Mikey Varas takes "pretty amazing" road to San Diego FC history | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

From where we stand today, with No. 1-seeded San Diego FC set to host Minnesota United FC before a sell-out crowd at Snapdragon Stadium in a Western Conference Semifinal on Monday night at the business end of statistically the best expansion season in MLS history, the Chrome & Azul look quite clever for hiring Mikey Varas as their first-ever head coach (10 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV).

SDFC have played some of the league’s most aesthetically pleasing soccer while also being viciously effective, paced by MLS Newcomer of the Year and Best XI honoree Anders Dreyer, and a first-place finish – fueled by expansion-club records for points (63) and wins (19) – ensures the Western road to MLS Cup 2025 presented by Audi runs through their house.

Things looked rather different when the choice was first announced back in September 2024, though.

A brand-new club, facing the typically treacherous road of year one in MLS, selecting a young head coach with zero experience of bossing a professional first team? Varas is the first to admit it was a gamble.

“During my interview process, I told them, I remember stating very clearly: If you guys select me, you will be very brave, because there's just not a lot of evidence,” Varas recalled in a one-on-one conversation with MLSsoccer.com ahead of Monday’s Audi MLS Cup Playoffs match. “You have to really get that right feeling and look really deep.

“That's huge credit to the organization in terms of vision, but also really believing that talent can be found anywhere, and believing in the power of opportunity,” Varas added. “I don't know who would have picked me out of the bunch of probably much more qualified coaches, on paper and based on experience.”

Starting from scratch

Varas and SDFC sporting director Tyler Heaps had both worked at the U.S. Soccer Federation, Varas as the U-20 men’s national team coach and a member of the senior team’s scouting staff, Heaps in the analytics department. But their tenures didn’t overlap.

So even with his good work with the U-20s in mind, it took a significant leap of faith – “huge belief and huge, huge trust,” in Varas’ words – to hand him the complex task of steering the on-field component of a large, ambitious expansion startup like San Diego.

Los Niños aimed to be competitive right out of the gates while executing the intricate, ball-dominant game model honed at their sibling organizations in the Right to Dream network, while also introducing themselves to their community and building a large residential academy that ranks as one of the league’s most comprehensive youth programs.

Heaps and Varas had essentially just met, and within days they found themselves jetting around the world for a crash course in Right to Dream, the global academy system that’s identified and nurtured a long list of top talents – most rising from humble circumstances – in Africa and prepared them for stardom in MLS and many of Europe’s top leagues, including and especially the Danish Superliga, where SDFC’s affiliate club FC Nordsjælland has grown into the project’s flagship.

“The first thing we did was we got on a plane together and went to Ghana and saw the Right to Dream original academy,” explained Varas. “Then we went to Egypt, then we came back, breathed for like a week, and then we went to Denmark. So what we did was, we actually jumped into the Right to Dream pool.

“I mean, we went on a road trip together, a month-long road trip where we spent 20 hours a day together, and that just further solidified the relationship and the chemistry. And then when we got home from so many conversations, it was like we were able to hit the ground running from a roster-building perspective.”

That whirlwind trip was where the duo first contacted future signings Jeppe Tverskov, Marcus Ingvartsen, Alex Mighten and Duran Ferree, pitching a brand-new club with a bold but still hypothetical concept somewhat akin to NASA’s Space Race.

“You're just talking so conceptually. It's such an interesting conversation,” said Varas, “because you're basically saying, 'This is what I promise you it’s going to be like.' But there's no proof of concept. They don't know who I am. They can't go to a Wikipedia page and say, 'Oh yeah, this has happened.' You know what I mean? But they were just so open-minded, and it was really great. We got great guys.”

Taking your shot

Varas likely would never have advanced this far without the ability to connect with relative strangers. He’s a self-made coach who worked his way up the ladder – “I've coached every age group there is, except for women's professionals,” he notes – without a high-level pro career of his own to pave his way.

Yet he still considers himself the beneficiary of serendipitous timing above all. Like the time he had a chance encounter with former FC Dallas and San Jose Earthquakes head coach Luchi Gonzalez at a U.S. Soccer coaching course that, nearly five years later, earned him an opportunity to join FCD’s academy staff.

“I've worked hard, tried to be a good person to people. I've also gotten very fortunate in life to meet the right people at the right time who have believed in me,” said Varas. “If Luchi Gonzalez isn't my roommate in an A license course, and says, ‘Hey, you're really good. Why are you coaching just U-11 girls soccer? You should be coaching higher,’ and then brings me to Dallas two years later, who knows where my trajectory is?

“I've just had amazing people along the way who have mentored or given me a pathway, opened a door for me,” he added. “If you're looking for the word, it's pretty nonlinear. It's like, you can't really map it … You can't look at my beginning and say that guy's going to be there. It's impossible, I think. And I think that that's pretty amazing.”

Leap of faith

Or before that, when a series of setbacks turned into an unexpected move to Sacramento Republic to lead the USL Championship side’s academy after several years of hard grind in the youth space in his native Bay Area.

“It was never my ambition [to coach at the pro level], to be honest. I just wanted to be the best U-12 coach there was, or U-14, or U-19,” Varas said. “I started realizing I probably didn't want to work evenings and seven days a week the rest of my life, because I had to coach five teams. And so my first trajectory was to be a community college coach and professor, and this is why I got my first master's degree.

“You want to talk about how random life is? I made three final [interview]s for community college professorship and coach, and didn't get any of them. And the only reason I got into the professional game was one of my references in Sacramento, Benjamin Ziemer, worked at Sac Republic.”

When Ziemer realized Varas was prepared to leave the Bay in pursuit of new challenges, he made him an offer that involved short-term pain for what turned out to be a life-changing long-range gain.

“I took a huge pay cut – like, a massive pay cut – went to Sacramento, and then your whole life just takes a takes a left turn, you know?” said Varas. “And community college is not in the works anymore.”

Opportunity calls

Understandably, that winding journey informs his outlook on SDFC’s current situation.

Minnesota upset Los Niños during their regular-season visit to Snapdragon, evidence that their diametrically opposite playing style poses a threat even in hostile conditions. While outsiders may look at their wildly successful inaugural season as drastic overachievement that makes this postseason run the equivalent of playing with house money, one where they could join the 1998 Chicago Fire FC as the second expansion team to win MLS Cup, Varas knows opportunities like this don’t roll around all that often.

“We're going after this game, because you can never take for granted where you stand,” he vowed. “It's not about house money. It's not about, 'Oh, you know, we'll get another chance later.'

"You don't take anything for granted in life. You got this exact moment. We get this one time, and we're going to be ready to go."

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