The MLS Semi-Recent History...Ah, Fuck Me, I Did Power Rankings

We're going deep, people. And shallow.

This post begins the process of looking forward to Major League Soccer’s (normal, hopefully) 2023 regular season. There are a number of concrete things in the works – among them, a new team (St Louis CITY FC (I’m told capitalizing “CITY” is deliberate, so I’m following the form guide), the launch of a new TV deal (it ain’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than a year’s worth of SlingTV) – as well as some ephemeral things we’ll all imagine together, e.g., a post-World Cup bump or slump, depending on how the U.S. Men’s National Team does in the repressive, murderous shithole still known as Qatar.

That said, this look forward begins with a look back – specifically, to how all the teams in MLS have done over the past decade-plus of competition. I had grandiose dreams of getting all granular with this, posting mini-histories for all the teams and flagging key players, but decided that was both pointless, what with teams cutting players (and, more to the point, not yet adding new players), and against the spirit of where I want and hope to take future league-wide posts going forward...which assumes twitter survives the impulsive sociopath that bought it a couple weeks back. If things hold together from today into the future, I want/hope to take in the regular season action from a bird’s-eye view, i.e., something more narrative and, if I can get the screws in my brain just right, looser. Which segues nicely to this post...

The research was quick, dirty and asked just one question: where did all the teams that participated in MLS for any given year between 2010 and 2022 finish at the end of the regular season? That misses a couple things, obviously – the proverbial “peaking at the right time” theory that became fashionably cliche in the early-/mid-2010s, but also a very real phenomenon like post-season form – but the thing I really wanted to establish was how all the teams that will compete next year have done over a fair patch of time. Or even lately – which does come up and in the way that anyone who follows the league would expect.

Before getting into that, I wanted to note some fun stuff I discovered while poking around the past. For instance, Chivas USA competed in the league all the way up to 2014; they’re not competing today anymore, not directly anyway, but I’d completely forgotten that my Portland Timbers ever played that team. Related to that, both Sporting Kansas City and the Houston Dynamo played in the Eastern Conference from 2011 to 2014 - and both were very competitive in the East during that time (to the tune of placing 1st and 2nd in 2011).

Of perhaps more interest, the 2010 and 2011 seasons featured pretty goddamn wacky rules for playoff qualification. If memory serves, this followed from a fleeting obsession with total points as the ultimate arbiter of which teams deserved what. They didn’t go too nuts in 2011 – that season saw the top three teams in each conference qualify for the post-season, along with the four teams with the highest points total after that – but the league went all-in on the concept in 2010. That season, just the top TWO teams from each conference qualified for the playoffs followed by the next four teams, regardless of the conference. And that, kids, is how the Western Conference sent six teams to the playoffs while the Eastern Conference sent just two...and did I mention the league had only 16 teams that season? That year got weird, and all the way down to the Colorado Rapids besting FC Dallas in MLS Cup. The perils of drugs and/or getting loose with playoff qualification concepts...

Portland Timbers 2022 Review, aka, The Malaise Post

Aren't we all her? Only with beer?

I’m going to front-load the scandals that stalked the Portland Timbers/Thorns organization until it forced them to make the same choice they should have made half a decade prior. Nice as it felt to see Gavin Wilkinson and Mike Golub get their long-overdue comeuppance for years worth of cowardice and asshole-ism (respectively?), the muleheaded determination to let the wounds fester until something like the third investigation called sepsis by its name did what those things do: kill the host. Honestly, to persist in something that willfully destructive boggles the mind.

Fucking morons...

Now, had things worked out on the field for the Timbers the same way they did for, say, the Thorns, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this cardigan gearing up to bum you out. But, goddamn, if light brown and mustard yellow aren’t my colors...

Bluntly, I am excited about exactly one player on the Portland Timbers current roster: Santiago Moreno. That doesn’t mean I neither rate nor like anyone else: for all its issues, I don’t see a need to burn it all down and start from scratch (which wouldn’t work in any case); moreover, I’m open to the argument they under-performed this year. Going the other way, I lean toward thinking they didn’t – or, perhaps more accurately, they played to the level of available personnel. Staying healthy matters to any team, obviously, but the Timbers have operated on a late-stage Jenga level for longer than I like. And if losing one piece, or even two, means the whole thing comes down? Well, that’s when you know you’re doing something wrong.

The key missing piece was Felipe Mora. Portland’s transition game relied on his implausible knack (because fucker’s short) for receiving the first pass into the opposition’s defensive third and finding a good, and ideally unsettling, pass before defenses could clutter up the space. The Timbers attack could rarely break down a compacted defense even with Mora on the field, but the ball movement in the attacking third mingled buck-passing (take. or. take. a. fucking. shot. god. dammit.) with a sensation not unlike despair for much of 2022. A guy who pops into the twitter feed with the occasional comment argues that Gio Savarese organizes the attack to work for tap-ins. I think he’s sold me on that argument at this point. Even if he hasn’t sold me on his particular solution – i.e., build the team around speed – agreeing that something ain’t working is the first step to doing something different. Which, here, means anything.

MLS 2022 Season Review: Did the Product Deliver?

Good God, yes. Now stop shouting.

I know I said I’d post a Portland Timbers review/preview by the end of the weekend, but I say all kinds of things that smart people take with a massive fucking salt lick – e.g., I’ll never post this feature again, I’m checking out of twitter, etc. etc. etc.

With the season wrapped up and MLS Cup in the well-heeled hands of Los Angeles FC – who, for the record, I doubted to the end – putting a narrative bow on Major League Soccer’s 2022 felt like a more fitting post for this Sunday night. If you’re fishing for something tactical or stats-driven, close this post immediately and look elsewhere. I have a simple goal for this post, one that boils down to answering one simple question: did Major League Soccer deliver a quality product in 2022?

Before digging in, set aside whatever frustration you feel about your local team’s failure to achieve – that goes double for Timbers fans, who suffered one of those even-year grinds where nothing went right and they missed out on the good stuff. Going the other way, having low expectations going in to 2022 could mean you wound up something close to happy about your team’s season, even if they didn’t so much as see a flash of silverware....and, there, FC Cincinnati isn’t the only team that fits that description.

With all that in mind, let’s start by working backwards from MLS Cup 2022 to the end of the regular season.

First thing first, 2022 ended with the rare feat of both No. 1 seeds – LAFC and the Philadelphia Union – making the final. A quick, sloppy review of the final standings of seasons past shows (Source 1 and Source 2) that has happened just three other times in league history – DC United and the Los Angeles Galaxy in 1998, the New England Revolution and the Galaxy again in 2002, and the Chicago Fire and the San Jose Earthquakes in 2003. All of those happened during the first 10 years of the league’s existence, back when the league fielded between 10 team and 12 – which put less clutter between any one of them and the top seed. A No. 1 seed reached the final 10 more times, but, again, the hit rate clusters to the league’s early history. In the years after 2006 – aka, the league’s 10th birthday – only four No. 1 seeds clawed their way to MLS Cup – the Columbus Crew in 2008, the Galaxy in 2009 and again in 2011, and Toronto FC in 2017.

FC Cincinnati 2022 Season Review/Preview: Competence's Unexpected Dilemmas

The view from 2019-2021. Fucker looks massive.

I decided to park on a review of FC Cincinnati’s 2022 season for a variety of reasons – the choice to check out in mid-July among them (it’s possible my middle name, “Anders,” is Norwegian for “erratic”) – but not really knowing how to read their season-ending 0-1 loss to the now-MLS-Cup-bound Philadelphia Union played its part as well. In so many words, I understood Cincy had defied virtually every observer’s expectations, but couldn’t really place them in a league-wide context.

Seeing both Philadelphia and Los Angeles FC kick great lumps out of the opposition in their respective semifinals – though, just to note it, LAFC played a more one-way game – went some distance to filling in that blank. FC Cincinnati didn’t just have their best-ever season, they had a very good one. To lift a line out of Matt Doyle’s year-end review:

“’Everything from June 18 to Decision Day is the highlight’ also has an argument, as over that 20-game stretch, Cincy lost just twice. That’s the best of anybody in MLS.”

The bitter little boy who lives inside my head compels me to point out that 10 of those games ended as draws, a point Doyle concedes sotto voce when he notes that “Cincy dropped more points from leading positions this year than anyone but the Revs” (and is it just me or did five teams drop the most points from leading positions? I’ve read that stat somewhere for at least three teams). That bitter little boy missed a deeper truth that I thought I’d written at some point this season, but, because I can’t find it, here it is again: those ten draws meant that Cincinnati went toe-to-toe against all kinds of teams, six of them future playoff teams (including New York City FC), and gave away very little. Call that a long of saying that all those dropped points didn’t matter after Decision Day: what mattered was that Cincy showed they stood just as high as (literally) half the teams in Major League Soccer. And, when you’ve got that, getting into the playoffs amounts to having a chance in every game going forward. As Red Bull New York learned in the hardest of ways.

All that’s better than laudable. It’s beautiful, especially given the dark slapstick that came before. From there, the question becomes how to get better in 2023.

Red Bull New York 1-2 FC Cincinnati: Can I Make This a Tale of Good Versus Evil? Yes, Yes, I Can

Earlier today, I saw a tweet celebrating the fact Red Bull New York crashed out of the playoffs. If I had to write a concurring opinion, I’d mourn how far they’ve fallen since the Thierry Henry/Tim Cahill/Sacha Kljestan/Dax McCarty days. Like watching 11 drunken men trying to climb a goddamn greased poll, I tell you.

I don’t have a headcount of how many neutral Major League Soccer fans wanted FC Cincinnati to come out of the...is it a play-in, or a conference quarterfinal (does it matter)? At any rate, on a day when Cincinnati managed the more controlled approaches to goal, while the Red Bulls flailed in some fortunate something from distance, Cincy left Red Bull Arena with the ticket to the next round of the 2022 MLS Playoffs. And there was much rejoicing (yaayyyyyy).

I haven’t written about FC Cincinnati since...shit, July, but I’ve dipped in here and there to stay current. Between the opposition and the plethora of draws they played in the second half of the season, I fully braced to see today’s game slump into penalties. Instead, and with the housekeeping crew at McMenamin’s Kalama Lodge impatiently tapping at the door, I had the good luck to see Brandon Vazquez’s game-winner and to miss the overstuffed stoppage time minutes tacked on to the end of the game. I doubt anyone quibbled with the final score (have I mentioned it was 2-1 to Cincy yet?), I only know I found it satisfying.

Because Pat Noonan has trotted out something like the same line-up for as far back as I’ve noticed, there’s not a lot to say about the roster beyond, I think he’s on to something. Not every part of the set-up clicked – e.g., the Red Bull Collective did a great job of keeping the ball away from Vazquez and Brenner for something like 86 minutes (Brenner’s point-blank header, saved by Carlos Coronel notwithstanding), but an in-form player needs only a chance and a (again) collective breakdown on Red Bull’s right side gave Vazquez the one clear look he needed.

How You (And I) Should Have Known the Timbers Would Miss the 2022 Playoffs

This was how I told them apart. Now?

It becomes rarer with each passing season, but I still see people argue it’s impossible to support two teams at the same time. My rebuttal: it’s as easy as wanting one of those teams win every game and wanting the other to win every game except the ones where they play that first team. And that’s how I feel about the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, respectively, and I’ll never understand how that’s complicated.

Going the other way, and unlike past three seasons, watching the Timbers play all season while I watched/tracked Cincy had more value than it did in the past – i.e., most of the past three seasons saw the Timbers wake up sometime in late summer and roll into the playoffs, while Cincy typically started wilting somewhere around late may and continued to the end like some overwrought Shakespearian actor counting his wounds until he rather loudly expired. There has always been a whiff of ne’er the twain shall meet about the experience, in other words, but that changed with Major League Soccer’s 2022 season.

To start with the full disclosures, yes, I really did believe that both Cincinnati and Portland would make the 2022 playoffs. That bet panned out for one team – FC Cincinnati – but not the other...whose name shall go unmentioned. Both teams needed to get something out of their final game of the season - Real Salt Lake away for Portland and DC United away for Cincy. I read both of those games as winnable, hence the whole thing about both teams making the 2022 playoffs, but I also overlooked something, arguably out of habit. The thing that makes that remarkable was how obvious it should have been in retrospect. And that goes back to something I would never expected going into 2022 – i.e., how similar Cincy and Portland would be by season’s end.

First and foremost, Portland and Cincinnati tied a lot - 13 games per team, i.e., tied for second under 2022’s undisputed masters of sharing points, Columbus Crew SC (who had 16 draws and who also missed the playoffs). Another fun fact (and unless I miscounted): Cincy and Portland had only six clean sheets all season, a detail that points to something else that’s obvious - i.e., both teams gave up goals with very real reliability. By the final tally, Cincinnati actually gave up three more goals than Portland did, 56 to 53. Moreover, just four points separated the two teams. And yet Cincy’s in while Portland’s out. And yet, that’s not even the weird part.

A Statement on Merritt's Statement

Dick!

“Yates’ investigation found that Paulson knew of other alleged, non-sexual abuses as early as 2014, but did not act on the information. It also found that in a conversation with the Western New York Flash — after Riley and the Thorns parted ways — that Wilkinson blamed Shim for ‘putting Riley in a bad position’ and said that he would ‘hire (him) in a heartbeat.’ Riley was soon hired by the Flash, which later relocated and became the North Carolina Courage.”

“’In 2014, after Riley’s first season as head coach of the Thorns, the NWSL issued an anonymous player survey in which players identified Riley as “verbally abusive,” “sexis(t),” “destructive” and stated he “s--- on (the) players every day,”’ U.S. Soccer’s report reads. ‘The survey results were shared with NWSL Executive Director Cheryl Bailey, USSF President Sunil Gulati and (CEO and secretary general) (Dan) Flynn, but no one provided them to the team and no action was taken.’”

And that’s without getting into darker findings about the Portland Timbers/Thorns front office impeding the investigation, revelations that Timbers/Thorns owner Merritt Paulson and General Manager Gavin Wilkinson “not only enabled, but also vouched for [former Thorns head coach Paul] Riley,” a man who, even they now agree, used his position to manipulate and do all the abuses (sexual, emotional, professional, probably some others) during his time with the team. And, as the phrase goes, they knew.

Just over(?) 24 hours passed (does it matter?) before Paulson released a statement. He attempted contrition – he may even believe it – but the substance of the response amounted to an apology that, in context, reeks of insincerity. Moreover, taking the token step of removing himself and the other executives under suspicion (Wilkinson and Mike Golub) from all “all Thorns-related decision making” raises more questions than it answers – e.g., if they didn’t take a pay-cut and now have less day-to-day responsibility, how is that not like out-of-school suspension for a high school kid who doesn’t give a fuck?