Dos Santos’ Future With Valour Will Be Decided This Month

After his third full season as Valour’s head coach, what comes next for Phillip Dos Santos is still undecided.

The Winnipeg boss has been with the side since taking over for Rob Gale back in September 2021, undergoing three full seasons at the helm afterwards. In those years Valour finished fifth in 2022 and dead last over the last two seasons, though they only missed playoffs by a one-match margin this year.

The Winnipeg Free Press reports that Dos Santos and Winnipeg Football Club’s Wade Miller have undergone multiple meetings to discuss a potential extension to his contract, which expires at the end of the year.

Dos Santos states that those talks took a positive tone, revealing that there was some realignment required for the intentions of the club and himself. Miller says that the parties will continue these discussions and ‘see where things ends up’ in a week or two.

“There’s a process to this and it takes some time,” Miller told the Winnipeg Free Press.

While Valour enjoyed a strong second half to the season, the renovation of Princess Auto Stadium this spring segued into five straight opening losses for the club. Primary defensive signing Tass Mourdoukoutas had a knock that kept him out at the start, though there were big silver linings like the form of left-back Themi Antonoglou, who led the league for assists and just got nominated for Defender of the Year.

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Dos Santos had been asking his side to show more fight as the season progressed, and by the end second half of the season they were actually one of the most in-form clubs. It came too little too late for 2024, however, with the last regular season game of the season seeing them not only eliminated, but drop down to last place.

The Winnipeg-based side is the only Canadian Premier League launch team who has yet to grace a postseason berth, having come closest in the 2020 Island Games season and the following year, where Dos Santos took over as the side’s general manager and head coach in the fall.

Despite the league standings, it’s clear that Wade Miller sees positives in what Dos Santos has been trying to build. Dos Santos, for his part, told us that he has always felt well-supported at the club.

“We’re not far off here,” Miller told the WFP. “There’s some pieces that need to be added, but what I’m looking for is how does that team compete. How did we compete right until the end, right? And you saw that in the second half of the season.”

It was only one year ago when Miller was pleading for patience from Valour FC supporters. The last match of this season was Fan Appreciation Night, but it certainly ended on a low with the loss to Cavalry coupled with the supporters’ groups taking down their flags in protest over a club dispute with a sign about the team’s opponents.

Dos Santos, who is still under contract through to the end of the year, says that he expects his core signings to remain in place for 2025, with Wanderers Notebook already reporting that Dante Campbell is expected back.

“For me, today, when I look at it, I say that for the club, we have put ourselves in a position where we are closer to succeeding than we were maybe 12 months ago, and that I have no doubt,” Dos Santos said on the matter, stating that by season’s end his club had reached a very high competitive level.

Whether that’s enough to keep the squad’s constructor on for another season, of course, remains to be seen.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

Header Image Photo Credit: John Jacques