Sweeney: Friedel wants mentality change in locker room, but really, it starts in the front office

FOXBOROUGH — Now, we’re getting somewhere. Now, we’re getting real criticism about the Revolution.

No, the criticism’s not coming from Blue Level, where we can only write “they blew another lead and dropped another set of points” so many times before you know how we’re going to write it. No, it’s not coming from the Twitter denizens on the hashtag. It’s certainly not coming from either of the two Boston sports radio stations, neither of which have a clue about soccer.

(Quick aside: Pop quiz — how many of you think any of them were watching the Revs and Portland Saturday night instead of the Sox game, or Notre Dame-Michigan? A show of hands will do.)

It’s coming from someone who sees the players day in and day out, someone a lot closer to the situation than you, me, and every Tom, Dick, or Harry with an Internet connection and an opinion.

But we have to ask: will it matter in the long run?

Revolution manager Brad Friedel has spoken about the club’s mentality a lot over these last two months, and he did it again after The Boys In Blue dropped points to Portland on Saturday night, a 1-1 draw which saw New England — and stop me if you’ve heard this before, folks — failed to defend a simple flippin' set piece.

How simple was it? My grandmother is nearly 87 years old, in a wheelchair. She could have stopped it. But I digress...

The failure to get three points now has the Revolution at nine consecutive matches — 63 days and counting as of Sunday morning — without claiming all three points. In that time, The Boys In Blue have claimed a total of three points.

Nine matches. 27 total points to be taken. Three have been taken, all via draw. 0-6-3 since the beginning of July.

And let me tell you something: even though it’s not in his character to call out the players (at least not by name) publicly or to show anything not resembling a calm demeanor, the last two months looks like it’s getting to Friedel. The lack of truly positive results are getting to him, and as we all know, there’s really no way out of it.

The reason? The Revs are a classic Old Mother Hubbard team, with no great stars in the cupboard. No one who can dig the club out of this funk is there on this roster.

“Befuddled? Yeah. Disappointed? Yeah,” Friedel said about being in this position, which is still, remarkably, in seventh place in the Eastern Conference. “But we’re also learning. Learning a lot about the players, learning a lot about what’s happened here the last few years. Learning the mentality about the players.

“We want winners. I’ve said it many times, and we’ll have winners here. That’s how it’s going to be. The staff and myself won’t accept things of this nature for long. Once you have your squad together, you persevere through the season, and then ultimately you’ll change personnel come the next season and we’ll aim to be better.”

There’s only one issue with this, gaffer: the Revolution have been in this mess for a while, yes. The prior regime that allowed this loser mentality you speak of to seep into the floorboards and the walls of the soccer side of Patriot Place has been gone for nearly a full 12 months. It’s like black mold, though, and the only way to get rid of it is to remove all the drywall, the studs, and maybe even the joists, too, before one can properly re-build a house.

Or in this case, a sports team.

“I told the players to their face, every single one of them, they’re playing for their contracts,” Friedel said. “Absolutely. And we’re coaching for our contracts. That’s professional sports.”

When asked if he has the right tools in order to succeed in Major League Soccer, Friedel gave a rather coy answer: “We don’t know, we’re still learning. We have eight games (left). You go on an eight-game unbeaten run in this league, which we or anyone else is fully capable of doing. You never know. We’ll talk after 34 games. But if we don’t make the playoffs, if we’re not successful, there will be changes. If we make the playoffs and we’re successful, there’ll be less changes. That’s normal.”

And there’s only one problem with that, gaffer: you can make all the changes you want — hell, I gave you a list of players that you can get rid of back on Aug. 10 — but unless they are Tom Brady-like, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett-like, and David Ortiz-like of the soccer world instead of the normal Route 1 panhandlers this front office picks up, we will still have the same results in 2019, and 2020, and 2021.

One of the reasons why the team is this way is because of poor scouting, and poor player acquisition. Over the last few years, the Revolution have not had a genuine star walk into that dressing room and truly lift the team to the playoffs year after year, getting closer to the goal of winning a title. We cannot count Jermaine Jones in 2014, because that was via a blind draw. The front office didn’t have to lift a finger to get him, and if Jones can be believed, MLS orchestrated that (the Revs refuted that in February).

Kei Kamara? Sure, he scored 12 goals in 2015. Great. They got to the playoffs that year. Fantastic.

They didn’t get to the playoffs with him on the roster in 2016, nor did they in 2017. Let’s try again.

Who else since the end of 2011? Designated player Jerry Bengston? Nope. Juan Agudelo? Nope (remember, he signed his pre-contract with England’s Stoke City after the 2013 season and came back to New England before 2015; he hasn’t scored more than eight goals in a season in Foxborough). Andy Dorman? Nope. Jose Goncalves? Okay, you have me there... but to a point.

Teal Bunbury? At 11 goals in 2018, but he’s tapered off during this run of form. Geoffrey Castillion? You’re having a laugh. Xavier Kouassi? Spent more time in the trainer’s room than on the pitch.

Krisztian Nemeth? Claude Dielna? Femi? Nope, nope, nope.

You see what I’m getting at here? As long as the same type of players are acquired — all of these busts — these same types of results will occur. That means more summer swoons. That means dropping points to friggin' Orlando. Or Vancouver. Or San Jose. Or letting LA Galaxy score two in second-half stoppage time.

Nothing’s really going to change … unless other changes a little higher up are made. And no, I'm not talking about necessarily replacing the bodies. I'm talking about changing the mentality of the front office, and the way they do business with other teams in MLS.

But then again, who really wants to come here?

Until that happens, the questions in the post-match press conferences will really be the same ones, over, and over, and over again.