Bruce Arena: “I’m not going to miss it to be honest with you”

The 2022 season is almost over for New England Revolution fans and this go around fans won’t be dreading the end.

After winning the Supporters’ Shield, New England’s 2022 season was an utter failure. The team was knocked out of Concacaf Champions League epically and dropped the most points from a winning position in MLS history.

Fans aren’t the only ones who will be happy to put the 2022 season in the rearview mirror. Head coach and sporting director Bruce Arena won’t miss this season.

“I’m not going to miss it to be honest with you,” Arena said. “Whether I’m happy about it is another thing, but I look forward to us rebounding in 2023. I’ve experienced a lot of good teams in my coaching careers, so when you have a year that’s not the kind of year you want to have, you can’t look back and start pointing fingers or being disgusted. You have to realize it’s part of it and the fact that I’ve been fortunate to be with a lot of good teams as well. I told the team at the beginning of the year, this season was going to be a lot harder than they thought and a lot of them have not experienced success to any great degree and probably didn’t know how to handle coming off a successful 2021, so that hurt us as well. So, listen, it’s all part of it. We’ll move on from here and I’m pretty confident we’ll have a better 2023 season.”

While three points are up for grabs on Sunday against the Chicago Fire, New England has nothing to play for in terms of making the playoffs. Still, Arena wants to end the season on a high note.

“Well, it’s different, but our approach for the last game is to try to win,” he said “I think despite the record this year, we tried to do that in the previous 33 games, so we’re not going to change that. I actually look forward to the game. I think over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten closer to having a full roster and that’s good to see and we can see a few things that will help us as we move into 2023. There are a number of our players that haven’t had the chance to play on a consistent basis, so we’ll get to see some of them on Sunday for the last time and that will help us figure out some of our planning for next season.”

So don’t feel bad if you want to forget that the 2022 season happened, you surely aren’t alone.