Level Set 3, Atlanta United FC: 2025 & History, Ahoy, MLS's Drunken Sailors

The answer to the subtitle: enjoy the show.

What follows is a brief history of Atlanta United FC, 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
As much as any team in league history, Atlanta United FC kicked off the tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging. They arrived in the 2017 season like fun drunks livening up a wedding, finishing fourth overall and with the second-best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) good Toronto FC team. Atlanta finished even higher in 2018 – if, again, second-best after a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield – but that promptly left their minds when they won their first MLS Cup at…well, an unfortunate stroll over my Portland Timbers. The secret to pulling that off followed from near-perfect roster construction. It started with (more or less) flipping off that season’s Expansion Draft, finding two future stars in the 2017 Superdraft – Julian Gressel was the stand-out (Miles Robinson bloomed later) – and then going nuts with trades and transfers. Atlanta’s FO built a spine out of ol’ reliables from all over MLS – e.g., Michael Parkhurst, Jeff Larentowicz, and their once-forever goalkeeper, Brad Guzan - but they had to scour the international markets for their crown jewels, Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron. One gave them lightning-like verticality – Almiron, who seemed to bend time when he got on the run – while the other finally ended Roy Lassiter’s reign of terror atop the single-season record for goals scored. For two fun-filled seasons – 2018 and 2019 - defenses struggled to keep Martinez from scoring goals and all came perilously close to allowing him a goal per game. Just when Atlanta’s Act I seemed destined to go on forever, it moved on to Act II (as every play does), aka, the one where the hero(es) look lost and everything looks impossible and the doom kicks in. The trouble started when Martinez tore his ACL in the first game of 2020 – he missed the entire season – and then came COVID, chaos (aka, Gabriel Heinze) and, when it all ended, a 23rd-place overall finish in the final standings. That’s not to say Atlanta didn’t move heaven, earth and bags of money to avoid that fate: when Almiron moved on to the EPL’s Newcastle, they gambled heavily on Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, two young, (reportedly) high-upside talents from Argentina. They paid a $15 million transfer for Barco and somewhere around $10 million for Martinez; Barco played more games (81), but Martinez got more in less time (39), but he was only around for 2019-20, while Barco lasted from 2018-2020. Both players are more memorable as cautionary tales than for anything they did on the field. Coaching problems plagued the team as well, starting with apparent sociopath, Heinze, but, with respect to Gonzalo Pineda, they haven’t got it right since. Some entry-level farting around in the CONCACAF Champions’ League aside (see below*), things faded fast and, hard as they’ve tried, the color hasn’t flushed back into Atlanta’s cheeks since…or has it?

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.

MLS Western Conference Round-Up: Checking the Blowouts & the Wrong End of the Standings

I go with the wind, I am the wind. That is me. True story.

If all goes according to plan – and if you’re holding your breath, by the gods, I urge you to stop – I will top next week’s version of this post with Portland Timbers’ match reportage. For anyone who’s curious what that will look like, it should be something like the Eastern Conference round-up posted to this same channel last night. But also shorter. I posted earlier on the Timbers letting two points slip away versus LAFC last Saturday, but fuck it, it’s early and Portland’s in fourth place and when’s the last time that happened. For the record, this used to be the kind of thing I would look up, but The Mothership has stripped a lot of the links and connectivity out of their archived material, which makes that kind of thing a lot harder…what a bunch of assholes.

A final programming note: most weeks, I will watch whichever team the Timbers have next, but there’s no goddamn way I’m sitting through Austin FC beating the Galaxy by one damn goal when I’ve already stared at both of those teams more than anyone but their biggest fans should have to.

Right, let’s kick around what happened in MLS’s Western Conference last weekend. Just the good shit.

Seattle Sounders 3-0 Nashville SC
Why This Game?
A combination of trying to figure out what’s going on with Nashville and keeping your enemies close…

The Game, Briefly (watched 1-45)
First, both teams rested their share of regular starters, if for reasons unknown – Albert Rusnak and Jordan Morris for Seattle, and Edvard Tagseth, aka, Nashville’s Engine – and, against the even numbers in the final stats, the game was over by the 34th minute. As confessed above, I only watched the first half (fine…most of it), but I caught at least five of Nashville’s shots on goal in the full highlights and never saw them serve up anything more threatening than a kitten in a sombrero. One li’l curiosity to note: wily veteran Andy Najar played some role in at least two Seattle goals, one by commission (the first goal), the other by omission (what was he doing so far from Paul “Everyman” Rothrock on that third goal?). Pedro de la Vega got a lot of hype in the Official post-game chatter (aka, MLS Wrap Up...gotta stop watching that bilge), but even he credited Obed Vargas for teeing up his goal. The Sounders overwhelmed Nashville, no question, and took just 15 minutes to bury them. Sometimes a game just gets away from a team.

Getting Reacquainted with Atlanta United FC, the Drunken Sailors of MLS

Pick his pockets! Pick his pockets!

Thumbnail History
As noted in yesterday’s post on Los Angeles FC, Atlanta United FC started the tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging. They arrived in the 2017 season like fun drunks livening up a wedding, finishing fourth overall and with the second best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) good Toronto FC team. Atlanta finished even higher in 2018 – if, again, second-best after a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield – but coming second almost certainly got lost in the dopamine when they won MLS Cup 2018 at…well, an unfortunate stroll over my Portland Timbers. The secret to pulling that off followed from near-perfect roster construction. It started with (more or less) flipping off that season’s Expansion Draft, finding two future stars in the 2017 Superdraft – Julian Gressel was the stand-out (Miles Robinson bloomed later) – and then going nuts with trades and transfers. Atlanta’s FO built a spine out of ol’ reliables from all over MLS – e.g., Michael Parkhurst, Jeff Larentowicz, and their apparently-fovever goalkeeper, Brad Guzan - but they had to scour the international markets for their crown jewels, Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron. One gave them lightning-like verticality – Almiron, who seemed to bend time when he got on the run – while the other finally ended Roy Lassiter’s 23-season reign of terror atop the single-season record for goals scored. For two fun-filled seasons – 2018 and 2019 - defenses struggled to keep Martinez from scoring goals and all came perilously close to allowing him a goal per game. Atlanta’s Act I seemed destined to on forever, but, as every play does, the action moved on to Act II, aka, the one where the hero(es) look lost and everything looks impossible and the doom kicks in. The trouble started when Martinez tore his ACL in the first game of 2020 – he would miss the entire season – and then came COVID, chaos (aka, Gabriel Heinze) and, when it all ended, a 23rd-place overall finish in the final standings. That’s not to say Atlanta didn’t move heaven, earth and bags of money to avoid that fate: when Almiron moved on to the EPL’s Newcastle, they gambled heavily on Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, two young, (reportedly) high-upside talents from Argentina. They paid a $15 million transfer for Barco and (I think) somewhere around $10 million for Martinez; Barco played more games (81), but Martinez got more in less time (39), but he was only around for 2019-20, while Barco lasted from 2018-2020, but both players are more memorable as cautionary tales than for anything they did on the field. Coaching problems plagued the team as well, starting with the apparent sociopath, Heinze, but, with respect to Gonzalo Pineda, they haven’t got it right since. Some entry-level farting around in the CONCACAF Champions’ League aside (see below*), things faded fast and, hard as they’ve tried, the color hasn’t flushed back into Atlanta’s cheeks since…or has it?

Kidding. It hasn’t. Not really.

Total Joy Points: 10

Getting Reacquainted with Club du Foot Montreal, Canada's "Other" Flash in the Pan

Actual search result for "flash in the pan"

Thumbnail History
One thing the entire "Getting Reacquainted with" project has surfaced is how few trophies Major League Soccer’s Canadian teams have contributed to the collective trophy case. While that makes sense when it comes to the Vancouver Whitecaps, who has battled gravity for as long as they’ve been a team, it takes looking past Toronto’s FC’s (one-off) all-conquering 2017 team and, to the case in point, the Montreal Impact team of the mid-2010s. As laid out in their list of mighty works below*, Club du Foot Montreal’s best era amounted to two fleeting seasons, but it was a freakin’ party for as long as it lasted.

The Montreal Impact, known as Club du Foot Montreal since 2021, graduated from the USL to MLS in 2012 and, judging by their Year One signings, they came in determined to make a splash. While their inaugural roster contained the usual smattering of MLS journeymen (e.g., Collen Warner, Davy Arnaud and….huh, Zarek Valentin), and hyped-up youngsters (e.g., Andrew Wenger), Montreal did some heavy shopping in Italy, signing CBs Alessandro Nesta and Matteo Ferrari and slick and saucy little forward, Marco Di Viao. All that investment not only failed to translate to Quebecois, it went two tits up in 2014, their only season to end with the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon. After the failure of the Italian experiment, Montreal started sniffing around other leagues for talent and that search brought in two of their all-time great talents, the Belgian defender/midfielder Laurent Ciman and, one of my all-time personal MLS favorites, Argentine winger/forward, Ignacio Piatti. Piatti had the misfortune of showing up in time to go through the Wooden Spoon paddle-wheel, but the arrival of Ciman and smart additions like midfield mind-fucker Marco Donadel the experienced Nigel Reo-Coker made turned the team’s fortunes on a literal dime. A mere five and half months after the worst regular season of 2014, the Impact went the distance in the 2015 CONCACAF Champions’ League, contesting the two-leg final against Mexico’s famous Club America. In a pattern familiar to any MLS fan from that period, Montreal carried a promising result out of Mexico City (1-1!) only to collapse under the weight of a second half onslaught front of their home fans in the return leg. Those 135 minutes’ worth of dreaming certainly felt incredible and, with that breeze blowing at their backs, Montreal became the talk of MLS when they hit the high-profile player motherlode by signing Chelsea/Ivory Coast legend Didier Drogba in late 2015. With the core intact and Drogba throwing around his weight and talent up top, even if not for every game (dude was old by then), L’Impact put together their best-ever MLS season in 2016…and, just as quickly as they came, the good times ended. Montreal would bubble up into the fringes of real competition in the seasons that followed, but, more often than not, they fail to make a noise loud enough for anyone to hear, at least not one that isn’t a thud of failure. Here's to a season and a half at the top, huzzah, or rather, allons-y.

Total Joy Points: 2

Getting Reacquainted with Atlanta United FC, MLS's Super-Fun Party Guy

Act II, when things always look their worst.

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

Tempted as I am to say that Atlanta United FC started a tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging, that strictly applies to them and Los Angeles FC (with honorable mention to New York City FC because they didn’t actually lift a trophy until their 7th season). Atlanta announced their intentions in its very first season (2017, btw), finishing fourth overall and with the second best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) great Toronto FC team. They followed that opening triumph by finishing even higher in their second season (second overall, this time behind a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield) and winning MLS Cup at…well, an unfortunate stroll because the team they bested was, again, my Portland Timbers (to any Timbers fans reading this, it only seems like Portland has lost MLS Cup to every team in MLS, but it was just NYCFC and Atlanta). That ended Act I in Atlanta’s history. They kicked off Act II in 2019 by finishing third overall and winning the U.S. Open…back when such things mattered. Then, Act II being what it is, tragedy (and a global pandemic) struck in 2020 and the breezes that forever blew at their back turned to blow in their faces. They ended the dread COVID season in 23rd place overall, out of the playoff picture despite a generous expansion of its outer boundaries. Atlanta’s fortunes have been mixed since then – e.g., two top 10 finishes (2021 and 2023) on either side of yet another 23rd place finish in 2022. In an expansion of theatric convention, Atlanta has stretched the third act of its early history over three seasons. The question is whether continues as tragedy or comedy.

Best Season(s)

Their Cup-winning 2018 season provides the obvious answer, what with Josef Martinez, Miguel Almiron and…[supporting cast] terrorizing all of MLS in transition, but I’m going to Atlanta’s 2018 season, when they finished third and won that Open Cup. Why? I mean, two trophies in three seasons. Think of what the future felt like to their fans…

…but, obviously, their best season was 2018. Lifting the Cup in front of your fans is a beautiful thing.

MLS Weakly, January 21, 2023: A Scrabble Bag, Honestly, Weaklier Than Usual

Vox Media's HR department.

I saw something late last week about a tech company that had their people show up to work and attempt to gain entry with their keycards. If an employee saw green, in they went...with a momentary reprieve, but if they saw red...

Red light, green light. Where have I heard that before?

I don’t mean to make light of the layoffs that appear to have wiped out what’s left of Major League Soccer coverage on SB Nation. I do, however, know that I’ve relied on SB Nation’s devoted team sites for years – particularly in preseason, when I’m sniffing around for hype on a player I don’t recognize. Some of those sites were better than others – bluntly, a couple employed stenographers instead of writers – but I’ll miss them all. And whatever I thought of any given writer, that’s a person now looking for work and that sucks.

Losing Stumptown Footy hits closest to home, obviously. The Portland market has always had a decent stable of writers and, more recently podcasters, but Stumptown made the local scene feel a little bigger and more stable. They had some good people to boot. Anyhoo, Vox Media can go to heck. Yearning for the days when people ran local media, and many other things, as a community concern. If I win the lottery. Or invent something...I listed each in the order they’re likely to happen...

The past week also saw the tragic, savagely unlucky death of Charlotte FC’s Anton Walkes. My oldest child turns 25 this year, which drives home the the agony of Walkes' parents. My heart goes out to his friends and teammates as well.

That’s it for the week’s tragedies, thank gods...

Last week was a slow fucker outside all that. (How slow was it?) The MLS Kickoff letter posted power rankings so premature that I couldn’t see the point in the reading – or the writing for that matter. [Ed. - Totally unrelated, but the soap dispenser next to one of the sinks at the bowling alley literally prematurely ejaculated. It went off when the water turned on and could not perform when the time came.] In fact, this little nugget from the second of Matt Doyle’s mailbag posts (again, the scrounging is universal) might have been the most interesting soccer-related thing I read all week:

Portland Timbers 2-1 Atlanta United FC: The Raw Art of Sufficiency

In the same way this is food...

To start with the biggest happy picture, three straight wins goes a long way toward getting a team out the hole it dug over the first half of the season. The Portland Timbers’ 2-1 home win yesterday afternoon over a winded and dizzy Atlanta United FC capped that hop, skip, jump run of games and hoisted them a little higher over the playoff line. That the Los Angeles Galaxy played two games over the past week and pissed away four points in what arguably should have been winnable games makes it a little sweeter still.

Another happy thought: the Timbers have scored two goals in each of those three wins, which bought the defense a little credit for the one goal it has inevitably given up. All that’s the say, the foundation look good, at least until you take a closer look at it.

First, and to finally get to the game, Atlanta hasn’t been good all season – i.e., they leave three-game gaps between wins and this game came in a trough – they’re crap on the road (1-9-5), and they kicked off the game under the playoff line and there they remain. So that’s at least three reasons the Timbers did no more than what they should have yesterday. And, to their credit, they looked the better team. Atlanta had a nice, crisp, organized opening period where they took the game to Portland, though in retrospect all that activity wasn’t materially different than a ‘keeper bouncing and flapping on his goal line ahead of a penalty kick...and how apt is that metaphor?

To sing a couple more bars of praise, I like the way the Timbers took over the game. Both midfielders and defenders snapped at most things played toward them – even when they had to step ahead an Atlanta player to get there first – and that did a number on the visitors’ confidence in moving the ball. When they finally started finding and prying at little seams in the channels, the three-man back line of Bill Tuiloma, Dario Zuparic, and (about damn time) Zac McGraw held the right positions to cut out the passes or generally get in the way. Atlanta’s too-late goal aside – and pour one out for the late tragedy of Josef Martinez’s great MLS career – they managed just one other clean look on goal, e.g., that clever ball over the top by Santiago Sosa to Ronaldo Cisneros. And Aljaz Ivacic got his leg in the way of that one. Moving on to the caveats...

Portland’s attack didn’t look great. Missing Eryk Williamson had something to do with that, of course...at least until you remember that, for all his utility (i.e., help us, Eryk, you’re our only hope), the Timbers’ attack hasn’t look much better when he’s there. A good way to phrase the phenomenon came to be as my attention wandered during the second half yesterday (and, lo, it went far and freely): the Timbers have arrived at place where they cause goals, as opposed to creating them. I can’t remember the last time Portland did anything particularly impressive, never mind artful, on the approach to goal; as much as I admired the indirect inventiveness of Eryk’s assist on (I think) the second goal in the win over Austin, they haven’t waltzed one in over the last three wins. It’s been a lot of free kicks and, yesterday, penalty kicks.

Portland Timbers 0-2 Atlanta United FC: Narratives and Their Wrinkles

That is clarifying (apparently), but who sees it as such?

I loved this game for everything except the result. It was a fucking diamond, I tell you, in that it reveals different things when you hold it up to the light…

I didn’t like that the game ended with the Portland Timbers losing to Atlanta United FC 0-2 in Portland, obviously, even if I kinda saw it coming, or at least the outlines of it. To make a list of it, if you look at Portland’s last 10 opponents – @ MTL, v FCD, @ NYC, v COL, v ORL, @ SEA (ha!), v LAG, @ MIN, v VAN, v CHI – between talent and form, Atlanta presents as the most thoroughly leveled-up of the bunch. Sure, NYCFC looked as strong as Atlanta when the Timbers beat them in the Bronx, but the rest of all of those teams rolled into their game against Portland with some amount of baggage and pain, and that’s the line I’m drawing in this post: in Atlanta, Portland finally met a team with a similar kind/amount of talent and momentum and, the shocking evenness of the evening notwithstanding, it didn’t go great for the Timbers. They lost at home and with…a solid percentage of what most people seem to regard as its best team on the field. The only question I have is what percentage of Timbers fans found this result disappointing and what percentage see it as clarifying.

I’m borne for the latter camp (Team Clarifying!), even as it cuts against the record the Timbers compiled over their last 10 games; trust me, 20 points from 30 is fucking rare in this league, but that’s been Portland’s level. (Immediately relevant thereto, Atlanta has managed 19 points in its last 10 games, MLS regular season only, as in, not this game, or what the Mexican press thought of it.) At the same time, Atlanta has played well – sometimes very well - against MLS’s better teams – e.g., your NYCFCs, your LAFCs, your Galaxys (a fallen family, but still). Portland, to their very real and enduring credit, has done the proverbial business since finding their feet toward the end of its long, opening road trip; whatever I think of each of the ten teams listed below, wins in those games didn’t just happen and Portland posted some memorable wins during that stretch – there, wins over Seattle and LA stand out – but that doesn’t change the blunt reality that this resurgent, surging Atlanta teams was a different animal.

Before digging into details, sure, it could have gone either way last night…and that applies even if I think Atlanta created the better chances overall. As much as it’s fair to point out that Julio Cascante made the inexplicable decision that lead to Atlanta’s second goal (not sarcasm!), that wasn’t every reason why the Timbers failed to draw, never mind win, last night’s game. (Also, and because I ignored it entirely below, here's Atlanta's first goal.) They were not centered, they did not feel…

MLS Cup & A Season Review from an Unreliable Narrator

Is safe, comrade.

I’ll start with my post-match analysis of MLS Cup 2018: the Portland Timbers lost.

What? Matchday Central never put up a...but…fine.

To start, I didn’t mind the way the Portland Timbers approached MLS Cup; the coaching staff actually impressed me a little. They set the line of confrontation higher than I expected, but that worked out, at least until a goal forced them to chase the game. Prior to that, Portland did a good job keeping Atlanta United FC in front of them. I hadn’t looked at the box score till now and…wow, that’s a balanced game, even to the point of equilibrium. Well, everywhere else but the score sheet. And that’s how you lose a game, people.

Here’s the thing with the last game of a season: there isn’t much to say beyond who won and who lost. No matter how feverishly the players itch for that shot a redemption, the next game won’t come till the next season. And what happened was really simple: Portland let in two crap goals, both of them dismal two-steppers. The broadcast team lamented the heavy touch by Jeremy Ebobisse on the first goal, but it was Ebobisse’s search for a better pass that slowed him down long enough for Michael Parkhurst (dude, not the fastest) to pick the ball off his toe. Parkhurst’s tackle left nothing between Josef Martinez and Portland’s yawning goal but Liam Ridgewell’s failure to stick all the way in. In a bit of cosmic unfairness, Ridgewell starred again on the second goal, this time by losing track of Josef “Single-Season-Fucking-Scoring-Record” Martinez, who would knock a header to a streaking Franco Escobar at the back post, aka, the guy Jorge Villafana lost. Two massive two-step mistakes, two goals, and the rest of it becomes what might have been – e.g., what if Ebobisse powered the ball across the goal instead of cushioning the deflection too near Atlanta ‘keeper, Brad Guzan? Had the Timbers leveled the score four-five minutes after Atlanta’s opener, who knows what might have been?

I fretted a little theatrically over Ebobisse’s mental state in a since-deleted tweet, but that’s misplaced nonsense because good players learn from mistakes. We’ll see how he handles this one, not just next season, but over the next couple; that’ll drop the relevant hints on Ebobisse’s ceiling. On that, Ridgewell had a bad night, an unfortunate capper on a season where he’d shown the mental resilience of three men by swallowing a benching and surviving an injury to become a key steadying influence during the MLS Cup run. How far did he climb in my mind: a trip down memory lane revealed that I’d written Ridgewell out of the team’s script somewhere in the middle of the season (Game 17, as it happens). The man enjoyed a side of redemption with his solid season, basically.

Atlanta United v. Portland Timbers: An MLS Cup Preview That Devolves Into Animal Metaphors

Spirit animal.

[Ed. – For those interested only in a breakdown/preview of MLS Cup, skip down to the double asterisk. For everyone else…let’s dig in.]

I went to bed two nights ago with the grand ambition of scouting Atlanta United FC by watching three of their archived: their two 2018 post-season home wins and their home win over the Montreal Impact back in April. I’d whittled that down to two games last night – the 3-0 home rout over the New York Red Bulls (patoo-patoo, [salt over my left shoulder], [cross myself in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition], a pox, and may such an abomination never come to pass until 2019, amen) and the Montreal game.

I realized I’d already watched the win over the Red Bulls by the second minute (why didn’t I remember watching it? While I was stone-cold sober, my wife talked over that whole damn game, hence the hole in my head), and decided I’d only watch the Montreal game. That’s when I learned that ESPN+’s archived footage would only let me go back to November 1...

…and so, thankful that circumstances saved me from my most excessive impulses, I just read some stuff and watched a couple videos of people doing the lifting for me. Like a normal person.

** After a week of being completely checked out of MLS, I don’t have a ton of specifics on what will help or hurt the Portland Timbers when they battle Atlanta for MLS Cup. After a battle of my own – How MLS Organizes Content on its Home Page versus Me (MLSoccer.com won; seriously, it takes a fucking divining rod to tick through their content) – and considering those inputs, here are my take-aways.

The Layout Favors Atlanta, but There Is No Underdog

In the one in-depth preview video I found (before giving up; work on it, a-holes), Taylor Twellman and Matt Doyle (also Calen Carr) made smart comments about Atlanta’s greater flexibility in terms of how they can attack, and I think those are accurate. Doyle leaned harder into the argument that Portland is a one-trick pony – e.g., stay organized (a word that needs refining) and counter – but the Timbers are really good at that trick; moreover, “really good” leveled up to fucking great around the beginning of October. Better still, this “you had one job” style of play travels well. I don’t know whether to call it irony or accidental brilliance, but the MLS home page’s article on that same point puts more time into talking about the Timbers’ other long-suit instead: how thoroughly capably this team plays for another. Portland has been on the same sentence of the same page for the entire post-season, something that has made them so damn hard to beat that no team has.

To the extent Atlanta holds an edge, those factors – e.g., a reliable game-plan that every player understands and believes in – push back against it.