Whitecaps are keeping their coach for MLS move

[Oldtimer]

The Vancouver Whitecaps have made it official – Teitur Thordarson will stay on to be their Major League Soccer head coach next season.
The 58-year-old former Icelandic international striker guided the Caps to a USL-1 league championship and a league final appearance in his first two seasons with the club and has the team in first place this season in the USSF D-2 NASL Conference.
The Whitecaps confirmed the appointment today at a news conference near BC Place stadium, which will be their MLS home after $563 million in renovations are completed sometime next year.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Whitecaps+retain+Teitur+Thordarson+head+coach+team +2011/3473933/story.html (http://www.vancouversun.com/Whitecaps+retain+Teitur+Thordarson+head+coach+team +2011/3473933/story.html#ixzz0yOb9G6UJ)

Makes sense to announce it now. Thordarson is unproven in MLS, but has a good record in D-2.

[ArmenJBX]

Hmm, could be a good move. I wonder who Thordarson will try to take from TFC seeing as he knows about us better then a new coach would.

[arbogast]

Good news.
I can continue calling them the Teitur Tots

[Alixir]

Good move for the Whitecaps.

[J .]

Thordarson will be a good for them. But I hope they do very poorly.

[Alixir]

Thordarson will be a good for them. But I hope they do very poorly.
I hope they do great...except when playing against us.

[Shway]

I hope they do great...except when playing against us.

add: And dont do better than us!

[zamperina]

Slightly off topic here, did the Whitecaps ever consider Empire Stadium as a viable option? I understand that the pressbox is terrible but pumping over 500 million to refurbish B.C. Place sounds ridiculous when Empire only needs maybe half that much to make it a great stadium.

[SilverSamurai]

Slightly off topic here, did the Whitecaps ever consider Empire Stadium as a viable option? I understand that the pressbox is terrible but pumping over 500 million to refurbish B.C. Place sounds ridiculous when Empire only needs maybe half that much to make it a great stadium.
Their owner (Kerfoot) owns the land and has the cash to fully fund his own stadium but the port authority won't let him build.

Makes the BC place refurb sound even worst, eh?

[Alixir]

add: And dont do better than us!
true that.

[Vindaloo]

Just wanted to point out some facts.....

-Empire Field isn't a permanent stadium. It's a temporary facility made completely of scaffolding, albeit costing $14m. It will be dismantled as soon as BC Place is open for sport next summer.

-Second, the location of Empire Field has never been a viable option due to it's location in the eastern part of the city. It doesn't have good transport connections compared to a downtown facility. Even Surrey or Richmond makes better sense.

-BC Place isn't just for the Whitecaps, or it it mainly a sports stadium. It's a convention centre/entertainment facility that is in use 200+ days out of the year. The renovation was going to happen regardless if the Whitecaps existed. It was cheaper for the gov't to spend $500m on a reinvention of the venue than rebuild a new one, which would cost well over $1b. The soil under BC Place is contaminated too costing millions to clean and possibly preventing redevelopment.

-The Caps are a temporary tenant at BC Place and have repeated many times that their plan is to build their own stadium, if that's the proposed Waterfront Stadium, which is tangled up in Port/federal bureaucracy, or somewhere else.

[Oldtimer]

He has matched Michel Platini goal for goal and studied at the feet of Arsène Wenger and Gérard Houllier.
But Teitur Thordarson's happiest hour came Thursday.
Sixty minutes before he was introduced as the inaugural head coach of Major League Soccer's Vancouver Whitecaps FC, Thordarson received a call that his fifth grandchild, a yet-to-be-named boy, had arrived in Norway. When he stepped before the cameras to sign a contract for Vancouver's 2011 debut season in MLS, the selectively stoic coach decided to take no chances and read from a prepared text.
“On a day like this,” he explained, “it's easy to get emotional.”


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/soccer/whitecaps-thordarson-all-choked-up/article1694841/

[rocker]

http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c141/PhJD/shitecaps.jpg