MLS Weakly, 01 30 2021: Ignoring the Big Whale in the Fish Tank

It’s been one of those weeks in the domestic soccer world in which big things have moved very, very slowly. On the one hand, sure, trades great and small continue to come together and fall apart, but an air of irrelevance will swallow them up until the relevant parties land the whale in the fish tank one way or the other…

…which refers, of course, to the ongoing negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between Major League Soccer (MLS) and its players’ union (MLSPA). Because my thinking on that has only got more muddled and frustrated, I’ve decided to bury the comments on it at the end of the post. I mean, why not pretend the lockout threatened by the owners won’t happen all the way up to the moment when it does? Let’s pull of a reverse mullet and put the party in the front and the business in the back.

A couple players moved around - e.g., Kelyn Rowe signed with the Seattle Sounders, Atlanta United signed some old dude (37) for a year, and the Portland Timbers are still somehow working on “finalizing” the signing of right back Josecarlos Van Rankin - which doesn’t give much to talk about on that front. The U.S. Men’s National Team* plays a game tomorrow against Trinidad & Tobgao - and I will watch it, thirsty bastard that I am, while refusing to give in to the hype of the countdown to kickoff timer that U.S. Soccer posted (for now) on its site, or the idea that I’ll watch anything of consequence when I turn in, never mind three of them.

[*Ed. - The U.S. Women’s National Team has three games in February and I still feel…funny, I guess about watching one national team, but not the other. The only response/defense I have is that I need a certain amount of context in order to enjoy (or, more accurately, judge something) and that leaves time to enjoy one national team, and so I stick with the one I started with…even as I believe I won’t live to see the U.S. Men win a World Cup….ooh, a poll!]

Thus beginneth and endeth league-wide news. The league released an outline of the 2021 MLS schedule, but it’s unclear at time of writing that they did that for the fans or for their own purposes - specifically, to put more pressure on the players to give in on the presently-stalled CBA negotiations. Think MLS gave the MLSPA until February 5 to captiula…or, rather, agree to a shaf…or, rather, sign the CBA and move on. Y’know, for the sake of unity, a popular argument these days.

The middle section of this post will, 1) kick around some idle thoughts on the two teams I follow, Portland and FC Cincinnati, and 2) talk as if the season will happen. To start with the easy one.

MLS Weakly, 01 23 2021: I Will Care When They Make Me Care, aka, Notes on the MLS SuperDraft

The MLS SuperDraft, 1996-2019

Saw a random tweet earlier this week that said the Major League Soccer 2021 season not starting until mid-May or some shit. Not that that doesn’t make sense (COVID), but because these weekly posts can’t be sustained on CBA negotiations and the MLS SuperDraft alone. Observe…

Portland Timbers Update
The Timbers finalized the deal to sign an endearingly happy Felipe Mora to a permanent contract…but doesn’t that seem like that already happened, like, two weeks ago? Elsewhere, Portland picked Dawson McCartney and Diego Gutierrez in last…Wednesday’s(?) MLS SuperDraft, at No. 43 and No. 70, respectively. In other words, nothing of consequence happened. More later…

FC Cincinnati Update
Rumors that FC Cincy had made a move for the New York Red Bulls’ Tim Parker evaporated in hours or even minutes one day last week, so that’s one rumor down. I thought the whole Papu Gomez saga had ended with him going to Sevilla, but I opened a link that said otherwise…before promptly closing it because the page it opened fucking attacked my computer, so let’s call that rumor unverified for now and wait till official channels make the relevant announcement.

Elsewhere, FC Cincinnati selected Calvin Harris (at No. 2), Avionne Flanagan (No. 29), Jonas Fjeldberg (No. 54) and Matthew Vowinkel (No. 56, and dynamite name, kid) in the 2021 MLS SuperDraft. In other words, nothing of consequence to report in FC Cincy circles either….well, maybe Harris will come good - hope springs eternal, etc. - but I’ll get into why it’s more likely he won’t below.

CBA Negotiations Update
Word got out that the Major League Soccer Players’ Association made a counter-offer to the league’s post-force majeure offer yesterday…to which the MLS owners responded publicly by restating what they’ve offered the players (e.g., “committed to paying the players 100% of their salaries this year, in return for a two-year extension of the MLS Collective Bargaining Agreement,” aka, something definite and tangible for something suspiciously vague), which signals a response to the players' offer - and probbaly not a great one. In other words, nothing of consequence happened.

Is that sensing a theme, or announcing one?

MLS Weakly 01 16 2021: Player Moves, a SuperDraft, Negotiations & No Firm Schedule

A late-winter/spring of cowboy metaphors...

The phrase “silly season” has made its annual return to the soccer lexicon, but the 2021 North American domestic season doubles down on the term. At time of speculating, nobody knows when the 2021 season will start or what it’ll look like; everyone’s counting on a vaccine to make the whole thing possible, as the fucking moronic distribution of that same vaccine races against one or more new and improved strain of COVID-19 in real-time. Also playing for Team COVID: the naked and belligerent unwillingness among tens of millions of Americans to accept reality and take even baby steps to aid and comfort other Americans.

So, this one’s less a “silly season” than a “really fucking stupid with heaping tablespoons of delusion season," which is considerably harder to navigate and/or understand.

On the other hand, that same fucking stubborn stupidity shares a distant relation to a more positive human trait - hope - and so all concerned will prepare for a 2021 season that will kick off ____________, 2021 and end ____________, 2021 (probably) skipping over one obstacle after another outbreak and so on until The Last Team Standing lifts MLS Cup 2021.

 A whiff of parody will follow these posts for the foreseeable future, and mostly because there’s nothing tangible to write about. Tucked into the notes on the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA; more later) between MLS ownership and the MLS Players’ Association (MLSPA) is the cold, hard fact that no one involved is even talking about opening preseason training, never mind planning for it, which means no preseason games to write about. People have started to talk about whether or not one MLS team or another (e.g., the Portland Timbers) have a shot in 2021’s CONCACAF Champions’ League (CCL), but that competition doesn’t have a start date either, so…

Even qualifying for U-23 soccer tournament in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo remains “slated to unfold” by the end of March, though there will be friendlies for both the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT) and the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) in January, and the USWNT has a whole damn mini-tournament in the second half of February. So, yeah, there is soccer on the horizon, if of a sort not really connected to anything but a vague, hopeful, post-pandemic future…

MLS 2021 (Will We Have a) Season Preview(?) & Word Association

Our demands are modest and reasonable.

I wanted to take time in between coup d’etats to lay down a sort of personal state of play for the upcoming 2021 Major League Soccer season. This isn’t deeply-researched, I couldn’t give less of a shit about MLS’s roster mechanics (the end-product is all that matters, so…), and, with 27 teams (presently) committed to participate in the 2021 season, I don’t know all the players as well as I did even five years ago and likely never will again. Further, the league decision to limit the pandemic’s impact by confining the teams to regional competitions meant I didn’t see a few teams at all during 2020 - e.g., the Chicago whatever-the-fuck-they-are-right-now almost certainly, plus maybe L'Impact du Montreal, Toronto FC and DC United, but as everyone always says, last year took a decade, so who can really say?

And yet I have opinions on all the teams in the league - e.g., general understandings of their history, whether or not I see them in the playoffs season after season, sometimes, or not at all - some of them old, some of them new, a couple of them borrowed, and some of them blue (which, here, means they move me to profanity). That’s what this post will do: talk about how I see all 27 teams fitting into the Major League Soccer Extended Universe heading into 2021. I’ll start with word association - e.g., the first word or phrase that pops into mind when I think of that team - then try to back that up with a statement or two, and I’ll close with the updates on each provided in the handy “offseason snapshot tranfer news latest moves and projected lineups” tracker posted on The Mothership’s main page (that’s MLSsoccer.com) to see if I see anything in there that would change my understanding of that team. Think of it as framing…

As with (most) past seasons, I hope to post some league-wide commentary once a week…but I’ll have to figure out how to make that work with 27 variables to track. (You’ll know if I succeed, and likely won’t notice the absence if I don’t.) With that, let’s turn to the 2021 season, starting with whether there will be one at all.

COVID-19 & the CBA
These two things pose the greatest known threats to MLS’s 2021 season - with general political instability tossed in as a wild card. Broadly speaking, political chaos (in whatever form) runs the risk of tripping up the vaccine rollout, which makes the road to normal (new or old) longer. The UK mutation (what I call “fast COVID”) could also mean more case-spikes in the near-term, plus all the paralysis that goes along with that, but there’s also a potential recession, mass evictions, maybe even another insurrection or two, random domestic terror attacks, etc. etc. Those last two things only show in the worst-case scenarios, but it’s possible that people will not be able to ignore politics in 2021 (and beyond) no matter how badly they want to, or even that too many people simply won’t be able to afford the luxury of sports. It’s hard not to notice when your league suspends play, in other words…

Portland Timbers 2020 Retrospective: The Season I Let Jesus Take the Wheel...and How the Car Wound Up in the Ditch

I still feel good overall. (Nailed it!)

Fucked up year, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just thinking that reminds me of the ads at the beginning of the lockdowns when all the commercials included some perfunctory spin on the phrase, “as we go together through these [random adjective generator for new/difficult] times.”

It’s fitting there, though, because for the first time I can remember, I more or less shut down the critical capacities in my brain fairly early into the 2020 season and just decided to believe everything would work out just fine. Maybe that goes back to some lizard-brain coping mechanism of basically going limp in the face of danger (e.g., the way I quietly muttered, “oh well,” as my car slid into a ditch just before last Christmas), but I think something simpler suggested the choice.

I’ve insisted that either or both Diego Chara’s or Diego Valeri’s legs would give out “this year” for longer than I should have - and it’s always been Valeri’s that set off the most agist-predictive concern. I didn’t recall what numbers Valeri posted in 2020 till I checked (8 goals, 7 assists) and, sure, they had to manage his minutes, but the former came in higher and the latter didn’t stop him from continuing to serve as both key cog and inspiration for the Timbers - and his set-pieces (corners, in particular) have never looked better. Chara, meanwhile…maybe he can keep retirement eternally at bay by tackling that shit before it sees him coming.

It absolutely didn’t hurt that every player Portland signed ahead of 2020 worked out well or better. Felipe Mora never looked like much, but maybe that’s the same voodoo he uses to lull defenses asleep (and does he double in size when shielding the ball? And do defenders’ eyes somehow see the same thing?) I remember Jaroslaw Niezgoda looking on the verge of passing out after scoring his first goal for the Timbers (what? he came in with a heart issue), but, until his knee blew up toward the end of the season, he showed he could score all kinds of ways and his combination-play added still more fluidity to a much smarter and trickier Timbers attack. Yimmi Chara looked like a miss at the start of the season, but found both feet in time to hold Portland’s attack together as a succession of injuries took one player after another out of the team. On the other end of the field, and no disrespect to Bill Tuiloma, Dario Zuparic gave Larrys Mabiala his missing partner in central defense…also, hold that thought…