Burgundy Wave sits down with the Sporting Director of the Colorado Rapids Padraig Smith for a bit of the behind the scenes of how you build a soccer team.
Teenaged boys, full-grown men, and certain ordained local rabbis, spend untold hours tinkering with imaginary soccer teams on Football Manager or FIFA 16 to assemble the right team, the best talent, and the right mix to have a winning soccer team. A winning soccer team that, of course, only exists in zeros and ones.
But Padraig Smith (pronounced ‘Porrick’) has the dream job: he, along with other members of the Rapids front office staff like Claudio Lopez, Paul Bravo, Tim Hinchey, Brian Crookham, and Pablo Mastroeni, actually find the right players each year to build a team.