At this time a year ago, Tyler Heaps, the 34-year-old sporting director for Major League Soccer expansion club San Diego FC, was sitting in his office, staring at a whiteboard of their roster.
It had six names.
“We had six players for so long,” Heaps said. “I just remember talking to (majority owner Mohamed) Mansour, and Mr. Mansour was constantly asking, ‘When are we getting more players?’ It’s difficult to tell him to be patient.”
On Saturday night at Snapdragon Stadium, SDFC hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps in the Western Conference final for a spot the following weekend in MLS Cup against Inter Miami or New York City FC. They got more players, and the league’s youngest general manager is a prohibitive favorite to be named its sporting executive of the year.
“It’s probably something I never want to do again,” Heaps said on an SDFC podcast last spring about constructing a roster on a vacant lot. “It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of sleepless nights, there were a lot of difficult conversations, there were a lot of really disappointing days where you thought you were going to get something done and weren’t able to.
“I can tell you the list we had at the beginning looks completely different than the roster we have now.”
Heaps studied previous MLS expansion clubs and their roster builds, borrowing a few ideas but discarding most. Instead, he took a unique approach, prioritizing players over 30 and under 21, using a secret sauce of analytics to identify talent that fit coach Mikey Varas’ tactical scheme favored by the Right to Dream program, heavily scouting U.S. youth national teams, resisting the temptation to use Designated Players slots (that don’t count against the salary cap) on aging European stars looking for a retirement home.
That, and persistence.
“We got told ‘no’ a lot,” Heaps told the Union-Tribune this week. “Luckily, I don’t take being told no very well.”
Heaps nearly selected Paul Arriola from FC Dallas in last December’s expansion draft, where the existing MLS clubs can protect only a portion of their rosters. Arriola made sense — a right wing who grew up in Chula Vista and had extensive U.S. national team experience.
But SDFC couldn’t reach acceptable contract terms with Arriola in the hours before the draft, and ultimately passed. Arriola instead was traded to Seattle and suffered a season-ending knee injury a month into the season.
San Diego FC wing Anders Dreyer celebrates after defeating Minnesota United in the Western Conference Semifinals on Monday at Snapdragon Stadium. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Heaps then turned his attention to Anders Dreyer, a 27-year-old Danish winger who caught his eye playing for Anderlecht of Belgium’s Juliper League. Heaps spent two years as an analytics guru with AS Monaco in France’s Ligue 1 but also scouted the Juliper League because they shared owners with Belgian club Cercle Brugges.
He called Anderlecht, which at the time had a Danish coach and Danish sporting director. The transfer fee for Dreyer was out of SDFC’s budget.
Heaps moved on, pursuing another potential Designated Player he declined to name.
Then that fell though.
“Then Anderlecht had a change in leadership and we approached them again, and the number was a little more appealing but still out of our budget,” Heaps said. “You keep calling and hoping for a different answer. We were fortunate that the number kept coming down and all of a sudden made a little more sense. Then it was just about understanding the player more and making sure he was the perfect fit.”
Which he was. With 23 goals and 16 assists, Dreyer is an MLS All-Star, a two-time player of the month, a Best XI selection and the league’s newcomer of the year. If it wasn’t for an Inter Miami forward named Lionel Messi, he would be MVP, too.
With Mexican star Hirving “Chucky” Lozano, that gave them DPs on both wings accounting for $10 million of SDFC’s $19 million payroll for 2025.
Then came the hard part: filling the remainder of the 30-player roster with $9 million to spend.
One objective was acquiring MLS experience on each positional line. So they got Inter Miami goalkeeper CJ dos Santos, a backup with only two career starts whom SDFC assistant sporting director Mark Prizant admired from his time there. They got DC United defender Christopher McVey, who was previously in Miami with Prizant as well. They got 35-year-old midfielder Anibal Godoy and his decade of MLS knowledge. They got 31-year-old forward Emmanuel Boateng, who is on his fifth MLS team and is an alum of the Right to Dream academy in Ghana.
That was counterbalanced by a crew of youngsters who fit the Right to Dream philosophy of bloodying them early and often. Most have caps with the U.S. under-20 national team, a function of Heaps’ confidence in the federation’s scouting acumen from his days as its director of sporting analytics.
Two more came from the college draft.
San Diego FC defender Manu Duah fights with Nashville’s Sam Surridge for the ball in their July game at Snapdragon Stadium. (Meg McLaughlin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
SDFC raised some eyebrows for using the No. 1 overall pick on Manu Duah, who had played just 14 games at UC Santa Barbara in an injury-riddled freshman season. Then Heaps made three different trades to move back into the first round and take Ian Pilcher from Charlotte at No. 24.
“Smashed it out of the park,” Heaps said of Brian Cronin, who oversees their college scouting.
SDFC’s current starting backline: McVey, Duah, Pilcher and Luca Bombino.
An MLS veteran traded for a mere $50,000 in General Allocation Money. … and three rookies.
The 19-year-old Bombino was unearthed from LAFC’s reserve team in a loan deal finalized two days after the season opener. It included a trade option that SDFC has since exercised to keep him next year and beyond.
“He’s a player we identified in MLS Next Pro (developmental league) that we tried to get many times and was not an easy acquisition,” Heaps said. “We had to call up the street plenty of times for him to see what the pathway was for him and the interest. We were fortunate that they needed something that we had in an international slot.”
Others came from Europe: Paddy McNair was out of contract in England, Alex Mighten had some unproductive loan spells from England’s Nottingham Forest, Luca de la Torre was buried on the bench at Spain’s Celta Vigo, Finnish midfielder Onni Valakari was on loan from a Sweden club to Pafos FC in Cyprus.
The MLS summer transfer window opened, and Heaps began adding and erasing names on his whiteboard. He got Escondido native Corey Baird, who had been languishing on FC Cincinnati’s bench after an eight-year MLS career with 31 goals and 126 starts. He got Amahl Pellegrino, who wasn’t even suiting up for San Jose most nights but whose metrics from his prior stop at Bodo/Glimt, a Norwegian club that plays a similar possession style to SDFC, showed promise.
Both have started throughout the playoffs.
“We were looking for low-risk, high-reward players,” Heaps said. “Sometimes in this league, that’s players on bigger contracts who aren’t producing, players who aren’t playing consistently but have had success in MLS in the past.”
They also graded well in SDFC’s internal statistical models.
San Diego FC sporting director Tyler Heaps speaks during a press conference at the team headquarters in Little Italy last January. (Howard Lipin / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The son of a chemist, Heaps initially planned to major in chemistry as a Division III soccer player at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. But then he realized “I actually hate this” and, influenced by “Moneyball” and baseball’s analytics craze, switched to mathematics with a minor in computer science.
“We (use) slightly different metrics,” said Heaps, who spent much of his time at U.S. Soccer and AS Monaco coding and building algorithms to evaluate players. “We create our own proprietary scores, combining different metrics that we value. We for sure are looking at things as simple as passing percentage and some things more complex, like bypassing defenders.
“We play differently from Red Bulls and Minnesota, so I’m sure their scores are quite a bit different from ours. There are hundreds of thousands of players in this world, and everybody has way to try to identify them.”
The poster child is central midfielder and captain Jeppe Tverskov, who came from Right to Dream sister club FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark. His athleticism is underwhelming, and, at 32, he’s not getting any younger.
But Heaps calls Tverskov “a data machine (who) pops in every metric.”
When one of Heaps’ scouts targets a prospect, his file is sent to another scout for a second, independent evaluation.
“If all that checks out, we’ll put him through a stress test,” said Heaps, who is married to U.S. women’s star Lindsey Horan. “That’s where we’ll watch him home and away, we try to watch him in different environments, we try to watch games where maybe they’re under stress. That’s to reduce the risk, to make sure we have multiple eyes and multiple reports on a guy. Then that gets brought up to me, and we make a decision if they’re worth signing or not.
“A lot of what people might call it time wasting. Oftentimes, the no’s are the ones that actually save you. But that’s just the reality of it.”
From December to February, Heaps went from six players to a full roster.
Now the league’s youngest sporting director — younger, even, than his starting midfielder — was at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson for SDFC’s inaugural match against the defending champion Los Angeles Galaxy.
“I went up into the suite, and Loutfy grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to sit here,’” Heaps said of Mansour’s son and the family’s chief liaison to the club. “Mr. Mansour went and sat on one side of me, and Loutfy sat on the other side of me. In the back of my head, I’m like, ‘This better go well.’
SDFC 2, Galaxy 0.
Nine months later, San Diego is playing in the conference final.
“It was a really cool moment,” Heaps said, “because those were the guys who trusted me from the beginning. They didn’t have to.”
MLS Western Conference Final: No. 1 San Diego FC vs. No. 2 Vancouver Whitecaps
When: 6 p.m. Saturday
TV: AppleTV+
Radio: 760-AM, 1700-AM (Spanish)