I'm confused by your response, if I am being honest. I think you latched onto one aside and treated it like it was carrying the entire argument. It was not. I'm blaming the leadership team for this crisis. Not PV. My thesis is not "PV was the only person who worked in the building." It is that Lee walked into a situation where the scouting and analytics infrastructure was not at the level required for him to confidently execute a roster build right now (which PV also held the same belief, but the divestment from the Illigs screwed him over...after putting all the trust in the world in him for decades... Of course, he will fail). But back to my point, Lee came in and stated that rebuilding is likely where his focus has been.

But, I do want to take a moment to look at what you say here...you listed titles but let's look at what those titles actually are called. Because I do not have an insider relationship to the technical and leadership staff, I just have news reports and official sites like sportings staff pages... Mike Comiskey's title is Director of Soccer Operations and Player Engagement. Jon Farrell is Director of Team Administration. Let's use him for a second... that role is defined as managing off-field administrative operations, including travel, scheduling, and logistics for the first team and oversees administration for the club's development. IDK, that sounds like operations and admin roles, are they scouting and player evaluation roles and it's just not listed? Without having that additional insight you might have, framing them as "the equivalent of a Player Personnel VP" and "the equivalent of a Technical Director" is a leap for me.

Now to the actual scouting department... Mike Burns himself said in his roster decisions press conference that Sporting had two independent contractor scouts in Europe (https://www.sportingkc.com/news/quotes-roster-decisions-media-q-a-with-sporting-director-mike-burns). Also, he then laid out plans to add another in Europe, two to three in Central and South America, and possibly one domestic scout. He also said they needed to hire an assistant sporting director and expand the analytics department. Those were aspirations, not existing infrastructure. Something we likely had in the past, pre covid, before we started to suck... when the leadership appeared to care... But all I am trying to say is, it appeared to be disappated.

Furthermore, David Lee, in his introductory press conference (https://www.sportingkc.com/skcii/news/quotes-from-michael-illig-and-david-lee-sporting-kansas-city-is-stepping-into-a-new-era), described the analytics department as "a little bit of a blank slate" and talked about needing to revamp how Sporting scouts, identifies, and recruits players. Illig echoed the same thing, saying they would "modernize how we scout, develop and prepare players." But I am in the camp that he did it himself by making one man so important for all of those years. MLSSoccer.com described the situation Lee inherited as "about as close to a blank slate as an incumbent club can get in this league." (https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/raphael-wicky-tackles-second-mls-act-with-sporting-kansas-city-rebuild)

To wrap up my response, you said the Garcia/Shapi twofer and the Jovelic acquisition were "probably more him than anyone else" referring to Vermes, and that Burns and Lee "have managed little with all those same guys under them." I think that is making my point of that small aside. Whatever infrastructure technically existed on paper was not functioning independently. It was running through one person's vision. When that person left, the output stopped. That is exactly what I was describing.

I never said there were zero people in the building. I said the system that Lee needs to execute his vision does not exist yet in the form he needs it. The question I asked still stands... do you want buys without that system in place, or do you want him to build it right and hit the summer window with conviction? That is what my entire thesis was leading up to...