Angel City Sporting Director Mark Parsons says he had a handful of key attributes in mind for the club’s new head coach when he set out to narrow down the pool of candidates.
“[We wanted] a coach that has a dominant style of play,” he says, “who wants to create chances in the opponent’s half, who wants to defend in the opponent’s half and press aggressively.”
Second, the club was looking for what he calls “a teacher—someone who can teach, improve, and grow the individual while also teaching, improving, and growing the development of the team.” And not just a teacher, but “someone who has won through teaching, through the development of players, through the development of the team.”
Next, “what is always going to be crucial to Angel City, what has been crucial for me wherever I am, is we wanted a really good person,” he continues. “Someone who cares about people, who cares about the person as well as the athlete, who is going to be open, collaborative, humble in the work environment.”
Finally, they had to be aligned with Parsons and the rest of the technical staff in being focused on the club’s medium-to-long term success. “Coaches get judged every weekend and it's become a short-term world,” he said. “If you look at a hundred coaches and ask, ‘who over the last three years has made their teams consistently better?’ It’s maybe five or 10. It’s such a small category.”
Alex Straus, who will coach his first game with Angel City this weekend after closing out his tenure with Bayern Munich, ticked all those boxes.
“When it came to the things around football and leadership and methodology—all the things where we were very clear on what we wanted—I didn't know the profile fit existed when I started the process,” said Parsons. “After meeting [the candidates], no one else was close.”
For Straus, the choice was easy. “There’s so much excitement around the club,” he says. “A lot of great people have done great work here, but haven’t fulfilled the club’s potential yet. I want to be part of that process of taking the next step and seeing if we can achieve something on the pitch.”
Straus, who arrived in LA earlier this week, spent his whole career before Angel City in his native Norway and, for the last three years, in Germany. With Bayern, he won three league titles in a row, ending his tenure this season by winning the DFB-Pokal cup and the DFB-Supercup alongside the league championship—a first in club history.
After wrapping up his playing career at his hometown club, IL Varegg in Bergen, Norway, in his mid-30s, Straus stayed on as a coach. “I went in as assistant coach and never had thoughts about going further than that,” he says. “I just wanted to be with the guys and in the environment.”
After six months, the club parted ways with its head coach, and Straus was appointed to lead the club for the rest of the season. “I said, ‘Okay, I can finish the season, and then you need to find a new head coach, because this is not for me,’” he remembers. “I had coached my kids, but that’s all. And then we did quite well, and they asked me if I could stay on.”
Straus stayed on at Varegg for three years before accepting a job as an assistant at Nest-Sotra, a men’s second-division club that was promoted to the top division in his first season there. From there, he worked his way through the ranks in Norway in both men’s and women’s soccer.
In answer to Parsons’s point about wanting a coach who hadn’t just coached winning teams, but built them, Straus spent two stints at IL Sandviken, leading them from a ninth-place finish in 2017 to fourth in 2018, his first season there. After a short period with the youth national team, he returned in 2020, coaching the team to consecutive first-place finishes in 2021 and 2022 before leaving for Bayern.
Straus says he sees parallels between Angel City and his previous jobs in the women’s game: “It's a little bit of a similar project, which I like very much,” he says. “I want to build something, but it needs potential. It cannot be a wasteland [to start]. I think there is a lot of will and a lot of people who want this club to be successful.”
When it comes to coaching philosophy, Straus says “I believe in understanding the human first, and then the footballer. I think that you cannot separate those things, and the connection between human beings is a big, big, big factor for success or not being successful.”
He’s also aligned with Parsons and the rest of the staff in being oriented towards the medium and long term. “We cannot make decisions that will help us in the short term but hurt us in the long term,” he says.
Straus stresses that everyone has a role to play in that success. “Nobody wants us to succeed except us,” he says. “We need to stick together—both inside the club and the supporters. It’s the 20,000-plus people in the stadium against the rest of the world, because the rest of the world wants us to struggle, and we want to be successful. I like that.”