Getting Reacquainted with Sporting Kansas City, MLS's Good Team Going Through Some Things

What passes for thrills in KC, in player and shirt form.

Thumbnail History
I’ll always quietly love them for coming into the league with beautiful rainbows on their kits and literally starting as the Kansas City Wiz. The fact they thought switching “Wiz” to “Wizards” made it better? Chef’s fucking kiss. The team itself, however, has never been particularly lovable. Preki, one of MLS’s first, great attacking players, lined up for them over their early seasons (and caught the eye of U.S. Soccer doing so), but most of SKC’s most famous players are defenders – e.g., Nick Garcia, Richard Gough (briefly, I think), Matter Besler, Ike Opara, Jimmy Conrad (fungi) – defensive midfielders – e.g., Matt McKeon, Diego Gutierrez, or, quite possibly “the most SKC player” ever, Roger Espinoza – or goalkeepers, e.g., e.g., Tony Meola, Jimmy “White Panther” Nielsen, and Tim Melia. They’ve had some fun teams – think the 2021 team when both Daniel Salloi and Johnny Russell had banner seasons, or the Benny Feilhaber years (2013-2017, effectively), when he had Krisztian Nemeth, peak Dom Dwyer, and Claudio Bieler running in front of him, and SKC Eternal Graham Zusi pitching in from the wide spaces. Those teams had some successes – MLS Cup in 2013, a cold fucker won both on penalty kicks (against Nick Rimando!) and the U.S. midwestern equivalent of the Russian steppes, but mostly U.S. Open Cups – and, despite the fact they scored more goals in my head than they did on the field, those teams still represent the beginning of a time when this team finally put some effort into entertaining. Still, I have never stopped thinking of them as the team that rode Meola and an 11th-minute goal by a Danish forward on a professional pit-stop (Miklos Molnar) to victory in one of the dullest MLS Cups ever played (2000). While I wouldn’t quite say their best days are behind them, the trophies have got smaller since their 2013 MLS Cup, and then stopped coming altogether after 2017. To be clear, that doesn’t represent some kind of radical drop-off – SKC has made the “real playoffs”(i.e., the quarterfinals or better) in five of the past eight seasons – they’re just not winning anything…and most of those playoff experiences stalled at the quarterfinals. And yet, that combined record raises them to sixth-best all-time team on the Joy Points Scale (see below). I suspect most long-time fans of MLS associate them with seemingly eternal head coach Peter Vermes’ aggressive, grinding approach to the game, but that doesn’t hold up as well as it used to. And that could be what’s going wrong. At any rate…

Total Joy Points: 37

Getting Reacquainted with Red Bull New York, MLS's Kings of Falling at the First Hurdle

To some, an insurmountable obstacle.

Thumbnail History
Born as the New York/New Jersey MetroStars (and with a logo inspired by, yet embarrassing on, the bottom of a skateboard), aka, Red Bull New York, aka, New Jersey’s finest soccer team, has always been a weird one – e.g., the first time they reached MLS Cup (2008), they made it on a run through MLS’s Western Conference. Despite later, praiseworthy successes (wait for it), few things have defined the MetroStars/Red Bull franchise like their franchise-long failure to take that final, winning step; the once-famous saying, “that’s so Metro” was coined for real and persistent reasons. Their Red Bull/energy-drink era started, both on and off the field, with the 2006 season and, setting aside second slap from the Wooden Spoon in 2009 (the first came in 1999), the deeper pockets and connections have moved the team in a…broadly positive direction. Playing in the nation’s biggest media market obliged them to swing bigger than most when signing players, even before the rebrand, and they have signed some infamous egos, er, players including Rafa Marquez and Lothar Mattheus, as well as some high-profile signings that didn’t quite hit – e.g., Youri Djorkaeff and maybe famous U.S. internationals like Tab Ramos and Claudio Reyna. Going the other way, they have launched a dozen or so famous careers for domestic stars. One could build the short list a couple ways, but I’m going with Jozy Altidore, Michael “Coach’s Son” Bradley, Tim Howard, Tim Ream, Tyler Adams, and Luis Robles (here's their all-time roster, so you can name your own). Those players provided the foundation for the big signings to finally pay off and that combination allowed them to put together some of the most consistent teams in league history – and notice I used the word “consistent,” as opposed to successful. Their best seasons started with the signing of French legend Thierry Henry and continued with Bradley Wright-Phillips – notably, one of the two players, with Robles, who was present for all three of the Supporters’ Shields the Red Bulls won between 2013 and 2018 – leading the line. Yes, it was raining Shields (Hallelujah!) over New Jersey through the mid-2010s. All that star-power relied on getting the supporting cast right and their Austrian brain-trust did with with players like Tim Cahill, Dax McCarty, (too briefly) Sacha Kljestan, and even Joel Lindpere, Garrin Royer, even deeper cuts like Sean Davis. Churning out a succession of rugged, successful defenders like Aaron Long, Jeff Parke, and even Marquez bought a succession of attacking units time to win games the Red Bulls otherwise would have tied. And yet, for all that consistency and success, the Red Bulls have never won a cup final. No, not even the U.S. Open Cup (runners-up twice, the last attempt in 2017). All that has made the Red Bulls the team that MLS fans know today – i.e., the one that qualifies for the playoffs every season, give or take a couple (even if all of those recent “wild card” performances don’t count on the Joy Points Scale).

Total Joy Points: 39

Getting Reacquainted with Columbus Crew SC, MLS's Kings of the Inside Straight

An inside straight, in human form.

Thumbnail History
They may come from a(/the greatest) flyover state, but the Columbus Crew, now Columbus Crew SC (a name that launched a thousand typos, e.g., “Columbus Screw”), have long had a knack for signing exotic players. Like any MLS side, they’ve signed plenty of guys who fit the working-class image of their original crest (faceless, yet somehow still leering construction workers) – e.g., Brian McBride stands out there, but they also got good seasons/mileage out of Josh Williams, Chad Marshall, Jonathan Mensah and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Artur and, briefly, Aidan Morris – but they put their stamp on league history through guys like Guillermo Barros-Schelotto, Lucas Zelarayan and, most recently, Cucho Hernandez. That little sprinkling of fairy dust came later. Toiling under the shadow of the early greats, DC United, the Los Angeles Galaxy and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago Fire and Sporting Kansas City, the Crew spent most of their first decade bumping against their achievements. They yanked a Supporters’ Shield out of their asses in 2004, but they also missed the playoffs five times between 2000 and 2007 and felt the sting of the Wooden Spoon in 2006. A mere two seasons later, though, Columbus became the smoothest, smartest team in MLS. Coached by Sigi Schmid, guided by Schelotto and back-stopped by a (hey!) working-class defense and midfield built around Marshall, Brian Carroll, and Brad Evans – incidentally, all players who went on to anchor expansion teams – the Crew picked up a double in 2008, plus another Supporters’ Shield in 2009. They’d cracked a unique approach to the designated player code: finding great talents that few people States-side had heard of. And it paid off smartly until it abruptly did not – or at least until they re-learned the old trick. Between 2012 and 2022, Columbus missed the playoffs as many times as they made them and, despite being the home to the first (and, fair point, super-basic) soccer-specific stadium in MLS history, Columbus barely survived a bid to relocate the team after the 2018 season. The fans pulled together to fight that off and, a couple seasons later, Columbus reclaimed their crown as the best team between the coasts in Major League Soccer. They won two more MLS Cups – one in 2020 (aka, The Weird Season) and again in 2023, both games at a saucy stroll – and they might have had one more trophy had they not screwed themselves over in MLS Cup 2015 (see: Clark, Steve and Valeri, Diego). For all their failures, and they’ve had a few, Columbus does have a bless’d eye for spotting talent. Checking Columbus' all-time roster and scrolling down is a genuinely worthwhile exercise, if just to see all the names that (arguably, in some cases) became more famous on other teams around the league. Per the Joy Points Scale, this is the third most-successful team in MLS history and all of the various powers-that-be that have guided them through damn near three decades’ worth of history deserve credit for accomplishing everything that they did in a…let’s go with unexpected market.

Total Joy Points: 46

Getting Reacquainted with the Los Angeles Galaxy, MLS's Joy Points Kings

He was just as surprised to be named MVP.

Thumbnail History
The Los Angeles Galaxy started as the first Buffalo Bills of Major League Soccer, losing the first three MLS Cup they went to. True story. Those last-minute stumbles buried more than one relevant fact – e.g., they won their first Supporters’ Shield as early as 1998, their first CONCACAF Champions’ Cup in 2000 (not the feat it later became, to be fair) - but the Galaxy put together competitive teams from the jump, even if they didn’t have all that many trophies to show for it. With long-forgotten players like Mauricio Cienfuegos, Kevin Hartman, Danny Califf, Cobi Jones and (the semi-infamous) Carlos Ruiz leading the way, the Galaxy won a Double in 2002 – and came damn close to a triple (they were runners-up in the U.S. Open Cup that year). Some real successes followed – an MLS Cup in 2005, if with a decidedly average team (also, won by one of the flukiest goals in MLS history) and the Shield again in 2009 – but LA spent the rest of the 2000s bumping their asses against the ground as hard and often as any team in MLS. Turns out that playing in a world-famous city doesn’t do a team enough favors when roster rules and small budgets have all concerned in shackles. It ultimately took not just the arrival of the Designated Player Rule (2007), but also the subsequent expansion(s) of the same (2010 and 2012), for the Galaxy’s natural advantages to well and truly kick in. Success wasn’t immediate - even David Beckham, aka, the OG DP, played under a peanut gallery calling him a flop – but the opening of budget rules, Rube-Goldbergian as they were, set the stage for the five-plus-season period that made the Galaxy what they are today, the most dominant team in MLS history. Between 2009 and 2014, LA won three MLS Cups, two Supporters’ Shields, and they went to one more MLS Cup besides. They owed a lot of that success to Landon Donovan, aka, the man whose name now graces the league MVP award, but Ireland’s Robbie Keane arguably put those teams over the top (his hit-rate in MLS was nuts). Those two, Beckham, some outstanding defenses, and unsung heroes like midfield back-stop Juninho turned the Galaxy into MLS first unstoppable force since the DC United teams of the late 1990s/early 2000s. There arguably hasn’t been one since (though both Red Bull New York and the Seattle Sounders would like a word), very much including the LA Galaxy. After that 2014 MLS Cup, they squeaked into the 2015 post-season as a wild card and went on to miss the playoffs outright in 2017 – their one and only Wooden Spoon season, btw – 2018, 2020, 2021 and as recently as 2023. The Galaxy continued to make big swings with player signings – see, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Giovani dos Santos – but they either couldn’t find a strong enough foundation or refused to pay for one. Throwing everything on Zlatan’s shoulders might have been part of the problem.

Total Joy Points: 74

How They Earned Them (How This is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 1998, 2002, 2010, 2011
MLS Cup: 2002, 2005, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2024
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 1996, 1999, 2001, 2009
MLS Playoff Semifinals: 1998, 2000, 2004, 2010
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 2003, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2022
CONCACAF Champions’ Cup Winner: 2000
CONCACAF Champions’ Cup Runner-Up: 1997
CONCACAF Champions’ League Semifinal: 2013
CONCACAF Champions’ League Quarterfinal: 2012, 2014, 2016
U.S. Open Cup: 2001, 2005
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 2002, 2006

The Joy Points Scale & The Off-Season Project

There is no good model, honestly.

This post carries forward an off-season project of amending, restating and, more to the point, condensing the histories I posted for…probably 20 of the teams in Major League Soccer ahead of the 2024 season. I wrote (and over-wrote) those using a template that ultimately exhausted me (I am not getting younger), so this year’s run at the same concept will attempt to present a frame that I’ll be able to use and update in years to come…and we’ll see how long that lasts (because, again, I am not getting younger. How are your knees and/or back?).

Something else I’m changing from last year’s posts: the formula I’m using to calculate “Joy Points,” aka, the dodgy scale I created to present the concept of how happy this team or that has left its fans over its time in MLS. I'll lay out the reworked formula for calculating Joy Points below, in annotated form, but that will be just one part of the posts in this series. Those posts will also include thumbnail histories for each team, notes on their long term tendencies on both sides of the ball, plus an attempt to square their 2024 season with their performance from recent seasons past. I’ll close out each post with loose thoughts on the open questions around that team – as well as I understand them. The history component is the main point of the project and, full disclosure, I never settled into the 2024 (or 2023 or 20222) season(s) in a way that felt right. That’s to say, I know some things about most of the teams currently competing in MLS, but you’ll get more from spending 20 minutes on any given MLS team’s subreddit than you’ll get from whatever vague impressions I can cough up. Back to the science…

Upon review, the Joy Points formulation I used for last year’s posts didn’t quite add up. Their biggest failure followed from completely discounting, to give one example, the joy a fan gets out of seeing her local team reach the semifinals in the playoffs – i.e., one game away from the final equals 90+ minutes of potentiality that can only die with the final whistle. As such, I assigned a point value to an expanded set of accomplishments to build the formula for calculating how a team earns Joy Points.

One final note on the “dodginess” of the Joy Points Scale: unless you control for time in the league, it creates too many apples-to-oranges comparisons to function as a one-size-fits-all scale. To give one vivid example, Chicago Fire FC has more Joy Points (18) than New York City FC (12), Inter Miami CF (12), and even my Portland Timbers (10). Those raw numbers are entirely a function of the fact that Chicago joined MLS in 1998 and had several successful seasons before…well, falling off the sporting equivalent of a fucking cliff. While things haven’t been season-to-season great for any of Portland, NYC, or Miami, being a Chicago fan since 2010 has been an auto de fe and/or an act of masochism.

A Final Statement on the Portland Timbers 2024 Season & A Longer Journey Ahead

We have the technology, we can deconstruct him.

I have two main goals for this post:

1) Closing the book on the Portland Timbers’ 2024 season with a handful (or so) of questions, ones that may or may not stray into the wilds of hypothesis. Don’t expect firm foundations like statistics and/or hard pitches for this or that player. To get one premise out of the way, 1a) I’m open to all kinds of fixes for what ails the Timbers, even as I accept I’ll be lucky to get three players and some tweaks to the coaching formula.

2) To serve as a preface for quick histories of every team that competed in Major League Soccer’s 2024 season (if with some really stupid twists). I’m still working on what each chapter will look like – e.g., lump the 29 teams into half-arbitrary categories? burn myself out by posting one chapter for every team, knowing full well that I’ll overwrite every chapter (and abandon the project)? – but my only promise is that the Portland Timbers will get the same treatment in the final chapter in that between-seasons series.

2a) I’m ignoring the New York/New Jersey Real San Diego FC United Burn Wizards (does San Diego’s team have a name yet?) because, to paraphrase a German exchange student who once berated me, they have no history. (The actual quote, and he was barely standing for this, but still said it to me directly, “you have no culture.” The same man used to say "sauber" every time he farted.)

My earlier post-mortem on the Timbers’ 2024 (aka, Timbers 2024 Post-Mortem, Part I) covered a fair patch of ground in terms of anatomy (the roster) and physiology (mechanics), so nearly all the points below look to bigger questions and beg further questions about how to fix them.

With that, sit and enjoy…what amounts to a second autopsy. Because the first didn’t return anything diagnosable. Won’t take long.

Wrapping Round One of the Playoffs & Pondering a (Potential?) Hole in the Timbers' Roster

This machine, like pundits, lies. I am all man.

With Major League Soccer taking its annual embarrassing mid-playoffs pause (mid-playoffs! nuts!), the urge to jump in and gently pick it apart got hold of me last weekend. The Portland Timbers started their pause a couple three weeks before that, and I’m going to close with some loose notes on that, but let’s start with the post-season.

First and foremost, and as much as it made me giggle immodestly, I’m not going to join in the circle-jerk around Inter Miami CF’s early exit from the 2024 playoffs as The Greatest Upset of All Time – not with the way crowned heads fell off across MLS’s Eastern Conference. Miami’s (admittedly shocking) fall versus(!) Atlanta United FC cleared a path wide enough for Columbus Crew SC to line-dance their way to a second straight title, but they crashed out against a revived Red Bull New York before that path even opened. I’m calling anyone who claims they saw that coming a liar, not least because the Crew survived a mosh-pit of a season and (and!) they beat the Red Bulls on the road, on Decision Day. With everything they had going their way – claiming second in the league after an achingly slow start, a coach all observers mooned over like a young, slim Frank Sinatra, and a roster deep as the Marianas Trench – seeing them get swept rises every inch as high on the Shock-o-Meter as Miami’s early ouster.

FC Cincinnati’s failure to capitalize was far less surprising – especially given that long stumble down the stretch. Having to rebuild the defense late in the season had a lot to do with it, but, from my vague look from a distance, the way the goals and confidence dried up did them in as much as anything. Those particular symptoms notwithstanding, Cincy’s demise highlights a recurring theme across MLS playoffs history the positive power of momentum and its damning opposite. Pat Noonan’s team had labored since the middle of July, which makes that less backing into the playoffs than commuting to and from work in reverse every day. To be clear, nothing about that felt inevitable – New York City FC trekked across their own wilderness before a three-game wining streak lifted them past the play-in (that was with them losing at Montreal on Decision Day in the mix) – and Cincy had enough chances and half-chances to score the go-ahead in Game 3. Maybe it’s something about how long the poison stays in your system after the snake bites.

A 2024 Portland Timbers Post-Mortem: Entertaining the Possibility It Really Was That Bad

Let the image go blurry...you'll see Raffi, I promise.

As I sit down to write this, I’m not even sure that I can see around the crushing 0-5 “home” loss to the visiting Vancouver Whitecaps in the play-in to the 2024 playoffs. (Play-in to the playoffs; that had to be deliberate, right?) One could even make a case that looking past that result amounts to a demand to misread the 2024 season, to treat it as something other than a failure or, as yet another “transition season.” That last rock gets kicked around a little more below, not least because I'm no longer sure that still applies, but when your team only “makes the playoffs” through a bloated invitation list, then passes out and collectively shits themselves an hour into it? Don’t worry, I’m not even going to try to find that image…enjoy an image from a more wholesome metaphor...

Something else that’s in my head as I type this: because 2024 was my first full season on the Timbers subreddit, I have a lot more voices rattling around up there. That’s not all bad, of course – a broader perspective is good! – but digging through any accumulation of detail(/clutter) inevitably pushes you toward the trees side of the forest/trees equation and this just feels like a moment to focus on the forest, maybe figure out why all those fucking trees caught on fire all season long?

That absorption on detail expressed itself in a singular way this season, if just for me (and, obviously, nobody pushed me into all those subreddit rabbit-holes) – i.e., a loose perception that every player on the team was, in so many words, more or less fine. To be clear, yes, people on the Timbers sub-reddit (hereafter, “Over There”) did eventually start naming names – e.g., Zac McGraw ain’t doing so good, even if Kamal Miller’s making that a contest, and some dude Over There mounted what started as a lonely campaign calling for James Pantemis to start over Maxime Crepeau and, for all the doubt, even ridicule that guy endured…Pantemis did, in fact, take over the starting job – but just about every player had their champion, many of them for as long as the season lasted. When faced with a team that finished 9th in the West, aka, hanging on by a rotted toe, that cheering section shouldn't exist. Call it a paradox, call an argument for firing the coach, or just some specific coaches, or for firing the general manager, but just the loose sentiment says more about how fandom works than anything about the Timbers’ 2024 season.

The Timbers Take a Giant Shit in Providence Park, The End.

I generally don’t do emotion as a soccer fan, it’s just not how I experience the game. And yet…

On an experiential level, tonight’s 0-5 loss at Providence Park to a lately woeful Vancouver Whitecaps side had a helpless feeling to it. Suffocation feels like the best analogy, only with full awareness of how much longer it would last.

Also, losses generally roll off my back, but this duck is fucking soaked.

I like all of these players enough that I hated to see them humiliated, but I say that knowing full well that something about this team has to change.

David Ayala showed up tonight. I think a couple of the attacking players might have, but I’m not sure how one would tell given how rarely they got on the ball. Oh, except Jonathan Rodriguez, a player seemingly obsessed with getting on the ball where he could do absolutely nothing with it.

Weird, brutal fucking game.

The Timbers missed the playoffs in 2022 and 2023, but this? It was worse on every level.

Unless I somehow get caught up in the rest of the 2024 playoffs – maybe Miami cashes out early? – and feel like I have anything to say, the next post about the Timbers will be a post-mortem.

There’s nothing left to do, but accept things went wrong and figure out the best way to douse the flames and put a bow on the corpse. Till then.

Thoughts from the Meat in a Seattle and Vancouver Sandwich, aka, a Portland Timbers Review/Preview

The state of play, in blues legend form.

I think of the Portland Timbers 1-1 road draw at the Seattle Sounders in terms of finding the proper balance between love and hate. Some markers are obvious – e.g., they gave up the inevitable soft goal (this one came with a pillow-top); against that they got a bold, dare I say spicy, goal from a source (Antony) that wasn’t the big three (Evander, Felipe Mora, and Jonathan Rodriguez).

All kinds of things fall into the space between those two poles, including the way Seattle took all the game the Timbers gave them (a lot), all the shots that resulted therefrom (could have been 1-2, even 1-4 against Portland), but for Portland’s James Pantemis rising to every occasion save the one. Moreover, the draw extended the Timbers’ lease in Seattle’s collective heads. The latter might not matter at all in the big picture, but it is really, really funny in the smaller one.

The rest of this post comes in two parts, the first looking back to the Saturday’s _______ game (still working on the adjective that fits it best), the second looking ahead to Wednesday’s big, big play-in against the Vancouver Whitecaps. Courtesy of motorsports, the lingering effects of Major League Soccer’s second-tier status in the North American landscape, the Timbers get to host that one despite the ninth-place seed. I think every Timbers fan knows that by now, but the thought still brightens my face with a mirthful smile two days later.

Sorry for the delay on this going up to anyone who noticed, but I had a family reunion this weekend and it was welcome and very nice.

The Rope-a-Dope That Ropes the Dope Every Time
I’ll start by reading some more old news into the record: Portland drawing Seattle – again, this is in Seattle – resulted in the Sounders dropping to fourth place (which puts them into a playoff series against Houston Dynamo FC…but is that actually better than facing Minnesota United FC?), missing an automatic berth in to the CONACAF Champions’ League, handing the Cascadia Cup to the Timbers in their own house, and losing Obed Vargas for the first game of their three-game series against Houston. Honestly, I don’t know how Timbers fans continue to breathe through all the laughter...

Seattle Sounders Scouting Report: In Which I Channel D.A.R.E.

D.A.R.E., still 1,000% on brand.

Yeah, yeah, up goes another post. What can I say? I get nostalgic about every regular season one or two games before it ends…

…and then I forgot every last thing about it one day after MLS Cup. I am a simple man overwhelmed by the passing of the seasons. Enough about me. Preview time.

Does it get better than two teams playing their nemesis (both on and off the field) with all kinds of things on the line? This Saturday (aturday, aturday, aturday) won’t just establish who leads and whom follows in the post-season dance, it will decide which team takes home the Cascadia Cup (still wide-open) among? the Seattle Sounders, the Vancouver Whitecaps and…your…Portland Tim-BERS! [CROWD GOING WILD! REGGAETON HORNS!!] If I’m tracking the information posted on Sounder at Heart right, fun fact, Vancouver actually has the weakest grip on the Cascadia trophy.

The math is simple for the Timbers: if Portland wins and Vancouver loses or draws at Real Salt Lake, the Timbers host the play-in game versus Vancouver and lift the Cascadia Cup to the heavens! [SOUND OF CROWD GOING WILD, REGGAETON HORNS!!] The math gets a little more complicated around Seattle, but that has more to do with the mad scramble/crash-up derby among the teams that currently sit between 5th and 7th in the West. I pulled Vancouver out of that grouping because they can’t finish any higher than 7th, but, unless my math is wrong (as always, check it) Houston Dynamo FC, the Colorado Rapids, and Minnesota United FC can finish in any order – that’s up to and including Minnesota falling to 8th place (which would happen if and only if Vancouver beats RSL and they lose at home versus St. Louis CITY FC). Bottom line, Seattle will sit in third or fourth by the end of the night regardless and,

Even if I just wrote The Great Gatsby of playoff maths, all the above counts as a massive digression from the task at hand – i.e., tallying the things to worry about against the Sounders this Saturday and/or finding the best path to prolonging the Agony of Brian Schmetzer. Let’s turn to that now…

Seattle Sounders, The Basics
Record/Top Stats: 3rd in West, 5th overall; 16-9-8, 56 pts., 50 gf, 34 ga (+16); home record: 8-2-6
Last 10 Results: WLWLWWTWWW
Home or Away: HHAAAHHHAA

MLS Round-Up: Some Word Association on the Cusp of Decision Day

Ooh. Something about Orlando coming up.

With some strays called in – e.g., Columbus Crew SC (expectedly) picking at the bones of the New England Revolution (4-0) and Los Angeles FC sniping the Vancouver Whitecaps in second-half stoppage (2-1) - and nothing left to play but Decision Day, an urge to get things organized one final time before we take ‘em one game at a time (aka, the playoffs) kicked in. The rest of you do this in the privacy of your own mind, and you’re almost certainly better off for it. And yet, here we are…

Don’t expect deep analysis in anything below and I didn't flag more than a couple players by name. Also, judge me, if you must, for giving up early on doing league-wide coverage literally every season, but I still haven’t landed on a way of actually cover Major League Soccer that 1) I trust and 2) doesn't feel like rehashing the same shit everyone has plowed over three times or more. I’ll take another swing in 2025 – i.e., tinker with the methodology, maybe lower the bar for “trust,” etc. – but the best I can offer for 2024 is recollection of half- (or less-than-half-)remembered videos and highlights, a review of undeniable trends, both long- and short-term, and a succession of hiccups percolating up from my gut.

In nuts-‘n’-bolts terms, I’m gonna list every team in MLS, by conference and in their current order, from top to tail, and give a brief read on where they are now and their season as I understand it. Hot takes will come as my gut gives ‘em, otherwise…allons y!

WESTERN CONFERENCE (hey, that’s my home conference!)
Los Angeles Galaxy (1st in West, 2nd overall)
The somewhat rare team that can pull apart the opposition, arguably as good in possession as they are in transition. Vulnerabilities include a middling road record (6-6-4) and a middling defense, but the Galaxy have real talent all over the attacking third (given a preferred starting XI) and they can score from as many places. They’ve been lethal at home all season – only LAFC beat them there (and the last of their three home draws came in mid-May) – and they can beat any team on their day. They’ll have to win on the road to do it, but the Galaxy have a real shot at MLS Cup.

A Scouting Report & a Tease

Even your mom thinks I'm cool.

It’s not often that one gets to scout both teams that yer local team will play in the play-in they are doomed to play. And yet that’s exactly what happened when the Vancouver Whitecaps hosted Minnesota United FC and let them steal dinner with a 0-1 loss.

Most of the notes below point to Vancouver more than the Loons and, yes, that’s me hedging toward the ‘Caps as the Portland Timbers’ likeliest opposition for the play-in. Hot take. Yeah. At any rate, watching…about 75 minutes of this game dredged up thoughts and memories about both teams, and I’m going to lace those the post below. To be clear, I am familiar with both teams, as well as most of the players that line up for them, but I won’t pretend to I know either of them.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t done obsessive (unhinged) stuff all season to help me keep tabs on every team in Major League Soccer. No, you're the weirdo with the Word doc you created to track the progress of all 29 teams in the league because the Form Guide (hallelujah!) fell short of truly connecting you to the data. Not me, not this winner. That said, if I was that guy, I might have something like this just lying around.

Minnesota United FC
Record/Stats: 14-12-7, 49 pts., 54 gf, 48 ga (+6); home 6-6-4, away 8-6-3; 7th in West; 12th overall
Last 10 Results: LWLWWLWWTW
Venue:                HHHAAHAHAA (again, not laughing; H = home, A = away)
Decision Day Oppo: v STL

Vancouver Whitecaps
Record/Stats: 13-11-8, 47 pts., 50 gf, 45 ga (+5), home 6-6-4, away 7-5-4, 8th West, 14th overall
Last 10 Results:   WLWTWTLTLL
Venue:                  HHAHHAAHHH
Final Games: v LAFC, @ RSL

I’ll reference that below, but let’s start with:

Portland Timbers 0-0 FC Dallas, aka, The Sum of Our Greatest Fears in 48 Minutes

Oh, it's coming, champ.

A should-win on Wednesday versus Austin FC that ended in a loss, followed by a must-win late this afternoon versus FC Dallas that ended in a gutless, goal-less, leg-less draw. Ye gods, egads, etc.

First question: how to put a bow on that much nothing?

Second question: when was the last time (verb tense entirely deliberate, btw) you could either believe or talk yourself into thinking that the Portland Timbers have a chance to end their season on the highest-possible high? Don’t know what that was for you, but for me it was a playoff (or play-in) win and a dream of bigger things (no matter how implausible)?

I was somewhat optimistic, personally, even through the loss versus Austin. That optimism took a square shot to the stones tonight and I can name the moment the blow landed: somewhere around two minutes after Felipe Mora’s best shot of the day, aka, the 48th minute or thereabouts. To that point in through both games, Portland had a firm handle on the game-states. They weren't scoring, sure...and, okay, Austin snuck one past them, but the Timbers were still doing good, productive, proactive things all over the field. And then even that dried up. If one accepts the conventional wisdom that Portland can't defend a lead, they need to be the team that outscores all comers. Instead, they've now gone 230 minutes without scoring. Closer to the point at hand, Dallas took over the game after that last best shot and that’s how they tagged ‘em both (both balls, I mean, paraphrasing Kingpin).

The Very Basics, aka, the (Perversely Happy) Flashbacks to the Austin Loss
Much like last Wednesday versus Austin, the Timbers rolled up the chances versus Dallas from around the 17th minute to the 39th. Mora blew at least two chances before steering his best chance wide, Jonathan Rodriguez almost caromed home a header off an Evander free-kick at the 22nd minute, and Evander tried everything up to and including (repeatedly) trying to salsa his way through the middle of Dallas’ defense. Both Juan David Mosquera and Santiago Moreno flailed some shots wide – one of them a hopeful bicycle attempt (Moreno’s) off one of Portland’s best flurries of night – but, for a second week running, the Timbers’ shot selection looked more desperate than wise or good. Finishing and finished product aside, the signs looked all right over the first half: the Timbers won every 50/50, not to mention most of the 40/60s, and they recycled the ball into Dallas’ end of the field over-and-over. Seeing a functioning recycling program felt good, guys…

Portland Timbers 0-1 Austin FC: Resistance and Young Love

First, a confession: I pay a lot more attention to a game when I’m at home. My wife will knock around for the opening 15-25 minutes – depends on the night – but, after that, it’s just me watching the game and spitting rhetorical questions into the void.

On the rare occasions I go to real-life live games – almost always from Section 210 (shout out! REGGAETON HORNS! REGGAETON HORNS!) – distractions abound. For instance, I missed last night’s only goal (Austin’s. fuckers), reminiscing with an old friend about another old friend’s family all had “hobbit feet.” If it wasn’t that, it was the couple straight-up dry-fucking in the row immediately in front of me. Seriously, light grinding started around the 43th minute and that graduated to full-on grinding and his hand up her shirt by the 80th.

Suffice to say, I didn’t pay perfect attention to this game, and yet, these are my notes…

1) The Game Was Better Than the Result
Swear to God, I will put the minimum amount of lipstick on this…I can’t say “pig of a result” because, all three points dropped aside, the Timbers piled on the chances and in numbers that, eight times out of ten secures at least one goal, sometimes two more, and often all three points. In this case, the official stats for this game do the double work of confirming and denying reality: on the one hand, you saw all the chances; on the other, you saw precisely why they didn’t go in. If Austin excelled at anything last night, it was getting dudes in the way of almost everything Portland attempted in their defensive third. How MLS stats-hacks landed on just two blocked shots for Austin, I’ll never know.

Austin FC Scouting Report: On the Undead and Shitty Committees

Give it to me straight, doc...

It’s nice to be back, feeling like I have the space to let my mind wander. I’ll seek not to abuse the privilege. Oh, and all of this is based on memory, 75+ additional minutes of review and poking around some (real, real) basic stats.

Record/Stats: 9-13-9, 36 pts., 34 gf, 44 ga (-10); home 6-5-5 away 3-8-4, 11th West, 21st overall
Last 10: LWLLTWLLTL
Venue: AHHAHAHAAH (again, not laughing, H=home, A=away)
Remaining Games: @ POR, @ LAG, v COL

First and foremost, yes, mathematical probability is the only thing keeping Austin FC from their due terminal diagnosis. They’re dead in all but name, obviously, but spectator sports count among the rare places where zombies can harm the living. So, shoot the fuckers in the head, yeah?

The (Largely Regular) Lineup
Austin’s head coach, Josh Wolff, has trotted out at least three different formations in recent weeks – 4-3-3, 4-4-2, hell, the man even made a pass at a 4-2-3-1; then again, what else does a coach do but tinker through a 2-6-2 run? – but it’s also a lot of plugging the same dudes into a different shape (for reference, the lineups reviewed go back to the game at Nashville in late August). Guilherme Biro and Mikkel Desler have been constants at fullback, Brendan Hines-Ike has anchored most of the defenses with either Julio Cascante (hi, Julio!) or Matt Hedges at his side. Alex Ring (always) patrols midfield in front of them, with Daniel Pereira the most frequent Batman to his Robin, though (coach’s son) Owen Wolff occasionally spells him. Sebastian Driussi still steers Wolff’s (ahem) attack and mostly toward a semi-stable combination of Jader Obrian and, since he joined, Osman Bukari, but you also see Diego Rubio and, in the briefest of glimpses, Gyasi Zardes (what a signing). Driussi gets a little attacking support from Jon Gallagher, mostly through crosses (he floats wide). It’s a couple cameos from there. The end.

Vancouver Whitecaps 1-1 Portland Timbers: I Accept This Result, I Love This Result

This can't be anything but disorienting.

The Portland Timbers rolled out of Vancouver with a point after last night’s 1-1 draw at BC Place. Based on a quick little spin around the Timbers subreddit, I liked this result more than others, maybe even more than I should. I’ll defend that choice between now and the end, but first…

The Very Basics
The Vancouver Whitecaps went up 1-0 with the opening whistle still echoing around the stadium (c’mon, roll with it). If the Timbers had hoped to ease their way into the game, the shock of Brian White’s ever-so-early (and unnervingly easy) goal hit them like a bucket of ice water waking them from sleep. The shock of it carried over the opening 15-20 minutes of the game: no Portland player seemed to know where he should be and where he should go from there. The “shock” metaphor seems especially apt because once the Timbers woke all the way up, they took hold of the game and, but for one “this fucking game” moment (Andres Cubas pinging Maxime Crepeau’s left post in second half stoppage), they never let go of it. Portland’s confidence grew side-by-side with the quality of their chance creation – i.e., Antony’s solo-run/desperate flail from the right to Juan David Mosquera firing from a seam up the middle to Santiago Moreno forcing Yohei Takaoka to save off a freekick - until Rodriguez crowned the recovery on his second bite of the apple with a deflected equalizer (his first bite was offside, sadly). The second half was all Timbers (the official stats can go to Hell), with Portland turning 50/50s into 70/30s all over the field and cutting off 90% of the paths out of Vancouver’s half. Had Takaoka’s left post not kept out Felipe Mora’s picture-perfect header, I’d bet my left leg (the bad one, fwiw) that the Timbers would be in 7th this morning.

What’s to Love
To anyone feeling blue about two points (arguably) slipping away, I’d respond with this: which team do you think feels better about not just last night’s result, but last night’s game? Sure, Vancouver punched their ticket to the post-season, but would you rather be the team ruing a slow start and 20 wasted minutes or the team trying to figure out 60+ minutes of getting played off your own pitch – and with three more crucial home games to go? The larger context only makes it worse for the 'Caps: the Timbers have defeated playoff-competitive teams since the Leagues Cup break, while the ‘Caps haven’t beat one since early July (Minnesota, on the road), or even June (Colorado, at home; Minnesota was flailing under the playoff line when the ‘Caps beat them in July). Even if you lean into the argument that Portland can only win at home, last night’s draw with the wild road draw at RSL behind it shows the Timbers getting results that, by the grace of penalty kicks, can become playoff wins. Finally, Portland has the comfort of knowing how they measure up against playoff-bound teams: both Portland and Vancouver have gone 4-3-3 over their past ten games, but the Timbers have played seven playoff-bound teams versus just four for Vancouver. That script will flip over the next two games for Portland and the next three for Vancouver – the Timbers play Austin then Dallas, while Vancouver hosts Seattle, Minnesota and LAFC – and that makes the two points separating them look at little smaller. And yet, neither team had all hands on deck…

Real Salt Lake 3-3 Portland Timbers: A Tale of One and a Half

The boy who cried wolf as an angsty teenager.

Portland Timbers fans have been invited to a transcendentally ridiculous party this season. What can we do but accept the invitation?

Very much related, the Timbers’ wild 3-3 draw at Real Salt Lake defies rational explanation. It was what it was and is what it is. It was necessary to endure the first half, experientially, in order to understand the full import of the second, it is always darkest before the dawn, and on every bloody morning after, one tin soldier will ride away.

Game Notes
The Timbers were very bad in one half, and just good enough in the second to smuggle one point out of Utah. Call it a Tale of One and a Half. I’m sure RSL fans feel aggrieved at the result, for a variety of reasons, but I’d peg one key moment as a shorthand for how/when the game went off the rails for them.

You could see RSL’s ‘keeper, Gavin Beavers (great name, no notes), scrambling to get his defense organized ahead of the corner kick that led to the Timbers’ first and fairly shitty goal. It recalled the boy who cried wolf barking at the villagers when shit got real, at long last, and it went just as well. The cross came in, Eric Miller nicked it more than he met it, but chaos ensued, and the ball rolled to Antony and he, for lack of a better verb, bumbled the ball into the net. At that exact moment, “the most dangerous lead in soccer” went to high alert.

The punchline to the whole thing: RSL had every reason to ignore that boy crying wolf. Their defensive shape and movement had Portland flustered to where they couldn’t connect more than two passes that didn’t go backwards. The Timbers midfield, in particular, didn’t seem to trust one another on either side of the ball; support failed to arrive on the attacking side, leading to wingers getting isolated and Felipe Mora operating in a void, and no one had a clear grasp on how to pass off players and rotate into cover on the defensive side. Between a defense as disarrayed as the Democrats and an offense that barely got off the couch (the Timbers’ official xG in the first half: 0.09), Portland looked doomed to a blowout.

Portland Timbers 4-2 Los Angeles Galaxy: ADDRIAAANNNN!!!!

Best scene. No notes.

The subtitle for the preview I posted for this game referenced Rocky III. Anyone who has seen that movie fully appreciates its merry absurdity, the boxing sequences, in particular, where large men (and Sylvester Stallone), arms rippling with muscles, landed one head-removing blow after another. None of them had any effect, of course, until they did and every single boxer in the movie stood there, arms at his sides as he had no other choice besides taking it. Blocking a punch is and was for weaklings and commies in the Rocky Extended Cinematic Universe, apparently.

The Portland Timbers' rapturous 4-2 win over the Western Conference-leading Los Angeles Galaxy followed a similar script. Between the construction and particular competencies of both teams, I doubt this game could have ended any other way. As predicted in that preview (c’mon, let me have it; I get so many of these wrong), this game was destined to be a free-swinging brawl. The only open question was which team would land the most swings.

Now, because I’m both on the clock and old…

The Very Basics
That didn’t mean the game didn’t start with some tentative jabs, a period where both sides studied the opposition for openings. The Galaxy fired the first best shot somewhere around the 14th minute, but the Timbers fired the first shot to go in. Evander started getting frisky shortly after LA’s shot – an attitude Portland desperately needed on the night – and mere minutes after firing their first real shot, he played a center-to-touchline-to-center give-and-go with Jonathan Rodriguez, who found a pocket and nodded home a whistle-clean opener.

Colorado Rapids 2-1 Portland Timbers: You Can't Always Get What You Want

Wants and expectations do a weird little dance toward the end of every American spectator sports season – and, let’s face it, the fact they unfailingly end in playoffs lumps them all into the same species. On the one hand, you know that your local team could really use the unlikely win…but doesn’t that adjective, “unlikely,” speak to the reality of the situation?

After a season of reducing the Colorado Rapids to a wholly-owned subsidiary of their very own, the Portland Timbers finally lost a game to the Rapids when it mattered most. The 2-1 final score hints at the respectably tight final outcome, but I doubt even one Timbers fan cares, what with Portland at the bottom of a deeper hole, seven teams above them, Minnesota United FC breathing down their necks and the already playoff-bound Los Angeles Galaxy coming to call on Wednesday…

…run-on sentences suggest urgency.

The Basics
What could have been, you know? Had Jonathan Rodriguez buried that first-minute breakaway, had the offside flag not gone up, if pigs could fly and sing “Hurdy Gurdy Man” as they whisked around the sky, maybe Portland gets that early goal and tees up an early Timbers lead. That’s how every meeting between these two teams have played out in their two games in 2024 and, oh, how that has fucked over Colorado at a 4:1 ratio. The early goal fell on the Rapids’ side of the ledger instead – more on that goal later - which left Portland chasing them for a change. It took just 10 minutes for the Timbers to catch them, and on a far better goal, and the game settled into a back-and-forth duel with decent chances falling on both sides.

Portland's best chances fell to Antony, Colorado's to Rafael Navarro: anyone familiar with either team can tell you how that panned out…I kid, I kid. Frustrated as he made anyone with green and gold in their veins, I won’t shit on Antony too hard – more on that later, too. When the goal came, it turned less on something special from Navarro than on Portland’s and/or Juan David Mosquera’s catastrophic failure to mark a player of his (demonstrated) quality on a set-piece.

MLS Round-Up: A Saucy Reset

This one’s going to be a blunt instrument a series of statements, a fair amount of it without showing most of my math. Suffice to say I had wee epiphany about why I bang on into the wee, foggy hours...

With the end of the season on the horizon, I wanted to post a read on the state of play since the…let’s call it gently(?) deceptive Leagues Cup wrapped up. Some of this follows from a personal failure to fully appreciate just how close we’ve come to the regular season – eight games left on the outside, and that’s only for four teams (Columbus, New England, LAFC, and Vancouver). It’s just six (nine teams, I think) to seven (16 teams?) for everyone else, which means shit got real two to three games ago depending.

Below, I lump all 29 teams into the following five categories, defined briefly below to make sure you catch my drift:

Contenders
The teams that look like they have a reasonable shot at reaching MLS Cup, whether by form (East) or conference (still East, but mostly West; more below).

Playoff Team, Dark Horses
The teams that, if they fix this issue or that one, have some hope of knocking off one of the contenders and reaching MLS Cup. That said, the relevant issue makes it pretty damn unlikely they will not. [NOTE: The relevant issue is not brought up much, or at all, below. Feel free to check out!]

Playoff Team, Plausible +1
Teams with a respectable chance, maybe even a decent one, of winning a game in the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you by Audi (probably?), but I wouldn't expect much and/or shit from there.

Bubble Teams
Teams that, regardless of their present merit and future upsides, still has real shit to do if they want to reach the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to be Hello Fresh!

The Dead
Teams that I feel confident will fall short of the embarrassingly low bar that MLS has set for reaching the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you Les Schwab Tires.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: (Complicated) Glory! + League-Wide Shit!

Oh, I'm just getting warmed up....

I was out of town for the Portland Timbers checks-all-the-boxes 1-0 win over a (punch-drunk) visiting Seattle Sounders team, but tracked the game from afar on the socials (i.e., reddit and Bluesky). People bitching about the broadcast team (Taylor Twellman and Jake Zivin, I think) popped up here and there and…I just don’t get how anyone can’t screen out the chatter, never mind get caught up in the relative amount of praise they heap on one team or the other. In my experience, color commentary follows the “broken clock” rule, with some hacks hitting the mark more often the others.

Why start there? Perhaps because some thoughts and arguments floated below may fall short of expectations for proper fandom. Let that come as it does, I’m squeezed a lot into this one post. Because it has surely been kicked around both hard and long enough, I won’t burn too many words on last Saturday’s game – which, to be 100% clear, was pretty damn awesome and nifty…it just needs an asterisk, maybe two.

The (Righteous!) Big Picture
Apart from giving up what (giving the Timbers’ history) felt like two games worth of corner kicks in the first half alone, I don’t recall a time when Seattle looked to have the upper hand last Saturday. Even if Portland’s chances weren’t all gilt-edged, the thought process behind them shone through; half the time, they failed due to some combination of a runner being half a step ahead or behind or the angle on the pass 10-degrees off. With key starters like Felipe Mora and Jonathan Rodriguez absent courtesy of varying amounts of bullshit (now half-corrected!), that shouldn’t surprise anyone. With the chance creation that little bit off, the happy deflection that transfigured Juan David Mosquera’s goal into a thing of beauty felt right at home. As for the play that led to it, what was that but vintage Timbers soccer?

The brighter notes played on the defensive side of the ball, and mostly through Timbers defenders throwing themselves in front of the best chances Seattle created. Dario Zuparic stood out there, with his block on Seattle’s not-yet budding star Pedro de la Vega as a stand-out moment (if it's not in here somewhere...crime). Kamal Miller got caught behind the ball now and again, and both fullbacks got burned 1-v-1 more often than any Timbers fan wants to see (Mosquera, in particular), but all concerned recovered well enough and generally played for one another. Now, about all that…

Portland Timbers 4-4 St. Louis CITY FC: To the Spoilers Go the Spoils

Tough one at the office today...

I can identify five criteria by which one can judge the Portland Timbers' 4-4 home draw versus the stain-stubborn St. Louis CITY FC team that came a-callin’ tonight.

1) A Bad Result
Because the Timbers suck on the road – not St. Louis bad, mind you, but pretty shitty – they need to get the best out of every home game. They did not.

2) A Great Response
Portland went down four times in this game – by two goals at one point, in heartbreaking fashion at another – but they kept punching back, firing a truly heroic number of shots and scoring a glorious late, late equalizer nine minutes past death through a deliciously vicious Evander free kick. They did better than never give up.

3) The Deeper Problem: Why That Was Required
With allowances for the truism that every goal your team scores is brilliant, every one they allow an embarrassment, the Timbers defense let in some dogshit goals tonight, and so many of them. I doubt it’s worth ranking them in terms of incompetence (and yet, what the Hell, from the most incompetent to the least: 1) Araujo’s dumb tackle (2nd goal; gotta watch the full highlights; Eduard Lowen PK); 2) Simon Becher unmarked in the box (1st goal); 3) Cedric Teuchert free and naked as the day he was born in Zone 14 (3rd goal); 4) Nokkvi Thorisson's step-inside assassination), because it’s the variety of failures that hurts. That's like Achilles  having four heels, instead of just the one.

4) The Primacy of the Individual
The Timbers executed a marvelous, fluid movement to score their first goal, aka, the one that made it interesting. A move that started with Santiago Moreno catching a stray pass at the center stripe and ended with a tap-in by Jonathan Rodriguez, but the best parts of it passed through Evander and Felipe Mora, who fed Rodriguez with a brainy, perfectly weighted pass to the back post. I’d call that an outlier, because all the other goals a) looked pretty goddamn scrappy and relied on the kind of spontaneous inspiration and technique – mostly through Evander – that’s tough to replicate. That idea – Portland needing something special from someone to make anything happen – was all over this result.

MLS Week 26: (Loose) Notes on the Re-Entry & Laying Down Some Markers

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? (Japanese game show, btw)

I didn’t watch nearly as much Leagues Cup as I’d wanted to (a single tear rolls fitfully down my cheek as I type) and for reasons I can’t quite put words to. I watched a good share of highlights, did the requisite oohing and awing over the prettier goals, but the sense that what happened there doesn’t translate to Major League Soccer’s regular season in any comprehensible way crept in somewhere around the time my Portland Timbers got a St. Louis shove out of the tournament in the Round of 32.

No small part of that follows from the Leagues Cup format itself. The three-team, two-game group stages makes for a weird/unforgiving format, for one – e.g., the Colorado Rapids and the San Jose Earthquakes qualified for the Round of 32 with 0-1-1 records, while Minnesota United FC and Real Salt Lake failed to qualify on 1-1-0 records – and that the Liga MX teams haven’t really started their season and also play a total of zero games at home gives even the shakiest MLS teams a leg up in one-off games…

…not that that stopped me from poring over the results, clocking who lost to who, and when, and running that against the…possibly eccentric document I created to track results, also it’s not me, I’m not losing my goddamn mind, because the Form Guide doesn't get the damn visuals right.

At any rate, with games of MLS Week…26 now playing on the streaming service that lives in your TV, I wanted to reconnect with where the regular season left off and what, if anything, the Leagues Cup said about where it may go between today and Decision Day. The observations below lean more into trends than details (i.e., no, I didn’t know about that minor knock that may make [Team X’s] your home team’s second stream (high potential!) No. 8 play a little south of his best), and it mostly kicks around loose impressions to be confirmed by later results, aka, the immovable facts that decide the fate of all and sundry. As stated in, I’m just trying to wrap my head around some things to get back in touch with what I’m watching.

This starts with an Eastern Conference overview, but will wrap up on how I’m feeling about the Timbers’ chances after the Leagues Cup. With that, let’s roll…

St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Loss and the Rest of the Season

Never, ever forget: the pig enjoys it.

I sat on posting this for a number of reasons – everything from still mulling it over to feeling like I didn’t have anything to say beyond, “say, that didn’t go well,” to feeling like a carcass Saturday morning – but the primary reason I took a breath for putting up a post about the Portland Timbers' 1-3 loss at St. Louis CITY (wNbc!) FC was this: I thought they played reasonably well given the givens…

…the secondary reason was a plan to shift to weekly, more context-rich posts (we’ll see how that goes). At any rate…

I took the usual time to tip through the subreddits – e.g., posts about how hard (and deep) Portland sucks on the road, how hard the defense shits the sheets, how everything would have been better had Evander not limped off…let’s go with disturbingly early (no low-hanging updates on that, btw) – and all those arguments and talking points make enough sense. And yet…

“Combative; looks like a foul-free war”

“midfield/middle of field, total melee”

Those rhyming phrases slipped into the notes I took during the game, 60 minutes apart. Between that and re-reading my post from Portland’s goal-less draw at St. Louis earlier this season, this Leagues Cup tilt delivered the game I expected. St. Louis disrupts more than they play, which makes them hell to play through: “forcing turnovers in advantageous places” (aka, pig-wrestling) has made them the MLS team they are today, for good (2023!) or ill (2024! probably!). Sure, Portland struggled to connect passes, but what is that but the whole damn point of that approach?

And, yes, any fan wants to see his/her/their local team play through that – but that’s exactly where I took comfort in the loss. Portland created enough chances to win – they even had two bites at scoring first (e.g., Juan David Mosquera somewhere around the 30th and Jonathan Rodriguez’s how-the-fuck-did-that-guy-miss chance at the back post (has to be in here, right?) – but they didn’t make them count. In defense of anyone ripping his/her/their hair about how few total chances Portland created, the official stats put a very real cap on how hard I can push back on that point, but the Timbers could have ridden Claudio Bravo’s gods-kissed banger to a draw, but for…well, St. Louis doing something like the same.

St. Louis CITY FC/Leagues Cup Scouting Report: A Mirror Into Portland's Past

legend.

Won’t lie. I would have loved to see the Timbers draw FC Juarez. If you haven’t watched the penalty shoot-out for their loss at St. Louis CITY FC, do yourself a solid and watch it. I’ve never seen a ‘keeper do that and it was a delight…

Speaking of Portland’s actual opponent…

In the interest of making these posts more reddit-friendly, and with apologies to people who come to this space for long-form content, I’m reducing Scouting Reports to literally five things I’d tell anyone about St. Louis CITY FC…well, aside from some basics – e.g., they have struggled to actually win all season, even at home, and that they have experienced some heavy turnover of (very late; farewell, Tim Parker, sweet prince). With that out of the way…allons y.

1) A Smarter Press, an Absent Wrecking Ball
St. Louis still defends quite high and leaves a fair amount of (exploitable) vertical space within that shape, but I haven’t seen them run the drunk-octane high-press that served them so well in 2023. The wrecking ball from the subtitle is Joao Klauss, who did as much as any player to make that work. He hasn’t appeared a ton in 2024 and hasn’t even made the bench during this Leagues Cup. At any rate, they have pressing triggers within that high defensive line and release them pretty effectively if a team can’t take them out of it. Related…

Club Leon 1-2 Portland Timbers: What You Learn & What Applies

Not tonight, not today, potato, pot-ah-to

I’m not going to dig too deep in the Portland Timbers late, glorious 2-1 win over Club Leon in Leagues Cup play tonight, mostly on the grounds that there’s not much to carry over between Leagues Cup and the MLS regular season…or is there?

Very Brief Summary
Leon looked set to make the 1-0 lead they laid down at the 12th minute hold up all night (also, helluva shot) – i.e., they collapsed on 50/50 balls fast enough to turn them into 60/40s, the Timbers struggled to play into their defensive third like a mime doing the wind bit, and they couldn’t really get so much going.

By my estimation, three players – Eryk Williamson (who had some redeeming to do), Dario Zuparic, and Antony – gave a hearty “not tonight!” to all that, and in that order. When they stepped forward, the rest of the team followed and they collectively started to punch out of the semi-defensive crouch suggested by Phil Neville’s line-up. They brought back the 50/50s, generally let Leon know they had a battle on their hands, if not a game. As the minutes ticked above 60, the Timbers took Leon out of their game.

It didn’t come together all at once, but it didn’t really have to. Without hazarding a guess at the actual game-plan, starting The Millers, Eric and Zac, on either side of Zuparic and Zac McGraw, screamed “just don’t fuck up.” Leon put the Timbers in plenty of jeopardy - more in the first half than the second (highlights!) - but they gave the Timbers heck over the first 10 minutes or so of the second too - but the rotations came through and Maxime Crepeau cleaned things up every time they didn’t. All that brings me to a phrase in my notes:

“highly episodic game”

At the 58th minute, Leon held an eleven-to-three advantage on shots. Some better than others, to be sure, but that impression of each team’s output tracked as roughly correct. In a live demonstration of how and why this result turned to Portland’s favor, the Timbers cut Leon’s advantage to eleven-to-six shots fired just two minutes later, courtesy of a flurry of them that started when Felipe Mora corralled a ball over the top, cut inside, found Evander, and sat poised to be the proud father of a succession of tertiary assist. The Timbers could only punch through here and there, basically, but, at that point, they'd already had their decisive moment just over 17 minutes earlier when Zac McGraw leveled the game with a perfect placement header off a corner kick. 

MLS Week 25 Snapshot Review: Of Life, Death, and "Postseason Hope"

Not subtle, therefore glorious.

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’, though they’re disapprovin’, keep them doggies movin’, Rawhide!

Three weeks in a row on these posts, baby. Officially hell-bent for leather…

I tried to tighten up the model this week, so we’ll see how that goes (good?). The due diligence felt…decent this week, watched a respectably stupid amount of soccer, took some notes, etc. – I even cribbed some helpful quotes from Matt Doyle’s (mostly) weekly column. I won’t bore you with the viewing schedule, but I want to close the preamble with this: I’d hoped to watch the Colorado Rapids stirring, if poorly recorded, 3-2 win over Real Salt Lake, but Apple TV+ still has that result at 2-1 and with no full replay available. Maybe they had John Denver on the tapes in the grips of a Rocky Mountain High? Or was it because it looked like a 90s-throwback night, only with shit attendance as the concept?

With that, here is your Major League Soccer Week 25, Leagues Cup Eve Snapshot Review. And, by way of chelebration, I’m gonna start big. And if anyone can remember which gutter-wine company used “chelebrate” for the ad copy, you’ve got a shiny quarter coming your way. Then again, it’ll never touch Orson Welles’ finest pitches.

1) This Is Not Postseason Hope
“Montréal’s three-game unbeaten run came to an end, but they still head into the break with real postseason hopes as they’re just one point under the red line, and just three back of Toronto in 8th.”
- Matt Doyle

In a league with all an Oprah-esque approach to the postseason – you get a berth! you get a berth! you get a berth! – the bare act of making the playoffs just means the local fans aren’t blushing at the end of the regular season. “Postseason hope" should mean exactly one thing: making the playoffs with an actual shot at doing something once you get in. Club du Foot Montreal has just three wins over their past eighteen (18) games. As you’ll see below (at No. 8), the bar for entry in the Eastern Conference hangs lower than the Count de Monet’s cuffs and Montreal’s just one of many teams who will, barring a miracle or a couple miraculous acquisitions, see their foot cut off the second it steps onto any playoff pitch they play over their heads to crash. That’s hardly unique, of course. Atlanta United FC looked genuinely good against a hot-streakin’ Columbus Crew SC in this weekend’s 2-1 win, but they’re still yo-yoing up and down in the middle of nowhere in the East. FC Dallas presents an even starker example, thanks to their recent revival – e.g., 5-3-2 in their last 10. That would matter if they could win a game on the road. Just one. So, again, when I use phrases like “postseason hopes,” I’ll be using it specifically.