Sporting Kansas City announced Monday that they mutually agreed to part ways with Peter Vermes, bringing his 15 year run as the longest serving head coach in MLS to a close.
Vermes leaves the club after Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to FC Dallas, which continues their spell as the last place team in the Western Conference with just one point in six games so far this season. SKC were also eliminated from the Concacaf Champions Cup in the first round in February, losing 4-1 to Inter Miami on aggregate.
“It would be hard to list all of the people I want to thank after 20 seasons in managerial positions at Sporting Kansas City,” Vermes said in a statement issued by the club. “I am thankful to everyone, especially ownership for giving me the opportunity of being a steward of this club for the past two decades. I wish the club nothing but the best in the future.”
Vermes, a former player who represented the U.S. at the 1990 World Cup, has spent the entirety of his managerial career in Kansas City. He first joined SKC in Nov. 2006 as the club’s technical director and became the head coach in Aug. 2009 on an interim basis. He went on to usher in an unprecedented period of success for the club, winning the MLS Cup in 2013 and three U.S. Open Cup titles from 2012 to 2017.
Kerry Zavagnin, an assistant under Vermes for the entirety of his time as SKC’s head coach, will serve as the team’s interim for the time being.
Vermes’ transformation of SKC
Vermes, already a familiar face as a former player, was hired as a technical director by the club in Nov. 2006 to oversee a transformation after the team missed the playoffs for two consecutive seasons when they had previously failed to make the postseason just once in their history. Though SKC, then known as the Kansas City Wizards, made the playoffs in each of the next two seasons under Curt Onalfo’s leadership, the real impact of Vermes’ work was not felt until he succeeded Onalfo as the head coach in Aug. 2009.
Though SKC failed to clinch a berth in the playoffs in the 2009 and 2010 seasons, Vermes then led the team to eight straight postseason appearances beginning in 2011, the season they rebranded and moved into Children’s Mercy Park. He won his first trophy with SKC in 2012 with the first of his three U.S. Open Cup titles, the most of any active MLS head coaches at the start of the 2025 season. He followed that up with the MLS Cup in 2013, the first time the club won the prize since he was a player in Kansas City in 2000, as well as two more Open Cup titles in 2015 and 2017.
SKC missed the playoffs three times in between the 2019 and 2024 seasons, with their form sliding last season. They finished 14th in the Western Conference and won just eight games as things became stale in Kansas City and have yet to win a game so far in 2025.
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Vermes’ defining longevity
When Vermes succeeded Onalfo as SKC’s head coach, the Adam Sandler-starrer Funny People won the U.S. box office, “LoveGame” on Lady Gaga’s debut studio album The Fame was the top song on the Billboard charts and MLS phenom Cavan Sullivan was weeks away from being born. Such was Vermes’ longevity in Kansas City, which is just as much a defining feature of his tenure as was the trophy haul.
He holds a crucial spot in the club’s history after coaching 609 games across all competitions, more than half the fixtures in SKC’s 30 year history. Vermes easily has his MLS counterparts beat in terms of being the league’s longest-tenured head coach, his 17 seasons on the touchline for SKC are seven more than anyone else. He ranks third in MLS for 511 regular season matches as a head coach, and won 251 games in total as the SKC boss.
Vermes ranks 40th all-time for longest-tenured coaches in soccer history, though coaching spells are rarely this long in any sport. If Vermes’ 17 season tenure was in the NBA, he would rank behind only the San Antonio Spurs’ Gregg Popovich and the Utah Jazz’s Jerry Sloan on number of seasons alone.
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