Getting Reacquainted with Real Salt Lake, a Team Frozen in Amber/MLS 2.0

Far, far, FAR worse than it looks.

[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

I’m here to tell the kids that joining MLS as an expansion team today is nothing like what it was in the mid-2000s. Back then, the incoming front office couldn’t sign even one designated player, so, when building their Year One roster, they had to pick through the same crappy buffet as the rest of the league. That’s the league Chivas USA and Real Salt Lake stepped into and, golly, does “stepped into” get right to it. It took Chivas USA just one season to turn over a competitive roster – signing some soon-to-be famous young Americans made all the difference - but it took RSL over three seasons to do the same. And yet, when they finally pulled that off in 2008, they became one of MLS 2.0’s most consistent – and dangerous – teams. The argument for that fleshes out between the Best Season and Names to Know sections below, but RSL made the playoffs over the next seven seasons with two trips to MLS Cup and one to a CONCACAF Champions’ League final thrown in. They turned Rio Tinto Stadium into a fortress on the back of a 29-home-game unbeaten streak that started in June 6, 2009 (their road form, meanwhile…) and the familiar winning formula of having a couple ringers running wild in front of brick wall (aka, an effective attack and a sturdy defense). And then, player by player and season by season, the members of that great team either aged out or moved on. No matter how dangerous they’ve looked at the end of any post-season since, and outside the 2016 and 2019 season (9th and 6th respectively), RSL has finished in 11th place or lower in every season after 2015; they’ve probably forgotten what a trophy looks like by now. They still turn up the odd great attacking player, but they never enough of them on the same roster and in the same season to take them that vital one step further. RSL still rolls reliable center backs off some invisible assembly line, but they otherwise look stuck in MLS 2.0.

Best Season(s)

The easy choice points to their MLS-Cup-winning season in 2009 – aka, the most famous “Rimandoing” in MLS history – but I’m going with the 2010-2011 run to the CCL final. If there’s a better underdog story in CCL history, I haven’t heard it. Moreover, that scrappy little RSL team came achingly close to winning it just three seasons removed from serial failure in MLS. They started the two-leg series by drawing the road leg at Monterrey 2-2, which meant all they had to do to lift the trophy was keep Monterrey off the board at Fortress Rio Tinto – and, to be clear, the final fell within the above-referenced home unbeaten streak. The stars don’t align much straighter than that…but then some guy named Humberto Andres Suavo Pontivo scored at the 45th minute for Monterrey and RSL couldn’t pull back one goal, the end.

Long-Term Tendencies

Fun-fact about RSL’s best seasons: their defense won it for them. Despite having Javier Morales for an ace and players like Fabian Espindola, Alvaro Saborio and Robbie Findley running off him, RSL stayed right around the MLS average for goals scored in most of the seasons between 2008 and 2014. They tipped well over average just once in that run - the 2013 MLS Cup-losing season (and just one more time since) – but RSL has a long and generally uninterrupted history of average attacking numbers. Very much related, and with just a couple seasons as exceptions (2019 and 2022), the defenses have been average or worse since 2015. Call it a failure to keep up.

Identity: A junior varsity regular clinging for dear life to his one great season on the varsity squad.

Joy Points: 13

10 Names to Know

Nikolas Besagno

Slow fucker that I am, I just discovered that you can sort the all-time RSL roster in various ways. If you sort by seasons, you get a sense of what RSL had to work with over the 2005-06 seasons. The short answer is not much, but I’m using Besagno as a stand-in for both their early struggles with roster building and an example of the limited resources teams had before the DP rule came to be. Kid went No. 1 in the 2007 SuperDraft and barely lasted a season…

Kyle Beckerman

One of the pillars on which RSL built its success. Rangy, rugged and well-skilled enough to pitch in on the attacking side, Beckerman stands as one of the best American players of his generation. A player opposing fans loved to hate, obviously, and he earned their hatred by making RSL fucking misery to pay against.

As good as it got, really.

Nat Borchers/Jamison Olave

I couldn’t choose between them, so I cheated and went with both of them. With Beckerman as a screen, Olave and Borchers stood and the heart of the brick wall noted above and shouted “you shall not pass.” Tempting as it is to call Borchers the brains and Olave the brawn, that misses the larger story of how well one complemented the other (not to mention a disservice to Olave). Helluva pairing, really.

Nick Rimando

Simply put, a legend among MLS goalkeepers, a man whose surname became a verb for stuffing penalty kicks. The final major piece in RSL’s famous brick wall.

Javier Morales

Morales joined RSL the same season as Bekcerman (2007; the last of their early dry seasons), but he became for them on the attacking side what Beckerman was on the defensive. The really wild thing: he wasn’t a DP for RSL until 2011(!). Easily among the best of MLS’s second generation of playmakers (i.e., after the “Marquee Player” era), Morales scored goals and dished them at a roughly 1:2 ratio – and he came close to 100 assists.

Alvaro Saborio

Had you bet me that RSL had Saborio when they won their one and only MLS Cup, I would have bet yes and lost. The do-it-all Costa-Rican forward actually came the season after and made RSL look all kinds of menacing. Great a tussling in the box, blessed with a powerful shot and a quick mind, he ran opposing defenses ragged and remains RSL’s all-time leading goal-scorer.

Joao Plata

An early example of the great (or maybe just good) attacking player that RSL turned up, but that they failed to surround with enough talent to thrive. A tricky and very short winger who could sit a good defender on his ass on his better days, Plata counts as the first victim of the slow erosion of RSL’s best team.

Justen Glad

An example of one of those “assembly line” center backs noted in the brief history and listed here as the longest-serving one. Glad started his first games for RSL in 2015 and the fucker’s still just 26 years old. He’s played a key role in holding their shit to the extent they have since then.

Damir Kreilach

The next player after Plata who was called on to do the same thing – i.e., to more or less carry RSL’s attack. To be clear, this wasn’t for lack of trying by RSL’s front office: Kreilach has played on the same roster as Plata, Jefferson Savarino and Albert Rusnak, but it’s just that they have consistently failed to add up to enough to break out of the MLS 2.0 amber. (Also worth noting: how much all those players’ numbers bump against the same ceiling.

Pablo Ruiz

Hear my out on this one. First, I had no idea Ruiz first signed with RSL in 2018. Second, as present as he has been through the 2020-2022 seasons, I don’t believe I ever registered his name during that time. I slipped him in this countdown because, if Ruiz can get back to the level he played out over the first half of 2023, before injury ended his season, RSL has one hell of a player on their hands. Dude was excellent. And a big part of “what might have been” for the next section…

This but less terrifying/ghostly.

Where They Finished in 2023 & What the Past Says About That, If Anything

Eleventh overall in the league with a -2 goal differential and wholly average on both ends of the field. RSL took eventual the Western Conference finalist and all-around sturdy Houston Dynamo FC to three games in the first, full round of the playoffs and to penalty kicks over the last two legs. In a nice narrative touch, rising star, Diego Luna, carried through those games only to crumple into a bawling heap after missing one of the penalty kicks in the third, decisive game. It’s good having players who bleed that hard for the team. It was a brave season, particularly after Ruiz went down, but also more of the same from RSL’s recent history.

Notes/Impressions on the Current Roster/State of Ambition

First, RSL has done some house-cleaning, much of it comparatively high profile – e.g., they moved Savarino (and one of their better attacking threats) to Brazil’s Botafogo and let Kreilach free to try his luck with the Vancouver Whitecaps. They still have some attacking talent left – e.g., Luna, Rubio Rubin and the young, dribbling Colombian winger Andres Gomez – but that leaves them thin when it comes to providing service to their very capable-on-his-day forward, Cristian Arango. It looks like Anderson Julio will stick around to provide jolt of speed off the bench, but they’re going to have to bring in something special to make that set-up anything like dangerous. The defense should be…all right between Glad, Marcelo Silva and the bruising Brayan Vera at center backs and (most often) Zac MacMath in goal, and they’ve got useful fullbacks in Bryan Oviedo and Andrew Brody. All that tracks as more of the same to me – i.e., MLS mid-table, which means better than even on making the playoffs and a little less likely to go deep, never mind to the end.

As for ambition, I’m going with not good enough. While RSL does keep finding intriguing options, it has been a minute since they’ve found any player to rank among the league’s best. You’ll have to ask an RSL fan whether that comes from lack of resources or a lack of competence, but it is what it has been for a while now. Hard to believe it'll change until it looks like it's gonna.

* 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