Level Set 19, Nashville SC: The Responsible Younger Sibling

It's Shaun Cassidy, right?

What follows is a brief history of Nashville SC, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Nashville SC joined in the COVID season (2020), along with Inter Miami CF, but fate has made them the plain sister/unathletic brother to MLS's glamour boys. And they built their inaugural roster as if they'd had their fortunes told by an insurance agent. It started with anchoring the backline with Walker Zimmerman and the midfield with forever-MLS vet, Dax McCarty; the front-office honchos filled out those two lines with still more familiar, imposing figures – e.g., Dave Romney and Daniel Lovitz in defense and Anibal Godoy in midfield. When it came to the offense, Nashville spent both big and wisely on one player – Hany Mukhtar, a future (and deserved) league MVP (2022) – but spent a couple seasons looking to squeeze more production than other teams got out of MLS journeymen like C. J. Sapong, Teal Bunbury, or even Alex Muyl and Fafa Picault. That’s not to say they haven’t tried to level up with bolder signings – e.g., I thought they’d landed a secondary scorer with winger Randall Leal, alas – but pinching pennies on the attacking side may have been Nashville’s first tradition. Have they moved on since? One could make a case for Sam Surridge as a first step – they (reportedly) paid $6.5 million – but he also came over after a shaky season in the English Championship. (And who can see what the future holds?) If Nashville has demonstrated anything, it’s how far a good defense goes toward getting reliable results and/or into the playoffs. Apart from a slip in 2024, Nashville has qualified for the playoffs every season since joining MLS, if sometimes only as a wild card, which, again, doesn’t count around here*…also, yes, wait for it. Consistency ain’t so bad, of course, and a good defense is great, but a team has to have a little something on the other end to win tournaments – and one player can’t shoulder the entire attack. Call it illustration, call it a quirky bit of trivia, Nashville didn’t even make the MLS Cup quarterfinals in Mukhtar’s 2022 super-season.

San Jose Earthquakes (Oof) 4-1 Portland Timbers: I Believe the Term Is Jointly and Severally

The number of things that went wrong...

A team can survive a bad night at the office, being a step behind, connected only in sad little spurts, etc. A team cannot, however, survive a half dozen or so catastrophic defensive errors.

I call that kind of collapse a Five-Minute Fall Apart, even when they unfold over an 11-minute span. The rest of the game wasn’t much better and that’s the beginning of the story of how the San Jose Earthquakes rolled the Portland Timbers 4-1 tonight.

About the Game
The post started with a distinction between collective and individual failure for a reason: the Timbers committed sins both individually and as a team tonight, but they might have muddled through, even if just to a more respectable final score, had, say, both Finn Surman and Kamal Miller not bit like half-starved basses on the pieces of bait San Jose dangled before them. Their mistakes turned into the (borderline) sitters that put the game beyond Portland’s likely longest reach inside the first 30 minutes. Maxime Crepeau could have done better on both shots – the man’s head and feet didn’t seem to have an open channel, on the second goal more than the third, for me – and, as much as I get wishing James Pantemis was there, that does everyone the same amount of good as wishing Surman didn’t overcommit all the way into Nevada on the ball into Ousseni Bouda, or that Miller didn’t sprint all the way to the left sideline just to get nutmegged by DeJuan Jones. That’s the individual stuff and I feel confident arguing that three-minute span killed Portland’s chances at three points tonight. Moving on to the stuff that made even one point unlikely…

San Jose scored their first goal on their third (or fourth) run at the same attacking movement – i.e., push the ball outside to a runner sprinting to get around the Timbers’ widest defender on one side or the other, then pull it back to an attacking player who drifted into the space left open by a Portland backline that appears willing to collapse into its own damn goal. Seeing them come close mere minutes before the 90th on the same damn play felt like the right way to wrap up the game, but the problem was always the same. When San Jose pushed the ball wide, an Earthquake player curled off Portland’s defensive line and none of those players tracked that movement; Timbers midfielders – e.g., Joao Ortiz was the closest available option on their first goal – failed to run back to cover that run, leaving some quality attackers with time and the full width of the goal to fire at from around the penalty spot. Under those circumstances, whose man is that? The answer falls somewhere between everyone’s, no one’s and the first player to see him peel off. And that’s the, or maybe just a, collective failure.

San Jose Earthquakes Scouting Report: Lady or the Tiger, If With Less Risk

MLS's Bill Bellichek? (Nah, and thankfully.)

Am I short-changing this report a bit? A bit, maybe. I mean, what is there to analyze, really?

Can the San Jose Earthquakes win this? Of course, they can.

Is that likely?

The only argument they have for “yes” is that big, lonely win versus DC United. Bet the longest outdoor bar in America rocked that night…

To the game at hand…

San Jose Earthquakes
3-6-1, 10 pts., 20 gf, 19 ga (+1), home 2-3-1, away 1-3-0
Last…6, 7, 8 Results: LLLTWLLL
Strength/Location of Schedule
v MIN (0-1 L); v COL (1-2 L); @ CLT (1-4 L); v SEA (1-1 D); v DC (6-1 W); @ LAFC (1-2 L); v SKC (3-5 L); @ CLB (1-2 L)

Outside some blips that even their fans have forgotten, the Earthquakes have been terrible since 2012. A season that started with two lopsided wins and some too-soon, “say, is this a little Bruce Arena magic?” (pleading guilty, with reasons of lack of data and a need to fill copy) has been answered with, “nah, still San Jose.” The defense trots a mere three goals behind in the backwards race for the most goals allowed – though, in fairness, that field is surprisingly crowded – and that has killed them, but a cast of once-greats on a revival package tour has them hanging in MLS’s Western Conference at a lofty…11th. On the plus side, they’re just three points behind a Seattle team that has lost Jordan Morris for a chunky chunk of 2025.

Arena has stuck with the 3-5-2 over the past three games (a reliable example, probably?). The constants include the three players The San Jose Organization gambled on – Cristian Espinoza, Josef Martinez and Cristian Arango, with the latter in the front two and the former covering (most of) the right – and a reasonably steady cast of players that hint at why San Jose didn’t stick around at the top the West. They’re better with Daniel in the net (especially after a fragile performance by Earl Edwards, Jr. versus Sporting KC) and have started Dave Romney (always) and Rodrigues (a little less so) in the three at the back. I have a vague sense Bruno Wilson made them better, but he hasn’t played since DC, though, for what it’s worth, rookie Max Floriani filled in at Columbus last week and looked all right. Bruce hasn’t settled the midfield, cycling variously among Ian Harkes, Nico Tsakiris, Beau Leroux, Mark-Anthony Kaye, and, wow, Ahmal Pellegrino – who I’d guess Arena tried as a playmaker – but it mostly makes them porous through midfield*. Vitor Costa de Brito has started opposite Espinoza on the left in every game I looked at, but that’s recent (he has just 346 minutes on the season), so maybe that side improves. All that aside, there’s a very basic method to whatever damage San Jose can inflict, and I’ll get to that after confessing sources.

Portland Timbers Snapshot, Between Seattle and San Jose (Not Just Literally!)

Not just this, but, yes, this.

Hoping against all hope that it wouldn’t be a total waste of time, I just sat through the 15+ minutes of the Portland Timbers' 1-2 home loss – and third loss in a row – against their archrivals, the Seattle Sounders. In terms of my time, checking out of Providence Park early was the right call because, apart from a half-hopeful, yet better-than-average shot by Santiago Moreno, the Timbers continued to do the same jack-shit they’d done for most of Sunday afternoon.

Optimists will say the Timbers started strong, pessimists that they started lucky, but they still took an early lead (15th minute; woot!) when a Dario Zuparic long-ball found Jonathan Rodriguez’s chest, which found Felipe Mora’s foot, which found the goal. Portland attempted to play long early as if they had aerial threats to play to, more or less treating midfield with the disdain that coastal Americans treat the (who?) flyover states. It worked better than it had any reason to: Mora is great with his back to goal, but he’s less good battling center backs (or even most fullbacks) at head level; Rodriguez, on the other hand, has the ups and size to make something of the ol’ high/hopeful. As such, that became Portland’s Plan A until Seattle’s defense wised up and started double-teaming Rodriguez.

Plan A totally collapsed four minutes later when the Sounders equalized. And if the fucking watch started again after that, I still haven’t heard it ticking. Sure, the Sounders caught a break on their equalizer (ping!) and, sure, referee Allen Chapman called the game as if his job started and ended with proving he didn’t favor the home team (and, quite possibly, gets off on seeing Mora get shoved around), but today’s loss goes down as the Timbers’ most dispiriting in a season that, between disappointing performances and points pissed away, has worked over time to keep spirits low.

The Sounders hardly put on a clinic and that only makes things worse. Still, Seattle had the defining advantage of knowing how to move the goddamn ball around the fucking field, both expletives needed and deliberate. If I had to point to the sharpest distinction between the two teams, I’d point to the Sounders’ second, 50th minute goal. Sure, Raul Ruidiaz misses that nine times out of ten, but Seattle’s passing and off-the-ball movement had Portland’s defenders and midfielders chasing the last ball. The past two weekends of Timbers “action” makes a good case they’d forgotten how to do that and, so, what should have been two winnable games for any competent, mid-table Major League Soccer sub-franchise became the second and third of three straight losses.

Portland Timbers 2-1 San Jose Earthquakes: Dairon = Rocky

Eye of the Tiger. Also, wrong movie.

At some long-forgotten point during my long career of amateur commentating soccer career, I had an over-fondness for boxing metaphors. With that, let’s dip into the ol’ well once more...

Everyone who has seen even one Rocky movie knows one thing: the more often he gets punched in the head/face area, the better he fights. It might have happened in one movie, it might have happened in all of them, but I distinctly remember a sequence (or five) where Rocky barked something like “is that all you got? hit me harder” (think he said that to both Clubber Lang and Drako), and, as Rocky’s corner started to panic (though not Burgess Meredith, he died during Rocky II, I think), Pauly always said, “no, no, he’s getting madder,” or something like that. And that's how Rocky won the Cold War.

Rocky got punched in the head a whole bunch of fucking times tonight – the official stats counted seven times on target – and All That Jazz Ivacic parried them all away, one of them at dead-cert equalizer by the most active/dangerous player in the San Jose Earthquakes’ line-up, Cristian Espinoza (who, honestly, should take a bow; helluva game, sir; also, The Mothership stiffed us on stand-alone clips, but the highlights would be derelict if they didn't have a few of Ivacic's finest). That “hair-of-their-chinny-chin-chin” madness was more feature the bug in the Portland Timbers 2-1 win over San Jose. And, seeing that I begged for a win, I’m not going to scrutinize it overly...despite this being the same San Jose team I semi-officially wrote off (if halfway) in something I posted just this past Friday, and despite a record of failure that goes back to 1980-fucking-2, aka, when I was a bone-thin knee-high instead of the corpulent gentleman I’ve grown into today...

...deep breath...because that’s all I take these days. And, holy shit, where to begin?

As noted early in my game-thread for the match, San Jose came out nearly as hungry as Dairon Asprilla. After an opening 10 minutes where the teams seemed to punch even, San Jose clawed their way to higher ground and, for too much of the first half, tilted the field toward the Timbers goal. My sparse notes for the first half included phrases like, “SJ clearly not intimidated” and “POR D posture a bit low early,” and I feel like both of those held up pretty well. Whatever anyone thought of each of them, a succession of yellow cards to Portland players – Josecarlos Van Rankin (39th minute/deserved); Yimmi Chara (40th minute/richly-deserved) and Claudio Bravo (41; full disclosure, I didn’t see that one, so I’m not judging its validity) – pinpoints the moment of peak out-of-fucking-control for the Timbers. I think San Jose scored off the free-kick Bravo handed them (don’t honestly recall what I was doing), but, again, who set up the goal that bobbled its way to where Benjamin Kikanovic had nothing to do but stab it into an empty goal? Yep, Espinoza. Related, Ivacic deserved better from that bobble...

MLS Off-Season Weekly (12/14/19): Playa Moves, Painful Realities, and an Amendment

Amended, but neither forgotten nor invalidated.

On the theory it makes some kind of sense, I’m going to start this week’s review with the league-wide news before covering the latest on the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati…

…which also relates to the reality neither of them have made much news. And, for the same reason, this will be my last soccer post of 2019. I mean, why dry-heave out content (like this guy) when the world fails to provide? I’ll be back in 2020, like one of those plants you start to dump beer on, half hoping it’ll die, so you don’t have to deal with it. (Hat-tip to a long-time friend of mine, who once had a plant named “Worf” that, as he put it “thrived on neglect.” For the record, he did not, to my knowledge, ever water Worf with beer.) So, come along for this quick round-up of news from all ‘round Major League Soccer, starting with playa moves.

Playa Moves
As a public service, I want to start by directing people to one of The Mothership’s (aka, MLSSoccer.com) better off-season features: the one-stop transfer/needs tracker, which gives little thumbnails on every team in the league till they start kicking things again. It keeps a bird’s-eye view on comings and goings, but without reinventing the wheel every week (like some kind of dumbass). And, honestly, a good chunk of what’s happening right now aren’t really “moves” – e.g., DC United buying three more years of Bill Hamid, or even Atlanta United FC making Emerson Hyndman’s States-side return official – but they still count as both smart and good actions, even if they just reassert the Status Quo Ante First Kick 2020. That said, some are more interesting than others. For instance…

So…Michael Bradley, Huh?

Sometimes, details from a story gets stuck in your head, and it muddies something that comes later – e.g., that thing about Bradley’s option automatically renewing at $6.5 million per in the event he lead Toronto FC to victory last season. As such, when I read that TFC re-signed Bradley, my first thought was, “for $6.5 million, are you fucking stupid?” (Even my inner voice is an incredible potty-mouth.) They aren’t, of course. While full terms were (annoyingly) not disclosed, Toronto burned some TAM to keep Bradley around and freed up a DP spot in the same move – i.e., reportedly the same template the Portland Timbers will use to hold onto Diego Valeri. Full disclosure, I’m weird on Bradley, in that I see him as valuable and overrated in the same glance – to apply brute logic to the question, could Toronto find a better player for his position (my answer: yes) - but, I also believe that a team can hold a player for multiple reasons.

San Jose Earthquakes 1-0 FC Cincinnati: A Hopeless Hat Looking for a Hook

Not always productive...

Several key numbers express what happened in FC Cincinnati’s 0-1 loss to the San Jose Earthquakes last night. Among them?

When Major League Soccer’s tech/video stooges condense games, they typically find 20 minutes’ worth of worthwhile footage. The condensed game for San Jose v. Cincinnati ran under 15 minutes.

The ‘Quakes’ Cristian Espinoza got sent off for a (soft) second yellow card (on his part; make it worth the time, son) at the 51st minute. That left FC Cincinnati 40 minutes’ with a man up.

FC Cincinnati put three shots on goal, two of ‘em after Espinoza’s sending off (and both by Fatai Alashe, I believe), so maybe the solution for Cincinnati involves somehow arranging to always play a man up? I’m just saying, have they tried it? Just asking questions over here, people.

For all concerned, it felt like neither progress nor regression, but, by ball that’s holy, ‘twas hideous. My short read goes something like this: when Espinoza left the field, the game went from one team having some capacity to make something happen out there (San Jose) to two teams flailing hopefully forward till the final whistle put fans and observers alike out of their shared misery. To clear up any potential confusion and/or inaccuracies, the ‘Quakes didn’t dictate the match by putting under pressure on or shots up against Cincinnati; they did, however, dominate possession for as long as they had 11 players on the field, and to an extent that made it impossible for the Orange and Blue to do anything with the ball, precisely because they never had the ball.

All it took for the ‘Quakes to collect these three fragile points was Nick Lima’s set-piece precision strike at the 22nd minute. Jackson Yueill’s two “shots” give a fair taste of San Jose’s attacking puissance (Kitten-Level, Unlocked!), and that says something about converting possession into chances or maybe less pathetic shots. All the same, I’ve seen Earthquakes teams look effective and smart with the ball, but I’ve never seen one look that comfortable playing eternal keep-away. It took a lot of movement to make it work – enough to make me wonder whether they’d fade – and it did work, and maybe that's Matias Almeyda's system in action. From the second Cincinnati lost control or turned over the ball, San Jose would take hold and shuttle it around for a few, often as if they had no particular destination in mind (much like drivers in Hillsboro, Oregon, who I hate with the heat of 1,000 suns.)

MLS Tourist Journal, Calender Week 6: Preseason and Varieties of Excitement

This far and no further till the regular season. You know the drill...

The fresh signings keep rolling into Major League Soccer – some flashier, some smarter – and preseason has started for just about every team in the league. Shit’s gettin’ real, but I still wouldn’t mistake anything that happens today for future lived reality, yea, these are the Ponzi schemes of fandom (what?).

Only the preseason portions of the above applies to the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati – and I’m directing the late jab at the end toward FC Cincinnati – but, before getting to them, I wanted to start with a wide-lens snapshot of MLS.

Varieties of New Signings

“They're coming off a championship, so those are the things that motivated me to come. ... [The chance to move on to Europe] was a factor, too. You see players leaving [MLS] for Europe, so that played into my decision.”

So said Atlanta United FC’s Pity Martinez, but the broad idea of showing up/off in MLS as a stepping stone to fat European pay-days has gained real currency over the past couple seasons. And not all players are doing this the same way, so do read the fine print in any new arrival’s contract. For instance, it looks like Martinez signed “a long-term contract” with Atlanta, so, even if he (and even Atlanta’s FO) think he’ll be gone in a year or two, they’ll have some control when he leaves and will almost certainly get a kick-back out of it. The San Jose Earthquakes took a different approach in landing Argentine forward(? – thought he was a midfielder) Cristian Espinoza, and used new head coach Matias Almeyda as a sweetener. Espinoza’s signing is almost explicitly rehab, i.e., “[talented] young player that needs minutes moves to a team with playing time available.” The other club involved – Spain’s Villareal – tapped Almeyda to mentor Espinoza and, if things pan out, Villareal reaps the long-term benefits. That business of acting as a finishing school for bigger clubs around the world doesn’t sound like the best deal, but, on the grounds that weirder things have panned out, may as well see where it goes…

Several other eye-catching signings have come together over the past week…just real quick: rumor turned to reality when New York City FC landed their Romanian stud/Replacement David Villa, Alexandru Mitrita (they also added young American defender Keaton Parks, who called rich-people start-up NYCFC “a great club”…based on…?); sticking with defenders, the rich got richer when Atlanta added the well-pedigreed Florentin Pogba at centerback and the Los Angeles Galaxy correctly identified and filled a hole with the signing of Uruguayan centerback, Diego Polenta. Moving to the other side of the pitch, it’s good to see Real Salt Lake sign a forward, and here’s to wishing Liberian international Sam Johnson comes through for them, while further north and east, and promises to “eat people” notwithstanding, I think Toronto FC might have taken a flyer by signing injury-tinged American forward Terence Boyd.