Nogueira hopes to be part of rebuild
Vincent Nogueira is in the final days of his two-year deal with the Union, but the midfielder is cautiously optimistic about his future with the team.
CHESTER >> In the best of times on the soccer field, Vincent Nogueira sports a grim yet focused exterior.
You can only imagine the French midfielder’s demeanor through whatever descriptor Dickens would’ve affixed to the campaign the Philadelphia Union have endured in 2015.
Underperforming seems to hit Nogueira harder than most, yet as the final days wind down on his guaranteed two-year deal, he seems cautiously optimistic about his future with the Union.
“I feel pretty good here,” Nogueira said Wednesday. “Of course, it’s not the season we expect as a player or I think as a club, I really want to do much better. For me, I didn’t do the season that I wanted to do. A lot of tough injuries, and when I was at my best level, it was good, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t on the field at my best enough time, but I still want to stay here. It’s my optional season.
“I don’t know yet, (the team and I) didn’t talk. For the moment, I don’ t know. It will be the club first and then we will see.”
The search for a sporting director notwithstanding, Nogueira is shaping up to be one of the bigger personnel decisions facing a Union squad in flux in this latest installment of a rebuilding offseason. The marginalization of on-loan players Fernando Aristeguieta and Steven Vitoria in recent months seems to make officially cutting ties perfunctory, while decisions on the contract options of many American players appears fairly straightforward.
The biggest stakes lie with Nogueira and Cristian Maidana, whose fates are intertwined. Both arrived in the winter of 2014 to a John Hackworth-led team supposedly primed to take a step forward. Both were inked to twoyear pacts with a team option for a third year.
Both midfielders represent solid value. Maidana, who occupied a designated player spot in 2014 given the transfer fee paid to Rangers de Talca in Chile, earns an affordable $217,250 in guaranteed compensation. Nogueira’s salary checks in at $330,000, remarkable value given the expense of the Bradleys and Gerrards and Pirlos that populate MLS midfields.
If you ask anyone who isn’t the immensely self-critical Nogueira, the consensus is that the diminutive midfielder has had a much stronger second campaign. He’s appeared in fewer games — 26 with 21 starts as compared to 29 and 28 in 2014 — but had a greater impact. He has five goals this season compared to two last year, despite taking less than half as many shots (24 compared to 59) as last year. He’s only found the target with 10 shots, an unheard of goal rate of 50 percent.
He notched assists in the Union’s U.S. Open Cup quarterfinal win over New York in a man-of-the-match performance and the final against Kansas City.
The juxtaposition of those two efforts from a team perspective gives Nogueira pause. Few internalize the Union’s maddening swings in form as acutely as Nogueira.
“The frustration is that we are able to play very good soccer on the field and then another game, very bad,” he said. “We’re missing consistency, and I think if you want to be a player, we need more experience, more consistency and that’s why it’s frustrating. It’s not like we were bad all season. We showed that we were able to play very well, and one time it’s a good game, and another time it’s a bad game.”
Nogueira’s individual chagrin stems from troublesome timing. He was slowed in preseason with a minor injury that robbed him of time to accumulate a fitness base, which threw his season out of whack from the start. Add an ankle injury in April and a quad issue in August, and the lack of stability for the team mirrors his personal predicament.
Some of that was unavoidable. Nogueira, who had been with Sochaux in France’s Ligue 1 since 2007, had adhered to the August-to-May season for years. He landed with the Union in 2014 in midseason form, but by the end of the campaign, his season had persisted uninterrupted for 16 months. That fatigue precipitated a change in offseason approach, when Nogueira said he took three months off, which he laments for his delays in sharpness.
If the Union oblige — and manager Jim Curtin has given every indication that the club is interested in retaining Nogueira’s services — the Frenchman will have a chance for a first in his MLS tenue: A regularly-scheduled offseason.
More importantly, Nogueira seems to echo the guiding mythos of the Union’s offseason, that the core of a winning team exists, and with a few changes, that potential can be realized.
“When you see the games that we were able to play, there’s no reason why we cannot play this kind of soccer all season,” he said. “Of course we are very close, but very close and very far because at the high level of professional soccer, you cannot be bad sometimes and good sometimes. You have to be at your best level every time, so it’s maybe the difference between the five or six first teams in the league and the rest of the teams. If we find the consistency, we’ll be much better.”