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

How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2000
MLS Cup: 2000, 2013
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2004
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 1996, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2018
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 1997, 2001, 2002, 2008, 2012, 2020, 2021, 2023
CCL Semifinals: 2019
CCL Quarterfinals: 2014
U.S. Open Cup: 2004, 2012, 2015, 2017
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 2024

The "evil mastermind" look feels apt, honestly.

Long-Term Tendencies
The loose impression holds up pretty well, honestly: a couple exceptional seasons aside (some recent, e.g., 2018, 2020, and especially 2021), SKC generally sticks at average or under it in terms of goals scored (18 of 29 seasons) and generally hangs at average or under on goals allowed (16 of 29 seasons). Think a lot of stacked ‘n’ stubborn defenses, combative midfields and an occasionally-interrupted succession of attacking stars to turns Ds (or Ts) into Ws. For what it’s worth, I do think this is shifting, if slowly, and with Vermes’ blessing. He’s mellowed. Except when it comes to working the refs.

Their 2024 Season & Recent Trends
The thing that stands out most over their past six seasons (a range chose solely to prove a point, but still reasonable) is SKC breaking those long-term patterns into the kinds of pieces one can only get by throwing something on the floor again and again. SKC went over the average for goals allowed in four of the past six seasons, and the offense only made up for that in 2020 and 2021. Both of those teams looked good on paper – they won the Western Conference in 2020 – but, as noted above, SKC crashed out in the quarterfinals in both seasons. 2024 marks the first season where they went well over in terms of goals allowed. Against that, 2024 saw Russell and Salloi’s posting half the numbers they did in 2021, Alan Pulido chipping in numbers you'd expect from a journeyman/”U22 prospect”; they got about as much from Erik Thommy and a little more from Willie Agada, and the sum of all that added up to missing the 2024 post-season entirely. SKC didn’t miss by a little either: they finished 16 points behind my Portland Timbers, on 31 points, i.e., an average of 0.91 points per game over the season. What little hope they had of doing anything better than nothing died by a four-game losing streak to end the season.

Questions for Their 2025 Season
First and foremost, how is Peter Vermes still coaching this team? How has his "Sell By" date not come and gone after 158 years? On the one hand, sure, they’re still making the playoffs more often than they miss them, on the other, the unavoidable question that hangs over SKC’s roster and coaching staff is what have you done for me lately? At time of writing, not nearly enough. It looks like they added a defender late last season – Joaquin Fernandez (Spanish, 28) – but it’s mostly the same team from 2024 at time of typing, minus, at this point and mainly, Johnny Russell and Tim Melia. Any improvement to the defense would help, obviously, but SKC’s problems with scoring have weighed heavy over the past three seasons too. Like a lot of teams I watched from a distance over 2024, SKC never looked awful; they did, however, get killed by awful lapses in defense, and repeatedly; as any fan or opposing coach could tell you, they just looked brittle. I have no idea how much Fernandez will help them, but, if to the first-degree once removed, their history has shown how far a good defensive team can go with an attack that that does just enough (aka, Molnar). Personally, I can’t imagine a single universe where SKC makes the 2025 playoffs with this roster, at least not one that requires a lot of help from other teams' (and that's teams, plural) failures. Unless this team/front office does something to improve on what's left of the roster, I don't expect anything from them in 2025. Moreover, if the team/front office can do something…it better be good.

To wrap up with a programming note: I put some real thought into how I wanted to roll out each of the MLS teams in this series. I found the original MLS teams the hardest to place – and SKC one of the biggest challenges. They owe their sixth-place rating on the Joy Points Scale more to time in the league to actual, consistent success on the field. Against that, they’re also, to paraphrase Andre 3000, steadily in the mix. Even it has been a minute for them, that’s something.

This series will continue in that vein: I’m rating the MLS teams who have avoided the curse of being serially terrible higher than the teams who went more or less dormant after sometimes enormous early success.

That’s it for this one. My goal is to get through all 10 original MLS teams before the end of 2024. Also, there is no Tampa Bay Mutiny, the Tampa Bay Mutiny doesn’t exist and never has. Heretic.