A (Loosely and Loose) Dungeons & Dragons-Inspired MLS 2020 Preview

The thing is, how you see yourself...

To carry through on a threat made late last week, below is…A Major League Soccer 2020 Season preview. Before carrying on, let me start with some hedging:

First, if you want a comprehensive preview that clocks every acquisition and covers every possible tactical look, MLSSoccer.com cobbled together such a beast and you’re better off picking through that than what’s below (or, for the smarter set, America Soccer Analysis called in independent soccer pundits from around the web to preview every team in MLS). While this post borrows liberally from those previews, I’m not even gonna try compete with that. (Historical Note: Total Coverage became an impossibility once MLS grew past 12 teams, and I could never pull it off, even back then.)

Second, while I’ve got (tentative, evolving) plans to keep an eye on the rest of MLS throughout the 2020 season, I follow just two teams closely: the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. As such, and on the grounds that I’m not looking closely enough, you should take anything I say about any other team with a fair-sized grain of salt. (And you should keep a salt shaker handy for all commentary on Portland or Cincinnati.)

Given those limitations, this preview takes a different tack to looking forward to the 2020 season. Rather than organize each team in the league according to the sharpness of their offseason maneuvering or rank one against the rest – though I will do that below, albeit (very) loosely – I’ll measure all 26 teams in MLS on two levels:

1) whether or not I expect them to be “good” (i.e., a decent bet for the post-season); and
2) whether or not I think they’ll be interesting in 2020.

As you’ll see below, these “rankings” sound a little “Dungeons & Dragons-esque” – e.g., “Interesting Good,” or “Boring Bad” (and you can find the sign up sheet for Drow Elf cosplay in the lobby) – and the supporting arguments for each call will be, per the hedging above, necessarily loose (but that doesn’t mean I don’t care). I’m going to start this review by fitting Portland and Cincinnati into the grand scheme of things, but every team will get its moment, if in thumbnail size. I’ll add some bonus details to each thumbnail, most of which is self-explanatory, with one exception: “predictions spread.” Each individual team preview on The Mothership’s site ends with their in-house hacks guessing where they’ll finish in its respective conference; there, the bigger the spread, the harder the call, the more unpredictable the team, the more fun/chaos I expect out of them.

Portland Timbers 1-3 New England Revolution: Chance Creation

Yes, that is who you think they are. 1996.

This week’s special word is “dispirited.” (Can I keep that bit up for 35+ games? Dunno….but I’m also not saying I won’t try.)

Because I came late to the party, I turned on the game already knowing the Portland Timbers lost their last game of the preseason 1-3 to, for what it’s worth, a New England Revolution team that I expect to be good-to-great in 2020. Again, who you lose to can go some distance to explaining why your team lost – i.e., if they’re better, what else would you expect? It’s possible, in other words, that the Revs are just better than the Timbers. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but, 1) the evidence points to yes, and 2) the question is what that means for Portland’s 2020.

To flesh out No. 1 above, I’d accept that New England has a better sense of how they want to operate on the field and, in that way, they are better than Portland. Even so, the final score damned the Timbers more than it flattered the Revolution. New England never had to be great on Saturday: they just had to defend well enough and put away the chances they created. The extent to which that’s true of literally every team in soccer is all it takes to understand all the problems Portland has going into 2020.

In the Timbers’ defense, putting this game beyond their reach took a bounce lucky enough to look like a perfect pass; the ungainly laws of physics that squirted the ball wide to New England’s Gustavo Bou in that specific moment operate on the same level of probability as a hard 8 in craps, so I feel all right putting Adam Buska’s goal down to blind and/or bad luck. The trouble is, the Revs hit that hard 8 two more times. The second one, Bou’s penalty kick, somehow hurt less, and maybe because Kelyn Rowe slotted a great pass to Buska (who may or may not have been offside; I never got a good angle on the stream). The first one, though, hurt like a mother, because it repeated a disturbing pattern from the blowout loss to Minnesota United FC – e.g., the game I’d allowed myself to write-off because head coach Gio Savarese opted to start T2 over T-Prime. For those who didn’t watch (or rewind the video three-four times), Bou crossed the ball to (I think) Brandon Bye, who then crossed it back to a wide-open Bou at the back-post, leaving him nothing more to do than hitting it with enough pace to slip past Portland’s Steve Clark. It’s the “wide-open” part (hence the italics) that really distresses a fella.

Portland Timbers 2-4 Minnesota United FC: An Unfortunate Spin on the Usual

What if we screamed louder?

I never mentioned it online, at least not until just before kickoff, but I wanted to see the Portland Timbers’ bench tonight. Sure, the FO grasped for some upgrades in the off-season, but the first team hasn’t changed enough (yet) to kill off my curiosity about who else the Portland Timbers have laying around the clubhouse.

When things started well – and they did, all the way up to “Help Me” Dairon Asprilla’s screamin’ opener (I know where the “help me” comes from, but I don’t get it either) – the narrative of a glorious collective future unspooled in my head. The idea was, Portland getting as many players as possible on the field would make this a real team-effort: all hands on deck, every man playing his part, just total, global buy-in from all concerned, and with plenty of minutes all-'round. It looked plausible too, for as long as the Timbers looked plausible. Then the goals started going the other way. Over and over and (one more) over again. The game ended 2-4, and not in Portland's favor.

I credit the Timbers coaching staff for testing the theory (or a theory) to the bitter end. They even doubled-down, as if someone dared them to do it. The last set of players looked like they took a wrong turn out of Lincoln High School’s locker room, but those young ‘uns took a couple shades off Portland’s blushes courtesy of Ken Krolicki scoring Portland’s second screamer of the night. I scream, Dairon screams, Krolicki screams…can we get two more and go to bed happier?

As a game, it wasn’t awful until it became awful. I think a lot of that had to do with Minnesota, unfortunately. They defended without any kind of intent for the game’s first 30 minutes, not really guarding space and certainly not pushing in some direction away from their own goal, but just kind of milling around in that slow-zombie way. Asprilla’s goal capped it all off, but Julio Cascante nodded a powerful header on goal and Pablo Bonilla fired in a solid near-post shot before that; the Timbers looked like they had the game by the scruff for as long as the Loons seemed willing to offer their necks.

Portland Timbers 2-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: An Easy Hazing

You need the neck, man. And the collarbones.

I’d made an agreement with myself to stop watching this one at the 80th minute until I saw the Portland Timbers pull a near-complete line-change. The Timbers were up 2-1, I knew how it ended and the Vancouver Whitecaps looked no more likely to steal the result than to earn it. All the same, if the preseason isn’t about watching the undercard talent, I don’t know why they do it. For better or worse – I’m inclined to better – the Timbers continued to pick off the Vancouver Whitecaps passes and generally keep the field tilted toward the ‘Caps’ goal after all those subs came on. Better, when the new guys came on, they seemed to hit the same angles on their passes and cut out Vancouver’s passes the same way; you might want a player with a different skill-set to come on to change the focus of the attack, but you want most of the team to play within the same system when they take the field, to look like they know how to play with others without thinking about it too hard. Portland did that on Sunday, and that’s promising.

Moreover, they could call in players like Jeremy Ebobisse, Julio Cascante and, yes, even Dairon Asprilla during that line change, guys with real MLS minutes and moments – and that’s before getting to semi-regular presences like Renzo Zambrano. Those late subs weren’t the first to come on – Marco Farfan replaced Jorge Villafana and Andy Polo replaced Yimmi Chara on the right at the half – and I think the Timbers need competition in those two spots as much as any other ones…now that I think about it, Portland has competition like that in a lot of spots, if with a fair number of clear favorites for each role.

Before going any further, I have a caveat about Vancouver: I don’t rate them for 2020, and I didn’t see anything in Sunday's game to change my opinion on that. Sure, they have some dangerous pieces: Ali Adnan (Jr.?) showed what he can do with a cross multiple times, including the one that created the ‘Caps well-worked goal. Several of their expected key players (e.g., Hwang Im-Beom, Markinovic and Lucas Cavallini) combined to make that happen, but outside that moment, they struggled to get the ball to Cavallini and the 'Caps struggled to get players around the ball anytime Cavallini had it. As much as Cavallini looked big, strong and effective, Vancouver seems to have found a head for its team (Cavallini) but without investing enough in a neck, or even a pair of collarbones. Even after that, the issues are global, whether it’s Derek Cornelius’ lightly bone-headed pair of gaffes (one of them, the penalty kick that Portland’s Felipe Mora had no need to sell to the ref), or the still impressive Yordy Reyna slicing through pockets of space (even if they lead to dead-ends). It’s not quite contempt, so much as an expectation that the Timbers will be one of several teams who will take advantage of Vancouver in the season ahead.

Because it’s preseason, I don’t need to dig too deep on anything, so kindly file all the above away as I tick through a handful of bullet points to close out.

MLS Off-Season Weeky (02.09.2020): Important Players & Unimportant Results

Also warms the heart. My Sunday is planned.

As I look at the results rolling in during this preseason, I’m reminded of the entirely goddamn awful names some American soccer teams have chosen of their own free will: “The Tampa Bay Rowdies”? “San Diego” (fucking) “Loyal”? “Austin Bold”? (seriously, Austin? I expect so much more of you…). Fire your marketing teams…

Back to the grind, the big news from this past week of preseason came with a guarantee that a regular season will follow: Major League Soccer and the MLS Players’ Association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement…was it Thursday? (And does that matter?) Given how little controversy surrounds it, I don’t have much to say about the particulars of who got what outta the deal (but, for those who want the details). I figured the CBA would get done the day the league and the MLSPA extended negotiations to February 7th, so I guess the most surprising thing about the whole thing in my mind is how much regular people care about how much professional soccer players get paid. Personally, all I need to know is, 1) that the players aren’t getting screwed over, and 2) we've got five seasons before we have to sweat this shit again (that said, the thing with the players getting a cut of a new TV deal is pretty nifty).

So, that’s that. The rest of this post will do the usual: check in with both the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati, followed by a whip-around of results from the past week. Before continuing, I have an editorial note: personal obligations will keep me from posting a weekly next weekend; in the best of all possible world, however, I’ll have preseason games to write about – two for FC Cincinnati (Wednesday and Sunday) and one for Portland (Sunday), so…can I haz streams, plz jesus? I don't think I've got another week of pretending to know anything about (e.g.,) Pablo Piatti, Mattheus Rossetto, or Jeizon Ramirez, because I don’t. We’ll see how everyone fits in or fails to as the results pile up…

Moving on, I wanted to fold one of those peak Off-Season Hot-Take Specials that MLSSoccer.com churns out in between seasons into my discussions of Cincinnati and Portland. In his latest column, Matt Doyle answered the question of which player is most important to each team in MLS. I’ll start both sections by taking issue with his answers (or not), while also checking in on what happened with both teams over the past week.

MLS Off-Season Weekly (02.02.2020): Fuck It, But File It

MLS, 2019-2020. Hell, Yes.

With preseason finally in full swing, I’ve decided to switch focus to those results instead of dry-humping meaning out of which teams get what players – except, that is, when new arrivals land in Portland, Oregon or Cincinnati, Ohio. That doesn’t mean I didn’t see Oswaldo Alanis joining the San Jose Earthquakes, or that I missed Luis Amarilla landing in Minnesota, and I definitely noticed Joao Paulo signing with the Seattle Sounders (bastards!): it just means, um, I don’t really have anything to add beyond linking the name of someone I don’t know to a team that I do and, because all the teams listed above play in the Western Conference, I hope that each of those players bring a soccer-performance equivalent of the plague into those respective locker rooms, by which I mean I don’t want anyone to die actually, but only metaphorically, and in a way that only hurts each individual player for as long as they are on those teams, and with good fortune and earnings thereafter, amen, etc. (There. That should satisfy legal...)

That said, the one player move from the past week that stuck with me was Real Salt Lake shipping Jefferson Savarino to Brazil. I mean, it was only a week ago that RSL’s staff talked about having the team to compete for the title and I assumed at the time (and I don’t think unreasonably) that part of that plan included Savarino, who has been a good and useful player for RSL for the past year or so, if not their most dangerous player. I get that teams sell players, I do, but this still feels like a weird one…and yet it all feels very grown-up and first-world soccer at the same time. This assumes, of course, that RSL has someone lined up to fill the gaping “danger-hole” in their starting XI. And why wouldn’t they? I mean, have you seen this off-season? It’s like a drunken sailor party at Mardi Gras out there...it’s enough to make the CBA negotiations feel like they’re happening in another league, but they’re not. Wild, right?

And, best thing of all, both the Timbers and FC Cincy got invites to the party. With that, let’s turn to a results ‘n’ transfers check in on my two favorite teams. Think I’ll start with…yeah, gonna do Portland.

Results ‘n’ Transfers, Timbers Time
The Timbers have played exactly one game so far, a 2-1 win over Costa Rica’s Saprissa down in (the other) San Jose. People have rightly celebrated Diego Valeri’s early free kick, but the real story is in the…nah, I can’t fake this one. The line-ups for both halves feel like the coaches came with that line-up by picking names out of hat. It worked just fine – hey! - but I’m also guessing that all involved played with professional pride and courtesy and saw that no one got hurt besides Bill Tuiloma…OK, so that’s two months from February 1st till he comes back, and that’s April 1st. Got it.

The big news this week was the arrival of two (2) attacking players for Portland in Jaroslaw Niezgoda (a player Timbers fans have expected to receive for…was it weeks or a month?) and Felipe Mora, who came as something of a surprise, at least to me. Both players come with impressive resumes, which means I’m excited to see them both, but without expectations they’ll save us from either sin or an early off-season. Between their arrival and having it on well-connected word (right?) that Cristhian Paredes will return, and that means the Timbers go into 2020 with an already-solid team, and now with at least four new, potential upgrades. It’s the “upgrade over what” question that starts a journey.

Based on very loose readings of what he does, I think I have some sense of what Niezgoda does on the field; based on still looser reading, I have no damn idea at all what Mora does: I’ll catch up on both when they play, like everyone else, but the immediate question is what those players’ arrival(s?) mean to Jeremy Ebobisse. The base-line thinking holds that Ebobisse starts either at forward or as a winger. Without knowing what Mora does (and I’m willing to wait), I don’t know that he’ll impact Ebobisse directly, but I’m guessing that Niezgoda will freeze him out of forward, at least until failure kicks in. Between Valeri, Sebastian Blanco, Yimmi...hell, maybe even Marvin Loria and Andy Polo, Ebobisse has a shit-ton of players to get through before he starts on the wing. So...

That’s frustrating, honestly. Ebobisse feels like too strong an asset to burn, but I’d also allow that he’s an odd duck as a player, a better soccer player than he is a forward, better at combination play in the attacking third than he is at scoring. I think he’d kill as a second forward on a team built to accommodate that role, but it also becomes a question of addition and subtraction that gets messy real quick. Just as a thought exercise, try to build a tenable Portland Timbers line-up that has both Niezgoda and Ebobisse starting. I think it’s possible, especially if you’re willing to deploy either Valeri or Ebobisse strategically, but getting the balance right will take more thought than I’ve put into it so far. Also, I don’t think anyone in the organization is really thinking that way – by which I mean, I expect to see (possibly) too much of Valeri and Blanco this season, and that’ll surely squeeze out Ebo - then again, based on the line-ups against Saprissa, who knows?

Letting Ebobisse linger on the bench seems unfair, I guess, and perhaps unwise, but, if there’s wisdom in having competition across the roster, the Timbers have definitely set up something of a cage-match in the attacking positions…maybe I’m just anxious because I don’t know how they’ll settle it?

Results ‘n’ Transfers, FC Cincinnati
I think it’s been reliably confirmed that Cincy has successfully signed Jurgen Locadia – even if the question of “success” remains up for grabs. Absent some kind of personal knowledge about him among Gerard Nijkamp and Ron Jans, Locadia has the kind of resume that blows up most often – e.g., falling in and out of the line-up, going out on loan, etc., and consistently – so that’s the red flag. To put a more positive spin on it, maybe he’s a good player who wasn’t quite as good as the players in front of him – loans aren’t always a sign of failure – and a player like that probably clears FC Cincinnati’s and/or MLS’s threshold, so I guess it’s back to wait and see…with that thing about exploding resumes as an asterisk, of course.

We’ll see what happens when Locadia comes, if Locadia comes, but FC Cincinnati now has two (somewhat) context-rich results behind them: 1) their 3-0 triumph over Phoenix Rising (but not fast enough, amirite?!), and 2) their 0-4 wake-up call about this not being the USL anymore MFs (and I know how totally 2019 that is, but the point stands), from a cocked-and-loaded Sporting Kansas City team. The results, as you’re fully aware, mean nothing; more to the point, had you asked me what I’d expect to happen in both games, I would have guessed both results, just with smaller margins. To name some points of interest from both games:

W over Phoenix: Rey Ortiz getting two assists is nice, so is seeing Andrew Gutman, Tommy McCabe and Joseph-Claude Gyau knocking in the three goals, you want your bit players scoring often as they can, etc. They made do in some ways – i.e., I wouldn’t field that starting XI often or confidently – and that’s the second piece of intrigue: FC Cincy’s second half XI strikes me as a likelier regular XI than the team Jans sent out in the first half.

L way under SKC: Cincy flipped the script in this one for me, in that this first-half starting line-up feels more like what I expect them to try in 2020, at least early on. And SKC shredded it. Daniel Salloi scored a goal, fer crissakes (srsly, check his 2018 versus his 2019). Based on both teams' rosters and recent histories, I’d expect the same thing to happen if Cincinnati played SKC at any point during 2020. One team upgraded on a solid/comically-underachieving foundation (that's SKC and, just to note it, Alan Pulido did not play), while another added some potentially useful pieces to the worst team in the league last season (uh, Cincy). If you expected better from this game, pay more attention to how often you’re disappointed and ask yourself why that is.

All the same, I do sincerely believe this is the beginning of a better year for Cincinnati. I’m confident I’ve mentioned this before, but I like Jans as a coach, and I think the team found and eliminated the fat quicker than we might appreciate. I didn’t agree with every move – e.g., Emmanuel Ledesma and Victor Ulloa are the ones I question (going the other way, Powell, no, Adi, no, Mattocks, no…say, there’s a lot of former Timbers in there) – but I do feel like they’re grasping toward a better, smarter foundation for 2020, and that they’ve found the hand-holds. We’ll see, of course, starting March 1, and every week thereafter from here till…it’s like goddamn Halloween before the season ends, right?

Anyway, Cincinnati will be better this year than last. How much better, and how that fits into all the teams they compete against? That’s the big, scary question, isn’t it?

More Results
I wanted to close with notes on some noteworthy results (no typo), because that’s where the rubber hits the road. FC Dallas signed Denilson way back when, and you shouldn’t know who that is…the point is signings don’t matter till they pay off on the field, even the big ones, and that’s why I fixate on results, even the dumb ones.

DC United 1-3 Montreal Impact
I found this notable for the goal scorers – e.g., new kid Romell Quioto and the returned Ballou Tabla. Montreal has weapons. It’s also a mess, but also that.

Columbus Crew SC 1-1 Vancouver Whitecaps
1) Vancouver’s starting line-up looks plausible (between the defensive mid side, and the attacking three); 2) Artur with Darlington Nagbe seems like a really strong midfield pairing, but we’ll see.

Atlanta United FC 4-0 Philadelphia Union
I want to say that Philly threw out some lambs, but I recognize enough of those names to wonder. The bigger news is that Pity Martinez’s name keeps showing up on the score sheet this preseason.

Los Angeles FC 3-1 New York City FC
Mostly because it feels ominous.

DC United 1-3 New York Red Bulls
Noticing a pattern for DC, but they did have some key players missing for this one. Also, look at those line-ups and tell me the Red Bulls won’t at least be tough.

FC Dallas 1-4 Vancouver Whitecaps
As if on cue, the ‘Caps drill a middle-top-tier Western Conference team. But, no, I’m not reading anything into this…yet.

Chicago Fire 0-4 Philadelphia Union
Chicago’s second half line-up is a who’s who of where did they come from? For Philly, it’s so far better than Chicago, but worse than Atlanta. Which is doable. To a point.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that skips a fair number of results, most of them against USL teams or foreign teams. I don’t discount those games at all, I just don’t know quite how to translate them to anything meaningful – for instance, I can’t read Atlanta drawing IF Elsborg 1-1 the same way I can look at Vancouver beating up Dallas on neutral ground. A 4-1 result going in Vancouver’s favor raises an abundance of questions, and from multiple angles…

…but it’s also the preseason, so fuck it (but file it).

USA 1-0 Costa Rica: Regular as Tuesday

Third image for "regular Tuesday." I like it.

Start with a premise: the U.S. Men’s National Team started (some of their) most promising young players, but not their (alleged) best, and go from there. Those kids lined up against a Costa Rican national team that was certainly experienced, but, full disclosure, I have no idea as to whether or not that’s Costa Rica’s finest.

Next question: how’d it go?

Eh. 1-0 to the U.S., and about as exciting as that sounds.

I’d say the U.S. was the clearly better team, or at least the one that played like it believed it could win – something else from playing to win – but Costa Rica had a great chance at the game’s first goal and they had at least two buck-naked breakouts (which means the U.S. had only one or two defenders close enough to matter) before that miss. Those breaks aside, the Americans started strong, and their movement and passing had the Costa Ricans chasing; Costa Rica adjusted by condensing its defensive lines, and the game turned into your everyday, ordinary CONCACAF slog.

To sum up, a young, untested American team played an experienced team from its qualifying region, one that has consistently ranked number 3 in the region behind the U.S. and Mexico, and they looked the better team, but still barely beat them. That's as regular as Tuesday, when you think about it.

Welcome to my blank slate for the U.S. Men’s National Team. I’ve made the decision to say, fuck the past, let’s just look at what’s in front of us. At this point, the U.S. is good enough to barely beat Costa Rica – and at home.