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| There is no good model, honestly. |
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.
With that in mind, I’ll do my best about keeping the apples (aka, the MLS originals) separate from the pears (aka, the teams that joined 2007-2016), and further separate from the oranges (2017-present) as the posts go up. That’s not to say no connections will be made between generations, because the success of, say, the Seattle Sounders says plenty about the number of laps that team has over MLS originals like FC Dallas and even a higher achieving team like Red Bull New York. Moving on…
The rest of this post lays out the Joy Points I have assigned to a select category of accomplishments that any given MLS team can attain in any given season from 1996 to 2024. I have then broken up according to competition with the number of Joy Points assigned to each and a brief explanation of how I have arrived at the number assigned where I feel like I need one. Even as I won’t change the methodology for this year’s posts, please feel free to challenge it in the comments.
On to the show, this is it….
Joy Points Formula (rev. 12/2024)
MLS League Play/Playoffs
Supporters’ Shield: 5 points
Yes, the highest points go to the Shield winner. Excellence over time trumps excellence in the moment.
MLS Cup: 4 points
Nice work, [winning team]!
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 3 points
Good try, [losing team]!
Semifinals: 2 points
Reaching the semifinals is a good season for any team, and that deserves recognition.
Making MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 1 points
Welcome to the first complicated category in the index. First, the baseline criteria boils down to being one of the eight last teams in the playoffs. For five of the first ten MLS seasons, this applies to every team that made the playoffs (i.e., eight teams out of a 10-team league made the playoffs). That obvious distinction notwithstanding, I stand by the formula on the grounds that, 1) parity meant a lot more between 1996 and 2006 than it did after the designated player era, and 2) MLS dilutes the quality of the playoff pool every time they expand the number of teams allowed to qualify for the post-season. And they can't seem to stop doing it.
MLS Playoff Wildcard: 0 points
Pursuant to the above, if your team fails before the quarterfinals, did they really “make the playoffs”?
Missing MLS Playoffs: -1 point
Failure is failure, the thing speaks for itself.
Missing MLS Playoffs (1996-97; 2002-2004): -2 points
Extra points subtracted because missing the playoffs in those seasons meant being one of the two worst teams in a ten-team league, i.e., you failed with an “F” as opposed to a more dignified “D”.
Wooden Spoon: -3 points
One team fails/failed catastrophically every season; this is their punishment, along with their reddened cheeks.
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| NGL, I'm thrilled that they, like me, bothered. |
It was weird, it was glorious, and I bet it was harder to win than anyone fully understands. Would I have awarded this had my local team not won it? I’d like to think so, but who knows?
MLS Is Back Cup Runner-Up: 1 point
I offer this as proof for the above assertion in re my (comparative) objectivity as a commentator.
CONCACAF
Winning CONCACAF Championship Trophy (2008-): 5 points
I have seen this as the greatest accomplishment for any MLS team since the CONCACAF Champions’ League became a thing. MLS teams swiped a couple before the Liga MXs teams started to care, something I date back to the 2001 tournament, if I’m being honest.
CONCACAF Runner-Up (2008-): 3 points
Again, between the timing of the single-elimination games and Mexican clubs starting to care about this tournament, this is a real accomplishment. It was super impressive when Real Salt Lake and Club du Foot Montreal came within fractions of winning it all.
CONCACAF Championship Semifinals (2008-): 2 points
See above, but less so for falling short.
CONCACAF Championship Quarterfinals (2008-): 1 point
See above, but less so for falling a little shorter.
CONCACAF Champions Cup Winner (1997-2008): 2 points
I’m 85% sure I saw DC United win this trophy way, way back when. It felt like a novelty/side-show in real time, more like Liga MX teams doing MLS teams a solid by bringing their fans to a tournament few domestic fans would otherwise care about. Again, Mexican teams started caring after the Galaxy won the (I think 2000) tournament, which made doing anything in the Champions’ Cup quite a bit harder even before it became the CCL.
CONCACAC Champions’ Cup Runner-Up (1997-2008): 1 point
It just occurred to me that the MLS teams from 1999-2001 were probably better than the teams from 2002-2007. That little burble aside, see above about Liga MX teams caring starting in 2001. MLS teams were thin, small and (generally) cheap in the early years, so playing well against Central America’s best teams counts as an accomplishment.
Leagues Cup
Winner: 4 points
If present trends continue – e.g., this tournament catches MLS teams in their best form, the Liga MX teams just coming into the Apertura - I may lower the points awarded here to three. Still, Mexico’s biggest teams are pretty goddamn good and deep, in and out of season, so I’m going to respect the accomplishment of winning this tournament until further notice.
Semifinal/Runner-Up: 2 points
See the above rationale.
Quarterfinal: 1 point
The above rationale, adjusted for a lower finish.
U.S. Open Cup
Winner: 2 points
I know, applaud, and have experienced the desire to make The Oldest Tournament in U.S. Soccer matter, but there’s no getting around the cold, hard fact that it doesn’t. No one goes to the games, it’s almost invisible on TV, most MLS teams start their scrubs in every round before the semifinals. Cherish it until you puke or it goes away, the U.S. Open Cup is the ultimate, “wait, we can win this?” tournament for every MLS team. That said, it’s still something that makes fans happy!
Runner-Up: 1 point
If this has ever been the high point of your local team’s season – and, trust me, this has happened to/for multiple fan bases – knowing your team went deep in any tournament brings at least one point’s worth of Joy into a die-hard fan’s life.
That’s it for the scale, hope it made sense, etc. The team-by-team posts will (briefly) feature one other item from my research into past seasons. This one:
Average Goals Allowed/The Over-Under Scale
If there’s one under-appreciated detail about any given team, it’s the general patterns in their play on the field – specifically, the extent to which they tend to field weak attacks and strong defenses, or vice versa. The blurb on this will be the second piece of hard data I introduce into any post, but it has been surprisingly clarifying when it comes to nailing down long-term trends about any given MLS team.
That’s it for this very long index post. I’ll have the first post in the series up sometime tomorrow, and should be able to knock out the rest in fairly quick succession. We’ll see it goes when it goes. Till then…
... To repeat: This is MLS - where teams can and do (not CHI) go from Woody Spoon to a deep run in the playoffs in a year.
ReplyDeleteIn that vein, why should successes from 10 and more years ago count for much if anything at all?
And to buttress this argument, There's so little long-term continuity in MLS that any record a team had from 10 years ago bears ZERO resemblance to what the same team is like today. No team even has the same GM or coach except SKC/Vermes...
It doesn't in practical terms, Rob, and least not necessarily*. I do this for two reasons: 1) to tell the full story of each team, to attempt to put myself in the mindset of a fan of the relevant team who feels a little extra sting upon remembering the glory days; and 2) because I enjoy it.
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