The MLS Semi-Recent History...Ah, Fuck Me, I Did Power Rankings

We're going deep, people. And shallow.

This post begins the process of looking forward to Major League Soccer’s (normal, hopefully) 2023 regular season. There are a number of concrete things in the works – among them, a new team (St Louis CITY FC (I’m told capitalizing “CITY” is deliberate, so I’m following the form guide), the launch of a new TV deal (it ain’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than a year’s worth of SlingTV) – as well as some ephemeral things we’ll all imagine together, e.g., a post-World Cup bump or slump, depending on how the U.S. Men’s National Team does in the repressive, murderous shithole still known as Qatar.

That said, this look forward begins with a look back – specifically, to how all the teams in MLS have done over the past decade-plus of competition. I had grandiose dreams of getting all granular with this, posting mini-histories for all the teams and flagging key players, but decided that was both pointless, what with teams cutting players (and, more to the point, not yet adding new players), and against the spirit of where I want and hope to take future league-wide posts going forward...which assumes twitter survives the impulsive sociopath that bought it a couple weeks back. If things hold together from today into the future, I want/hope to take in the regular season action from a bird’s-eye view, i.e., something more narrative and, if I can get the screws in my brain just right, looser. Which segues nicely to this post...

The research was quick, dirty and asked just one question: where did all the teams that participated in MLS for any given year between 2010 and 2022 finish at the end of the regular season? That misses a couple things, obviously – the proverbial “peaking at the right time” theory that became fashionably cliche in the early-/mid-2010s, but also a very real phenomenon like post-season form – but the thing I really wanted to establish was how all the teams that will compete next year have done over a fair patch of time. Or even lately – which does come up and in the way that anyone who follows the league would expect.

Before getting into that, I wanted to note some fun stuff I discovered while poking around the past. For instance, Chivas USA competed in the league all the way up to 2014; they’re not competing today anymore, not directly anyway, but I’d completely forgotten that my Portland Timbers ever played that team. Related to that, both Sporting Kansas City and the Houston Dynamo played in the Eastern Conference from 2011 to 2014 - and both were very competitive in the East during that time (to the tune of placing 1st and 2nd in 2011).

Of perhaps more interest, the 2010 and 2011 seasons featured pretty goddamn wacky rules for playoff qualification. If memory serves, this followed from a fleeting obsession with total points as the ultimate arbiter of which teams deserved what. They didn’t go too nuts in 2011 – that season saw the top three teams in each conference qualify for the post-season, along with the four teams with the highest points total after that – but the league went all-in on the concept in 2010. That season, just the top TWO teams from each conference qualified for the playoffs followed by the next four teams, regardless of the conference. And that, kids, is how the Western Conference sent six teams to the playoffs while the Eastern Conference sent just two...and did I mention the league had only 16 teams that season? That year got weird, and all the way down to the Colorado Rapids besting FC Dallas in MLS Cup. The perils of drugs and/or getting loose with playoff qualification concepts...

Portland Timbers 2022 Review, aka, The Malaise Post

Aren't we all her? Only with beer?

I’m going to front-load the scandals that stalked the Portland Timbers/Thorns organization until it forced them to make the same choice they should have made half a decade prior. Nice as it felt to see Gavin Wilkinson and Mike Golub get their long-overdue comeuppance for years worth of cowardice and asshole-ism (respectively?), the muleheaded determination to let the wounds fester until something like the third investigation called sepsis by its name did what those things do: kill the host. Honestly, to persist in something that willfully destructive boggles the mind.

Fucking morons...

Now, had things worked out on the field for the Timbers the same way they did for, say, the Thorns, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this cardigan gearing up to bum you out. But, goddamn, if light brown and mustard yellow aren’t my colors...

Bluntly, I am excited about exactly one player on the Portland Timbers current roster: Santiago Moreno. That doesn’t mean I neither rate nor like anyone else: for all its issues, I don’t see a need to burn it all down and start from scratch (which wouldn’t work in any case); moreover, I’m open to the argument they under-performed this year. Going the other way, I lean toward thinking they didn’t – or, perhaps more accurately, they played to the level of available personnel. Staying healthy matters to any team, obviously, but the Timbers have operated on a late-stage Jenga level for longer than I like. And if losing one piece, or even two, means the whole thing comes down? Well, that’s when you know you’re doing something wrong.

The key missing piece was Felipe Mora. Portland’s transition game relied on his implausible knack (because fucker’s short) for receiving the first pass into the opposition’s defensive third and finding a good, and ideally unsettling, pass before defenses could clutter up the space. The Timbers attack could rarely break down a compacted defense even with Mora on the field, but the ball movement in the attacking third mingled buck-passing (take. or. take. a. fucking. shot. god. dammit.) with a sensation not unlike despair for much of 2022. A guy who pops into the twitter feed with the occasional comment argues that Gio Savarese organizes the attack to work for tap-ins. I think he’s sold me on that argument at this point. Even if he hasn’t sold me on his particular solution – i.e., build the team around speed – agreeing that something ain’t working is the first step to doing something different. Which, here, means anything.

MLS 2022 Season Review: Did the Product Deliver?

Good God, yes. Now stop shouting.

I know I said I’d post a Portland Timbers review/preview by the end of the weekend, but I say all kinds of things that smart people take with a massive fucking salt lick – e.g., I’ll never post this feature again, I’m checking out of twitter, etc. etc. etc.

With the season wrapped up and MLS Cup in the well-heeled hands of Los Angeles FC – who, for the record, I doubted to the end – putting a narrative bow on Major League Soccer’s 2022 felt like a more fitting post for this Sunday night. If you’re fishing for something tactical or stats-driven, close this post immediately and look elsewhere. I have a simple goal for this post, one that boils down to answering one simple question: did Major League Soccer deliver a quality product in 2022?

Before digging in, set aside whatever frustration you feel about your local team’s failure to achieve – that goes double for Timbers fans, who suffered one of those even-year grinds where nothing went right and they missed out on the good stuff. Going the other way, having low expectations going in to 2022 could mean you wound up something close to happy about your team’s season, even if they didn’t so much as see a flash of silverware....and, there, FC Cincinnati isn’t the only team that fits that description.

With all that in mind, let’s start by working backwards from MLS Cup 2022 to the end of the regular season.

First thing first, 2022 ended with the rare feat of both No. 1 seeds – LAFC and the Philadelphia Union – making the final. A quick, sloppy review of the final standings of seasons past shows (Source 1 and Source 2) that has happened just three other times in league history – DC United and the Los Angeles Galaxy in 1998, the New England Revolution and the Galaxy again in 2002, and the Chicago Fire and the San Jose Earthquakes in 2003. All of those happened during the first 10 years of the league’s existence, back when the league fielded between 10 team and 12 – which put less clutter between any one of them and the top seed. A No. 1 seed reached the final 10 more times, but, again, the hit rate clusters to the league’s early history. In the years after 2006 – aka, the league’s 10th birthday – only four No. 1 seeds clawed their way to MLS Cup – the Columbus Crew in 2008, the Galaxy in 2009 and again in 2011, and Toronto FC in 2017.

FC Cincinnati 2022 Season Review/Preview: Competence's Unexpected Dilemmas

The view from 2019-2021. Fucker looks massive.

I decided to park on a review of FC Cincinnati’s 2022 season for a variety of reasons – the choice to check out in mid-July among them (it’s possible my middle name, “Anders,” is Norwegian for “erratic”) – but not really knowing how to read their season-ending 0-1 loss to the now-MLS-Cup-bound Philadelphia Union played its part as well. In so many words, I understood Cincy had defied virtually every observer’s expectations, but couldn’t really place them in a league-wide context.

Seeing both Philadelphia and Los Angeles FC kick great lumps out of the opposition in their respective semifinals – though, just to note it, LAFC played a more one-way game – went some distance to filling in that blank. FC Cincinnati didn’t just have their best-ever season, they had a very good one. To lift a line out of Matt Doyle’s year-end review:

“’Everything from June 18 to Decision Day is the highlight’ also has an argument, as over that 20-game stretch, Cincy lost just twice. That’s the best of anybody in MLS.”

The bitter little boy who lives inside my head compels me to point out that 10 of those games ended as draws, a point Doyle concedes sotto voce when he notes that “Cincy dropped more points from leading positions this year than anyone but the Revs” (and is it just me or did five teams drop the most points from leading positions? I’ve read that stat somewhere for at least three teams). That bitter little boy missed a deeper truth that I thought I’d written at some point this season, but, because I can’t find it, here it is again: those ten draws meant that Cincinnati went toe-to-toe against all kinds of teams, six of them future playoff teams (including New York City FC), and gave away very little. Call that a long of saying that all those dropped points didn’t matter after Decision Day: what mattered was that Cincy showed they stood just as high as (literally) half the teams in Major League Soccer. And, when you’ve got that, getting into the playoffs amounts to having a chance in every game going forward. As Red Bull New York learned in the hardest of ways.

All that’s better than laudable. It’s beautiful, especially given the dark slapstick that came before. From there, the question becomes how to get better in 2023.