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| Had some great damn songs, but... |
[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]
Thumbnail History
Tempting as it is to see DC United as the team that squandered its legacy as the first best team in MLS, that narrative writes their first (and only) renaissance out of its history – i.e., the 2004-07 seasons, which saw them win another Cup and two more Shields. The echo might have been half as loud, but it did happen. Against that, those first straight-up fucking insane seasons – DC won three MLS Cups and two Supporters’ Shields, on top of having a crack at a fourth Cup in 1998 (the Chicago Fire won that one) – created a firewall thick enough for them to hold at sixth place on the all-time Joy Points Scale (methodology below*) despite getting slapped with four (4!) Wooden Spoons and some of the worst seasons in league history. Between them checking out of the post-season a half decade at a time and 10 seasons of Benny-ball (when Ben Olsen was in charge) thrown into the mix, it’s almost impossible to remember that DC United reigned as the undisputed Kings of MLS 1.0. Some of MLS’s first great players starred for DC, not all of them listed below (e.g., Jeff Agoos, Roy Lassiter, and Raul Diaz Arce, to name a few). In fewer words, yeah, the designated-player era passed them by. That doesn’t mean they didn’t try, and that they haven’t had a couple hyped hopes, but they have yet to catch up to a league that seems to get faster with each passing season.
Best Season(s)
I’ll always have a soft spot for MLS Cup I, when DC stepped into the downpour that fell on it as the underdog, but I’d call the 1997 and 1999 seasons the franchise’s high-water marks. I don’t remember 1999 so good, partially because I’d moved on to Boston and rooting for the New England Revolution, but I had a front row seat for 1997 and they ran away with everything that wasn’t nailed down. Special team, special players…also, this is where I picked up my aversion to success…
Long-Term Tendencies
DC built their trophy-winning seasons on reliable, live-wire attacks – sometimes to the point of covering for a shaky defense. The reverse held true as well: they suffered their worst seasons when a stumbling attack became the anchor that drowned them. Defense hurt a little as well, but the offense was always a little worse. And here’s a fun little detail: despite its reputation for playing it safe, the Benny-ball era (2010-2020) didn’t consistently translate into improved defensive performances: DC either hit over or above the average for goals allowed in eight of his 10 seasons coaching the team.
Identity: Washed-up rock stars who keep showing up, only playing smaller and smaller venues.
Joy Points: 21, which seems like a metaphor for the benefits of inherited wealth.
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| Third time saying it, can't be arsed. |
10 Names to Know
Marco Etcheverry
He rocked a mullet so bold that it had to make a comeback and, to someone whose primary domestic soccer experience to that point was watching the old-school Seattle Sounders play on turf, he had what felt like otherworldly skill – especially on a back-breaking long-ball. Not unlike Liam Neeson from the Taken franchise, Etcheverry had a particular set of skills that no player in MLS’s first-class of Marquee players could match. And when his partner in crime arrived…
Jaime Moreno
The most talented forward in MLS’s early season walking away for me. Moreno could work with Etcheverry as a foil, he could create his own shot, he could help with ball progression. Unlike Etcheverry, Moreno played through both of DC’s best and brightest seasons, which would make him Mr. DC United, but for one player below. Unlike that player, however, he remains the fifth all-time career scorer in MLS and I can’t see anyone lapping him soon.
Ben Olsen
Speak of the devil and he shall appear. I remember Olsen coming into DC’s first team as a very young player. He played as a No. 8, and with all the intelligence he grew into (as a coach, in particular), but he also scored this blistering, random hat-trick I’ll always remember. More than anything else, Ben Olsen, the player, evokes a time when DC had a knack for finding rising (apparently) reliable talent.
Freddy Adu
Adu represents the dark side of MLS’s growing pains with developing young players. As people of a certain age know, he got his first professional start at what looks like age 14 and he was hyped to the damn ceiling across multiple seasons – not just by American outlets, mind you – and…he just never reached that ceiling. If nothing else, Adu taught me to read super-young soccer prodigies as child stars waiting to implode.
Santino Quaranta/Bobby Convey
To start with the weird thing, DC signed both Quaranta and Convey before Adu. While I don’t want to go overboard with calling Quaranta a cautionary tale, he labored under the “next big thing” label almost as much as Adu did. Convey, meanwhile, walked the same track as Olsen – i.e., that of a good, competent midfielder doing a simple job well. Those fundamentals took him to Reading, then in England’s First Division (don’t think it became the Championship till later), and to other ports of call and I’ll be damned if the Quaranta/Convey divide doesn’t explain U.S. soccer before MLS teams had well-functioning academies.
Christian Gomez
As if as a departure from several seasons of failed experiments and trying to find the “next big [American] thing,” DC called in Gomez as arguably the first transformative summer signing in league history. Arguably the first ringer from the pre-DP days, Gomez delivered the full bag of tricks MLS fans have come to expect from the exotic South American import – i.e., line-breaking combination play with free-kicks as a bonus.
Luciano Emiliano
A Brazilian forward, a talented one too, came in as the second punch to Gomez’s first. And it worked like gangbusters that first season (2007), when DC won the Shield (again) and Emiliano the Golden Boot…then Gomez moved on to Colorado (hide the children) and, while Emiliano continued to have good seasons, DC did not. This becomes something of a tradition, btw…
Chris Pontius
Tall, fast, impressively skilled and not cursed with operating as a teenager among men, Pontius felt like the next step toward where DC hoped to go as both team and organization. And, but for Ponitus’ recurring injuries, who knows? He helped teams quite a bit when he stayed healthy (e.g., 2012 for DC and 2016 for Philly), but he seemed to recover almost as much as he played.
Steve Birnbaum
When all else failed – as it by and large did – DC found solid, steady defenders for the never-ending task of buying time for a struggling attack. Here, I’m using Birnbaum as a stand-in for the harried, yet capable parents (or defenders) that have held DC together, if to the extent such a thing is possible, over all those seasons. And without (truly) strong No. 6s and 8s to help them out (e.g., Perry Kitchen came so damn close to making this list).
Luciano Acosta/Wayne Rooney/Christian Benteke
And, to bring the whole thing full circle, DC United have signed clearly talented attacking players in the seasons since 2007. And yet, all that barely added up to a blip. They missed the playoffs in Acosta’s first season (2017), exited in the first round in the two seasons Acosta had Rooney to work with, and they missed the playoffs again last season despite Benteke’s strenuous efforts. As noted re Emiliano, this has become a pattern. Something must change, most likely in midfield…
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| Blink three times if he can point to the bodies. |
Where They Finished in 2023 & What the Past Says About That, If Anything
Outside the playoffs for the fourth season in a row, 23rd overall and with a narrowly negative goal-differential (-4; and, hey, the attack didn’t show up again). In their defense, that looked like winning the Quadruple after a 2022 campaign in which DC failed on every possible side of the ball (an Hernan Losada as head coach…just WHY, Montreal?), but it’s still too much more of more of the same from DC. Some of that follows from continuing the as-yet-unidentified tradition of bringing in average-to-solid players from teams around MLS – e.g., Pedro Santos, Cristian Dajome, even Aaron Herrera – who are either on the wrong side of their prime, or who don’t bring enough to the table to lift the team (and if you like at the all-time list of DCU players, you’ll see a lot of familiar names with very short tenures with DC); for what it’s worth, I think they did it again with calling in Jared Stroud from St. Louis. Throw in a couple underwhelming DPs – e.g., Taxi Fountas for some bigoted something (he left in the second half of 2023) and Mateusz Klich, whose (potential/alleged) talent can’t overcome his clear confusion half the time he steps on the field – and the sum of their 2023 adds up as expected. Still, I rate Benteke highly and have seen good things from some of their young players like Theodore Ku-DiPietro (think the other one was Jackson Hopkins or maybe Jeremy Garay) and they’ve got some steady performers in Russell Canouse and Steve Birnbaum. There’s a foundation, in other words, even if it ain’t so big. And yet…
DC’s front office seems permanently flummoxed by the challenge of building a competitive team, or even just a better one. You’d think they would have either caught up or fired enough people to turn over an ace by sheer dumb luck by now, but…NOPE! It becomes harder to think DC can turn it around with each passing season, even if you have to think they will one of these seasons.
* Joy Point Index
Winning the CONCACAF Champions’ League: 5 points
Claiming Supporters’ Shield : 4 points
Winning MLS Cup: 3 points
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2 points
Winning the U.S. Open Cup: 2 points
Winning CONCACAF Champions Cup: 2 points
MLS Is Back Cup: 2 points (yeah, yeah, I’m a Timbers fan; still, that was a tough one)
CONCACAF Champions League Semifinalist: 1 point
Making the Playoffs: 1 point
Missing the Playoffs: -1 point
Missing Playoffs in 1996-97, 2002-2004 (when 80% of the league qualified): - 2 points
Wooden Spoon: -3 points
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