MLS Weakly, January 27, 2022: Preseason Status Check & Historically-Informed Statement of Biases

This will only make sense at the end.

This post combines a couple thoughts to create a sort of grand frame for the 2022 season. And, yes, I absolutely overdid it. I’ll be parking these Weaklies for a couple weeks after this and, when I get back in the saddle, I’ll only have notes on teams that look like they might go somewhere compelling - an adjective I use in the spirit of the weasel word, because “compelling” contains multitudes, a spread wide enough to include teams that look like MLS Cup winners on one side and teams that might finally escape the cellar on the other.

This severely over-long post has two components:

1) A brief history of MLS, told through the lens of teams/systems who have won either MLS Cup or the Supporters’ Shield; followed by

2) applying that perspective to the thumbnail impressions on where each team in MLS, both generally and based on their 2021 season.

I’m doing all this to announce my biases going into the season. So long as another wild hair doesn’t sneak up my ass, this will be the only Total Coverage post of the 2022 season - i.e., the only time I anticipate having notes on every team in the league. Think of it as the sign I will tap when someone asks the question: what about my team? The answer: because they do not matter…

…but I also when nuts on the history because I like narratives. Time to excavate!

Trophies and the Teams Who Have Won Them
First, some numbers: a total of 14 teams have won MLS Cup in the league’s 26-year (right?) history; 15 teams have won the Supporters’ Shield over the same period - two of which, the Tampa Bay Mutiny (1996, aka, Year 1) and the Miami Fusion (2001, no longer exist, though Pablo Mastroen still haunts us all; eight teams have won both the Cup and the Shield - five of them landed a double - while six teams have won only MLS Cup and five have only won the Shield. I’ll get to the short, wild stab at history in a tick, but I want to examine the flipside of all that success.

The eight active teams who have never won either major trophy (yes, I am writing off the U.S. Open Cup, and always will) are: Austin FC, Charlotte FC, FC Cincinnati, Inter Miami CF, Minnesota United FC, CF Montreal, Nashville SC, Orlando City SC, and the Vancouver Whitecaps. All of those teams came via expansion, with (I believe) Vancouver coming in first, followed by Montreal, followed by the rest - and, no, I’m not gonna look up who joined when, because that undermines the primary mission of understanding my biases about each team, and that means going by memory as much as possible. [* Of course I had to (minimally) research the Cup/Shield thing to make the above list.] To extract a broad thought out of that, I’d say that makes strong case that MLS does a better than fair job of sharing the spoils. Or, rather, even allowing for freak-cases like Atlanta United FC, the spoils come after a certain amount of either time or, more often lately, investment. Which segues nicely into the history…

Anyone who finds this post has probably seen or heard the concept of MLS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.3, and so on - the evolution of the league in distinct steps of progression. Most of that turns on mechanics, obviously - e.g., stringent salary caps and the limits of the player pool (mostly in the 2000s, honestly) in the early days, then the designated-player rule (stupid as it was early on), the gradual expansion of the salary cap, more players from abroad dipping their toes into MLS, the expansion of the DP rule, the acronyms/roster mechanisms that made me give up on thinking about all that, and, finally, today when MLS has a real place in the global market. And that’s the fun/funny thing about looking at which teams won the Cup and Shield, and when: a team (or teams) serve as make-shift stand-ins for each “version” of MLS. I’m not even gonna try to connect either the teams or the trophies to a specific #.0, but I think I’ll be able to get the gist across.

First things first, the Shield is a bit flukier - e.g., the collection of “outlier” teams who have won it include Tampa, Miami, the Philadelphia Union (2020), Los Angeles FC (2019), the New England Revolution (2021), and, get this, FC Dallas (2017!?) and Chicago Fire FC - but it also works as a helpful, if imperect tell for identifying teams that achieved some version of greatness or consistency. I left the date after Chicago’s Shield win blank for that reason: Chicago lifted their one MLS Cup in 1998, but the fact they won the Shield in 2003 touches on a couple things about MLS’s early history. Before MLS had DPs, they had “Marquee Players,” some of them quite good - e.g., Piotr Nowak (for Chicago), Marco Etcheverry, Carlos Valderama, that whole first class - and the Fire laid a damned sturdy foundation, one that held together quite well when most of MLS’s player pool came largely from a combination of the draft (i.e., college players) and Central America. Things just moved slower back then…

Two teams dominated that first period: DC United and the Los Angeles Galaxy. People have bitched about the league bending the rules for LA for as long as they’ve been in MLS, but DC just fucking roaring out of the gate - they won three of the first four MLS Cups, and won the double in 1997 and 1999 - has to count as one of the greatest accidents in MLS history. The secret to success that both teams shared boiled down to the same thing: doing better than average with average player acquisition, plus landing some great players (Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno for DC) took a team far in the Marquee Player era. And Chicago did largely the same thing.

I don’t quite recall when contraction happened - think it was 2002 (again, memory) - but those days of austerity elevated a different model team, one built around coaches who could make a feast out of the scraps that MLS had to offer. The Galaxy managed to keep going during this period - they landed the first of their two doubles in 2002 (the second came in 2011), plus another Cup in 2005, all of which (maybe?) came under Sigi Schmid - but DC fell off during that same period. A lot of credit for that belongs two teams/coaches: Dominic Kinnear’s San Jose Earthquake and Houston Dynamo teams, and Steve Nicol’s Revolution. I don’t have the “coach-brain” to describe how each coach made it work, but Kinnear set up a system that lasted nearly a decade and Nicol got a good 5-6 years out of his. On the one hand, sure, both teams attracted talent - success does that, even without trophies (New England). To just flag the flashy players, the Revs had Taylor Twellman and Shalrie Joseph (and, later, Pat Noonan!), and Houston had Brian Ching, Dwayne DeRosario, Brad Davis, and a hard-ass defense. - but one really does get the sense that, with things being so equal across the league, good, sharp coaching mattered as much as anything during the 2000s.

And this is where the second transition in league history comes in, something you couldn’t see at the time, but that makes sense in retrospect. The Dynamo won their second of two consecutive Cups in 2007, a year I’d call the swan-song of “The Coach’s Era” of MLS, but the point of interest here comes with the teams that won the next three MLS Cups. In order: (now) Columbus Crew SC in 2008, Real Salt Lake in 2009, and the Colorado Rapids in 2010. In my mind, two things happened there: 1) the function-over-butts-in-seats-DP era officially started when Columbus signed Guillermo Barros-Schelotto; and 2) it took two years or so for the league (or just the Galaxy) to fully catch up on the concept, and that’s how RSL (good as they were; which was very at that time) and Colorado managed to win MLS Cups (the latter over Dallas in its only MLS Cup appearance).

If I had to tell someone where to draw the line between MLS 1.0 and 2.0, I’d point them to somewhere circa 2010, aka, the year when the Galaxy maximized the DP rule before anyone else. Here’s the thing: Columbus had two damn good years: they won the double in 2008, and the Shield again in 2009, but, between Landon Donovan, Robbie Keane and David Beckham (I’m not listing him last out of hostility, but it was a lot of the other two and an underrated supporting cast), LA’s resources and better draw as a new home, they won three MLS Cups (2011, 2012, and 2014) and two Shields (2010, 2011), which, whatever you think of all involved, made them the dominant team for the first half of the 2010s, i.e., five whole goddamn years. Kinnear’s teams pulled that off, and so did DC United under Bruce Arena/the Marquee Player system, but, shit got kinda wild after that. And that’s what I see as the world in which MLS now operates. Three trends notwithstanding, I’d argue that MLS entered another transition/chaos period - if mostly among the teams clawing at the top of the heap - since the Galaxy’s star faded. Now, those trends:

First, hard as consistency is to come by, at least three teams have held more of their shit together than most during what I hereby dub “The Chaos Years”: the Portland Timbers and the Seattle Sounders, on the grounds that one team or the other has (literally) reached the final for the past six years and the New York Red Bulls for the last, great run on the Supporters’ Shield (2013, 2015, and 2018). The Red Bulls counts as something of a bleed-over from LA’s glory days in that some of their success came from working the DP Rule (e.g., Juan-Pablo Angel, Thierry Henry), but the rest followed from 1) bringing energy-drink soccer to MLS and, 2) highly-astute roster-building (e.g., building around Dax McCarty and Sacha Kljestan). They applied a novel template in some ways, something that applies less to Portland’s and Seattle’s success, because I’d argue they built-out on the blueprint Columbus drew out - i.e., scouting and signing good international players that Europe either missed or dithered over too long. Players like Nico Lodeiro and Diego Valeri don’t have the name recognition of a Nani and or a David Beckham, but they meant one hell of a lot more to their teams than he did and provided a more durable platform.

The other two thoughts actually tip in a different direction, i.e., toward the chaos. First, the lifting of the salary cap and the ever-expanding reach of player pools that MLS can reasonably dip into has made it easier/more tempting for teams to burn it all down and start over again. The second factor follows from the first: the burn-rate on success has shortened quite a bit since the Galaxy’s glory days. And this is where it gets fun and/or robust debates open up. For instance…

- As wildly consistent as Seattle have been, they have yet to match the dominance of the early DC teams, Kinnear’s San Jose/Houston teams (though it bears pointing out that none of Kinnear’s teams managed a double, only one won the Shield (the 2002 ‘Quakes), and his Houston teams never really came close), or LA’s league-suffocating reign over the first half of the 2010s. The take-away point there is that Seattle's two Cups and one Shield could be as heady as it gets for a while, i.e., until one team or another masters the next #.0 step in MLS’s evolution and truly dominates the league for half a decade?

- Toronto was the last team to win a double (2017) - LA was the last before then (again, 2011) - and the Cup/Shield pattern has only grown more erratic since. To list them:

MLS Cup Winners, 2018-2021: Atlanta United FC, Seattle, Columbus, New York City FC

Supporters’ Shield Winners, 2018-2021: Red Bulls, LAFC, Philadelphia Union, New England

Take away the fact that that the MLS Cup winner has come from the same conference as the Shield Winner in each of those years (make of that what you will), I’d call access to resources, and a willingness to invest them, the main through-line shared by all the teams in that list. To take a wild stab at a sporting metaphor, it reminds me a little of the difference between the Preakness and the Belmont - i.e., some teams only have the legs/structure/timing to keep pace and sprint at the right time while some teams possess sound structures that provide more sustained success. Then again, luck intervenes here and there (e.g., think Atlanta’s Josef Martinez tearing his ACL and that fucking psychopath, Gabriel Heinze taking over; shit happens, basically).

I don’t know when it’ll be possible to build a true dynasty team in MLS again. I’ve seen people talk about the 2017 double-winning Toronto a great team, but…can a flash in the pan, no matter how bright 'n' blinding, really count as “great”? I’d call Seattle the better team during Toronto’s best years, honestly, and don’t think I’d get a lot of push-back on that. Each of the teams that won either major trophy between 2018 and 2021 had something special about them - fwiw, I’d call New England breaking LAFC’s daunting single-season points record on its way to winning last year’s Shield the greatest, single-season accomplishment since Toronto’s double - and yet all of those successes will look isolated, in the sense of league history, if neither team manages to win something else soon. And who doesn’t like the Revs’ chances better than LAFC's right now?

Now, the absolute avalanche of rambling shit above amounts to a preamble for what comes below, an overelaborated "how did we get here"? All that provides the context for the rest of this post, which 1) gives thumbnail impressions for what I think about every team that will play in MLS in 2022, and 2) goes on way too long.

Each thumbnail impression starts with word association - i.e., typing the first thing that came to mind when I saw each team’s name. The second part, “Translation,” elaborates on the word association (to the best of my ability; I was loooosssse during the first draft), and the third talks about what each team’s 2021 season did (or did not do) to that impression. The fourth part is trickiest, because it folds in the context above to talk about what I’m calling “The Model” each team uses as a strategy for success (or its opposite) in the MLS Chaos Years. After some thought, I wound up with six loose Models:

Buy Success - Big Spenders, Good and Bad
Academy - Teams that live, earn and die through their academies (rare breed)
Columbus Model - Teams with the scouting intel to find sleeper DPs and solid rosters
Money-Ball - Teams that scrounge for hidden value, mostly within MLS and/or the Draft
Sugar-Daddy Sons - Teams who are owned by a bigger system that actually cares (also rare)
Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire - i.e., nothing good. (Sorry, I had just the five then I got to Chicago.)

I hope the rest of what’s below makes some kind of sense, because I spent a stupid fucking amount of time on all this. For what it’s worth, I trust some of the models listed above - e.g., the Columbus Model and Sugar-Daddy Sons - more than I trust others - e.g., Buy Success, Academy and Money-Ball. There’s nothing to do from here but dig in. Sorry, but also enjoy!

Atlanta United FC - A Mercedes under repair
Translation: Atlanta hasn’t been around long - they joined in 2017 (what? I had to look it up)- but the ruthless magic of 2018 evaporated quickly as it came and now they’re somewhere between rebuild and recovery.
My Impression of Their 2021: Won’t lie. I fully expected their ship to come in by year’s end - and it did get closer to shore once they canned that psychopath, Gabriel Heinze - and to the extent I thought they might pip NYCFC in the first round of the playoffs. They didn’t, obviously, and it’s possible I’m mentally downgrading them out of spite.
Model: Buy Success, which is harsh, but their general approach has featured chasing shiny objects (e.g., Pity Martinez and Ezequiel Barco as DPs or Heinze as a coach).

Austin FC - Eager achievers, neither under- nor lower-
Translation: They got props for both their roster build and the way Josh Wolff had them play, and that’s fine, but it only gets you so far when you can only kick the shit out of one team (the Timbers).
My Impression of Their 2021: They looked like what they were: an expansion team.
Model: N/A, not enough data

Charlotte FC - I’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name
Translation: On the one hand, I don’t know what to expect. On the other, see above. A lot depends on the state of what counts as The Great Powers in MLS for any given season.
My Impression of Their 2021: It was better than Cats. I’d watch it again and again and again.
Model: N/A, literally no data

Chicago Fire FC - Wait, didn’t they fold?
Translation: There was about five years when one could believe Chicago was gonna change MLS. And then the organization lit that on fire and scattered the ashes. Then they bought a leaf-blower and did it again. And then it got worse.
My Impression of Their 2021: Not so different than the last 20 seasons or so. Pretty shitty.
Model: Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire: I can’t remember the last time they made the playoffs, but has it mattered, like, at all? They’ve been bad.

FC Cincinnati - A very expensive punch-line
Translation: Not much to explain. Domestic soccer’s equivalent of throwing darts blindfolded and lighting money on fire.
My Impression of Their 2021: I would only repeat myself.
Model: Buy Success, if with the uniquely grabastic approach of buying fancy furniture before the house is built.

Colorado Rapids - The kid in the purple shirt who runs real fast
Translation: Being able to run around real fast doesn’t accomplish much on its own, but it gives a person/team an advantage in the right year - e.g., 2010 (when they won MLS Cup) and 2021, when they were a legitimately good team.
My Impression of Their 2021: Just…really good bones, back to front and all the way up through the coach (and probably front office).
Model: Money-Ball, with the question of what they do next hanging over it.

Columbus Crew SC - The lower nobility of MLS
Translation: As noted above, I credit them with establishing the modern DP model. As implied by the title, and despite the time they almost got relocated, they’ve been better than worse since 2008.
My Impression of Their 2021: A Caleb Porter team. They won the Cup one season, then missed the playoffs the next. If the same script continues they’ll keep him for two more seasons of “meh” and they’ll part ways.
Model: Their own. They’ve been smart about keeping a good foundation.

DC United - The King is dead. Fucker died a while ago
Translation: Watching these guys in 1997 was like watching the Globetrotters play the goddamn Washington Generals. A good middle-passage aside - there, I’m thinking of the Luciano Emilio/Christian Gomez era of the mid-2000s more than the more recent Luciano Acosta/Wayne Rooney edition - the general state recalls 10th century Rome (i.e., gone badly to seed).
My Impression of Their 2021: Hernan Losada seems to be building one of those disrupt/destroy pressing teams and, outside the regular season setting, that model tends to hit a wall.
Model: Mmm…gonna go with Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire. DC hasn’t been relevant for a minute.

FC Dallas - Interesting, but also not interesting, and rarely successful
Translation: Dallas has played some of the most interesting players in MLS history - a young Oscar Pareja among them, but there was also Ariel Graziani going way back, Eddie Johnson was pretty damn fun, same with Robbie O’Brien - and they’ve since become MLS’s sturdiest pipeline to the world. Success has not followed from, which makes it possible to celebrate and ignore them at the same time.
My Impression of Their 2021: Another season pissed away. Worse than usual
Model: Academy, with a misguided dash of Buy Success; they don’t seem to have scouting down.

Houston Dynamo FC - The 1970s regional pro wrestling of MLS
Translation: I mean that both temporally and stylistically: Dom Kinnear Dynamo teams that terrorized MLS for six years or so were tough as nails, but as about as interesting to watch. They had some flair (e.g., Dwayne DeRosario and Brad Davis), but the defining, bashing element came from Ching and the defense.
My Impression of Their 2021:They pushed money-ball to a self-destructive extreme.
Model: Money-Ball, but making eyes with Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire.

Sporting Kansas City - Fitness obsessives
Translation: Even if Red Bull mastered it, Peter Vermes might have been MLS’s first proponent of “energy-drink soccer.” As such, and despite some aesthetic improvement, I tend to think of ugly, chippy high-press soccer when I think of SKC. That and running their legs off too early in the season.
My Impression of Their 2021: Cheated a bit. See the last sentence above. Still, they have some great parts and a couple years left on a team with good bones.
Model: A slow evolution from a method (high press) to a version of the Columbus Model, even if I don’t have a sense of where their player pipelines connect to.

Los Angeles Galaxy - Once glorious, now tarnished as too many stars on Hollywood Boulevard
Translation: As noted above, the Galaxy straight-up became MLS’s glamour team through the league’s defining growth spurt - 2002 to 2012 or so. They had lightning in a bottle for most of those years, but it feels like they’ve been chasing a totemic player ever since.
My Impression of Their 2021: They put too many chits on Chicharito, so when he fell apart…
Model: Buy Success. They might be the case-study for it.

Los Angeles FC - A tech stock IPO in the form of a soccer team
Translation: They came in with a CRAZY-high valuation and, season by season and one blown post-season after another, came back down to walk among the mortals. It got bad enough that they sacked Bob Bradley in the off-season and killed some assumptions about what they’d look like in 2022. The dread “transition” season, in other words.
My Impression of Their 2021: Missing the playoffs was the defining visual for the wheels finally coming off. It was a little like seeing a bully get a wedgie…
Model: Mmm…another tricky one. Call it Columbus Model with a froth of Buy Success and arguably some mistakes (e.g., moving Walker Zimmerman) borne of arrogance.

Inter Miami CF - Part of me doesn’t believe they really exist
Translation: I think of them more as a conceptual throwback to the DP Era concept (e.g., Pizarro and Gonzalo Higuain) than an actual team. They seemed to sign players as much for the “wow-factor” as building a functional team.
My Impression of Their 2021: Honestly, I think this begins with them beating Cincinnati at least twice and ends with Phil Neville bitching about the refs.
Model: Buy Success

Minnesota United FC - Dour’s (Not So) Light
Translation: So, I think of beer when I think of Minnesota, sue me (shared a six pack of generics with my dad at a road-side campground near International Falls when I was…good, 10?). Despite having some flash players (e.g., Reynoso, and Molino was fun), I think of Minnesota as one of those ugly, organized teams that grinds out results and reaches the playoffs, where they confront the limits of the method.
My Impression of Their 2021: I suspect their 2021 season revived the above observation.
Model: Dammit. Another tweener. Call it a mix of Money-Ball and Buy Success. I think they fluked into the best version of themselves in 2020.

Club du Foot Montreal - Thoroughly Post-Modern French
Translation: I mean that in the sense of the “Gallic shrug” (only without the hostility), and a sniff of Old World complacency (only without the “fallen Great Power” past). They don’t seem terribly ambitious, and they don’t seem to mind that.
My Impression of Their 2021: Mostly that MLS’s in-house pundits kept trying to sell me on them, and I kept refusing to buy.
Model: Perilously close to Money-Ball, at least since the Igancio Piatti years.

Nashville SC - Stubborn men dressed in yellow
Translation: Ties. So many ties. They’re never bad, but defense feels like their calling card.
My Impression of Their 2021: Generally impressed, especially when Hany Muhktar started to make them sing. In a bizarre twist, the way they gave up so many first goals meant they needed that to make all those ties happen.
Model: Money-Ball, for the most part. For all its good/improving parts, the first iteration of Nashville was built on MLS regulars, McCarty and Zimmermann. It’ll be interesting to see where they go next.

New England Revolution - …managed to make me forget many things
Translation: Because the Revs were my main team from late 1990s until the Timbers came around, they’ve put me through a lot - e.g., terrible/borderline unwatchable to thwarted greatness to basically anonymous…which reminds, me I’ve got a particularly obsessive Excel spreadsheet that tracks the history of the league that I need to update. Anyhoo, I’ve resigned myself to never seeing them win MLS Cup at this point.
My Impression of Their 2021: In a phrase, holy shit. They really did have a magic about them last season, the way they found goals in every orifice…until they very suddenly did not.
Model: Their recent DPs (e.g., Carles Gil, Gustavo Bou, Adam Buksa) say Buy Success, while Andrew Farrell and the defense as a whole says Money-Ball. We’ll see how long it lasts.

New York Red Bulls - Some of the most fun I had watching MLS in the 2010s
Translation: MLS hasn’t seen a ton of “machines” in its history, but the Red Bulls teams that kept picking up Supporters’ Shields really were something. It took me a while to cotton to the high-pressing style - in all honesty, I hated it for the first couple years - but, once they figured out how to follow the ugly shit with some very efficient and pretty soccer, I got the concept.
My Impression of Their 2021: A pale shadow of the glory days, but I caught glimpses of the oil getting into the joints. The gegen-press simply doesn’t come off without the personnel.
Model: It’s mostly about the method, but Sugar-Daddy Sons.

New York City FC - Hey, those pricks stole Portland’s 2nd MLS Cup!
Translation: That’s mostly a bitter joke: NYCFC has always had quality players, they generally play a pretty style, and they’ve always been in the mix without being particularly interesting.
My Impression of Their 2021: For all the talk of formations, tactics, and (allegedly) massive importance of “the modern [insert position] in today’s game,” soccer is ridiculously simple, in that good defense goes a long way. All you need from there is a little talent, and NYC had more than a little.
Model: Sugar-Daddy Sons, no question. The best iteration in MLS.

Orlando City SC - Nani probably isn’t enough to carry a team
Translation: As much as they’ve improved from their Year 1, Orlando still suffers from the late-season fade - i.e., the same thing that afflicts Nani did down the stretch. Even as they found better and coaches to compliment him, the pattern remained.
My Impression of Their 2021: The slow fade strikes again.
Model: Buy Success, for the most part.

Philadelphia Union - I like Jim Curtin
Translation: The Union are a very likeable team; Curtin is a very likeable coach. Better yet, they seem to get interesting players and do good things with them, even if it’s just selling them.
My Impression of Their 2021: For all the names I could drop, I doubt I could explain how they won the 2020 Shield. And when they sold some of those names I could drop, they reverted a bit, if less than I expected. Starting to entertain the possibility that Philly has figured out some things.
Model: Academy, with some smart touches from the Columbus Model.

Portland Timbers - Can’t comment due to lack of distance
Translation: They’ll always the best team in MLS, the worst, or just the most frustrating. What I think of them fairly reliably relies on their last five games and the moods swing.
My Impression of Their 2021: Even with the ending, nothing short of unbelievable. I mean, the odds I would have given you on them reaching MLS Cup would have made you a rich person.
Model: Columbus Model, with the pipelines almost exclusively into South America. It’ll be interesting to see how that holds up.

Real Salt Lake - Scrappiest l’il team in MLS
Translation: Think of RSL as the mom-and-pop that somehow holds on when the big box stores and chain restaurants come to town. They had, like, a three-four year window when they had the best team in MLS, and I can’t think of a team that got spun by the DP era quite like them. And yet they keep holding on.
My Impression of Their 2021: Punched at least two classes above their weight against every other team but the Timbers. Weird shit, man…
Model: Buy Success meets Columbus Model, with the latter coming in because I can’t fully account for their success with random DPs (e.g., Albert Rusnak and Demir Kreilach).

San Jose Earthquakes - Feckless
Translation: The 2012 Bash Brothers team was probably the last great version of the ‘Quakes, a Money-Ball team that doubled as a hangover from the old, stable years. Apart from serving as home for Chris Wondolowski’s fantastic career, I can’t think of the last time they did anything. Or something that didn’t feel like trying to get too much out of pennies.
My Impression of Their 2021: Not quite as fragile as the 2020 team, but they still seemed to play on the edge of falling off it. Which they did.
Model: Call it an international version of Money-Ball, but also slumping toward Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire.

Seattle Sounders FC - The rich shitheads of MLS, tech-bros gone wild, a team I hate more than I have any reason to, honestly
Translation: I hate myself for the tribalistic pettiness I get when it comes to the Sounders, so I patch over the blunt fact that they’ve been…just good since joining MLS with implications that the gods or someone else handed it to them. I don’t know how they do it, but they keep doing it.
My Impression of Their 2021: I’ve pined for them to have a terrible, wrenching season for as long as they haven’t had one, and partially on the grounds that it would help me hate them less. And, for what it’s worth, their 2021 felt a little soft, despite how well it finished.
Model: Columbus Model. They’ve got good connections abroad and know how to work them.

Toronto FC - A money-pit
Translation: More than any other team in MLS, I’ll think of Toronto as the team that bought an MLS Cup until someone does the same thing and buys a Cup or three. And yet, it has been a while, hasn’t it? If the past couple seasons have taught the rest of us anything, it’s that money can’t buy love forever…
My Impression of 2021: Pissed away half the season by hiring Chris Armas…
Model: Buy Success. The balance between the stars and average players reminds me of the Galaxy.

Vancouver Whitecaps FC - The worst Cascadia team. No offense
Translation: They could sign Pele-Jesus and I’d still dump on their chances of going anywhere meaningful. I also see them as a boring team.
My Impression of Their 2021: The few pundits I read keep telling me they’re going places. The ‘Caps late-season run backed that up.
Model: A real odd duck in that it’s a bit of none of the above: it lacks the calculation of the Columbus Model and the desperation of Buy Success, they aren’t big movers in the Money-Ball market and, while this could be a blind-spot (or a deaf one), I don’t hear much about their Academy. And yet it’s not Train-Wreck Humping a Tire-Fire, either.

Well, that's all of it. Now that I've spit all that out, I'll readily acknowledge that the models didn't stretch to cover as many teams as I'd like. Going the other way, I found certain commonalities between some teams - e.g., Toronto and the Galaxy - that work to explain certain things about them. For now, let's just call it a rich tapestry and a day. Till the next one...which I'm thinking will come in the mid-week before 1st Kick.