Sebastián Driussi is a luxury player on a team that still, even today, needs necessity players.
When Driussi came over to Austin FC from Zenit in the summer of 2021, he was an unknown quantity to Austin fans, but it was evident even in his limited time on the field that season he was the team’s best player.
And in 2022, he had an MVP-quality campaign with 22 goals and seven assists — a goal contribution every 99 minutes — to lead Verde to a second-place finish in the West and a Western Conference Final. Everything seemed to work for the first 27 matches of the season, culminating with a 4-1 home win over LAFC that remains, two and a half years later, the club’s apogee.
But even then, with Diego Fagundez having a career year as a wide playmaker, and Maxi Urruti having his best statistical year since his 2017-2018 peak, cracks were beginning to show. Austin lurched to a 1-4-2 run to close the season, which included a playoff-clinching win against Real Salt Lake thanks to Moussa Djitté’s best game ever, and a MVP-clinching 3-0 Nashville loss which saw eventual winner Hany Mukhtar score two exclamation point goals late to turn a 1-0 match into a rout.
During that time — in which it seemed opponents were catching on to how to thwart Driussi and slow the rest of Austin’s offense down — Felipe Martins was chirping at media in a move that I think was meant to be motivational, but led me to write an open letter to him (and, by extension, to the rest of the team) that encapsulated the collective late-season frustration fans felt with how far off their play was falling, exemplified by a 3-0 loss to the Sounders immediately following the Nashville loss.
You had a chance to clinch a playoff spot, to vanquish an MLS giant that’s been on the ropes for weeks now, get three points closer to your season-long goals, and awaken from a slump that has all your fans concerned.
Instead, we got a lackluster performance that your own coach called “disappointing.” He said, at the risk of sounding negative, that the team has lost some of its “luster and bite” over this recent stretch. You’ve now lost your last three matches to potential playoff teams by an 8-1 margin. In losing last night to the reigning CCL champs, who no one wants to see in the playoffs, you opened the door to them getting right back into the playoff race.
And this was Austin’s good season.
When it went south
2023 started with original sporting director Claudio Reyna quiet-fired from the club under a cloud of scandal involving then-USMNT coach Gregg Berhalter, and with head coach Josh Wolff attempting to remake the offense to allow Driussi to be heliocentric once again.
