MLS Weakly, February 5, 2023: Keeping Up with the Joneses, Hoping They Have a Limp

Isn't this what I'm doing here?

The good news: 22 men finally kicked a ball in anger yesterday morning.

The bad news: the Seattle Sounders lost to Egypt’s(?) Al-Ahly in the Club World Cup on an own-goal that pinged off a recycled shot. Basically, Al-Ahly put Seattle into the “murder box” – i.e., they pinned them in their 18 and Seattle couldn’t clear – just as Seattle has done to countless opponents over their better seasons. Will that specific manner of doom will prove to be an omen for the Sounders’ 2023? We’ll see...

It wasn’t a great game, honestly, and neither team wowed me. I thought Seatle played too conservatively, at least in the second half (the only half I saw, for the record), keeping too many dudes behind the ball in defense and committing too few in the attack and too rarely. Ah well, maybe MLS will make a stronger showing when it sends a better team...

...I kid, I kid. Between the time of year they play the Club World Cup and the opposition, I expect any MLS team that makes it to struggle, even in the play-ins.

And yet that wasn’t even the biggest news of the past week: the launch of Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass app last Tuesday kicked up a hell of a lot more chatter. People all over twitter wandered around the big, ol’ digital playground, picked up the toys and generally treated the whole thing like some communal unboxing. I’ll do the same at the tail-end of this post, if on just one feature, and thank gods the chintzy bastards gave me something to talk about between today and First Kick 2023. I’d rather they streamed preseason games too, but we only get what they serve us...and aren’t they all closed-door scrimmages, here, in 2023?

Then again, teams haven’t played that many preseason games as yet – and last week was pretty damn thin until yesterday’s games larded it up. To round up the points of interest so far:

The two most impressive results from the past week (and here's all of 'em, with recaps for each available) saw Orlando City SC beat Minnesota United FC 2-0, with new signing Martin Ojeda reportedly involved, and freshly-minted St. Louis CITY FC (never forget ALL CAPS) smack Inter Miami’s CF’s gob 4-0 – and, just to note it, Miami is winless in preseason and with a -7 goal differential (that’s zero scored and seven allowed). Colorado’s perfect preseason came undone courtesy of a 1-3 loss at Queretaro, while New York City FC finally earned “preseason points” (non-fungible) with yesterday’s 2-1 win at the Los Angeles Galaxy. Charlotte FC started the week brightly with a 3-2 win over DC United and ended it tolerably with a 1-1 draw against the Vancouver Whitecaps – and DC appears to have played Vancouver to another 1-1 draw the same day they lost to Charlotte and that’s weird, right, playing two games in one day?

It’s mostly stray stuff from there – e.g., Austin FC beating up El Paso Locomotive 5-0, Atlanta United FC failing to beat Chattanooga FC despite putting three goals past them (it ended 3-3) – because what can you really learn from an MLS team beating kids from the college down the road or even a collection of very talented children (e.g., the U.S. U-20s)? Preseason isn’t the main event, obviously, and it’s almost certainly less consequential than finding fresh and inventive legs for your local team’s roster before...what do you call it, the roster compliance deadline?

Turning to the two teams I follow, the Portland Timbers haven’t done much of that (they haven’t done much of anything; more on that later), but FC Cincinnati added young Colombian center back Yerson Mosquera – who they swiped him right from under Portland’s idle nose (dammit!)! – and they appear set to add another Colombian, right back Santago Arias. And, yes, it is...uncomfortable watching the Timbers sit/fart on their hands while Cincy bulks up its roster, not least because the latter finished three points higher than the former, not to mention in the 2022 playoff picture. The very straightforward logic of the situation only makes it more maddening:

Did your team do well last season?

If yes, standing pat makes more or less sense, depending on ambition; if no, it’s probably time to shop for some upgrades.

That goes double when the teams around you have done so. Now, because they’ve been quite bad and for a quite a while, I’m not inclined to overly sweat the San Jose Earthquakes bringing Carlos Gruezo back to MLS, but I'm keeping an eye on the Rapids ongoing rebuild with the addition of Australian left back Alex Gersbach and I don't like the rumors of Vancouver bringing Sergio Cordova back to the league one little bit. Moving to the East, Cincy fans may do well to keep the Pepto handy what with playoff perennials Red Bull New York signing Belgian forward Dante Vanzier as a DP (which hints at how much they rate him), or that Atlanta signed an experienced Peruvian center back (Luis Abram). I'd be completely remiss if I didn't mention the fun that people had with Orlando's latest signing, Dagur Dan, aka, "Dagger Dan" Thorhallsson, but, again, every season poses two complementary questions: how good is your team and how good are the teams them? It’s easier to keep up with the Joneses, after all, if they’re limping.

That question will get asked again and again over the 2023 season (and what will feel like again and again and again during July and August), and in a variety of ways. And it’ll get asked for the first time just 20 days from now, so let’s check in on the state of things for both FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers.

This Week All Up in Cincinnati
Cincy didn’t just add players this past week, they held on to a big, if potentially mopey one. Reports that the EPL’s (once great) Notttingham Forest dropped an offer for Brenner surfaced in the middle of the week only to slip back under the waves without leaving a ripple. I hereby freely admit that I’m more anxious about Brenner leaving than everyone else seems to be – the few takes I caught bordered on sanguine, honestly – but I think most Cincinnati fans would agree that it’s better to start the 2023 campaign with Brenner than without him. Better still, the delay gives Chris Albright time to make some calls, pull some strings and generally do the voodoo that he do(es) so well.

Put it all together – i.e., Brenner staying, the arrival of Marco Angulo, Mosquera and (potentially) Arias – and you get a solid argument for a solid 2023 for Cincinnati. Worst case, Brenner sours the locker room with a perpetual case of the Mondays (and a mysterious craving for lasagna), but full credit to all involved for at least putting in the work to add to last season’s haul of 49 points. Ooh, one little sidebar:

“’Yerson is a tremendously talented young player that has a real desire to defend,’ Cincinnati general manager Chris Albright said in a release. ‘His size, pace, and technical ability will be a great fit for our group, and we’re delighted to welcome him to the club.’”

90% of everything said about an incoming player is pure boilerplate, isn’t it? Then again, at least they have new players to talk about...

This Week All Up in Portland
“I think that the players learned a lot, individually and as a group. For this season, we are coming with this different mentality, with an idea that there are some things that we have to do better. And from the first day, I can tell you that the players came in a great mental stage, with unity, and [were] ready to be able to play.”
- Giovanni Savarese, from Timberlean'sreport on a Timbers' presser

Seriously, why ask these people a single question. Distilled pap, I tell you...

I, like you, hope that Evander exceeds even my most doe-eyed, that glass is totally fucking full expectations, but, as the Timbers head off to their own, lesser version of Coachella, gray clouds are already crowding the sky. Per the preseason round-up posted on OregonLive, David Ayala will be out for two months as he recovers from knee surgery, Claudio Bravo will miss the next two weeks thanks to a hamstring issue, and Portland won’t get all of Felipe Mora until mid-season (when, in the best of all possible worlds, he’ll feel fresh as a new signing). The same report notes that Sebastian Blanco is “steadily progressing” from the chronic knee pain that suffocated his 2022 season and, dear God, tell me that more bad news won’t jump out of the damn bushes between today and February 25.

If you’re feeling more optimistic about the Timbers 2023, I’d love a very large serving of what you’re having. Given the way Portland struggled on both sides of the ball in 2022, the fact that some attacking pieces won’t come online until something like July - and Blanco may not come online at all – casts some tangible doubt on the idea that the offense will improve enough to cover for a shaky defense that, 1) got at most half an upgrade (aka, Juan David Mosquera, who met yet prove to be a full upgrade) and 2) Diego Chara appears fated to carry for yet another season, only with another year’s worth of miles in his legs. Moreover, and his injury notwithstanding, Ayala was visibly not up to speed last season, which leaves nothing more to do than pray he gets there this season and that Yimmi Chara learns that it’s perfectly okay to shoot the (goddamn) ball outside of bicycle kick scenarios. I hope they prove me wrong, of course, of course, but...

The essence of "The Ritual."

That’s it for the soon-to-be on-field stuff, so let’s circle back to the big, (so far) frictionless world that is AppleTV’s MLS app. Like a lot of people, I spent some time poking around the porn (to clarify, I refer to everything that isn’t an actual game as “porn”) and, like a lot of people, I came away impressed. And I dug into one specific series – the “The Ritual” video shorts for each team (I linked to the series there, fwiw, because I'm not about to link to every episode mentioned below). For next week’s Weakly (after which I’ll be taking one week off), I’ll pass on some thoughts on another section of the AppleTV playground, but the Ritual series has its charms.

Some were better than others, obviously, and you have to think how much of that turned on the quality of the marketing departments that produced them. Here, it pains me to admit that I found Cincy’s clip (“The Bailey”) less inspired than the thing it featured (i.e., the game-day procession to the stadium) and that Orlando handled their overly busy list of traditions smarter than the Timbers handled their “’Member Berry” grab-bag, which came off as a cheap appeal to the good ol’ days, i.e., before the scandals got mom and dad fighting over who gets the kid (aka, the team).

Some personal favorites include Atlanta’s (“Golden Spike”), Minnesota’s (“Wonderwall”) and Austin’s (“Heartbeat of Austin”), and even Seattle’s was all right now that I know the story behind “Jingle Bells, but my honors for best go to DC United’s “The Chico Stand” for centering an OG fan and the concept/presentation of the Colorado Rapids’ “Oar-igin Story.” And who thought Colorado would have one of the league’s cooler, quirkier traditions? Hats off, regardless.

It was fun seeing the different approaches teams took for their little elevator pitches – for instance, both Sporting Kansas City and Vancouver spoke to rituals they created to celebrate their fans (SKC’s “The Sway” is sweet, but the ‘Caps “Stand By Me” is more poignant), while Houston made their story about the city by explaining where “Hold It Down” came from (related, I’ll never make fun of that hashtag again). Some were merely tolerable (e.g., Toronto FC’s “Legend TFC”), while only a few were outright bad – e.g., Columbus Crew SC’s “Jackhammer” (oof) and the New England Revolution’s “Scarves Up” – but only one team achieved the remarkable feat of producing a pitch that was actually depressing. Then again, who else could do that but Chicago Fire FC, who’s “Ring of Fire” feature took the bold step of reminding fans just how long it has been since they’ve been reliably competitive? Frank Klopas did his best with the material, but egads.

At any rate, they’re fun little videos and most of them are pretty short...well, except San Jose’s, which takes seven-plus minutes to tell a story that could have been better told in three. Like the rest of them.

I’ll be going through the team profiles for the next Weakly. Till then...