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No sporting director, no coach, no proven answers.

It’s been a maddening cycle — one that sometimes felt like a tailspin, while other times feeling like there wasn’t any progression at all. And so, with its latest head coach already sacked this summer, club CEO Carolyn Kindle fired sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel on Monday.

Gosh, we just went through all of this, right? A spry sporting director came in and built and built and built — year after year after year — yet it proved, ultimately, to be an unstable and unsustainable construction. So now a new boss will take over and, yup, build and build and build.

Meanwhile, the passionate fans in their City Red gear will cheer and hope and, along the way, pay a bunch of money for tickets and concessions and everything else it takes to properly invest in modern sports fandom.

Pfannenstiel is a smart soccer mind and a fun fellow to chat with. He worked crazy hours and yearned for St. Louis success. But even as City SC leapfrogged to No. 13 in Major League Soccer spending, the team still stunk.

Yes, Lutz’s inaugural team took MLS by storm in with its storm-like pressing style that, for much of the season, was relentless and rewarding. The boys finished first in the Western Conference — what a ride that was — but lost in the first round of the playoffs.

That second season was a rough reality check — City finished third-to-last in the West. And this third year, St. Louis is second-to-last at 14th, just two points ahead of cellar-dweller LA Galaxy.

And while you can point out optimism with to the exceptional play of City2, the team equivalent to Triple-A in baseball, City SC was struggling in seemingly every other soccer department (OK, maybe not in goal but everywhere else). We can play what-if with injuries, but so can half of the teams. And City allowed a mind-blowing amount of goals late in matches this season. This wasn’t a mentally tough team. And so, here we are.

It’s fair to point out that St. Louis isn’t the only expansion club that got rid of a sporting director in the first few seasons. Cincinnati and Austin are examples of clubs that did the same thing — Cincinnati is second in the Eastern Conference at this point.

But right now, St. Louis City SC is at a crossroads. They don’t need me to tell them that the next hire is critical (the new sporting director will then hire the new coach). There is a lot of goodwill toward this club, but a little bit slips with each blown win or tie.

And the team’s new identity must be, well, identified.

And what’s frustrating is: It could take some time.

Lutz was hired in 2020 and fired in 2025. And now, over at City SC headquarters, they’re talking about 2030.

Club president and general manager Diego Gigliani told Tom Timmermann of the Post-Dispatch that “a five-year cycle is a very reasonable amount of time to give a sporting director to come in, set a strategy and execute toward that strategy to be able to assess results. ... As we set our sights on the next five-year cycle for this club, we need to think about do we have the right people in the right roles. ...

“It’s not a short-term decision-making process with a sporting director; we did not assess on the basis of the last two or three weeks of wins and losses. That’s not how these sporting director decisions get taken. It is looked at over the medium term, and we look at results, we look at performances and we look at overall organizational maturity and way of working. We look at all those things, we project it to 2030, and we feel it’s the right moment to start a new chapter.�

In the final pages of the previous chapter, we learned a little more about what the City SC ownership is thinking. During the final summer transfer window, City SC nabbed center back Fallou Fall and forward Sangbin Jeong — and Pfannenstiel had to pay transfer fees for the footballers. For a while there, City SC didn’t acquire players who had transfer fees, but in these two recent instances, City wrote a couple big checks. Fall cost St. Louis $3.8 million, while Jeong cost $1.6 million.

So this is a light of optimism going forward.

But the journey, which feels like it’s been going for a while, is just beginning (again).

As I write this column, I’m in the press box at Busch Stadium before the Cardinals-Pirates game. Makes me wonder which club will return to the postseason first, the transitioning Cards or City SC?

Playing in October, for both clubs, seems bleak — and I’m not just talking about 2025.