritizes are simple movements but are very effective if done correctly. He’s adaptable to what the opposition gives him; showing a willingness to tweak his buildup structures based on the way different teams decide to press. 

But I found his emphasis on “ball tempo” to be the most insightful. I don’t think he’s the type of coach that is going to focus on completing designated attacking patterns to check off a box. If there is space to move the ball, it will be moved quickly to that space. When the ball is moving quickly, the team will also move quickly. The structure moves up and down the pitch together, but it also flexes to form a sufficient rest defense. 

“Football and tactics, to me, is about the players.” There were some hallmarks of Cifuentes’ principles on display during that Seattle destruction. He presents himself as a coach who can generate buy-in and someone who uses simple but effective language to communicate his ideas to his players. Did I mention that he also speaks Spanish? I probably didn’t need to considering he’s, you know, Spanish, but it’s another good box to check! Considering his pedigree and high floor, he strikes me as one of the top coaches in the Western Conference already. What’s not to like?

The other side of the coin has to be mentioned though. Cifuentes has done quite a bit of bouncing around between clubs and has shown a willingness to leave if a better opportunity presents itself. That worry is counterbalanced by a three-year contract and the massive undertaking he’s about to accomplish by moving his life across the ocean to a new country. He’s made other international moves before, yes. But none have been this dramatically distant or different.

This coaching search has been largely silent as the club has done their due diligence and narrowed down their lists. Jim Curtin was off the table the second he showed disinterest in taking charge in the middle of the season. Thomas Christensen opted to re-sign with the Panama national team through the next World Cup cycle. Josh Wolff was the third finalist, and the data should have instantly denied him as a proper candidate given how poor his Austin teams were. But Cifuentes is the coach with the highest ceiling and highest floor out of all the reported names. If he is committed to building a contender in Portland, he can be a home run hire. This is a coach who could have landed at 80% of the jobs within the top 5 European leagues last summer. He chose Leicester instead. Portland’s organization does have their problems, but he’ll be backed financially in ways that Leicester and QPR simply couldn’t provide. The early consensus for this hire is “coup.” Let the Marti Parti begin. The climb continues.