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| Actual search result for "flash in the pan" |
One thing the entire "Getting Reacquainted with" project has surfaced is how few trophies Major League Soccer’s Canadian teams have contributed to the collective trophy case. While that makes sense when it comes to the Vancouver Whitecaps, who has battled gravity for as long as they’ve been a team, it takes looking past Toronto’s FC’s (one-off) all-conquering 2017 team and, to the case in point, the Montreal Impact team of the mid-2010s. As laid out in their list of mighty works below*, Club du Foot Montreal’s best era amounted to two fleeting seasons, but it was a freakin’ party for as long as it lasted.
The Montreal Impact, known as Club du Foot Montreal since 2021, graduated from the USL to MLS in 2012 and, judging by their Year One signings, they came in determined to make a splash. While their inaugural roster contained the usual smattering of MLS journeymen (e.g., Collen Warner, Davy Arnaud and….huh, Zarek Valentin), and hyped-up youngsters (e.g., Andrew Wenger), Montreal did some heavy shopping in Italy, signing CBs Alessandro Nesta and Matteo Ferrari and slick and saucy little forward, Marco Di Viao. All that investment not only failed to translate to Quebecois, it went two tits up in 2014, their only season to end with the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon. After the failure of the Italian experiment, Montreal started sniffing around other leagues for talent and that search brought in two of their all-time great talents, the Belgian defender/midfielder Laurent Ciman and, one of my all-time personal MLS favorites, Argentine winger/forward, Ignacio Piatti. Piatti had the misfortune of showing up in time to go through the Wooden Spoon paddle-wheel, but the arrival of Ciman and smart additions like midfield mind-fucker Marco Donadel the experienced Nigel Reo-Coker made turned the team’s fortunes on a literal dime. A mere five and half months after the worst regular season of 2014, the Impact went the distance in the 2015 CONCACAF Champions’ League, contesting the two-leg final against Mexico’s famous Club America. In a pattern familiar to any MLS fan from that period, Montreal carried a promising result out of Mexico City (1-1!) only to collapse under the weight of a second half onslaught front of their home fans in the return leg. Those 135 minutes’ worth of dreaming certainly felt incredible and, with that breeze blowing at their backs, Montreal became the talk of MLS when they hit the high-profile player motherlode by signing Chelsea/Ivory Coast legend Didier Drogba in late 2015. With the core intact and Drogba throwing around his weight and talent up top, even if not for every game (dude was old by then), L’Impact put together their best-ever MLS season in 2016…and, just as quickly as they came, the good times ended. Montreal would bubble up into the fringes of real competition in the seasons that followed, but, more often than not, they fail to make a noise loud enough for anyone to hear, at least not one that isn’t a thud of failure. Here's to a season and a half at the top, huzzah, or rather, allons-y.
Total Joy Points: 2
*How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
MLS Semifinals: 2016
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 2015, 2022
Wooden Spoon: 2014
CCL Runner-Up: 2015
CCL Quarterfinals: 2020, 2022
Canadian Championships: 2013, 2014, 2019, 2021 (kept them out of the negatives, woot-woot!)
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| Sound ideas (e.g., steps) can go bad (like so) |
Their better seasons aside – which, here, includes 2015, (sort of) 2016, and what looks like an on-paper best in 2022, when they scored plenty and held the goals-against close to average – Montreal has historically fielded soft defenses and average-to-flaccid attacks. Like a lot of teams, this is less a failure to sign good players – e.g., the smattering of good (enough) seasons out of, say, Romell Quioto and Djordje Mihailovic - and a respectable list of solid, long-time players – e.g., Rudy Camacho, Lassi Lappalainen, Victor Wanyama, and, most recently, Mathieu Choiniere – than a failure to get enough of them on the same roster in the same season. If you look at their (rather messy) all-time roster and start sorting the fields, you walk away with an impression of a team that gets pulled apart and thrown back together took often and too haphazardly to do much good for the organization.
How 2024 Measured Up
Like it fit the history laid out immediately above. While they didn’t do something as flamingly stupid as hire Hernan Losada, as they did going into the 2023 season, new and (I believe) still-current head coach Laurent Courtois couldn’t bring coherence and consistency to yet another grab-bag roster. Not even a rebound season(?) from striker Josef Martinez could lift their offense to the league average (48 v 53.5), despite a supporting cast that looked reasonable (e.g., Kwadwo Opoku, Bryce Duke, and the ever-present Lappalainen), provided you squint hard enough when you look at it. That didn’t hurt them nearly as much as a defense that wasn’t just the fifth-worst defense in MLS, but one prone to repeat, catastrophic collapses – see the nine occasions Montreal gave up three goals or more, particularly the six of those that came in the first 20 games on the season. To their very real credit, Montreal clawed their way out of the hole, got their collective shit together and put together a string of results down the stretch. They went 5-1-1 over their last seven games, with two to three against good teams, and came out with as the top seed in the wild card play-in. They fell short against an Atlanta team with some giant-killing in their future (eat it, Messiami!), but that’s not bad for a recovery.
Questions for Their 2025 Season
As befits a team that, when one puts it all together, still fell well short (8th place is never great), Montreal cut a lot of losses at the end of the 2024 season. The ever-present Lappalainen no longer is, they moved on from Wanyama and Martinez and cut short the injury-addled tenure of Uruguayan forward Matias Coccaro. The moves they’ve made since range from sensible – e.g., Fabian Herbers (signed as a free agent from Chicago) will bust his ass, at a minimum, and trading the Galaxy for a decently-high-upside defender like Jalen Neal makes enough sense – to the baffling – e.g., what did Giacomo Vrioni do for the Revolution that any team would want him to do for theirs? The sum of that doesn’t point to anything too promising, never mind a repeat of the 2014-2015 turnaround/miracle, but there’s some off-season to go yet, so, against most odds and the weight of history…maybe there’s a plan?
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