American soccer said goodbye to a football legend in Los Angeles on Friday. There was not an empty seat in the American Martyrs Church as the family and friends of Sigi Schmid gathered to remember the most successful manager in US soccer history.
Among the guests was former Germany and US coach Jurgen Klinsmann who was a close friend of Schmid, MLS Commissioner Don Garber and former Derby County player Alan Hinton, who went on to befriend Schmid in Seattle while he was Head Coach of Sounders FC.
The Seattle club was well represented at the service with minority owner Joe Roth, majority owner Adrian Hanauer, coach Brian Schmetzer, broadcasters Pete Fewing and Matt Johnson, executives Taylor Graham and Gary Wright, Drew Carey, Jordan Morris, Tyrone Marshall, Pat Ianni, Brad Evans and club doctor Dr. Michael Morris all in attendance. Cobi Jones and Pete Vagenas were among other ex-players attending as well as a plethora of Schmid’s ex-college players including Tayt Ianni and Tibor Pele, both of whom gave emotional tributes.
Wright spoke at the service and uttered an unforgettable tribute:
“He wasn’t just a Hall of Fame coach. He was a Hall of Fame person.”
The guests were handed a symbolic black captain’s armband with ‘Sigi’ imprinted on it
Schmid won MLS titles at the LA Galaxy and Columbus Crew, as well as US Open cups with the Seattle Sounders. At the Seattle club, he led them to the playoffs in their first season and to day they have never failed to make the playoffs.
Schmid emigrated to the USA from Germany when he was a toddler and experienced the full range of latent hostility to Germans which had not quite died down after World War 2.
Jurgen Klinsmann shared the Swabian dialect and became close to Sigi Schmid
He played in midfield for UCLA before moving to Major League Soccer in 1999 where he became the most successful head coach in the history of the league with 240 regular season wins and 26 victories in the MLS postseason.
Having won MLS titles in Los Angeles and Columbus, he was drafted in to take the helm at the ambitious expansion club Sounders FC.
There he won three Open Cups and made the playoffs every season.
Former US international Alexi Lalas and Venzuelan international Alejandro Moreno were also among those who spoke at the service with Moreno drawing tears from many of Schmid’s other ex-players in the audience with his stories of how Schmid used to motivate and encourage players, referring to Schmid emotionally as ‘his MLS father’.
Another Seattle connection to make the trip was Alan Hinton who won the English League twice with Derby County before moving to Seattle.
In an earlier interview, he told Prost Amerika’s John Zielonkla:
“We became really great close friends. I really admired him a lot. In fact I loved him a lot. It’s a very sad loss. He was a big fan of the regular man.
“He wasn’t off partying after the game with the big shots. He wanted to be with regular people. He loved the game. He loved his family. He loved the fans. A gentle giant no question about it.”
Last to speak at the service was Klinsmann who recalled how he and Schmid shared the same Swabian dialect of German. He credited Sigi not only with teaching him how the US college system worked but also more generally American society.
In one of many anecdotes told throughout the evening, the former Germany, Bayern Munich and USA head coach credited Schmid with knowing training regimes that were new even to him.
“I was saying to myself. You played for some coaches out there like Beckenbauer, Trapattoni, Osvaldo Ardiles, Cesar Luis Menotti who won World Cups and stuff like that, and along comes this gentleman who speaks my dialect and who pulls out a training session that I’ve never seen before.
“That opened my eyes to soccer in this country that is so full of talent and so full of knowledge that it is simply amazing. He was my role model.
“Over the years we developed that friendship that he called me for advice and I called him for advice.”
Klinsmann also told a story of going to Buenos Aires with Schmid to see Boca Juniors play River Plate.
“We get to the training ground the day before the game, the biggest game in South America and that’s when I really understood Sigi.
“So here comes the training staff from Boca Juniors, one of the biggest teams in the world. The coach is Guillermo Barros Schelotto who played for Sigi in Columbus.
“I see the coaching staff running out of the locker rooms and they were running to Sigi like little kids. Like little kids they were running to Sigi and hugging him.
“The affection, they way they adored him, the hug that they gave Sigi made me and my other friend that came with us just speechless.
I’m so grateful that I could learn from Sigi the last 21 years. I keep him in my spirit all the time, Klinsmann concluded.”
The assembled crowd listened to more speakers from Sigi’s college coaching days and lifelong friends who occasionally had to pause often to control their grief.
As was fitting to a larger than life character though, they all gathered together afterwards and shared anecdotes and football stories with each other into the late evening.
Alan Hinton was one of many Sounders FC representatives in LA
Sigi Schmid died aged 65 on December 25th 2018, leaving his wife Val and four children, Erik, Lacey, Kurt, and Kyle.
On January 11, 2019, MLS announced that it would rename its Coach of the Year Award ‘the Sigi Schmid Coach of the Year Award’ in honor of Schmid’s enormous contribution to the league and the sport in North America.
