Caps go extra distance to land Tunisian
Team had to sell itself to physical centreback Khmiri while ensuring he was also the right fit
The ancient sandstone fortress of Ghazi Mustapha is now flanked by legions of gleaming modern resorts in the city of Houmt Souk, and further buttressed by a colourful market that tourists flock to when they’re not relaxing on the white sand beaches that line the Mediterranean island of Djerba.
Twenty-four hours after taking off in Vancouver, Phillip Dos Santos got off one of the planes — that’s planes, plural — he took to make the 10,000-kilometre journey, he stepped straight into a whirlwind series of meetings.
There were talks with officials from Tunisian side Stade Tunisien, French soccer legend Alain Giresse and the Tunisian national team, but the most important one was with a young soccer player with a foppish haircut and a quick smile: Jasser Khmiri.
“I was expecting to meet a kid that would be very shy, because he doesn’t speak (English). He understands everything in French, but he’s mainly Arabic,” Dos Santos, the Vancouver Whitecaps assistant coach, said over a crackling phone connection from Hawaii on Saturday, where the team is amping up pre-season training.
“I was expecting someone who was very shy, very closed, very introverted. And that’s not what I found at all. I found someone who was very confident, who was very clear in his mind what he wanted, who was very outspoken and joyful.
“He was always smiling and always ready to answer a question, and didn’t fade away at any moment. For me, that was a good sign.”
It wasn’t the final step in the process, but it was the most important one. The face-toface meeting was necessary to see if Khmiri, a rising star with the national team and starting centreback for Stade Tunisien, fit with the team’s culture. His skill and talent was already a known quantity; his personality wasn’t.
Seventy-two hours after he took off from Vancouver, Dos Santos landed back in Vancouver, went straight to work at UBC for the team’s medical testing, comfortable and confident the Caps would soon have a new centreback on their roster.
The team’s new coaching administration has been dutifully consistent in the type of players they’ve signed to the roster this season — 11 in all, with Khmiri the most recent. They all fall inside the mould of style of play the Dos Santos brothers espouse.
“It’s very easy to find players. They fall on our desk every day — it’s true,” said the 40-year-old Dos Santos, younger brother of Caps’ head coach Marc.
“There’s a lot of good players out there, so I think the main thing is … to have a clear idea of who you want to be as a team, have a clear model of play, have a clear profile of positions, and then go after the best players available at those positions inside that profile.
“Then we ask ourself is the player going to play in MLS, is the player going to play for the Vancouver Whitecaps? The last thing is … can we meet with him, can we talk to him, to know what he’s all about as a human being? For us, it was more about having a feel for a player.”
Khmiri is a fast, physical, 6-4 centreback. He first blipped the radar with a strong showing with the national team’s youth side, then was called up to the senior team before the 2018 World Cup.
He was a player the team had under observation for months, and when teams from French-speaking leagues such as Ligue 1 and the Belgian First Division — the most common destination for North African players — started making overtures, the Caps kicked their recruitment into high gear.
Armed with personalized promotional videos and booklets, Dos Santos flew to Djerba to sell the 21-year-old Khmiri on the team while assessing him at the same time.
Not only did the team want to get a better understanding of Khmiri’s personality, it was a chance to gauge how he’d adapt to life in a completely foreign country.
“The kid had all the tools we were looking for as a centreback, but the question was always ‘do we pull the trigger on a player that is young, who lives in a country that is culturally very different,’” said Dos Santos, who has experience coaching and playing in Canada, the U.S., Mozambique, and Portugal.
“He’s going to need time to adapt to a different culture. It’s a lot more than just the language. There’s the everyday little things; going to a grocery store, a market, to (find) a place where you can relate when it comes to people, and food.
“There will be an adaptation period, but I think in Vancouver we have all the tools to help players like him adapt quickly.”
Khmiri won’t join the team in Hawaii for training and the Pacific Rim Cup, but will connect with the club at some to-be-determined point this pre-season, whether it’s in Los Angeles or Vancouver. His contract, announced Friday, has him signed through 2021 with a team option for a 2022.
“If things fall in place,” said Dos Santos, “he’s going to be a very good centreback for us.”
For us, it was more about having a feel for a player.” Phillip Dos Santos