Guys, I've Met Someone: On a New Team, Swinging, and the Solution to Everything

Just 2015? No shit?

I’ve always prayed for this day, without believing it would arrive. At long last (fucking long, guys!) the much-fabled, oft-misunderstood Soccer Gods finally smiled on one of their longer suffering Jobs. (That’s me. I am Job. Or Gob. I hear some people do that.)

At various, yet shockingly consistent, and yet also virtually never wire-to-wire…um, years, since a severely misguided internet made it possible for every asshole (again, me) to write about Major League Soccer, without editing, never mind overseers, I have written about Major League Soccer. A three-four year stretch of me writing about the Portland Timbers in the lower leagues happened…and that might have two-three years, mind you. (And I can’t prove it either. Once I sour on a blog, I delete the motherfucker like I never knew it. Seriously, I am Cronos and I eat my children.) In most of those years, I tried to cover every part of whatever league I invested in most that season. That always ended with me overwhelmed, bummed, or jaded (in all honesty, it was jaded, like, 3/4 of the time) before the first ball rolled in the playoffs. Still, I could fake keeping up until, oh, 2010. Once expansion really kicked off…forget it. I’ve been gasping by Week 15, if not before, ever since. Even for the glory years with the condensed games.

That brings me to the miracle. Its name is FC Cincinnati, aka, the answer to my prayers and the solution to my problem. Also, the team that will join Major League Soccer in 2019.

If I haven’t mentioned that I was born in, and spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio, yes, I spent the first 13 years of my life in Cincinnati, Ohio. I once heard it said that Danny DeVito collects people from New Jersey, wherever he can find them; that’s me with people from Ohio, only the shy version of it. In other words, whenever I meet people from Ohio (or, sometimes, that general area of the Midwest, if mostly north of the Ohio River…um…), I quietly, but almost automatically love them. I left Ohio, basically, but it never left me. I’ll agree that identifying with a place you almost never visit doesn’t make much sense, but I still rarely go a week without thinking about Ohio. And which one of us is crazy, because I don’t think it’s me.

Close observers might have caught the pronoun I slipped in front of “Portland Timbers” up above. Yes, that was “my.” I stand by it. I love my Portland Timbers and I moved to Portland, Oregon not once, but twice in my life. I ultimately settled here  and that was very intentional. I love Portland. And yet I still look at real estate prices in Cincinnati from time to time…shit would blow the mind of a Portlander....

I don’t know why I’m going into this. Who hasn’t accepted “swinging” by now (as in “to swing, as in me and Dot are swingers”) in (select parts of) the culture. That’s all I’m doing here. That’s all to say, Daddy loves you very much, but he has two teams now. In all seriousness, the actual miracle in this is that, after years of taking on more than I could ever possibly stomach (also, insecurity and compulsion mix together to make a powerful punch), FC Cincinnati joining the league gives me two teams that I can legitimately follow - as in, I have only two things to keep track of, HOLY SHIT!!!

Well, that was confession time. Now….I know nothing about FC Cincinnati, I mean besides the fact they play in Cincinnati and they’re about to join MLS. That’s it. Anyway, kids, let’s meet the other partner. Her name is Chastity, and you wouldn't believe where I met her...

First things first: I am equal parts thrilled and proud to read this (from ESPN’s report on the team’s launch):

“FC Cincinnati had made major strides toward constructing a new stadium in recent months, winning approval from the Cincinnati city council to cover $34.8 million in infrastructure costs for the team's otherwise privately financed 21,000-seat, $212.5 million venue in the West End neighborhood.”

Before going on - and this will be my last reference to my personal connections to Cincinnati…well, in this post - but I had to Google whatever the hell the “West End neighborhood” is. Full disclosure, I grew up in Glendale, Ohio, a suburb. Still, I’ve picked up enough about the neighborhoods around the University of Cincinnati and the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood during that time and since to think, yeah, seems like a good spot. And that’s the split I like to see on funding stadiums for professional teams (not everyone is happy). Anyway, back to the plot…

…in which, now that I see how quickly this team got slapped together, I’m 1) a little disturbed at the arriviste vibe of the whole enterprise (est. 2015? srsly? Public spending argument….strengthening), and 2) genuinely impressed by that stack of attendance records. Whether or not the whole thing amounts to a Potemkin soccer team, they pulled together one hell of a convincing illusion. That’s enough history, time to dig into the now.

Hey…currently first place in the United Soccer League’s Eastern Conference standings, and even with Portland Timbers 2 on points. (Scroll down and, O God, you made them equal in this precise moment, and for that I rejoice and feel your blessing (if this feels tacky, look, I started with a “miracle” vibe; just sticking to the bit)). I just noticed that the Western Conference of the USL has a bit of an edge on its Eastern Conference; T2 are 4th in the West, behind Sacramento Republic FC, Phoenix Rising FC and a disturbingly near-perfect Real Monarchs SLC…8 points dropped from 39…da-amn. At any rate, the team’s current record stands at 7-3-2, with a +6 goal differential and…shit, how does this damn thing work? Does this damn thing work? How many goals scored by each team, how many…shit, never mind. I’ll add it up. OK, for FC Cincy, that’s 22 goals scored, and 16 goals against in 13 games, about 1.7 goals scored per game, and 1.2 against. Nice.

After that, I went through all the highlights the team’s official website links to, plus a reasonable pile of the match recaps. (On that, I need to have a word with the Customer Care Department, because the sentence, “Click here to read the full match recap,” appears at the bottom of those match highlights, only without a link to the match recap, like, a lot of the time.) Because these are almost exclusively goals-only highlights, I didn’t get much more than a semi-reliable repetition of names - e.g., Emanuel Ledesma (who’s got to be close to points leader for the team; five goals, seven assists), Danni Konig, with a little Kenny Walker (un, helluva goal, kid), Corben “The” Bone, and Nazmi Albadawi sprinkled in, along with a dash of Jimmy McLaughlin and Emery Welshman (first pro hat-trick in this one!). (For what it’s worth, the Player Stats page on FC Cincinnati’s website contains remarkably rich, yet somehow publicly-encrypted data on each player. It’s like Ancient Sumerian, once you get the hang of it.)

I don’t feel remotely qualified to comment on any of the above beyond noting this: FC Cincinnati does reasonably well attacking up the gut, though most of it looks like it comes from a combination of pressure and transition, especially through the channels between fullbacks and the centerbacks. Better still, their players got good clear looks on a healthy number of their 22 goals. That suggests they have the quality to carve good openings.

The better news is that, now armed with ESPN+, it looks like I’ll be able to catch a lot of FC Cincinnati’s games, if not all of them, for the rest of their 2018 season; if nothing else, I know I can catch the next two - against North Carolina, at Cary, NC (btw, the locals had an acronym for Cary, at least when I lived there: “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees,” a masterpiece of the genre), and in Cincinnati (where, again, they draw reliably good crowds) against Bethlehem Steel. I’ll confess that I know USL teams about as well as I know the Maltese 3rd Division, but I can state, for the record, that Cincy tied Bethlehem 1-1 on the road earlier this season, and they kicked North Carolina pretty good (four times, in fact) in Cincinnati only a few weeks ago.

In other news, I just read that Cincinnati travels remarkably well (6-1-1 on the road), and that they’ve only been shut out a total of 3 times this season, twice to Louisville City FC, the team that accounted for two of Cincinnati’s three losses on the season. (The other came in last night’s loss to Minnesota United in the U.S. Open Cup.) I have no idea how all this well level up to Major League Soccer next season - but that’s also what I’m going to find out by watching the rest of FC Cincinnati’s 2018. And, if this whole thing pans out - and, honestly, I feel really good about this plan - I’ll be tracking the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati until I can no longer, whether by will or old age. Unless MLS decides to slot Cincinnati into the Western Conference - which they could, and this is my preemptive “FUCK OFF!” in the event they do (Guys, I need this!) - having two teams to follow means contact with two other MLS clubs every weekend and that, when supplemented by low-hanging MLS content (e.g. Matt Doyle’s weekly stuff, power rankings, MLS Rewind, etc.) feels like a decent foundation for understanding MLS, saints, and all the choirs of angels by praised, thy servant has been rewarded and, right now, this is Hell, right? I mean, I’m already in Hell and I just don’t know it, but this is it, this is Hell, oh my God, why did I see that contract? I mean, the man had a fucking goatee, smelled of sulphur. Wow, just wow.

In closing, I just learned that my new team’s nickname is “The Orange and Blue,” and I’m good with that. Bright, and I’ve always been a fan of Dutch artistry (the arrogance, less so; maybe the blue balances that out? Yin embraces Yang?) Barring an Atlanta United FC-level launch, I don’t expect FC Cincinnati to roar out of the gate when they join MLS next season. Unless they’ve got a bunch of gems-not-yet-named on that roster, I don’t know any names on that roster besides Michael Lahoud, The Bone, and I’ve convinced myself that good things have attached to Tomi Ameobi and Emery Welshman. Wasn’t that last guy a high draft pick, or something? (Yeah, it was something. Shit.)

At any rate, my first FC Cincinnati post-game post will go up this weekend, with one more to follow the weekend after. Looking forward to this experiment like I haven’t looked forward to much about soccer in a while. This feels doable…till Saturday. Well, probably Sunday for this bunch…