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| The end of Hour 1. Just two hours to go. |
And, goddamn Inter Miami CF and goddamn the man, yes, I’m calling this MLS Week 16. Know why? I averaged the number games played for all the teams in Major League Soccer, including the ones without Lionel Messi on the roster, and guess what said average came to? 16.1 games played.
Most weeks (assuming I ever do this again), I’m mostly looking for some combination of trends or hiccups – e.g., did [Team X] (which, here, means FC Cincinnati) keep that absurd winning streak going to jam-band states of eternity, or did [Team Y] (which, here, means Sporting Kansas City) keep eating shit like they were participating in the Nathan’s Famous on the Fifth Ring of Hell? (Yeah, I recycled that joke. Shame.)
This time, and this is because I last posted league-wide content on May 19, I’ve got three games’ worth of trends and hiccups to catch up. That said, the format/framing will look should look the same – i.e., this will just be me doing a steam-of-consciousness data-dump – and I’ll be doing the same basic thing – i.e., riffing from the last snapshot post – which is the May 19 post referenced above (LINK), where I posted little data blocks and narratives for every team in the league. Fun fact, that May 19 post referenced a similar snapshot post that went up on April 2 (LINK).
Best case, I’ll keep this going. Likeliest case, I’ll do everything wrong, abandon this and threaten to shut down this blog for what has to be the 10th time. To paraphrase the intro to Black Star’s “Brown Skin Lady,” even my neuroses have neuroses.
With that, time to dig into the meat of this thing.
The Eastern Conference Since May 19, 2024
Thanks to Cincinnati’s mysterious stumble versus Nashville SC (versus! they had them at home!), Miami (the bastards) continue their bastard-like reign as the top team in the East and in MLS as a whole. Cincy has two games in hand and a better points/game number (2.04 v 1.96) to catch that up, and Miami left the door open by allowing six goals across their past two games (v Atlanta and v St. Louis) – and, thanks to some scouting report prep, I know Miami came within a Messi of losing the game versus St. Louis. Before leaving this alone, don’t get too excited about Nashville because what do they do immediately after beating Cincy at TQL? They lose to fucking New England!
Both Miami and Cincy would do well to check their rearview, because they’ve got both New York teams – e.g., New York Red Bull and New York City FC – just four and six points behind them, respectively, and both of them picked up wins in their last two games. Moreover, and hold that thought, the Red Bulls have won four of their last five, while NYCFC have won a positively wild eight of their last nine games.
To flag one commonality between East and West so far this season, the top…let’s call it seven teams in the league have started to get real separation from the pack. That includes the top four in the East and the top…let’s go with three teams in the West – i.e., Real Salt Lake, Los Angeles FC and Minnesota United FC. The last one’s a bit of a stretch, but let’s wrap up the East before getting to that…
Charlotte FC, a (perhaps personal) surprise at 5th, could run with the leaders if they could score (just 18 all season, and against a league average of 24.03), but the reason those top four teams look poised to run away with it follows from the form of every Eastern Conference team south of Charlotte – with the exception of Columbus Crew SC*. Four of those teams – DC United, Orlando City SC, the Philadelphia Union, and Toronto FC - failed to win any of their past three games and the remaining teams – Club du Foot Montreal, Atlanta United FC, Chicago Fire FC, and New England – all picked up just one win…but all of them are, in the immortal, wounded words of Bob Mould/Husker Du, "Too Far Down" to matter (hardcore fucking bummer of a song, fwiw).
* Eastern Conference teams from 3rd (NYCFC) to 6th place (Toronto) shouldn’t sleep on Columbus. They won their last three games – all of them on the road and have somewhere between three (Toronto and Charlotte) and two (both New York teams) in hand on all of them – and they’re well above Toronto and Charlotte in points/game.
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| Vancouver, just thinking about shit. |
While it’s definitely and 100% worthwhile to pause to admire RSL’s, frankly, fucking crazy winning streak – they have not lost since March fucking 10th, people, on an 8-0-6 record – LAFC’s five-game winning streak probably counts as the bigger story at this point. That said, both teams are solid defensively – i.e., under the league average for goals allowed at -5.03 – and both have made a fortress of their home pitches (6-1-1 for RSL and 7-0-2 for LAFC). RSL’s (current) advantage comes from fewer road losses and scoring seven more goals. We got ourselves a race in the West, in other words.
If there’s a difference between East and West, it comes with the fact that the cliff comes a little earlier. As noted above, Minnesota’s doing all right, but their early season form of rolling through all and sundry has petered out to kicking around the softer marks – e.g., Sporting KC twice (both at home), Atlanta away, and a pre-improvement (PLEASE?) Portland Timbers team. With that particular set of teams accounting for your past four wins, it’s not too crazy to wonder what the future holds. There’s also the Los Angeles Galaxy, of course, who sit just three points behind LAFC and five behind RSL, but LA’s original half also has just two wins over their last eight – which came at home against Houston Dynamo FC (who suck on the road) and FC Dallas (who just suck) – and they just lost 1-2 on the road a Chicago Fire team that has surely forgotten 50% of the synonyms for “good” by now.
As for the rest of the teams in the West…sure, there’s the Vancouver Whitecaps, who did, point in fact, put together two straight wins over their last three, one at Sporting KC, the other versus Colorado, but they also went 0-3-3 in the six games before that. With that, we have officially arrived at the cliff.
With the exception of my Portland, Seattle and Houston, no Western Conference team below Austin has won any of their past three games – and that grouping includes Austin(!). Each of Colorado, St. Louis, Dallas and San Jose are winless in four and, on a 10-game winless streak and an 0-8-2 record, Sporting KC can only be described as MLS’s chief exporter of points to other teams. And, holy fucking shit, how does Peter Vermes still have a job – particularly with Atlanta showing Gonzalo Pineda the door just this morning (or was that yesterday)?
That’s it for this one. It was more trends than hiccups, obviously, but we’ll see what I do with a shorter week – which, for the record, won’t happen until after June 15. I don’t know who else has noticed, but MLS fans won’t get more than a snack this upcoming weekend. Till June…I’m going to aim for the 18th.
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