Looking at roster, shake-up is likely

Inter Miami CF has made one thing clear this offseason: Its first season in Major League Soccer wasn’t good enough and potential shake-ups are on the horizon.

The club has 17 players under contract for next year (30 are allowed on the active roster) and eight players entering free agency Wednesday after its end-of-year roster decisions and Tuesday’s MLS expansion draft.

These are the players under contract with Inter Miami for 2021:

Drake Callender, John

McCarthy;

Nico Figal, Leandro González Pirez, Christian Makoun, Dylan Nealis, Jairo Quinteros;

George Acosta, Jay Chapman, Blaise Matuidi, Lewis Morgan, Matías Pellegrini, Rodolfo Pizarro, Victor Ulloa;

Julián Carranza, Gonzalo Higuaín, Robbie Robinson.

Juan Agudelo (declined option) Mikey Ambrose (declined option), A.J. DeLaGarza (expired contract), Federico Higuaín (expired contract), Luis Robles (declined option), Alvas Powell (expired contract), Brek Shea (expired contract) and Wil Trapp (expired contract) are the eight players who ended the 2020 season with Inter Miami who are now free agents.

Jerome Kiesewetter, David Norman Jr., Andrés Reyes and Denso Ulysse — all of whom had their contract options for the 2021 season declined — also don’t have deals with Inter Miami for next year. The club said in a news release that it was having conversations about the return of certain players, with the statement mentioning Reyes by name.

Although it’s anticipated some players who don’t have contracts with Inter Miami for next year will return, everything the club has done to this point of the offseason suggests there will be significant changes to the roster. It’s already been reported by multiple outlets that Trapp is expected to leave Inter Miami in free agency and has received interest from Minnesota United FC.

Club ownership and management haven’t been made available for comment since the season ended.

After entering the year with high expectations and setting out to be “MLS’s global team”, Inter Miami stumbled out of the gates and at multiple points during its inaugural season — finishing the regular season with a 7-13-3 record — before fellow expansion team Nashville SC eliminated it in the playoffs’ play-in round.

“We have nobody to blame but ourselves,” DeLaGarza said after Inter Miami was eliminated. “I think a lot of guys could say they didn’t live up to what they came here to do, unfortunately. We have to go into the offseason feeling like that.”

The first signs of a potential team overhaul came when the club announced its end-of-year roster decisions. After those were made, Paul McDonough stepped down as Inter Miami’s sporting director and chief operating officer last week after being with the team for over two years.

Then Monday, Diego Alonso thought he was out of the job after the conclusion to an end-of-season meeting with club ownership. It was later clarified via a club spokesperson the situation was a “miscommunication” and the 45-yearold Uruguayan is still Inter Miami’s coach — although his future with the club is reportedly “still being determined.”

McDonough’s departure and Inter Miami’s potential roster shakeup are seemingly connected.

Nine of the 13 players who ended the season with Inter Miami but are longer under contract with the club — including Ben Sweat, who Inter Miami traded to new team Austin FC on Sunday — joined the team before Alonso was officially hired as the team’s coach on Dec. 30. That doesn’t include Grant Lillard, Lee Nguyen and Roman Torres, MLS veterans who were traded during the 2020 season, or Luis Argudo, who was waived in September.

The timing of when McDonough hired Alonso — three weeks before the start of training camp — didn’t help matters for either side. There appeared to be an on-field, tactical disconnect between the players McDonough signed before Alonso joined Inter Miami.

It also didn’t help that Inter Miami didn’t bring in multiple significant signees — Leandro Gonzalez Pirez, Blaise Matuidi and Gonzalo Higuaín — until later in the season, though some of the delayed roster construction can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even then, Inter Miami didn’t gel during their first season on the field under Alonso and fell short of the lofty goals they entered the year with despite having one of the more talented and expensive rosters in MLS.

Whether Alonso will stay with Inter Miami remains to be seen.