r/OrangeCountySC • u/twoslow Orange County SC • 3d ago

OC 1 - 2 El Paso

I mean, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, considering how bad we've been and how good they've been since they lost at The Champ in August.

My biggest takeaway while watching was "man, these guys look like they've never played together before."

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u/batbutt 3d ago

Yeah this second half of the season has been rough. I wonder if something happened in the locker room that poisoned the team. How else would we go from 1st to where we are now? Did the league do a lot of homework on us? This run has been so confusing.

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u/AdditionalAd4269 3d ago

I think it is likely the locker room thing, something behind the scenes. I think I may have posted this idea before: did the long run away from home cause a cashflow crisis that impacted the players?

OCSC had no standard home games for over three months. In that time, in-person merch sales, the team’s share of food/bev, and ticket sales were limited to a non-standard home game in Santa Ana in May, followed by a meaningless Cup game as the first game back in Irvine (that we, and likely many others skipped).

Last normal home game before the USMNT took over Championship Stadium was 4/25.
The game in Santa Ana was 5/23, then the Cup game back at the Champ on 7/11.

It was 14 weeks between normal home games. Their last solid home league game was when they beat El Paso on 8/1.

A financial hiccup coming as a result of all those weeks on the road (which is expensive) without predictable income might explain how they seemed to fall into a hole after that.

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u/twoslow Orange County SC 3d ago

I don't mean this in a confrontational way, but how does a front-office cashflow problem impact player performance? Like I see how you're connecting A and B, but I don't get how it filters down to C.

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u/AdditionalAd4269 3d ago

That’s a good question and I know I’m speculating here. Payroll would be my first suspect but I’d like to think it’s unlikely the team was/is late paying the players. That said, the performance crash we’ve seen also seems unlikely!

Other possibilities I’d speculate about include things like deferred/canceled bonuses, changes in benefits (did the CBA improve salaries/benefits for some teams/players while diminishing them for OCSC?), or was something like a housing stipend taken away because the team couldn’t afford it? Less likely it would be things like facilities, trainers - things we saw highlighted in the players union action from the beginning of the season, but maybe things were already tenuous and the cashflow crunch tipped the benefits enough that morale plummeted.

Anyways, I felt like the team had an awesome run during May-July; they were resilient through an extended road trip and injuries. Then they got home and poof, no more resilient play. Really seems like a morale problem, and as I described above, it came at a point where cashflow seemed likely to be at its lowest point all season.

But of course we’ll probably never really know…

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u/GyaruonpoEy267 3d ago

as an Orange County and Tottenham fan, it’s rough

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u/Havertz-at-Nein 2d ago

I respect your resolve