What Does a Chief Soccer Officer Do in MLS?

The Chief Soccer Officer: One Job, Many Names, and a Surprisingly Collaborative League

Walk down the list of MLS clubs and you’ll find the same job called something different almost everywhere you look. One club calls it Chief Soccer Officer. Another calls it Sporting Director. Another calls it General Manager, or President of Soccer Operations. Different titles, same actual job, and the same person sits in that seat at every single MLS club, whatever his business card actually says.

What MLS’s Own Rulebook Actually Calls It

Interestingly, MLS’s own Roster and Budget Guidelines don’t use any of the flashier modern titles at all. The formal, generic term used in the league’s compliance documentation is simply “technical director,” with “general manager” and “sporting director” listed as explicit real-world equivalents in the same breath.

There’s real proof every club needs someone in this seat, too. MLS runs a formal compliance process called the Salary Budget Rules Compliance Club Representative Affidavit, and it has to be signed by a specific list of club representatives every year: the head coach, the chief financial officer, the chief business officer (or club president), the controlling owner or a designated parent-company executive, and the technical director, “such as general manager, sporting director.” Whatever a club actually calls this person, the league’s own paperwork requires someone in that functional role to personally sign off on the club’s compliance with the rules.

Whatever a club actually calls this person, the league’s own paperwork requires someone in that functional role to personally sign off on the club’s compliance with the rules.

Worth flagging here: the league’s own choice of wording is genuinely a bit confusing. In real MLS club org charts, “Technical Director” very often refers to an entirely separate, more specific role, distinct from the General Manager, Sporting Director, or Chief Soccer Officer, and it isn’t unusual for a club to have both at once. LA Galaxy, for instance, has a General Manager (Will Kuntz) and a separate Technical Director (Mikkel Dencher) working simultaneously, and LAFC runs the same structure with a Co-President & General Manager (John Thorrington) alongside its own Technical Director (Neil McGuinness). So while MLS’s compliance paperwork borrows the term “technical director” as its generic label for the top soccer decision-maker, that’s not necessarily how the title gets used inside an actual club, where a real Technical Director role can exist underneath, or alongside, the person actually holding the job this piece is about.

The Full Roster

Here’s the complete picture across the league, the person actually holding this role at every MLS club, whatever the specific title on his door:

Even a quick glance at this list makes the naming point on its own: the actual titles behind these names range from Chief Soccer Officer to Sporting Director to General Manager to President of Soccer Operations and beyond, depending entirely on the club. A few confirmed examples of that title diversity:

• General Manager: LA Galaxy (Will Kuntz), Seattle Sounders (Craig Waibel), FC Cincinnati (Chris Albright), Portland Timbers (Ned Grabavoy), San Diego FC (Tyler Heaps)
• Sporting Director: Philadelphia Union (Jon Scheer), Orlando City (Ricardo Moreira, who also holds the General Manager title there)
• Chief Soccer Officer and Sporting Director, combined: Atlanta United’s Chris Henderson has held exactly this dual title, both at Atlanta and previously at Inter Miami
• Co-President & General Manager: LAFC (John Thorrington)
• President and General Manager: Sporting Kansas City (David Lee)

Note that Technical Director isn’t on this list. As covered above, that’s a genuinely separate role at clubs like LA Galaxy and LAFC, not another name for the job this piece is actually about.

Worth keeping in mind: this seat changes hands often across the league, so treat this as a snapshot of where things stand right now rather than a permanent reference.

What the Job Actually Covers

Whatever the title on the door, this role typically sits at the center of a club’s entire soccer operation: overseeing recruitment and roster construction, setting the club’s broader technical and playing direction, and often having a hand in academy development, scouting structure, and the medical department too. It’s the person ultimately accountable for the sporting side of the business, separate from the commercial and business operations side the club president or chief business officer typically runs.

Competitors on the Matchday, Partners Off It

Here’s the part that genuinely sets MLS apart from how this relationship tends to work in most of the football world: these executives aren’t just rivals who occasionally cross paths. They’re in regular, structured contact with each other throughout the year, meeting in person multiple times a season to work through shared issues that have nothing to do with beating each other on the field, player development pathways, competition structure, academy standards, and a range of other league-wide topics that every club has a stake in getting right together.

That’s a genuinely unusual dynamic. On a Saturday, these are the people building rosters specifically designed to beat each other. During the week, they’re sitting in the same room working collaboratively on the systems that govern the entire league, since improving those systems helps every club at once, not just one at a time.

On a Saturday, these are the people building rosters specifically designed to beat each other. During the week, they’re sitting in the same room working collaboratively on the systems that govern the entire league, since improving those systems helps every club at once, not just one at a time.

Why This Makes MLS Structurally Different

This connects directly to something that’s run through this whole series: MLS’s single-entity structure. Because the league itself, not the individual clubs, ultimately owns player contracts and sets the rules everyone operates under, the people running each club’s soccer department have a shared incentive to get those league-wide systems right, even while fighting each other as hard as possible for wins, trophies, and top talent.

In most of the world’s major leagues, a sporting director’s relationship with his counterpart at a domestic rival is almost entirely adversarial, there’s little structural reason for those two people to collaborate on anything beyond a specific transfer negotiation. In MLS, the same executives who are competing fiercely for playoff positioning are also, quite literally, co-architects of the rulebook both of their clubs live under.

In MLS, the same executives who are competing fiercely for playoff positioning are also, quite literally, co-architects of the rulebook both of their clubs live under.

The Bottom Line

Chief Soccer Officer, Sporting Director, General Manager, President of Football Operations, the title genuinely doesn’t matter, it’s functionally the same role at every MLS club, even though the league’s own compliance paperwork somewhat confusingly borrows “technical director” as its generic label for it. What makes the role genuinely distinctive in MLS isn’t the title inconsistency, though, it’s the collaborative relationship these executives maintain with each other across the league, a structural byproduct of MLS’s single-entity model that has no real equivalent among rival clubs almost anywhere else in the sport.