An MLS History Project: 1997, The First Great Roster Build

Drawing your attention to the two dumb, squat trophies in the foreground...

Dang. It’s already getting harder to keep shit straight. I’ve got a thin prompt for one – mostly a table of standings, a handful of names (specifically, top goal scorers, players of the week/month), and who finished where – and digging much more than that violates the spirit of the project (started with 1996). So, I won’t…

Fortunately, I have a ready-made theme for 1997 – one based on the simple, accidental reality that I moved from Portland, OR to Washington DC in early ’97 (by Amtrak; I can’t recommend the method enough, young people). As noted in the post on 1996 (link up there), the first MLS Cup churned my loins into a passionate froth, so I was already in the tank for DC United when the logic of moving there made enough sense to get me there. The season had started before I arrived, but I still bought season tickets and spent the year going to RFK. Alone, too. I had company for a couple games, and I was lucky to have some close friends in the area at the time, but I still went to and watched* the overwhelming majority of games all on my lonesome.

To share one memory from those games at RFK, one that really stuck with me, there was a concourse between the set of seats in the field and the one immediately behind it, and my tickets were in that second tier of seats. Just about every game there, some very young woman in summer dress (e.g., tube-top, tank-top and short shorts, it hardly mattered) would walk that concourse to a chorus of cat-calls, whistles, and other unmentionable sounds. Genuinely icky, obviously, and that’s just 25 years ago people and that chorus was loud.

To turn to a happier memory, I also saw DC host Chivas de Guadalajara that year in an early iteration of the CONCACAF Champions League. The game ended in a draw, and DC looked all right doing it too. To be clear, this was an American team, with a couple Bolivian ringers (Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno) playing mighty Chivas to a draw. Sure, it was in DC – probably helped it was August, and I remember the tournament rules somehow bending in MLS’s favor as well – but I was so used to watching DC win by then that it all made sense.

An MLS History Project: 1996, So Goddamn Thirsty

Desperation should never start here. Pro tip.

With no Major League Soccer to watch and/or write about, I’ve decided to take my...let’s call it chemically-strained memory for a test drive. The vehicle will be a year-by-year personal history of the first 24 MLS seasons; call it my own little commemoration of a 25th anniversary season that may or may not happen (for the record, my money’s against it, but my heart’s for it).

Because this is about what I actually remember, the overall intention is to use minimal prompts – e.g., a couple Wikipedia articles, maybe one specific event or concept I can mine to give anyone who finds this something better than, “and then DC United beat the New York/New Jersey MetroStars*, where they played the Tampa Bay Mutiny** in the Eastern Conference semifinals." (* The original New York team has always struggled with branding. ** Wow, I still type “Tampa Buy Mutiny” the first time ‘round even all these years later.)

The broad goal is to track themes, trends, great players, weird players, bad ideas, good ones, and to just try to get my mind back to what those moments felt like; the underlying goal is to treat the whole thing like a trivia night at the local bar: there will be no googling and no further research after checking…let’s go with three prompts (except to, say, dig up video for something I remember and would like to post).

Before diving in, I can tell you where this whole thing is very likely to fail: I put my chances at not being able to make particular distinctions between, say, 2003 and 2004, very, very high. But that’s not what this is. It’s a trip down Memory Lane. Because, when you’ve got nothing else to look at, why not look at what came before?

The whole thing starts when Major League Soccer started: 1996. Let’s set the scene…

First things first, the league was supposed to start a year earlier, in 1995 (apparently), but it failed to launch in the originally-scheduled Year One. Recalling that knocked loose the memory that having an officially FIFA-sanctioned top-flight domestic soccer league was a condition for the U.S. getting the World Cup in 1994 (how explicit a condition, I don’t recall). When friends asked about that during World Cup broadcasts, I have this loose memory of thinking it’d never happen…and, once the product rolled out, I figured the whole damn thing was doomed.

MLS in the Time of COVID-19

It's a myth. LIVE! (No, seriously, don't.)

Seeing that this space has been chronicling the comings and goings of Major League Soccer since January 11, 2015, how can I pass through one of the biggest events in its history without commentary? I’m talking, of course, about MLS’s 25th anniversary season! 25 years, guys! Holy shit, and how many times did I think you’d never make it…but also COVID-19, the fact that the 2020 regular season was put on hold for several weeks and, when you get right down to it, may not happen at all…

…and if some part of you hasn’t braced yourself for the possibility of the entire 2020 season never happening, my guess is you’re wondering why everyone’s freaking out and hanging scare-quotes about the phrase “social distancing” in every day conversation. This post is for you too, and don't mind the insults.

With news on the coronavirus outbreak going wall-to-wall until we run out of walls, I’m not going to dig too much into that specific subject. Anyone who wants to know what’s happening already does, which leaves the rest of you deciding whether Fox News is “too far left” of OANN (here, “too far left” signals an a willingness to try bleach as medication). To go back to why I almost expect to see the entire 2020 season cancelled, that just follows from what I'm reading - same as you (and, seriously, don't read OANN). MLS honchos have tentatively slated May 10 for the league’s return and, based on most of what I’ve read, they still hope to play the full slate of games, only on a condensed schedule. If that happens and a full season comes to pass, I’ll celebrate more irresponsibly than most. That has everything to do with how surprised I’ll be to see it.

First things first, no one knows much about this bug – all the way down to seasonality, i.e., whether or not higher temperatures will slow it down. That said, whether it’s higher temperatures or the (increasingly unlikely) effect of fully successful social distancing and/or nation-wide shelter-in-place lock-downs, it’s entirely possible that, perhaps as early as May 10, or even as late as June or July, countries all over the world will attempt a resort to “normalcy,” which, by the way, is one of my favorite words from around the time of the Spanish Flu outbreak. (Ah, the unwanted parallels.) At any rate, once the infections stop growing, y’know, exponentially, temptation to return to normal life will exert a powerful pull on all of us. Also, face it, just about every person on the fucking planet will embrace that with the “I-don’t-actually-care-if-it-kills-me” recklessness of this year’s Spring Break revels. Seriously, if/when the day comes when The Man gives the all-clear, it will take a reservation and a sword and shield to get into your favorite local night-spots. The party is gonna be lit, y’all!

MLS Week 2 Recap: Contra Bunkering & Where the Action Is (the West)

Googling "bad training" turns up some stuff...

“There’s an old question common to all sports – e.g., whether you’d rather be entertained versus whether you just want the W however you get it. The Nashville game tested the hell out of that one. Some part of me has always known how I'd answer.”

I tweeted that earlier (and apologies for quoting myself), and I want to finish the thought. Regardless of whether my Portland Timbers opt to bunker-‘n’-counter for the rest of 2020 – and I mean this specifically in terms of, as someone online put it, “grinding out results” - this is me formally objecting to the concept.

Grinding out a result on the road against a good team is a time honored tradition of the game, and that is good and just; I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about adopting it as a style – or, to use a buzzword I hate, an “identity” built around that. Sure, that can win a team some games, but, unless you’re flirting with elite in your counterattacking quality (and I’m not sure the Timbers are in 2020), that’ll never win you a title, and I thought that was the point of all this. And if your team’s goal is to make the playoffs, only to die in the first round, I…I don’t know how to talk to you.

More to the point, I’m a firm believer in the idea that a team should know how to play soccer – i.e., how to advance the ball up the field, and in a controlled way that allows a team to put good shots on goal. That’s one of those things that, 1) a team has work at, and 2) something the players can’t learn unless they get high-rep practice doing that. Because “grinding out a result” trains a team in the opposite direction, I don’t believe it should be encouraged, even on a shitty team. Besides the act of practicing that approach will reveal the players who are up to it. Anyway, all I wanted to say is that there is a time and place for grinding out results, but that isn’t in league soccer – or least not in any league I’d want to watch.

With that li’l rant out of the way, it’s back to regularly scheduled programming. I’ve reviewed the MLS in 15 highlights for all the games in Week 2 – and I went the full 90 on Atlanta v Cincy and Portland v Nashville (links below) – and ranked all the results in the order of their comparative importance; the more important, the higher up on the list it shows. I checked the box scores for each game (not a lot to get excited about this week, fwiw; also, I embed MLSSoccer.com's data-set into the header for each game), and did some light reading, but it’s mostly just notes on the games at this point. Good ones, hopefully, but I’ll be the first to admit I come into these games in various moods and/or states of mind. It’s in the way that you use it, or something to that effect. Oh, and I should still post a link to the 2020 MLS season preview I posted about a month ago; that'll inform some part of the commentary, whether conscious or not, until about Week 5 or so.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Nashville SC: Malaise & Balance

Get out those sweaters people, and turn down the thermostat.

Unless I’m mistaken, the Portland Timbers’ 1-0 win over Nashville SC had exactly two defining moments. The first happened when Diego Valeri stumbled into the on-side pocket where Andy Polo’s more alert than good header found him; Valeri finished the moment in a manner befitting someone to whom a team pays the big bucks, and that was literally the game. The other happened when Steve Clark tipped Anibal Godoy’s rifle-shot around his far post. Between them, those moments provided Portland’s margin of victory, and, good God, no, it wasn’t fun to watch. Children fidgeted, I tell you...

If a person argued that nothing really happened on either side of those two moments, that person would not be wrong. That person is me. Sure, Walker Zimmerman came close at the very deathiest of the death, but he nodded the ball wide; at the end of the first half, and quite possibly in injury time once again, Randall Leal cut his way into an opening…and then he fired his shot so close to Clark that he didn’t even have to move to save it…

…with that, I believe I’ve covered all points of interest. Thank you for attending today’s tour, just promise that you’ll never speak favorably about it to anyone, any time, ever. Don't encourage this shit, for the love of all that's holy.

This was an awful game, from Portland’s POV in particular. They scored on one of three shots fired, and one of the two they put on goal. For their part, Nashville put up a normal and reasonable number of shots, but I’ve listed the only two that really counted above…and, dear god in heaven, can that really be it?

The grim reality is fairly straightforward: based on the available evidence, Portland will struggle to get even one point out of any game in which they allow the opposition to score. Nashville couldn’t score, and that let the one, beautifully fluky goal Valeri fired in stand up. My memory matches the box score perfectly, in that I can’t recall even one more decent move by the Timbers outside Felipe Mora’s…competent (but no better) shot on Nashville’s goal. To wrap up what I’m getting at, yes, the attack looks that bad right now.

Atlanta United FC 2-1 FC Cincinnati: A Different Feeling in My Stomach

Explaining a nonsense phrase below...

I’m going to use Atlanta United FC’s second goal as exemplary evidence that they are a better team than FC Cincinnati. The latter’s defense earned every shot you want to take at its shape, but Emerson Hyndman, 1) spotted the space, 2) Ezequiel Barco found it, and with a well-weighted pass and, more than the first two points, 3) Hyndman’s touch took him around the defender and opened Spencer Richey’s all the way up. A professional player 10 yards from goal with the ‘keeper on or near his line ends badly nine times outta ten, and that’s how one team breaks down another team, or vice versa, and whatever that means.

As people paying careful attention already know, Atlanta beat FC Cincy last night by a final score of 2-1. Cincinnati pulled one back with a slicing shot from Yuya Kubo ("golazo"? srsly, MLSSoccer.com; are expectations so low?), and they had a couple chances besides – good ones, too – but Atlanta already had one crack in Cincy’s defense in the bank before the second one happened, and that left the Orange and Blue playing out of a hole for the second week running…

…and yet, I feel good. Bah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

For anyone watching at home, no, you didn’t imagine it: Cincinnati put up a fair number of shots last night, and more than Atlanta. In fact, Cincy nearly doubled Atlanta’s necked shots total (i.e., just shots not shots on goal; eight for Atlanta v 14 for Cincinnati), but two key thoughts follow from that:

1) Did Cincinnati ever appear entirely in control of last night’s match?

2) The box score from Atlanta’s season-opening win over Nashville SC looks much the same, and the result looks exactly the same.

The question is, what you draw from all that?

MLS Week 1 Recap: Results, Meaning, Ranking, and Meaningless Rankings

But is it totaled? I mean, I know a guy.

To start with the permanent, standing disclaimer that necessarily introduces every Week 1 post in any league, what any given team did over 90 minutes stopped mattering immediately after the final whistle in the, frankly execrable and as yet unmentionable, late show. AHEM. What matters is what they do over the next 33 weeks…

…well, unless you’re an Atlanta United fan, because losing Josef Martinez has real potential to total what looked like a promising 2020. (Pity Martinez and Ezequiel Barco: the croupier has passed on you the dice.)

Welcome to the first in-season Major League Soccer Weekly of the 2020 season. There’s plenty of blah, blah, blah below so I’ll keep the preamble short. Most of each week’s (to be very clear on this) shallow analysis will continue to be results-driven; that’s just what makes sense to me, because it answers questions like how much Martinez’s injury means one week at a time. (Am I still making those monstrous Info-Tables in the shadows? Maybe.) I still want to somehow signal the things that look important, and from within a results-based frame, so I’m going to borrow one of the silliest analytical tools in sports writing: yes, I’ll be ranking results each week, and based on how much I think they establish, alter, bend or break a narrative. Got it?

“On what criteria, you son of a bitch?!”

That’s something someone might be saying, and the initial criteria will be the 2020 season preview I posted a couple weeks back on this site. It’s all in there, typos, good analysis, unconscionable reaches, places where I just sort of drifted off mid-thought a la Joe Biden, etc. I’ll reference it less and less as the results come in, but the notes in that post gesture vaguely to where I think all 26 teams in the league came into the 2020 regular season.

The results from MLS’s Week 1 are all listed or linked to below. I’ll embed a link to The Mothership’s match recap info-pond inside the score of each result – where you’ll get box scores, line ups, the Opta crap, the Audi Index bullshit, etc. – and I’ll dot the narratives I write for each game with the best of the good shit. I’ll close each section with a statement on what I think the result does to each team’s…shit, idiom? No, let’s call it current state of affairs results. (I haven’t landed on a name or mechanism for this piece, so sorry for inserting that cliché inside the larger ranking cliché.) With that, let’s get started…

Portland Timbers 1-3 Minnesota United FC: Deva Ju, Dammit

Best scenario, right?

I remember the happy tweets from the first 30 minutes of the Portland Timbers preseason game against Minnesota United FC. While there was some confusion about whether the balance of the Loons’ line-up came from their first or second team, general agreement held that the Timbers B-team was giving them the proverbial business. The business, I tell you.

The Timbers actually scored the first goal in that preseason game, only for Minnesota to start by finding ways to stop the Timbers attack and end with them punching Portland four goals into submission before it all ended in a 4-2- win for them, again, in Portland. The Timbers pulled one goal back courtesy of Ken Krolicki (and may we meet again, no, not seriously), but the loss was total, abject, and a bunch of other words authors like to use to really drive home a point. Tonight, Portland appeared to have repeated the feat of pulling back one useless goal, only to have it called back, correctly and painfully, as offside (and it's not even worthy of a solo highlight...damn). So, that’s not even a consolation goal and now the games count. Super.

Portland lost to Minnesota 1-3 tonight in Portland, at Providence Park, and this was unnervingly close to what I expected to happen. The sense of déjà vu didn’t just go back to the preseason loss; it went back to Portland’s aimless, meandering 2019.

The pattern is, by now, fairly well established: Portland can’t score goals, which means that pretty much any team with a sufficiently positive goal differential has a fair chance of beating them any given week. Minnesota, as it happens, has become one of those teams. In a fun twist, a lot of the key work came from MLS 3.0 (or thereabouts) players – e.g., Kevin Molino and Ethan Finlay (see all goals, but the third). These aren’t world-beaters, their talents rarely translate to the world stage (not least because they don’t get the chance so often and…fine, most of them would die on the biggest stage), but the part of me that frets over the United States’ capacity to produce effective attacking players always thrills a little at seeing loosely-known players from the home country take charge and win a game. Raising the bar for the next generation is a good thing…just wish they didn’t raise it at Portland’s expense.

New York Red Bulls 3-2 FC Cincinnati: The Battle They Won & A Special Little Miracle

Deck still works. (That's taking the positives, baby!)

I’d argue that result makes the bigger, poorer statement on the state of the New York Red Bulls than it makes about FC Cincinnati. More to the point, New York absolutely needed that late, unlikely goal from Daniel Royer to win the game 3-2 and to stay one small step ahead of opening day embarrassment. Cincinnati held a fairly clear, universal edge over the game’s last 30 minutes – and, most encouraging for them, new, spendy kid Jurgen Locadia provided a focal point for forward traffic once he took the field.

As for the bad news, the Red Bulls scrambled the bejesus out of Cincy’s defensive shape throughout the first half. Their passing and movement made the Orange and Blue’s defensive midfield, in particular, about as useful to the overall effort as me sitting on my sofa quietly whispering, “dear gods, what is happening over there?” For as long as they had the energy to pull it off, New York worked their usual, preferred formula of forcing turnovers and immediately finding good, often novel ways of getting vertical toward the opposition goal.

There’s a cautionary tale for both teams in that: as much as Cincinnati’s defensive posture improved (i.e., defenders started tracking the movement and anticipating the next pass), nearly every Red Bulls’ player’s legs had given out before the game’s end. Scuffed touches saw them looking down to make sure they took the ball with them on dribbles and under-hit/wayward passes made it easier for Cincy’s defenders to pick off the strays than it had been during a first half of smart, sure touches.

They might not have won the game, but Cincinnati won the fitness battle…though it’s also worth wondering whether the Red Bulls run their collective legs off whilst building their cushion in the first half. To reduce that to an analogy, did Cincinnati push the Red Bulls to the edge, or a lactic acid burn take the Red Bulls out of the way?