The Unknown Brit Sent to Fix the MLS Club No One Wants to Touch

The Unknown Brit Sent to Fix the MLS Club No One Wants to Touch

Sporting Kansas City have not beaten a team other than the Colorado Rapids since June 26th.

Yes, that is a real statistic.

In that time, 14 games of football have been played, over 1,300 minutes endured, and 34 goals conceded. The club have been without a permanent manager for six months now, and if results go against them on decision day, SKC will finish at rock bottom of the 30-team standings.

It's safe to say 2025 has been one of the darkest years in the Midwestern outfit's history. But what if I told you it was a realistic possibility that Sporting could be challenging for the MLS Cup in two years' time? Surely not, right?

David Lee Revolution

Introducing David Lee. Who? Don’t be embarrassed if you’ve never heard the name before. Lee is an Englishman who studied Sport Technology at the University of Staffordshire and Performance Analysis in Sport at Cardiff as a postgraduate.

Welcome to KC, David 👋

Stream his inaugural press conference live Wednesday at 3PM CT on YouTube.

— Sporting Kansas City (@SportingKC) October 7, 2025

Lee was an early pioneer of technical sports analysis in the lower leagues of England. Before completing his master's degree, he would join Exeter City in January 2009, back when the club were in League Two. By doing so, he became the Grecians’ very first analyst.

It did not take long for higher powers to catch onto the young analyst’s talent, or more specifically, his ability to identify talent. After two and a half years at Exeter, and one successful promotion to League One later, Lee joined the New York Red Bulls as a performance analyst.

His greatest work came after he crossed the Hudson River to join the newly established New York City FC. Lee spent almost 12 years at NYCFC, helping build the club's first-ever team that played in their inaugural 2015 campaign.

An accomplished executive & 2021 MLS Cup Champion ⭐️

David Lee joins our Club after a successful 11-year tenure at New York City FC. pic.twitter.com/3U89iUEtFA

— Sporting Kansas City (@SportingKC) October 1, 2025

Moving up the ranks, the Englishman was promoted to the sporting director role in 2019. Under Lee’s guidance, NYCFC would sign players like Taty Castellanos and Santiago Rodriguez from fellow City Football Group-owned Montevideo City Torque. The South American attacking duo were cornerstones of New York City’s run to lift the MLS Cup in 2021, and together would generate over £25 million thanks to their player sales. Huge numbers for MLS exports.

Why Does Lee’s Hiring Matter?

The front office, especially general managers and sporting directors, seem to be talked of far more frequently in the MLS than those making the decisions at European clubs. If you ask any MLS-obsessed individual to list the 30 names who call the shots at each team, they can normally cite the majority.

In England, for example, a new sporting director is hired at a Premier League side, and you will hear a few “he should sign a few good players” or “look at these guys he signed at his last club” remarks. In Major League Soccer, a new sporting director enters the picture, and you hear, “this is the man who will transform us into title contenders.”

Picture the MLS like a classic arcade machine from the 20th century, and a franchise’s roster like a game of Tetris. Sporting directors must build a 30-man team that fits two-thirds of those players inside a minuscule salary cap (£4,427,990 a year) compared to other top-flight leagues in the world. The rest of the squad is made up of individuals who lie outside of the cap, like designated players, but even those slots are capped at three per roster.

The roster rules and regulations go far deeper than that; they highlight the building blocks that officials like David Lee play with in order to form a competitive team.

David Lee bids farewell to New York City FC 💙 pic.twitter.com/338upjYY3A

— New York City FC (@newyorkcityfc) October 7, 2025

A New Analytical Era

As briefly mentioned earlier, Sporting Kansas City parted ways with head coach Peter Vermes in March after a winless start to the season. Vermes was the longest-tenured head coach in MLS history, spending 15 and a half years coaching SKC dating back to August 2009.

Kansas City was once an energetic and promising club under Vermes, but the team had stagnated since 2022. It was time for an overhaul, a rebrand, call it what you like, but change needed to occur in the Great Plains.

In the Vermes Era, the man himself oversaw all sporting operations and had a large influence on decisions made at the club. He left behind him a magical legacy, but almost everyone around SKC knew that his time was up. Vermes had been figured out, and it was no longer working.

1x MLS Cup champion 🏆
3x U.S. Open Cup winner 🏆🏆🏆
203 wins (third-most in MLS history) 🙌

What a 17-year run for Peter Vermes at the helm of @SportingKC. 👏 pic.twitter.com/rS3HNwCt0Q

— Major League Soccer (@MLS) March 31, 2025

After a six-month global search, Lee’s hiring was described as the “most important decision” that the club had to make this year. Placing it above the appointment of a head coach to take over from interim boss Kerry Zavagnin.

Why would Lee leave a team gearing up for the playoffs to join a Wooden Spoon candidate? He explained to MLSsoccer.com in a conversation about his move.

“It's one of the most, if not the most exciting opportunity in all of MLS… I think there's something exciting about taking on a challenge where you get the opportunity to build something… to put my stamp on it.”

Under Lee’s guidance, Kansas City will embark on a new journey that is heavily reliant on analytics, the field that the Englishman studied as a student. SKC’s owners are heavily involved with the health information technology industry, and therefore wanted someone who would align with their values.

Since 2020, NYCFC have accumulated the most regular-season points in the league, an achievement Lee can boast about. On top of the first-ever MLS Cup triumph in the franchise's history, he also helped develop 14 homegrown players at NYCFC, an integral piece of any MLS squad.

The homegrown player rule allows clubs to work around the salary budget by signing players who have resided in that club's home territory and participated in the club's youth development system for at least one year.

David Lee introduced James Sands (who has gone on to play for Rangers and St. Pauli) and Joe Scally (a USMNT international and Borussia Monchengladbach regular) as NYCFC’s first-ever homegrown players, identifying the youngsters as high-potential teenage prospects before they had entered adulthood.

When Joe Scally got into NYCFC academy at 12, his mom drove him to games and training— a three-hour drive round trip from Long Island.

Now 21, Scally is an established pro who just made 100 appearances for Bundesliga side Borussia Monchengladbach.

Sacrifices paid off. #USMNT pic.twitter.com/oIwDTi32BU

— Anthony (@AnthonyKyaw) November 30, 2024

A Mountain of Work To Do

It’s hard to rebuild a football club within a player cap if you have a squad full of lengthy contracts. Fortunately for Lee, 17 of Kansas City’s 25 registered players are out of contract at the end of the 2025 season. That’s 68% of their team potentially out the door before Christmas, if contracts aren’t renegotiated.

David Lee himself saw this as a huge positive, speaking to MLSsoccer.com, he said:

“The potential to put my imprint on the squad in a relatively short period of time is another reason why I think it's a fantastic job, and why I'm so lucky to have it. Because normally in MLS, if you aren't having a great season, and you're locked into all your contracts for the next two or three years, that's a really hard problem to get out of.”

This is a brilliant opportunity for SKC to start fresh. Long-time servants like Khiry Shelton and John Pulskamp will likely depart, but quite frankly, there's no other choice, as the players at the club right now have mustered seven wins in 33 games.

David Lee will build a squad around Dejan Jovelic and Manu Garcia (if they survive the chopping block), Sporting’s two designated players at the time of writing. Jovelic was an insane coup for Kansas City, as his goals in 2024 effectively won the LA Galaxy the MLS Cup. The Serbian international has 18 goals since joining the club in January, but what use is a competent striker without 10 others behind him to support him?

With his goal against the Colorado Rapids, @SportingKC forward Dejan Joveljic became the third player in MLS history to score at least 15 goals in consecutive seasons for different clubs, joining Raúl Díaz Arce (1997 & 1998) and Evander (2024 & 2025). pic.twitter.com/VUWzYBUHXY

— MLS Communications (@MLS_PR) August 31, 2025

The winter months will bring plenty of meetings, negotiations, and phone calls, but Lee is already used to that lifestyle. A spare designated player spot, plenty of room for new and effective signings, as well as the first permanent head coach appointment in Kansas City since 2009, are all things that SKC fans should look forward to.

Finally, the club that had needed a new lick of paint for years is being tended to, with David Lee a shining beacon of hope. The Englishman who has risen from nowhere, plying his professional trade at first in Devon, before moving to the Big Apple, will instil a belief and mindset in the club that has been missing for a while. As in his own words,

“I really feel like there's something special in Kansas City.”