An Overdue Farewell & Some Thoughts

It's in there, sure as my knife's going in your tire.

After spending about a week thinking about it, and even writing one more Timbers post for old time’s sake, I’m pulling the plug on this project. I won’t delete it – I put 12 years into it, for fuck’s sake – but will allow it to molder until even the internet forgets it. Doubt it’ll take long…

Traffic is down, but so is my enthusiasm. I can’t remember the last time I prioritized getting something posted on time, which makes this feel like good timing – i.e., I’m getting sick of doing this just as people are getting sick of me. Don’t know if that’s a win-win or a lose-lose, but it feels natural regardless.

Because I really, really think I’m going to finally, and for real, shut down this site, I have some final observations I’d like to make about the game I’ve spent 20+ seasons writing about in one form or another and for a minimum of three teams (for the record, the New England Revolution, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati.)

Give Them Grace
If you’ve ever screwed up at work (or at home, or just at life; raise your hand, this is a safe space), and you knew the specific thing you did wrong like your first name, last name and middle initial, and still had to sit in silence while someone walked you through that same error, i.e., the one you know on the same resentment-fueled granular level that you know your romantic partner’s worst habits, as if you made the mistake out of ignorance or idiocy, well, you know how that breaks your brain and generally makes you feel like you want to slash a parking lot’s worth of tires. Don’t worry, that won’t be the last run-on sentence in this post. Tradition means something around here.

To repeat something I don’t think I’ve ever said enough, soccer players are, otherworldly athleticism and drive notwithstanding, human beings. More to the point, they do the most stressful part of their job with tens of thousands of people watching, like, 10% of the time they spend on the clock. Sticking with percentages, watch almost any soccer game and you’ll see 22 people performing the job they were hired to do 90%, maybe 95% of the time. That beats me by 20% on my best days. They hate when they fail more than you ever will and getting reminded that you failed by, literally, thousands of people has to be an avalanche's worth of a lot. Also, when they don’t put in the effort because they’re day job sucks, that should be relatable, not cause for an inquisition.

This is what we're watching every week.

That said, every soccer team on the planet shares the same goals: winning as many games as possible, thereby winning trophies. And, when a player isn’t up to the job, a team has to let him go. Feeling sympathy for someone in that position is totally natural, but think about it this way: if you contracted with a professional of any kind – painter, accountant, on-call body-double – and he or she sucked at the job, the first thing you’d think was, “whoa, that person needs to get fired.”

All I’m saying is be a decent person about that space in between. I think 90% of soccer fans get that right 90% of the time, but I still think that’s worth holding to as a North Star for fandom.

An Addendum to One of My Favorite Gripes
Major League Soccer’s competitive structure – i.e., the interminable regular season, the overstuffed invitations to the playoffs, just the general malaise of too much, for too long – has been a hang up of mine going back to contraction (aka, 2002). I stand by the argument – yes, 18 teams of 30 is too many and 34 games is Jesus-Christ-what? long – but it was always weird to treat it as something unique. [Ed. - As an aside, I'd like to see MLS adopt an Apertura/Clausura schedule, with the same conferences and 20 games per half-season; eight teams making playoffs for each would be both ample and competitive and the winners from each conference would meet in a home-and-away final - hell, go with a best 3-of-5, I'm sleazy - which would wield one champion for the Apertura and one for the Clausura...maybe something happens after that, ran out of time before I got there.]

Most teams in every European league go into every season with the understanding that they're playing for the privilege of competing and, almost certainly, failing against the biggest clubs in the world the following season. The majority of the teams in all of those leagues won’t meaningfully succeed or fail in any given year, they’ll neither get relegated nor go to Europe, and doing the exact same thing next season amounts to the highest likely aspiration for multiple organizations. That's wild, of course, but people also sit through that season after season and that’s fine. Great even. It’s also not so different from what I’ve done every year since the early 1990s and will continue to do after I stop posting here.

If you’ll indulge a tangent (then again, what is this post but a self-indulgent tangent?), when I was at the game versus Red Bull last weekend, the people over my shoulder – all of them co-workers, fwiw – had a conversation about the changes they wanted to make to game. I didn’t like the ideas - one person suggested a penalty box a la hockey, another suggested a two-point line for goals (because the three-point line “did so much for basketball”; also, dip back into this Alexi Lalas commercial, oldsters) – but it’s fine to have them. Why?

Because every sport has something awful about it. Clock management is the least unwatchable part of American football, but fans lose their fucking minds when teams don’t do it right – and rightly so. The sum of the rules of basketball actively encourage persistent fouling over the final four to five minutes of a game and that bricks up the flow of game, and in a way 1,000 laxatives can't hope to relieve. I can’t see that as anything but bad TV, but it just ratchets up the tension for basketball fans.

Stop smiling. Don Garber just lit a cigar and greased a pig.

That’s a roundabout way of admitting that, MLS might be a stupid league run and operated by people that I’d struggle to be around for the length of an elevator ride, but I still love it. I love it both for its faults and despite them. It love it as a kind of companion that has been with me for my entire adult life. For all I know, I’ll clock out watching a game.

The Thing I’ll Miss Most & the Future
Pretty simple: I like knowing that I could post a thought on (then) Twitter or (now) Bluesky and that there’s a fair chance that someone will see it and either say something back, or simply like it. I got genuine satisfaction out of posting something here and watching the views go up. Even with a digital interface and effective anonymity thrown in, I never stopped enjoying receiving comments from anyone and anywhere.

All that’s to say, I’ll miss the parasocial relationships most of all.

It’s possible I’ll wander over to Reddit and its multitudinous spawn to get my fix on this, but, if I’m being honest, I find that place exhausting. I plan on posting strays on Bluesky going forward (@snackyd.bsky.social, but searching “Conifers & Citrus” will get you there too) and I hope to see the same people interacting, maybe even more of them. The intent is to keep the soccer posts structured – e.g., posting little threads on Portland, Cincy, and anything else that interests me – but all that will be done on the Bluesky-level and in much shorter form and we'll see how that goes.

If that keeps even some parasocial relationships going, fantastic. If it doesn’t, I don’t blame you.

Expecting me to change my mind about this is a completely assumption to make, and historically accurate to boot. In the event this is the end, though, thanks one more time to anyone who ever popped by to read this – a sentiment I send even to the people who thought I stopped doing this back in 2015.