Portland Timbers 3-2 Columbus Crew, Plus MLS Week 1 Notes/Theories/Bullshit

No, seriously. Buffets are almost always bad.

I’d call that a decent opening weekend. This post looks to recap portions of that, but it also doubles as a first step in to a different, still unsettled approach to digesting a reasonable amount of the never-ending buffet that the average Major League Soccer matchday has become in the 30-team era.

Still working on the model for that, but to get the main programming note out of the way, I noticed that the recaps offered through Apple TV all appear to have come in at around 10 minutes so far. Assuming that holds, MLS Wrap Up is dead to me. Some non-trivial number of fans seemed turned off by MLS’s in-house talent – aka, Sacha Kljestan, Dax McCarty, Bradley Wright-Phillips, Kaylyn Kyle and (for me, the insufferable) Kevin Egan – which, here, means they actively hated them, so it looks like they’ve turned that into a loose narrative told over a bundle of short highlight clips. Sure, the in-house talent said some stupid shit, and I may be alone in missing the banter, but all those people still said something amidst the blah-blah-blah and you simply lose all of that in a two-minute clip of disconnected highlights.

Ten minutes, on the other hand, gives a fella something to work with. For as long as (the notoriously cheap and unreliable) Apple TV keeps that up, the plan going forward will be to: 1) watch and report on my Portland Timbers every week and whomever they played; 2) watch 45 minutes of three other games, one more involving a Western Conference team and two involving at least one Eastern Conference team, plus 3) tentatively going with five 10-minute recaps for the other games that interest me…

…while it would be a little harsh to say the rest of the games can gently fuck off, I’m also not not saying that. With that, lets get to this week’s results starting with a section I intend to use as framing:

Level Set 2026, the Portland Timbers: Where Things Stand as We Wait for the Whistle to Blow

Hello, 2012.

[Ed. - Factually, yes, I did post a “farewell post” for this blog late last year – and it wasn’t the first time. I very much meant it at the time, but please see the bottom of this post where I mumble some excuses for what will change going forward and why the farewell holds up, if in the most sorta kinda way possible.]

What follows is a brief history of the Portland Timbers, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed in between those two sections and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., less than one week before First Kick 2026. I saw an Adam Sussman skeet telling me that Merritt Paulson told him to expect a couple more signings before then, so it's likely that not everything below is final…and yet, I’m not going to hold my breath for greatness or anything.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

…for obvious reasons, this one’s going to go on a bit longer than the others in the series…

Thumbnail History
In my head, I knew the Portland Timbers had some lean seasons before they won MLS Cup 2015. That datapoint receded to where it felt like some other team’s history until I picked through Wikipedia posts about those early seasons, as if thumbing through a yearbook. I also remember the 2015 season through a very specific lens, but I’ll get to that. Starting at the beginning…

Level Set 23, Charlotte FC: It Was Just Another Tuesday, And Then...

Does the job. A job.

What follows is a brief history of Charlotte FC, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
I have a nasty habit of picturing Charlotte FC as a team wholly composed of Brandt Bronicos, but that’s a personal hangup, not history. Charlotte only joined MLS in 2022, but they’ve been a reasonably successful, if conservative start-up. One could make a case that they’ve improved season-on-season – e.g., no playoffs in 2022, then qualifying as a wild card in 2023, then qualifying for the playoffs clean in 2024 on the back of a lofty fifth-place finish in the East (then in 2025…wait for it) – but they also have yet to hit that prized gallop on the road to progress. instance, Charlotte struggled with scoring from the jump – e.g., partial to/stuck in the mid-40s (e.g., 45 goals in 2022, 44 in 2023, 46 in 2024) – and, if memory serves, they’ve never been good on the road. The sole reason Charlotte landed the wild card in 2023? MLS expanded the number of teams that qualified for the playoffs from a (half-)sensible 14 in 2022 to a comically expansive 18 in 2023 (which tracked as an insurance policy in the event Miami struggled). Most of the spicy stuff happens on the player side with this team – e.g., the failed star experiment that was DP forward Enzo Copetti, the low-simmering drama around Polish forward/(still) all-time leading scorer Karol Swiderski – but a kind of “Charlotte FC is a team that plays in MLS” level of buzz around the team remains. So far, think capable to a fault.