Last year, Calvin Anthony Daniel gave then-head coach Nick Cushing a failing grade in these pages. That assessment might seem a little harsh in retrospect: Did we really expect a club that didn’t sign a striker or playmaker until the summer transfer window – or settle on a starting goalkeeper until August – to compete in Major League Soccer?
But Daniel wasn’t just looking at results, he was looking at a lack of development of key players such as Santiago RodĂguez, James Sands, and Talles Magno, all of whom were stuck in 2023. It wasn’t pretty.
But if Cushing was held accountable for the stagnation in 2023, then he should get credit for the growth we saw in 2024.
After all, RodĂguez enjoyed the best season of his career this year, and is poised to become an elite midfielder in 2025. Sands was a rock in the defense, and is returning to the form that prompted a move to Rangers FC in 2022. And as for Talles Magno, well, he seems to have found comfort playing back home in Brazil.
New York City FC | Record by Head Coach
| Name | G | W | D | L | PTS | GF | GA | GD | PPG | Win % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Cushing | MLS | 89 | 31 | 27 | 31 | 120 | 121 | 119 | 2 | 1.35 | 34.83% |
| All Comps | 107 | 37 | 31 | 39 | 146 | 141 | 5 | 34.58% | |||
| Ronny Deila | MLS | 70 | 34 | 14 | 22 | 116 | 118 | 71 | 47 | 1.66 | 48.57% |
| All Comps | 90 | 44 | 19 | 27 | 154 | 99 | 55 | 48.89% | |||
| Domé Torrent | MLS | 53 | 26 | 14 | 13 | 92 | 92 | 67 | 25 | 1.74 | 49.06% |
| All Comps | 60 | 29 | 15 | 16 | 104 | 76 | 28 | 48.33% | |||
| Patrick Vieira | MLS | 83 | 39 | 22 | 22 | 139 | 148 | 120 | 28 | 1.67 | 46.99% |
| All Comps | 90 | 40 | 22 | 28 | 28 | 151 | 137 | 14 | 44.44% | ||
| Jason Kreis | MLS | 34 | 10 | 7 | 17 | 37 | 49 | 58 | -9 | 1.09 | 29.41% |
| All Comps | 35 | 10 | 8 | 17 | 51 | 60 | -9 | 28.57% | |||
| Total | MLS | 329 | 140 | 84 | 105 | 504 | 528 | 435 | 93 | 1.53 | 42.55% |
| All Comps | 382 | 160 | 95 | 127 | 606 | 513 | 93 | 41.88% |
Two to grow on
Even more impressive under Cushing, two members of the squad went from being perennial benchwarmers to ranking among the very best players in the league: Matt Freese is on a path to becoming the top goalkeeper in Major League Soccer, while Alonso MartĂnez surprised every pundit, executive, coach, fan, and ball kid in North America when he emerged as a striker so clinical that he finished the year trailing only Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez in goals scored per 90 minutes.
Other players we should include in the growth and development camp include Malachi Jones, a draft pick who emerged as one of the team’s most exciting attackers; Tayvon Gray, whose goal and seven assists were the most for a fullback since the four goals and four assists from Anton Tinnerholm in 2020; and Christian McFarlane, who looked composed beyond his 17 years in the 13 appearances he made for the First Team across all competitions.
But there was significant stalling as well. Striker Mounsef Bakrar scored just four goals in 28 appearances in league games, JulĂan Fernández looked sharper when he joined the team at the end of the 2023 season than in the few appearances he made in 2024, and AgustĂn Ojeda barely impacted the season despite being the “jewel” of the Velez Sarsfield academy that New York City were lucky to land. Most disappointing, $8.6 million wunderkind Jovan Mijatović looked like a total bust: The striker was the only member of the NYCFC attack not to log a single goal or assist in league play.
The season in one player
But maybe the player who defined Cushing’s 2024 more than any other was Hannes Wolf, the attacking midfielder who displayed flashes of brilliance early on but who faded as the season went on. Wolf was undroppable despite his diminishing performances — and despite a history of not being able to play a full season’s worth of games due to recent injuries.
A team with more depth could have benched Wolf in favor of a young, hungry player ready to prove his worth; a team with more patience would have rested Wolf, and allowed him to find his footing in a league that plays through the summer and across the continent; and a team with greater ambitions would have signed a new name in the summer, instead of sitting out that transfer window completely.
But Cushing played Wolf in every single league game this season. This is pure speculation, but it seemed that Cushing had no choice. He couldn’t afford to take a chance on a younger player, and the front office didn’t bring in a game-ready attacking midfielder in the summer to alleviate the pressure. Wolf was Cushing’s best option, and so Cushing played Wolf.
Is Cushing responsible for Wolf’s stagnation? Maybe a different coach could have gotten more out of him. Or does he get credit for coaxing 42 performances out of him in all competitions? After all, Wolf hasn’t made more than 20 appearances in a season since 2021.
Managing expectations
To look at it another way, Wolf was a rehabilitation project with high expectations, a promising player who hadn’t performed at his peak in more than three years but was tasked with carrying much of the NYCFC attack by a front office that felt he was an undervalued asset ready to take his place among the best in the league. Do we hang his season – and the seasons of Bakrar, Fernández, and Mijatović – on the head coach?
The truth is, we wanted more from Cushing. After all, he took over the team midway through the 2022 season, and was the longest-tenured head coach in club history. But at the same time, it never really felt like the team was his until this year: He was the interim head coach in 2022, and then oversaw a two-season rebuild that was mostly demo work in 2023. He didn’t have a fully functioning team until the start of 2024.
Which makes handing out Cushing’s final grade a little tricky. To go just by the results in 2024, he deserves a B or B-, depending on how generous you’re feeling this holiday season. New York City were among the best clubs in the league but never quite elite, a young and skillful team capable of playing beautiful soccer — and capable of being bullied out of a game. That B grade reflects the exceptional season of players such as Freese and MartĂnez, and the underwhelming performances of players such as Bakrar and Fernández.
It looks different if you grade on a curve. Cushing was the second-youngest head coach in the league, and he was guiding the youngest squad in the league through the biggest rebuild in club history. By that standard, Cushing should get a B+, maybe even an A-.
But mixed messages sent out by the club made the assignment unclear. Was this Year One of a rebuild, a time to put the pieces in place for a strong 2025? Or was 2024 the year that the team would return to their winning ways and a Top 4 finish — a goal often voiced by Cushing himself?
Because the grading standards weren’t clear, Cushing gets an incomplete. It brings an unsatisfactory finish to an inconsistent career at New York City, one that saw some of the most magnificent wins in club history, and some of the biggest losses.
Sad to say, an incomplete is maybe the most appropriate end to the Cushing era at New York City.
Incomplete strikes me as fair. Had he gotten all of 2025 to finish the job, then it would have been proper to grade him. But for whatever reason, the organization pulled the trigger (was Marcelo Claure’s finger on it?) and it literally remains an incomplete project.Now it’s up to the next gaffer. I hope we’re smart. Whoever it is, we want them to be at the helm through 2027, at least. And we need to know whether the kids David Lee signed are going to be who he thinks they should be. My guess is, not playing them enough is what ultimately got Nick canned, by the way. Had we continued the summer momentum and finished third or fourth in the East, he may have kept his job. But that’s just a guess.
I was surprised at the decision. While there were certainly aspects of his approach I disagreed with, overall I think he was consistent in preaching patience in the process. The team improved in 2024, and I expect if he stayed we would have been even better in 2025. Hard to tell what the front office expected.
I had the same reaction. I really thought Nick was going to get one more year to see it all the way through even with the late-season stumble. But from what I can tell, it was David Lee’s call, which is why I suspect it had more to do with not playing the new acquisitions than anything else.Of course, that now means David is on the hot seat. If Jansen comes in and continues to leave all that money on the bench because they’re simply not good enough, Lee is going to be out of a job too. (For the record, I think they’ll be fine. Talented kids. They need minutes.)
Did you prefer that they would have given him another season? I actually preferred they would have. I wonder if a lot of fans may underestimate what “player development” actually entails, and overlook that it doesn’t always happen within the confines of a single 30-something game season.
Yes, I thought he had earned one more year. After coming all this way, it struck me as just a bit precipitous, especially since he had grown so much as a coach and a leader.That being said, whether fair or not, I always got the impression the squad lacked something. It’s not anything I can quantify. I just thought it was very quiet at mealtime when they were all watching a match together. No banter, trash talk, whooping it up, at least not that I could see on YouTube Admittedly, it’s a lousy source of information. But it did strike me as odd.