Will Kuntz’s life changed with a letter.
He was a small-college basketball player at Williams College, an even smaller liberal arts college in Massachusetts, when he found himself alone in a dorm room flipping through the school’s alumni directory out of sheer boredom. On that list of former Purple Cows — that’s the school’s mascot, not a description of the alumni — was George Steinbrenner, then owner of the New York Yankees.
A lightbulb went on.
“I wrote this cheesy letter, introduced myself and asked to be considered for an internship,” Kuntz remembered over a cup of tea 22 years later.
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By his own admission, it was a bold, brash and possibly stupid move for someone who barely knew the difference between a spitball and a spitwad. Yet five months later, Steinbrenner personally signed off on a summer internship in baseball operations.
“That Purple Cow mafia must work,” Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ longtime general manager, said last week.
If Kuntz was a made man though, it was Cashman who benefited, because once Kuntz got through the door, he never looked back. In 10 seasons with the Yankees, he went from running errands to running the pro scouting department, helping the team win a World Series.
Now, a decade after leaving the Yankees, he’s proven to be an even quicker study as an MLS general manager. In less than 19 months in charge of player personnel for the Galaxy, he’s taken them from near the bottom of the table to the Western Conference final, where a win over the Seattle Sounders on Saturday would give the team its first spot in the MLS Cup since 2014.
“We’re obviously very pleased with where we are but the job’s not done yet. We still have two games ahead of us to reach our ultimate goal,” said Dan Beckerman, the president and CEO of AEG, the Galaxy’s parent company, and the man who hired Kuntz.
“But yeah, it’s been an incredible season. He’s done an outstanding job. Everything that we hoped he could do, he’s done.”
When Kuntz, 40, was hired early last year, the Galaxy were on their way to missing the playoffs for the fifth time in seven years. They would finish with eight wins, matching the franchise low for a full season, and allow 67 goals, matching the franchise high.
This year, with coach Greg Vanney starting nine players signed by Kuntz, the team matched modern-era bests with 19 wins and 69 goals, missing its first regular-season conference title since 2011 on a tie-breaker. It’s one of the most remarkable turnarounds in league history.
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“If you look at where we were 12 months ago and where we are today, it is an incredible bounce back. And it was exactly what we had hoped would happen with the changes, the investments that we made in the roster and just a new vision, a new culture,” Beckerman said.
“When things aren’t going well, different is good. There’s a new energy, a new buzz. It’s just a different feel and a different culture.”
Kuntz’s journey from that dorm room at Williams College, where he won an NCAA Division III basketball title, to the general manager’s suite with the Galaxy was a methodical one. While working with the Yankees, he attended law school at night, earning his degree in 2013 before leaving baseball for a three-year stop at MLS headquarters, where he became steeped in the minutiae of the league’s complicated salary structure.
“My first impression of Will was, ‘Boy, he has a lot of confidence,’” said Nelson Rodriguez, a long-time MLS executive who worked alongside Kuntz in the league office. “But the other thing that has struck me about Will is his very clear standard. He has a high standard of integrity, a very high standard or work ethic. And he’s been remarkably consistent.”
Rodriguez also saw courage in Kuntz’s decision to leave one of the marquee franchises in American sports for a league that was still seeking a foothold.
“He saw an opportunity in soccer and saw the growth of the sport coming, so he was probably on the leading edge of that,” he said. “He’s not afraid. While he has his confidence, he’s not stubborn and he’s not arrogant.”
One of Kuntz’s duties was to represent the league in contentious talks with the players union for a new collective bargaining agreement in 2015. John Thorrington was on the other side of the table, representing the players, and both men came away from the experience with respect for the other. So when LAFC, then an expansion team, chose Thorrington as its first general manager, he chose Kuntz as his top assistant.
“He’s very intelligent,” Thorrington said. “He had unique experience, both in other sports and [in] seeing high-operating organizations like the Yankees. So he would pick up on the learnings and apply his experiences.
“Now, ironically, that benefit is going to our direct rival.”
Kuntz spent six years at Thorrington’s side, leaving when his contract ran out weeks after LAFC, the Galaxy’s Southern California neighbor, won the MLS Cup in 2022.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving,” he said. But, he added, he felt “pretty strongly that what I was getting offered was below where I believed my market value to be. It was one of those moments where, if you take this now, after the year we just had, you can never expect anything better. Maybe you should see what else is out there.”
The first feelers came from Austin, he said, which was looking to replace Claudio Reyna as sporting director. But his equally accomplished wife Priscilla Muñoz, executive director and regional controller of West Coast real estate investments for JP Morgan, didn’t want to move to Texas. The Galaxy, meanwhile, were imploding, having lost more games than their had won during the previous six seasons and going eight years without an MLS Cup appearance, the longest drought in its history.
The players didn’t mesh on the field, the front office was dysfunctional and the team’s most loyal fans had begun to boycott home games. Once the league’s model franchise and long its most successful, having hoisted 12 trophies, the Galaxy were a hot mess.
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So Beckerman hired Kuntz as senior vice-president of player personnel, though it was clear that was just a temporary position. Because when he sacked longtime president Chris Klein a month later, he handed Kuntz the keys to the sporting side of the franchise.
That was a huge break from normal for the famously loyal Beckerman, who had stood with Klein through 10 mostly challenging seasons. But it worked. Just three teams in MLS won fewer home games than the Galaxy last season; this year they matched a franchise-record with 13 regular-season wins in Carson.
“His resume is pretty incredible,” Beckerman said of Kuntz. “He had experience. He’s a lawyer. He really understands the league and the complexities of Major League Soccer and the intricacies of the rules. That was a huge plus. Having the experience of working for a great organization like the Yankees is certainly appealing. He had MLS experience at the club level.
“He had a very clear vision of what he wanted to execute in terms of assembling a team and a fresh look, which is something that, frankly, we needed. We needed a new direction. We needed a new look. Will checked all of those boxes.”
In the midsummer transfer window, his first in charge, Kuntz got about giving the team that new look, adding five players including center back Maya Yoshida, now the team’s captain, and midfielder Edwin Cerrillo. But he worked his real magic last winter, after being promoted to general manager.
He began by signing defender John Nelson and goalkeeper John McCarthy, who had been cut loose by their previous teams, then acquired Japanese defender Miki Yamane for a modest transfer fee. All three have played vital roles in the team’s success this season. However the additions that really transformed the Galaxy came closer to opening day when Kuntz added Brazilian winger Gabriel Pec and Ghanaian forward Joseph Paintsil as designated players.
The players were young — Pec was 22, Paintsil 26 when they signed — and talented, but relatively anonymous in the U.S. They were also expensive, with Pec costing the team a club-record $10-million transfer fee while Paintsil’s transfer was only slightly cheaper at a reported $9 million. But after years of spending money on big-name stars such as Gio dos Santos, Steven Gerrard, Javier “Chicharito” Hernández and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who brought the team little playoff success, Kuntz believed in the new approach and met privately with Beckerman and AEG owner Phil Aunschutz to get their approval.
“This club has a really storied tradition and we had certainly gotten pretty far afield from that. The thinking at the club had gotten stale,” Kuntz said.
“People felt like they had to deliver a huge star that had name recognition because that’s a Galaxy player, right? The league has changed. Let’s try to find the players we really believe will give us the best chance.”
Kuntz didn’t do that alone. Instead, he worked closely with Vanney to identify the profile of player the coach wanted, then tried to deliver that. And the strategy proved transformative, with Pec scoring sharing team highs with 19 goals and 16 assists, including playoff games, while Paintsil has 13 goals and 11 assists.
“I can’t remember when an MLS team hit it out of the park with two DP signings in the same year,” said Paul Kennedy, the Hall of Fame editor of Soccer America. “Pec and Paintsil have been so good for the Galaxy.”
Kuntz also straightened out a front office that had long been underperforming, removing Jovan Kirovski as technical director, expanding the duties of scouting director Michael Stephens and player personnel director Gordon Kljestan and hiring former Danish Superliga executive Mikkel Dencher as technical director.
No one is less surprised at his protege’s success than Cashman.
“People that are successful, first and foremost, have to be able to connect with people and Will is exceptional at that,” Cashman said of the man who got away.
“I tried to convince him you’re making a mistake,” he added. “You have a path here to become a general manager in Major League Baseball. But he had a different dream.”
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It’s a dream that hasn’t fully been realized because Kuntz, like many of his players, sees Europe as the ultimate test of his soccer skills. He’s already won championship rings with the Yankees and LAFC and could earn another with the Galaxy next month — and he’s still five months shy of his 41st birthday, leaving him with both the time and ambition to attempt scaling mountains in other continents.
“I still do get romantic thinking about the possibility of putting together a team in Europe that can compete for a Champions League [title,]” he said. “But that’s another level, another jump, and it requires more education.”
Maybe he could start by writing a letter.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
