The Owner's Tab

Anthony Precourt has been in the Austin FC chair since the club's founding in 2021. As of May 19, 2026, he has also presided over the departure of two sporting directors and two head coaches. The people he hired are gone. He remains.

That is the arithmetic. What it means is the question Central Texas sports coverage has largely set aside while chasing the next hire.

How the Model Was Supposed to Work

When Austin FC entered MLS, Precourt structured the front office around a sporting director model. The idea was coherent: put a football expert between ownership and the coaching staff, give that person authority over roster and personnel decisions, and insulate the club from the kind of reactive ownership that produces instability.

The first sporting director was Claudio Reyna, a hire with genuine soccer credibility. Reyna departed in 2023. Precourt then brought in Rodolfo Borrell, whose résumé included time at Manchester City, Liverpool, and Barcelona. For a club still working toward its first Western Conference title, it was an ambitious appointment.

Borrell made one head coaching hire in his tenure: Nico Estévez, most recently fired by FC Dallas. The choice drew skepticism, in part because Borrell had suggested publicly that coaches "you wouldn't believe" had expressed interest in the role. The gap between that framing and the eventual announcement followed Borrell for the remainder of his time at the club.

Eighteen Months

Estévez's record was uneven in ways that complicated any clean narrative. He guided Austin FC back to the MLS Cup Playoffs in his first season and reached a U.S. Open Cup final. Those results were real.

The 2026 season moved in a different direction. Austin fell to Louisville City FC — a USL Championship club — in the first round of the U.S. Open Cup. On May 13, the club lost 5-0 at San Diego FC, an expansion side in its first MLS season. Three days later, Austin lost 2-1 at home to Sporting Kansas City, which held last place in the Western Conference at the time. The record through 14 games stood at 3 wins, 5 draws, and 6 losses.

On the morning of May 18, Precourt fired both Estévez and Borrell before noon. Lead assistant Davy Arnaud was named interim head coach for the May 23 match against St. Louis City. The sporting director position was left open.

Precourt's statement read: "We believe this team can compete for a playoff position, and given our results thus far, a change is necessary to achieve our goals."

The statement described the outcome. It did not describe the sequence of decisions — roster construction, the coaching hire, the scouting overhaul Borrell had promised — that produced it.

The Continuity Question

Davy Arnaud has now outlasted two head coaches as an assistant. That is a notable fact about institutional continuity at Austin FC, though what it reflects about decision-making above the coaching level is harder to read from the outside.

The club has framed the upcoming two-month MLS pause for the World Cup as a useful window for transition. The front office called it "a natural period to implement a transition." Whether that period produces a different kind of hire — or a different kind of accountability — is an open question.

What the published record shows is a pattern: each departure described as a reset, each hire described as a signal of ambition, each cycle ending with a press release from the owner explaining why the people he chose were no longer the right people. The sporting director model, designed to place football expertise between ownership and the bench, has now turned over twice without a public examination of how that model has actually functioned.

Precourt has been the one constant across both cycles. The coaching staff has changed. The sporting directors have changed. The food vendors at Q2 Stadium have changed — Taco Flats, Mighty Cone, and Kerbey Lane have all come and gone since the stadium opened, replaced by new entrants each season. The owner has not changed.

That is not, by itself, an indictment. Owners are supposed to outlast coaches. The question the record raises — and that Austin FC coverage has not yet pressed — is what Precourt's own role has been in the decisions that define the club's first five years, and what, if anything, he would do differently.