An MLS History Project, 2015: Symmetry, Tragedy and Triumph

Yes, on multiple levels...

Of the 24 (full, unfucked) seasons in Major League Soccer history, 2015 counts as the most consequential for me, personally – and not for the obvious reason. Yes, the Portland Timbers won MLS Cup and, yes, it was one hell of a ride and I’ll cover all of that below, probably to the point of short-changing the rest of the league. To paraphrase the great moral philosopher, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, the writing of history falls to the victors (and, to finish his thought, yes, I just put Baby in the fucking corner, deal with it).

To get the personal weirdness out of the way, I barely enjoyed watching the Timbers win MLS Cup. It wasn’t a great game for one – and I mean that in terms of spectacle – Portland’s goals were cheap (the first) and dirty (the second) and, because their opponents, Columbus Crew SC, never really recovered from Diego Valeri’s sucker-punch goal in the very first minute, it was effectively over as a contest by the 7th minute when the Timbers’ Rodney Wallace scored their second, naughty goal (here's a wrap-up of all the malfeasance in MLS Cup 2015). On a deeper level – and a misplaced one, as explained below – I experienced the 2015 season as seven months of (at times deep) mediocrity followed by two weeks of joy. I struck out on a metaphor in my post on the 2014 season, so I’ll borrow a cliché and say I want at least four of those seven months back, dammit.

In fewer words, 2015 was the season I decided I’d take the Supporters’ Shield over MLS Cup every goddamn time. Watching a better team get results all year long sounds like a better season to me, thank you very much (and winning the U.S. Open Cup will always be a happy accident and/or a sporadic confidence builder for your bench, will be rewarded for their service by watching the starters step in to steal the glory over the final two games). The grass is always greener, the cup will never be anything but half-full, the pope wears a funny hat and shits in the woods, etc.

Moving on to programming notes, I’m not going to list all the teams, their records and some notes at the end of the post anymore. Back when I started this, that seemed like the best way to provide hard information about a season, but you can read and digest the final 2015 conference tables as well as I can, and now I’ve got the Form Guide, fresher memories, and more reliable access to video highlights, and that gives me enough material to create and/or embellish a narrative of the season. [Ed. – Point in fact, I could watch highlights of most games from the 2015 season, but I love myself too much for that madness.] Now, to our regularly scheduled programming…

An MLS History Project, 2014: Of DPs and an Indifferent, Yet Angry Universe

I have my limits....

Several times in prior posts in this series, I’ve talked about Major League Soccer becoming the league it is today (e.g., 2020, only without COVID-19), with established rules and practices that carry over from year to year (I devoted a messy paragraph to this argument in my 2013 post). As I keep discovering, oh, every time I look to the next season (or five), that doesn’t hold up. There will always be the next stupid idea, another cheapening of the competitive structure that will devalue the regular season until the ice caps melt and we all drown. The circle of life, etc. Happily, we get relief from the worst ideas here and there and, the league did make one little big tweak to the rules of competition for the 2014 season and that one caught all of my eye:

“The first tiebreaker remains total wins, but the second and third tiebreakers have been swapped—goal difference is now second and goals scored is third.”

The first time I considered goal differential as (perhaps) a key tell for future success specifically in the MLS playoffs showed up in my post on the 2010 season. And, yes, this change feels like validation…which is why I assume it won’t last. All the same, when I finally wrap up 2019 season, I will create an index/summary post that links to all of this “history project” shit and tie it all together with some details that stand out. The goal differential thing will get explored, along with a number of others. There was one other tweak to the rules in 2014 – MLS decided that away goals would count a little more in the playoffs. And they would.

While some big shifts await – mostly thinking TAM and GAM, but also how the league managed the playoffs –2014 was a curious mix of old and new. On the “old” side, the Los Angeles Galaxy (again) battled the new-model New England Revolution (again) in an MLS Cup at the Galaxy’s home ground (again; 6th fucking time at that venue, people). Because the Seattle Sounders had been reliably good since joining the league in…wow, forgot already…2010(? nope, 2009), seeing them lift the 2014 Supporters’ Shield twists the “new” side of the above into another step toward Seattle’s eternally bright future…yeah, yeah, you can hate it, Portland Timbers fans, you just have to swallow the reality of it.

When Seattle won the Supporters' Shield, they pulled off their…shit, fourth or fifth trophy as an MLS team (the U.S. Open Cup ends before the playoffs, right? So, their first Shield was their 5th trophy) by running up the score all season long. The forward tandem of Obafemi Martins (17g, 13a) and Clint Dempsey (15g, 10a) did the heavy rowing to get them to 65 goals over the regular season. A couple teams kept up nicely – the Timbers among them (just four goals behind at 61), but the Los Angeles Galaxy makes the greater point of interest. They topped Seattle by four goals (69), and pulled a highly-similar trick with Robbie Keane (19g, 14a) and Landon Donovan (10g, 19a) leading the way. The difference was, those two made more players better than Dempsey and Martins: it starts with Gyasi Zardes hitting higher numbers than Lamar Neagle (16g, 2a for Zardes, 9g, 9a for Neagle), but it carried all the way down to about the 8th spot on the statistical ladder for the Galaxy. Still, in both cases, your better DPs raise all boats.

An MLS History Project, 2013: The First MLS 2.0 Final?

Pictured thinking of phrasing for me...

Due to the way my brain does and doesn’t retain things, I have two broad memories about the 2013 Portland Timbers team. The first is unconscious: I believe this team planted the deep memory in my mind that Portland has never had a bad season. 2013 was, in fact, a very good regular season for the Timbers. Even if you remember they battled for the Supporters’ Shield to the death, you may not remember how close they came: the New York Red Bulls went 6-0-2 in their last 8 games, while Portland went 5-0-3; the Timbers fell two points short. Pretty damn close.

Second, Diego Valeri, Diego Chara aside – OK, yes, and Rodney Wallace (7 goals, 6 assists) and Will Johnson (what? 9 goals, 5 assists?!) – this team relied on players who scan as mediocre in my memory. That’s particularly true in defense, where I saw Pa Modou Kah as clumsy (mostly in disposition) and Mamadou “Futty” Danso, who I’ve always read as playing over his talent – to his credit - but who I can’t bring myself to buy as an MLS defender. (That’s why it came as less of a surprise when FC Cincinnati’s Forrest Lasso didn’t cut it; I’d seen the movie; also, the word “top-flight defender” doesn’t feel right in my mouth, so I went with “MLS defender.” Back to it…)

Whatever I thought of them, Danso and Kah anchored MLS’s second best defensive team in 2013: they allowed just 33 goals in a season with a league-wide, goals for/against average of 46.7; only Sporting Kansas City allowed fewer (30), and they won MLS Cup that season. SKC also finished fairly high – and I’ll get to that – but, to finish off Portland, the other “scan(s) as mediocre” player was Ryan Johnson. I’ve seen wistful backward glances at Ryan Johnson recently as a year ago, and he did have a pretty broad tool kit as a forward, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “that’s the guy to win Portland trophies.” A complementary piece, a second banana, Johnson fits all of that, but he did have a solid season, chipping in 9 goals and 4 assists. Those aren’t great numbers in the grandest of schemes, but they weren't far off the norm for 2013, so, in context, not so bad. Honestly, it was a tough room…

…then again, Camilo Sanvezza posted 22 goals and three assists for Vancouver that season, and Marco di Viao was the Montreal Impact’s first league-wide fascination the same season (20 goals, two assists; classy, lethal player, the guy was a total gas; a worthy predecessor to Ignacio Piatti). Johnson suffers in comparison here and there – e.g., Mike Magee hitting 15 goals and 4 assists with his hometown Chicago Fire - but he was at the low end of average at worst. And that’s really how MLS’s 2013 season worked: a tight-fisted season, which ended with a tight-fisted, balls-shriveling MLS Cup (cold AF) hosted by Sporting Kansas City, and won by Sporting Kansas City, after a fascinatingly interminable penalty-kick shoot-out, because Nick Rimando and Jimmy Nielsen, and a fiver (I’ll venmo) if you can tell me his nickname (no googling!).

The Magical World of Major League Soccer: Yes, It Is Weird

On the theory they protect this brand a little less...

Holy shit, this whole “MLS Got Back” thing is actually happening. Yeah, I could get mad, but that’s not gonna stop it. Also, I haven’t made The Witcher good by believing in it with my whole heart and the last new sporting event I watched was PBA Bowling Strike Derby (I was pulling for the other guy), though I am enjoying my third (fourth?) pass at Avatar: The Last Airbender. It holds up, fwiw.

Rather than set the scene – that’ll come later – do I think the (semi-)hermetically sealed one-site tournament in Orlando, FL, aka, The Magical World of Major League Soccer is a good idea? Put it this way: it could have been worse. I’ve read the players are pissed off at the league and have no reason to doubt that, and that’s not good. More than anything else, though, I’m profoundly relieved that I didn’t have to watch this knowing that MLS held hotel employees hostage for seven weeks to pull this off, because that would have made watching a struggle. Of course, people coming and going heightens to risk of exposure for all involved, but the hostage situation thing just feels closer to a human rights violation, so I’m going to down a dram of that poison. If you want more details on the COVID-control side of the equation, The Athletic’s write-up on “what to expect” provides it. Going the other way, you should have some idea of what COVID management looks like by now. A critical mass of players will get it or they won’t, regardless, and that’s that.

As for mechanics, all 26 MLS teams will arrive between June 24 and July 1, 2020, and the games will start on July 8 and end on August 11. Here’s how it’ll work, broadly:

“Every team will play a minimum of three group-stage matches that will count toward the regular season. The group stage will be followed by a knockout round, in which the results will not count toward the regular season. The maximum time any team would spend in Orlando would be seven weeks, and MLS will aim to return to action in home markets at the conclusion of the tournament.”

Say, that’s a fun question: will that whole “return to action in home markets at the conclusion of the tournament” thing happen? To give my honest answer, yes, and with very real trade-offs, maybe even real problems. We've got some unsavory years ahead, people...