Andonovski on USWNT exit, return to NWSL: 'I don't need to prove anything to anyone except myself'

Vlatko Andonovski feels like he is home again — not just in obvious geographical terms, but in the spiritual sense of belonging. Saturday’s NWSL season opener against the Portland Thorns will be Andonovski’s first as head coach of the Kansas City Current, his hometown team in the city where he made a name for himself before becoming coach of the U.S. women’s national team.

Andonovski has been in his element since the NWSL preseason started six weeks ago, coaching players daily and watching practice film late into the night. The club game suits him, far more than the international setting in which he’d operated for the past four years.

“It’s something that is continuous — that’s the difference,” Andonovski told ESPN. “Like, it’s not, ‘Oh, now let’s take a break for two months. We’ll see you in May.’ Now we keep going. ‘All right, we check this box but you got to check the next box.’ “

Andonovski knows the elephant in the room: Saturday’s match will be his first in charge of any team since a harrowing August 2023 night in Melbourne, Australia, where the USWNT endured its worst finish at a World Cup, falling to Sweden in a penalty shootout in the round of 16.

-Live on ESPN+: KC Current vs. Portland Thorns (Saturday, 1 p.m. ET)

Moments after the USWNT was knocked out of the World Cup, a despondent Andonovski emerged in front of gaggle of international media who questioned the coach’s acumen as he processed the historic loss. A few days later, Andonovski resigned from his USWNT post and retreated from soccer altogether.

“After the World Cup. I just wanted to take a break,” Andonovski said. “I wanted to know where I stand. I wanted to know what is right for me, what is not right. I wanted to evaluate everything. I just wanted to be away from the game, to be quite honest. And I’m glad I did that, because that made me first and foremost realize how much I love this game — how much I cannot live without this game.”

He had other offers for work, he said, from a head-coaching job in the USL to an assistant coach role in MLS and other NWSL possibilities, but everything kept coming back to Kansas City. Andonovski is Kansas City to the core, from religiously watching Chiefs football games to swearing by the famous barbeque joint Joe’s as a meal that heals. He arrived in the city in 2000 from North Macedonia (formerly part of Yugoslavia) as a professional indoor player and has lived there with his family since.

He was at Joe’s in late August — after one of Andonovski’s best friends dragged him out of seclusion to go out for dinner — when a fan ran after him in the parking lot. That fan didn’t berate Andonovski for what happened at the World Cup, but hugged him and expressed excitement for the coach’s return to Kansas City.

“It’s almost like they’re so proud of what I’ve done or the successes that I’ve had for the city that they’re not just supporting but they’re also protective,” Andonovski said of local fans.

A call with Kansas City Current club co-owners Angie and Chris Long made it immediately clear that home was also where Andonovski’s vision best aligned with his prospective bosses’. The vision is ambitious — building what they could consider the best club in the world — and they know that isn’t just about building a roster.

The Longs provided most of the private funding for the $117 million construction of the first stadium built for an NWSL team, CPKC Stadium, which opens Saturday. They also spent about $18 million on the team’s training complex and offices. The Longs, with co-owners Brittany and Patrick Mahomes (the latter being the three-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback of Andonovski’s beloved Chiefs) have spent an unprecedented amount of money on NWSL facilities.

CPKC Stadium might as well be a different world from the NWSL that Andonovski left behind when he took the reins of the USWNT in 2019.

Andonovski was the original coach of FC Kansas City, which he guided to a pair of NWSL championships before the team folded in late 2017. FC Kansas City hosted the first NWSL game in history — also against the Thorns in 2013 — at a high school football stadium. The team played its final season on the main field of a youth soccer complex. It was a stadium — to define it generously — that failed to meet minimum standards of the NWSL or U.S. Soccer. Some fans watched from temporary bleachers behind ropes just past the sideline.

On Saturday, players will walk out of a locker room built for them and through a tunnel adorned with custom Kansas City Current wallpaper. This time, the fans within arm’s reach will be those who paid for access to the luxury club lounge.

“When you’re in Kansas City and you’re competing against L.A. and New York and Chicago or Houston, you’re always looked at like, ‘Ah, Kansas City, come on,'” Andonovski said as he motioned dismissively. “We were always followers. We were always [second-rate], where now we are trendsetters. Everybody else will follow us and it is a proud moment for the city. It’s a proud moment for anyone that lives here that we are setting the setting the standards.”

Can Andonovski win in the new NWSL?

With such resources comes pressure. The Longs hired Andonovski with the expectation that he would bring titles back to Kansas City, just as he did a decade ago. The NWSL, however, has changed drastically over the past few years.

For a start, Andonovski won titles in 2014 and 2015 with a notable lack of resources. When he left the NWSL in 2019 after two seasons in charge of Seattle Reign FC, the salary cap was $421,500, with a meager minimum salary of $16,538. This year, the NWSL salary cap is $2.75 million. Multiple NWSL teams paid transfer fees of more than $700,000 in a record-breaking winter transfer window, on top of paying player salaries that now reach seven figures cumulatively. Teams are better from top to bottom, and they feature a greater volume and more diversity of talent than ever with the newly approved expansion to seven international spots per team.

“The game itself, first and foremost, evolved,” Andonovski said. “The league evolved. The players — everything is different. I get that. I know that what we did in ’13, ’14, ’15 is not going to work now. What worked then worked then, and now we know we have got to do something different, something better.”

Kansas City finished second from bottom in 2023 despite a run to the final in the season prior. Former coach Matt Potter was mysteriously fired a few games into the season with little explanation, and the Current spent the rest of 2023 under interim management. Prized 2022-23 offseason signing Debinha was one of a handful of players who suffered early-season injuries last year, which hampered any efforts to build a winning foundation.

Andonovski watched the Current’s tumultuous season transpire from afar as he prepared for the World Cup, and he believes there is a core of players who performed well last year and will be leaned on again in 2023. The Current have bolstered their roster this offseason with their own new internationals, such as Brazilian forward Bia Zaneratto and young players such as 18-year-old Claire Hutton, whom Andonovski already views as the team’s starting No. 6.

There are parallels between the abundance of resources in Kansas City and the U.S. women’s national team job. Unlike his first stint in Kansas City, Andonovski now has arguably the best facilities in the league, in addition to a roster filled with international talent. But nothing can replicate the environment of the U.S. national team, Andonovski said, echoing the sentiments of players throughout the years. His coaching has evolved from that by necessity, he said.

“You have no choice but to grow, as I’ve said before so many times,” Andonovski said. “You work with the best of the best and you have no choice but to be the best on a daily basis. You have to look outside the way you approach things, the way you work, the way you do things on and off the field.”

Andonovski has grown, but he hasn’t looked back. He speaks glowingly of officials at the U.S. Soccer Federation and his former national team players, some of whom still keep in touch, but he won’t — or perhaps can’t — watch the U.S. national team’s games. He looks up the results and lineups after the fact and hears about things that have happened, but sitting down to watch a U.S. women’s national team game is not on his to-do list.

Andonovski is known for his preference to stay offline and not read media reporting about himself or his teams, but he thought for a moment in August about breaking that tradition to look back at the World Cup after the USWNT’s exit. Ultimately, he never did.

“I don’t think I want to, to be honest,” he said. “I know that if I start reading, I’m going to start thinking about some performance or some of those things. Listen, I know: I coached, I didn’t win the World Cup. I failed.”

Many of those global media reports that Andonovski never read called into question his tactics and coaching ability. The wider world was largely oblivious to the NWSL success that got Andonovski the U.S. job in the first place, instead seeing only the rigid tactics that made U.S. players look like shells of themselves in four games at the World Cup. U.S. players and coaches failed to adapt to the game plans of opponents.

Now, Andonovski faces a different challenge of adaptation. He’s back in his comfort zone as a club coach, where he can develop a team over the course of days, weeks and months, and he’ll also be able develop young players over the years ahead. He’s on the training field every day rather than flying across the country every weekend to scout players from the stands like he did with the national team.

There is an implicit challenge that he has something to prove again — that he’s more than the coach who failed at the World Cup, or even the feel-good story of a self-proclaimed “nobody” who constructed one of the best NWSL teams in history a decade ago. There is a looming question as to whether his tactics, known for being defensively sound, remain fresh and effective.

Andonovski doesn’t entertain those ideas. He’s in Kansas City because he deserves to be, he said, and he’s ready to win again.

“I don’t need to prove anything to anyone except myself,” he said. “I can do this. I want to do well for certain people or groups of people, but I have nothing to prove. I was in the league [and I was] fairly successful. I got the job with the national team not because I was doing poorly — it’s because I was doing well. I’m here again because somebody believes that I can do it well. Nothing to prove. I’m just looking forward to doing anything possible to repay the trust that people put in me.”