Inter Miami preaches patience after showcasing revamped roster on Day 1 of 2022 preseason
The South Florida side discussed on Monday what to expect from the overhauled and younger squad this coming season
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Younger, hungrier, more athletic and energetic.
Inter Miami may have a retooled and revamped roster, but that is no guarantee of immediate results. In fact, it could be quite the opposite.
Inter Miami officially started preseason preparations for the 2022 MLS season on Monday morning, trotting out the overhauled squad that was strategically pieced together this winter. There seemed to be at least as many new faces as there were familiar ones at the practice session at the Inter Miami Training Facility, and afterwards the team brass explained pretty clearly why such drastic changes were made this offseason.
“We needed to have a fresh new team,” said head coach Phil Neville. “This is a reset button for the organization. I feel as if it is exciting. With young players and young people in general, you get people that are fearless, you get people that go out and play, you get people that have not been burned or have had bad experiences in the past.
"That is what we needed to get rid of. A lot of players in that dressing room last season had probably been burned for the last 18 months about negativity with bad results, bad performances, giving goals away. Now there is none of that left in the dressing room and the players that are left are the players that we wanted to keep and the players that are coming in are fresh and hungry and fearless.”
Inter Miami’s new blood may be just that, but whether those attributes will combine with those of the holdovers and translate into quick and consistent results is unclear.
After all, it typically takes some time and games — not just practices or exhibitions — for players who are unfamiliar with one another to get on the same page and develop the type of instinctive understanding that the best teams boast.
“With a new team and the big changes we have made, we have to remain patient,” said Neville. “We have to remain patient and let this team grow and develop.”
Added star striker Gonzalo Higuain in Spanish: “We are going to have to ask for patience because there are a lot of new players and learning the automatisms on the field will take longer.”
Just how patient Inter Miami fans will be after two largely subpar seasons at the start of the South Florida side’s existence is also a bit of a mystery. The glitzy franchise came out of the gates back in 2020 talking about competing for an MLS Cup right away, but has notoriously fallen well short of that mark.
Still, the belief from within is that the new-look team has the proper pieces in place to be a more competitive side than the one that finished in 11th place in the Eastern Conference and missed the playoffs in 2021.
“We are now not just signing players because a friend of a friend knows someone that is good or an agent that is close to someone,” said Neville. “We are signing players because they have been watched 20, 30, 40 times by five, six people and we know all about their family history, and everything they have done in their career.
“We are not signing players now off a whim. We are signing players because they fit into what we believe is our team.”
Getting this newer, younger squad in sync is now the main challenge for Neville and his players. They will spend the next six weeks trying to do just that ahead of Feb. 26’s season opener, but the process is likely to continue well into the campaign.
Such is life for Inter Miami after such a massive makeover.
“Now it is about getting them together and jelling and working on the cohesion of the team,” said sporting director Chris Henderson when asked what the expectations were for the team in 2022. “But for sure (if) you get in the playoffs in this league you have a chance to move on. We have to have high hopes and this club will always have high hopes of bringing excellence to this community and our fans.”