Getting Reacquainted with the San Jose Earthquakes, MLS's Great Betrayal(?)

Thanks for the fully-built expansion team!

Thumbnail History
Extremes characterize the early history of the San Jose Earthquakes, and the rest is tragedy. They also have a real shout as MLS’s most tortured franchise, but to start at the beginning…

They started as the San Jose Clash and started poorly. After making the playoffs in the league’s inaugural season (1996), the team missed them over the next four, three as the San Jose Clash (1997-1999), then one more as the San Jose Earthquakes (2000); as if to prove that rebranding doesn’t equal rebirth, they picked up a Wooden Spoon under each name (1997 and 2000). San Jose flipped the script one thin season later - and how. It started with the hiring of MLS Frank Yallop as head coach and only got better when U.S.-wunderkind, Landon Donovan, returned to the States after a frustrated stint with Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen. With a reliable spine of Joe Cannon in goal, Jimmy Conrad in central defense and Richard Mulrooney battling in front of them, Yallop filled out the roster with young players who would dominate mid-2000s MLS – e.g., Canadian great Dwayne DeRosario and hard-nosed center back Eddie Robinson – plus wily veterans like former DC United fullback Jeff Agoos and nifty Danish import Ronnie Ekelund. With that fresh start, San Jose threw down 2000’s Wooden Spoon and grabbed MLS Cup 2001. Another strong recruitment class – e.g., future MLS stalwarts like Ryan Cochrane (defender), Brian Mullan (midfielder), and Brian Ching (forward, for both club and country) – plus some crafty poaching - e.g., long-time midfield anchor Ricardo Clark – not only carried them to their second, and last, MLS Cup in 2003, but carried them to the 2005 Supporters’ Shield, despite Landon Donovan’s (controversial) departure to the LA Galaxy and losing key players like Ekelund, Agoos. And then the team fucked off to Houston, Texas.

One more respectable moment (see below, 2010) and one great season aside, San Jose has mostly suffered since re-joining MLS. Before wallowing in misery, I want to spare a moment and a smile for the ‘Quakes fantastic, and broadly loathed, 2012 team. Lead by the two hulking “physical” (i.e., borderline violent) forwards, Alan Gordon and (especially) Steven Lenhart – aka, the Bash Brothers (this short bio on them is a masterpiece, btw) – San Jose literally battled their way to that season’s Supporters’ Shield. Backed by a banner season by Jon Busch in goal and Honduran central defender Victor Bernandez, all the ‘Quakes had to do was keep the goals out and have “Gordo” and “Lenny” knock down everyone, everything, and get the ball to MLS's all-time leading scorer, Chris Wondolowski (okay, gotta slow down on the linking; egads), who had a crazy 2012 season (27 goals, seven assists). They scored 13 more goals that season than the next nearest team and were heads and shoulders above the rest in scoring...and an appearance in the 2014 CONCACAF quarterfinals aside, that’s probably the last happy memory San Jose fans have had. They’ve either squeaked in as a wild card (three times) or missed the playoffs entirely (nine times) every season since. The Wooden Spoon spanked them twice over that same period - the first in 2018, the other in…hey, 2024 – which, when added to their 2007 Wooden Spoon, gives them five all time and the more seasons with the wrong kind of rosy cheeks than any other team in MLS. The truly wild thing? The ‘Quakes got 103 goals out Wondoloski from 2013-2021. I mean, how bad was everyone else?

Getting Reacquainted with Chicago Fire FC, MLS's Exercise in Meeting Your Unemployed Ex

He may be happy, but it's still putting lipstick on pig.

Thumbnail History
Chicago Fire, aka, Chicago Fire FC, hold still-unbroken record of being the one and only team to win MLS Cup in its expansion season, 1998. And, as if to announce their hell, yes arrival, they won the U.S. Open Cup in the same season. The Fire remained highly-competitive nearly every season through 2009, reaching the semifinals of the playoffs or higher in eight of those twelve seasons (i.e., they reached MLS Cups in 2000 and 2003, so higher) – and winning the 2003 Supporters’ Shield, plus four U.S. Open Cups. The Fire went into their first twelve seasons in MLS looking like a contender and generally backing it up. Some of that followed from the “Marquee Player” rule still applying when Chicago joined the league in its third season (1998). When someone in Chicago’s front office went knocking around Eastern/Central Europe for talent, they found Piotr Nowak and Jerzy Podbrozny, both Polish, and a Czech sweeper named Lubos Kubik. With those three leading the way, the Fire played even with MLS’s best talent of the time and heads-and-shoulders above the rest. When those players left, and in surprisingly short order (in the order I listed them above, they left after 2002, 1999, and 2000, respectively), Chicago still had to one of the best, U.S.-based cores on an MLS roster, including Zach Thornton in goal (through 2006), (yes, that) Chris Armas in midfield (until 2007), Ante Razov banging in goals up top (in stints split between 1998-2000, and 2001-2004), and C. J. Brown keeping things steady in defense until 2010. A cast of characters rotated around those players in seasons to come – the standouts included Bulgarian legend(ary asshole) Hristo Stoichkov and Mexican great Cuauhtemoc Blanco and on-again-off-again rising attacking talents like Justin Mapp and Patrick Nyarko. Those last two players actually open the path to a distinction: Mapp, as the smooth, genuinely productive winger, who played with Chicago through the back-end of its best seasons (2003-2010), Nyarko, as a hard-to-place forward/winger hybrid, who played at the end of their best seasons and through a lot of their worst (2008-2015). Head to head, Mapp blows Nyarko out of the water in terms of raw numbers…but you have to wonder how much Mapp benefitted from playing on a better team/in a better system than Nyarko. The worst possible version of that same question has haunted the Chicago franchise with the vengeance of a curse since the 2010 season. That same season they started their existence as the searing disappointment that Chicago fans endure and most MLS fans ignore. They enjoyed their last “high-water mark” in 2017, when they finished third in the Eastern Conference (true story), but even then they face-planted out of the playoffs to to Red Bull New York in the knockout round of one of MLS’s patented bloated playoff schemes. Everything on both sides of that has been literal carnage – up to and including back-to-back Wooden Spoons in 2015 and 2016, and a whole lotta missing the playoffs. In fact, that head-fake/fuck of a 2017 season aside, the Fire have finished 20th or lower in the MLS-wide standings for every season since 2015 – a run that includes a 28th-place finish in 2024. (Spoiler. Whoops.) That brings me to the main thing that should keep fans of every other MLS team from drooping into an easy sleep: it’s not like Chicago hasn’t thrown money and effort at saving the ever-sinking ship – e.g., they had Serbian forward Nemanja Nikolic and German great, Bastian Schweinsteiger, between 2017 and 2019, and, as recently as last season, they took pretty big swings on Swiss hot-shot Xherdan Shaqiri and Belgian forward Hugo Cuypers. As evidenced by the above, all of that balanced out to a broad, “nah.” All of the stoutly average around those signings almost certainly played a role, but…all that started to feel like a gutted club/team culture years before those players arrived. The open question is the extent to which they’re a symptom (i.e., the players around them make them worse) or the cause (i.e., they just weren’t good/the right signings). Don't let the Joy Points fool you on this one, because Chicago ain't good.

Total Joy Points: 18

How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2003
MLS Cup: 1998
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2000, 2003
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 1999, 2002, 2006
Wooden Spoon: 2004, 2015, 2016
U.S. Open Cup: 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 2004

Somehow not the solution...

Long-Term Tendencies
Much like DC United (see previous chapter), Chicago provides another unsurprising example of a team having good numbers when they're, y’know, good, and bad numbers when they're not. Entirely related, Chicago’s knack for building more good defenses than bad ones over those early seasons carried them through leaner-attacking times that characterized their latter, less successful seasons (i.e., the second half of the 2000s). While it’s not so cut-and-dry as the defenses since 2010 just plain sucking, going over the average for goals allowed (five times), or even very over that same average (also, five times), has been the Fire’s normal since the 2013 season, aka, a fucking minute for their fans. The attack has rarely been up to the task of lifting them up – in fact, they’ve gone over the league average for goals scored just four times over that same period and only well over once (in…you guessed it, 2017!) – and those combined basic, even fundamental, facts tell the story of a bad team. The Fire simply haven’t been good. Quelle surprise.

How 2024 Measured Up
In a phrase hinted it with supporting documentation above, really badly. Chicago finished 2024 dead-last in the East, 10 points out of the playoff picture and rarely looking like even their fans should bother with them by…I’m going with somewhere around June. And, in keeping with the recent trends noted above, they fell well on the wrong side of average on both sides of the goals equation (i.e., the were 13.5 below the averaged on goals scored and 8.5 goals above average on goals allowed). Being someone who tries to squeeze in as much meaningful action as I can in any given week, the Fire didn’t give me much incentive to watch them. That said, I have seen Chicago players do good and useful things on the field and on a consistent basis – e.g., Gaston Gimenez presents as a two-way midfielder with a strong bite on both sides of the ball, Bryan Gutierrez has skills to die for at age 21, even if the numbers haven’t entirely come-around, and…yeah, I guess that sums it up. Shaqiri missed most of the season and just seemed to complicate things when he showed up, and, based on what little I know and have watched, Cuypers suffered from a lack of a strong supporting cast? Maybe? This is me asking you, honestly.

Questions for Their 2025 Season
This one’s more statement than question, but here goes: Chicago has been so bad for so long that no reasonable person has any reason to believe they will improve next season. Only one theory explains the Fire’s comparatively long history of failing to get things right: they are bad at what they do. Until further notice, it’s that simple.

Getting Reacquainted with DC United, MLS's Aging Rockstars

Give us a push back stage, love, and you can see it.

Thumbnail History: MLS’s Washed-Up Rock Stars
Pretty much anyone who follows MLS knows that DC United was its first great team. How that success came about may be less known. Bruce Arena built his reputation there, of course, but it also started with winning the lottery on one of their first Marquee Player picks (Marco Etcheverry; scroll down here to see the full list), that selection connecting them to the Tahuichi Academy, Bolivia’s (then?) premier player development academy (hence, Jaime Moreno), and the signing of a semi-random striker who would hold the single-season record for goals scored for 23 years (Roy Lassiter). With a nod to all the teams that made it possible (i.e., the poor fuckers who allowed them), MLS was a free-scoring league over its first five seasons, and DC generally led the way (with the 1998 LA Galaxy as the other big swinger). After the 2001 contraction, scoring fell off cliff (from 51 goals scored/allowed in 2000 to 42.1 in 2002), and with the ability to just buy talent seven to eight years in the future (or, honestly, more like 12), the margins separating the best teams from the worst shrunk. It’s possible that DC’s on-field successes (plus playing in a global capital) helped them pull off their generally forgotten Renaissance in the mid-2000s. With Moreno back from a stint in the EPL, shiny new playmaker, Christian Gomez, pulling the strings from midfield, Ben Olsen and Brian Carroll doing the dirty work and OG Kiwi Ryan Nelsen anchoring the backline, DC won its last MLS Cup in 2004. Several of those same players carried them to consecutive Supporters’ Shields in 2006 and 2007, if with replacements/upgrades like Bobby Boswell at the back and Luciano Emilio spearheading the attack. All of that success created a firewall thick enough for them to (still!) hold on at sixth place on the all-time Joy Points Scale (methodology below*) despite getting slapped with four (4!) Wooden Spoons and some of the literally worst seasons in MLS history. When DC sucks, in other words, they suck. As laid out below, they won their last trophy of any kind back in 2013 and its entirely fairly to say they haven’t been meaningfully competitive for going on a decade. That doesn’t mean they haven’t signed some real talent – e.g., a young Luciano Acosta, Wayne Rooney and, more recently, Christian Benteke – but, after their glory years, their hit-rate with signing top-rate talent from outside MLS has been patchy at best – e.g., Edison Flores - and too-often under-supported by the talent around it. Some of that might follow from betting too heavily and too long on the next future soccer star; Freddy Adu was just the most egregious (and now-outdated) example, but DC also pissed away years in the 2000s/2010s waiting for, say, Santino Quaranta and Nick DeLeon to fill their forever-potential. A strategy of rescuing once-great cast-offs from other MLS teams – e.g., Julius James, Fabian Espindola, Chris Rolfe, Alvaro Saborio, and Pedro Santos – provides another theory for how and why DC has fallen so far behind, not just their once-lofty standard, but the league as a whole. The choices they’re making aren’t uncommon by any means; it’s more that DC sucks at making the right choices and have for multiple seasons.

Total Joy Points: 38

Getting Reacquainted with the Colorado Rapids, MLS's Broken Clocks

It's nine ten somewhere, mother...shit. Never mind.

Thumbnail History
MLS’s highest franchise, the Colorado Rapids, have just two trophies (that aren’t the Rocky Mountain Cup) in their trophy case after 29 seasons in the leg. So, one may ask, what the flaming hell are they doing as the seventh team in this series? To explain the title, Colorado is like a team that gives the right time twice a day, and just twice. Consider the following: they won MLS Cup once (2010) and have felt the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon exactly one time, way back the league’s first season (1996); the only other MLS Cup they competed in arguably doesn’t count, coming as it did in the second season (1997), even if they won their one and only U.S. Open Cup that same season. What sets them apart, even if by a thin margin, comes with the fact that they have this thing where they come out of backside of absolutely nowhere and do something wild and weird like reach the semifinals in the playoffs (2016 and 2021), or maybe they jump out of the bushes and swipe the Western Conference title (okay…yes, that’s 2021 again). To be clear, yes, I understand that fans of this team sees opportunities to brag less often than Americans elect their next president (hold that thought; might not hold for long), but every one of those rare, great seasons gives the Rapids a certain kind of superpower: they scramble expectations for all the teams around them, if mostly during the regular season, and mainly in the Western Conference. Part of that follows from the challenges of drawing top talent to a (no offense) backwater market and with an historically tight-fisted front office writing the invites - e.g., paying $3 million for Djordje Mihailovic going into 2023 was their record signing until they bumped it to (maybe) $3.5 million for Rafael Navarro in the middle of 2024 (great deal so far). Their most famous players used to be goalkeepers – e.g., Tim Howard, Zac Steffen(?) - defenders – e.g., Marcelo Balboa, Drew Moor, Jeff Larentowicz(?) – or defensive midfielders – e.g., Pablo Mastroeni. A couple dozen players could squeeze onto the very short list above if one wanted to go deeper (see Colorado’s (gently-outdated) all-time roster and build your own!), but the Rapids have often been a spine of a team waiting for attacking legs and arms to make them complete and dangerous enough to make one of those semifinals runs. As implied above, they do pull it off now and then, with the most famous example being the attacking line of Omar Cummings and Conor Casey, who led them to MLS Cup 2010. The relative absence of famous names on the Rapids’ other two, post-2010 “glory teams” – i.e., the one that mounted the 2016 semifinal run (Shkelzen Gashi? Dillon Powers? Axel Sjoberg?) or 2021’s Western Conference-winning roster (Jack Price? Danny Wilson? The season that sold everyone on Lalas Abubakar before…yeah) – goes back to the point I’m making about the Rapids franchise overall: there is no way to see their next good season coming, but that season will abruptly become one more obstacle standing between your local team and a shot at glory.

And if that doesn’t completely explain why I placed them seventh in their series, here’s the rest: they have consistently been the same team throughout their history in MLS and, unlike the rest of the originals coming up, they have enjoyed some form of success over the past 10 seasons.

Getting Reacquainted with FC Dallas, a Narrowly Successful MLS Team

But....is it really waiting to be filled?

Thumbnail History
FC Dallas, fka, the Dallas Burn have the singular honor of playing in the most WTF MLS Cup ever played. When they lined up against the Colorado Rapids in MLS Cup 2010 – then competing in their second final – I have to believe that the collective response boiled down to, “sure, why not?” Apart from winning the 2016 Supporters’ Shield (and tying Red Bull New York on total points in 2015), FC Dallas have not enjoyed what most people, very much including a whopping percentage of their fans, would call success. When it comes to actual silverware, they have the Shield mentioned above plus U.S. Open Cup titles in 1997 and 2016 (a great year, by their standards), aka, not much to fill the cabinet after 29 seasons. And yet they still gently undermine the entire “Joy Point” concept (see below for methodology*) because they rank ninth in MLS history based more for consistency than what any fan would recognize as joy. They racked up most of those points simply by clearing low bar to make the playoffs over MLS’s first ten seasons – it took some fucking missing when the league had only 10-16 teams – and, while things have slowed down, they have (very) generally made the playoffs every other season (or so) since then. More to the point, it’s not like Dallas hasn’t tried to keep up with MLS’s bigger, richer teams: hell, they swung hard to land a one-time world-record transfer, Denilson, only to miss harder than the swung. To their credit, they kept their chins up on either side of that debacle, signing players like Ariel Graziani and Ronnie O’Brien while most MLS burned time waiting for the next kids to graduate (yes, that’s a gross over-simplification). They improved on the signing side, if with some hitches, by landing playmakers like David Ferreira and, less so (due to injury), Mauro Diaz, or even a higher-profile (if gently under-performing) player like Fabian Castillo…and, unless you want to throw in a current player like Petr Musa, thus endeth the short list. More than anything else, Dallas has relied on, and I mean this sincerely, top-notch budget signings everyone else missed – e.g., Michael Barrios, Blas Perez, and running one of, if not the most effective academy/homegrown system in these United States. That long list includes Kellyn Acosta, Jesus Ferreira, Reggie Cannon, Brandon Servania, Ricardo Pepi, and, a star from the Los Angeles Galaxy’s latest run to MLS Cup, Edwin Cerrillo. Moreover, Dallas’ belief in youth has kick-started some of the all-time great careers in MLS history (picking through this all-time list), e.g., Walker Zimmerman, Drew Moor, Clarence Goodson, Matt Hedges…I hope you’re seeing the pattern in there (see below). Going the other way, I’ve covered what all the above has given them and have no doubt that falls short of what both the organization and the fans of it want. On the plus side, that dynamite academy, aka, America’s answer to the Eredivisie’s AFC Ajax, doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon…and yet, who can help but wonder how high they could rise if they kept some of those promising players two days after their 20th birthday.

Total Joy Points: 21

Getting Reacquainted with the New England Revolution, MLS's Maids of Honor

To the queen in blue: you are seen, you are beautiful.

Thumbnail History
I moved to Boson in 1998, the same season I consciously uncoupled from DC United (successful teams don’t challenge you enough as a fan) and embraced the New England Revolution. The Wooden Spoon stung their bums for the one and only time in their history at the end of that very season. Fortunately, for both me and them, New England became one of the first teams to crack the post-contraction code and that made them the Second Most Menacing Team in MLS for pretty much every season between 2002 and 2007. To be clear, not all of those MLS Cup runs were created equal: with Taylor Twellman and MLS iron-man/assist-king Steve Ralston in the starting XI, the 2002 roster had the beginnings of the Revs’ real glory seasons, but it took additions like Matt Reis in goal, Michael Parkhurst and Jay Heaps leading the back line, plus Shalrie Joseph dominating midfield to transform the Revolution into a team that could win any given game. Throwing a team like that into the playoffs season after season (e.g., from 2002-2009) gave them plenty of chances to win it all. Which, again, they did not. To get a little personal, none of those losses kicked me like the 2006 final and, firmly as believe that spectator sports cannot deliver trauma worth even five minutes of therapy, I do consider that loss formative to how I “enjoy” soccer to this day (i.e., never get too close). The Revs’ history tells a familiar tale from there – you know the drill, players leaving the team one by one, new players coming in who don’t fill all of the hole left by the guys before them, a once-reliable coach sticking around past his sell-by date, etc. Several rough seasons followed, before the 2014 season rolled around. New England had made the playoffs the season before, sure, but they fielded not just a young team, but one that had mainly proved itself IN MLS. It started with Andrew Farrell in defense, but continued up the spine with Scott Caldwell in central midfield and Kelyn Rowe and Lee Nguyen running the midfield. That basic line-up got a boost of nitrous in the person and personality of U.S. Men’s National Team adoptee, Jermaine Jones, who came in as a late-season addition and girded every loin he could bark into shape. And all of those budding youngsters promised a brighter future…until they very abruptly didn’t. The Revolution sulked back into the wilderness for fives seasons after 2014 – I mean, they didn’t do shit – but caught up to the new way of doing things by 2021. Part of that relied on calling in new designated players – the (cliché alert) mercurial Gustavo Bou and one of MLS’s latter-day greats, Carles Gil – but the other half relied on spotting some of the best North American talent of the current generation – e.g., Matt Turner (goalkeeper) and Tajon Buchanan (full/wingback) lead that bunch, but Henry Kessler and DeJuan Jones are nothing to sniff at. That team benefitted from the wisdom of MLS Svengali, Bruce Arena, and leaned on a spine of some old-guard regulars – i.e., Farrell and long-time MLS-above-averager, Matt Polster, but it took a second generation of budding talent to lift the 2021 Revolution team to the then-best-ever regular season in MLS history. And, yes, that record was broken just three years later by an Inter Miami CF team that rode a smash-and-grab reunion to even greater heights. Only to run into the same dead-end that never stopped haunting the Revs. They didn’t even make the semifinals. Ha.

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.