MLS Off-Season Weeky (01 25 2020): Welcome to the Weird Season! (Plus Some Moves)

Preseason.

Ah, preseason, the heady days when teams across MLS can nurse delusions of grandeur – whether Real Salt Lake claiming they’re “not that far from competing for the title” or Dax McCarty pretending new kids Nashville SC won't do the soccer equivalent of a flex-arm hang from the playoff line in its inaugural season.

The Chicago Fire (the rebrand didn’t run off with their OG name, right?), meanwhile, stung by a lost decade, takes the sober course: “I can guarantee them that we will work hard every day.”

We will try, the city of Chicago, they say. That’s really all any team can say ahead of any given season. To flip the script, Los Angeles FC can talk about a title all they want, but no promise can stop them from another stumble in the playoffs. At any rate, what will be will be. And some teams have already taken their first steps toward their 2020 fate.

Preseason, MFs!
I’ll clock some playa moves below, as well as what’s going on with the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, but I wanted to start things off with actual preseason play.

Does it matter that (weird) Atlanta United FC beat the (weird) New York Red Bulls 2-1 in hot MLS-on-MLS action yesterday, or that the (weird) Seattle Sounders dropped their first preseason game to Uruguayan giants, Penarol? Nah. Everyone’s knocking off the rust (no matter what the copy says about Josef Martinez) and the regulars knock off after the first 30 minutes, and a bunch of randos come on to replace them: the silly season continues, but welcome to the “weird” season. (Related: I’ll be placing “(weird)” in front of every team’s name until either real games come around or when a given team plays some version of its expected first team in the late-stage preseason.)

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see or learn by reading the wrap-ups – e.g., the Sounders trying Dillon Serna (formerly of the Colorado Rapids) and Alex “The Other” Roldan at fullback and Gustav Svensson dropping back to centerback to prepare for the CONCACAF Champions’ League and manage a shortage at that position (that said, the cavalry is in sight). Also of interest – this is from Atlanta v. RBNY – note where they lined up Brooks Lennon in their opening 4-2-3-1 (also, hello, Edgar Castillo!).

That’s it for preseason so far (though I see that Orlando City SC beat up on some college kids earlier this morning), but, as the season gets closer, expect notes on results and line-ups to take up more and more of these posts. Thank the Lord, we’ve got people kicking things again…

Think I’ll wrap up the league-wide notes before moving on to Portland and Cincinnati…where to begin?

Playa Moves
The final, official landing of Javier “Chicharito” Fernandez with the Los Angeles Galaxy is the default “big news” on the transactional side – and, for the record, I can’t gainsay anything The Mothership’s Matt Doyle has to say about how he’ll do in MLS (I’ve only seen Chicharito play a handful of times ever), so take his thoughts and run with ‘em. One other move got nearly as much copy – Julian Gressel going from Atlanta to DC United for an impressive pile of scratch – and I’ve spent all week trying to figure out how big this really is.

I’ve read articles that track the money/mechanics of the Gressel move, but the one thing I read that felt most worthwhile was a whip-around of anonymous quotes from “technical staffers,” an approach that I think works just fine in soccer (while being a factually toxic aspect of political/access journalism), because, y’know, it’s just spectator sports. Those quotes are generally impressed and upbeat, but, on a personal level, it took remembering that DC had just signed Edson Flores for a fuller picture to unfold – as in, I didn’t see Gressel alone as a “holy shit” move until someone dropped it into the puzzle. Will it work? It pencils out nicely and shows ambition, so no one can say they aren’t trying…but I also wouldn’t sleep on DC in 2020.

I have one note that unites the two trades – i.e., Gressel and Chicharito, one that reacts to the substance of Doyle’s (high) expectations for Chicharito’s success in MLS. The nut of that argument is Chicharito as a poacher-supreme, a guy who just knows where to find the gaps that lead to goals, and the numbers back that up (i.e., Chicharito has scored many, many goals). Those (high) expectations will likely bear out, because good players do good things, but you do get a counter-point in a video segment where David Gass argues that Atlanta can’t replace Gressel’s service to Martinez. Expectations for Gressel hinge on him hitting the same kind of numbers with DC that he hit with Atlanta (well, that and his positional flexibility), but the larger point remains: not even the best and wisest runs count if the service isn’t there…and I found it interesting that Doyle didn’t name one player on LA’s roster as an obvious point of delivery for Chicharito’s runs. The deeper point is that, Chicharito racked up his numbers with some damn big clubs – and West Ham. But, according to general/received wisdom, even West Ham has better average players than a lot of teams in MLS.

Right, that’s enough of that. Before talking Timbers and Cincinnati, here are some other moves around MLS that caught my eye:

- No, I don’t know why Atlanta signed a mediocre Irish striker either, but I find it fascinating.

- FC Dallas, on the other hand, has Franco Jara coming in mid-2020. Could be some big, script-flipping shit.

- Jacori Hayes to Minnesota United FC was interesting, if only due to the comparisons between him and Darlington Nagbe when Hayes got drafted. Seeing what they paid for him, on the other hand, makes you wonder how much field he’ll see.

- Speaking of, it’s becoming increasingly clear that getting Kyle Beckerman off the field will require chloroform. (Fine, get the all-time appearances record, then retire.)

- The Vancouver Whitecaps continued with the rebuilding their rebuild by signing Leonard Owusu. Will it work? Eh. They’re tryin’, man, just like the rest of us (also, please fail; forza Cascadia!).

- Last, but not least, the Montreal Impact re-acquired Orji Okwonkwo and the Philadelphia Union re-signed Ilsinho. I lumped them together on the grounds that they’re both fun players to watch, and I’m happy they came back (didn’t know Okwonkwo put up those numbers either).

That’s the rest of MLS, now onto the two teams I follow, starting with the least interesting of the two:

Timbers Twiddling Thumbs
Sure, they signed a dude as a homegrown (Blake Bodily), but he’ll be with (the frankly over-priced) T2, and there’s the happy talk out of preseason camp all over the Timbers official page (“hitting the ground running” and “rhythm already humming”; never trust any organization to asssess its own progress), but that doesn’t change the central plot at the moment: there’s nothing to do but wait for the Jaroslaw Niezgoda signing to wrap up (or not), wait on the rumored, additional “one or two attacking players,” and for (weird) Portland Timbers to start kicking balls in anger.

What Is About to Be Done to FC Cincinnati(?)
The one video I watched from Cincy’s preseason camp in Tucson cured me of any interest in future editions, see note about not trusting an organization to tell you about itself, etc. I see that Cincinnati has an intra-squad scrimmage schedule for today, but that’ll just yield more of the same (aerated bullshit). Hopefully, Cincinnati fans will have something to watch and chew over by Wednesday (stream this game, please! Related, MLS keeps improving on its one-stop/league-wide preseason schedule; don’t know about you, but I’ll have that bookmarked until preseason wraps.) That said, some big news related to FC Cincinnati did drop late last week…and it feels strangely ominous…

Reports have Fanendo Adi reuniting with Caleb Porter (and Darlington Nagbe) with Columbus Crew SC (which, for years now, I;ve typed as “Columbus Screw” on the first pass). After the whipped-dog of a season Adi suffered while wearing orange and blue, I can see a lot of Cincinnati fans shrugging off this move. For what it’s worth, I’d advise against that impulse. I can’t promise Adi will return to terrorizing opposition defenses, but this does sees Adi playing under a coach who knows how to use him (unlike the three coaches he had last season), and with players demonstrably able to hit the kinds of passes Adi likes to run onto (e.g., Pedro Santos, maybe even Wil Trapp and Harrison Afful (and Milton Valenzuela) – and that’s before taking Lucas Zelarayan into account).

The larger argument, however, goes back to comparing Eastern Conference rebuilds against one another. Columbus, clearly unsatisfied with their 2019, has put a considerable rebuild atop an already solid foundation. Now, throw the rebuilt DC United into the mix and that’s two Eastern Conference teams who look likely to improve in 2020. From there, if you review the steps the remaining Eastern Conference teams (and teams across the league) have taken to improve – there, I’d argue that only Montreal, the Red Bulls, and Philadelphia stood pat – that leaves only the big, glaring, unavoidable question: has FC Cincinnati done enough to keep up? The same applies to the Timbers, say, when you see that Dallas might get a mid-season hiccup (that could match Seattle's now-annual mid-season burst).

We’ll only know the answer when the real games start…but it bears remembering that even the teams that stood pat ended 2019 in a better place than FC Cincinnati. Much better in some cases. Can I get an “oy, vey”?

To end on a higher note, FC Cincy’s main page ran a “five questions” feature, and one of the answers strikes me as something worth exploring: can Cincinnati play with three defenders at the back? When I look at the personnel…I can see that coming off nicely. To make the point another way: it’s not always the personnel you have that makes or breaks a team (or a season), but how you play said personnel.

All for this week. Ideally, the good Lord and a streaming service will give me something to write about Wednesday night.