Level Set 3, Atlanta United FC: 2025 & History, Ahoy, MLS's Drunken Sailors

The answer to the subtitle: enjoy the show.

What follows is a brief history of Atlanta United 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
As much as any team in league history, Atlanta United FC kicked off the tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging. They arrived in the 2017 season like fun drunks livening up a wedding, finishing fourth overall and with the second-best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) good Toronto FC team. Atlanta finished even higher in 2018 – if, again, second-best after a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield – but that promptly left their minds when they won their first MLS Cup at…well, an unfortunate stroll over my Portland Timbers. The secret to pulling that off followed from near-perfect roster construction. It started with (more or less) flipping off that season’s Expansion Draft, finding two future stars in the 2017 Superdraft – Julian Gressel was the stand-out (Miles Robinson bloomed later) – and then going nuts with trades and transfers. Atlanta’s FO built a spine out of ol’ reliables from all over MLS – e.g., Michael Parkhurst, Jeff Larentowicz, and their once-forever goalkeeper, Brad Guzan - but they had to scour the international markets for their crown jewels, Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron. One gave them lightning-like verticality – Almiron, who seemed to bend time when he got on the run – while the other finally ended Roy Lassiter’s reign of terror atop the single-season record for goals scored. For two fun-filled seasons – 2018 and 2019 - defenses struggled to keep Martinez from scoring goals and all came perilously close to allowing him a goal per game. Just when Atlanta’s Act I seemed destined to go on forever, it moved on to Act II (as every play does), aka, the one where the hero(es) look lost and everything looks impossible and the doom kicks in. The trouble started when Martinez tore his ACL in the first game of 2020 – he missed the entire season – and then came COVID, chaos (aka, Gabriel Heinze) and, when it all ended, a 23rd-place overall finish in the final standings. That’s not to say Atlanta didn’t move heaven, earth and bags of money to avoid that fate: when Almiron moved on to the EPL’s Newcastle, they gambled heavily on Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, two young, (reportedly) high-upside talents from Argentina. They paid a $15 million transfer for Barco and somewhere around $10 million for Martinez; Barco played more games (81), but Martinez got more in less time (39), but he was only around for 2019-20, while Barco lasted from 2018-2020. Both players are more memorable as cautionary tales than for anything they did on the field. Coaching problems plagued the team as well, starting with apparent sociopath, Heinze, but, with respect to Gonzalo Pineda, they haven’t got it right since. Some entry-level farting around in the CONCACAF Champions’ League aside (see below*), things faded fast and, hard as they’ve tried, the color hasn’t flushed back into Atlanta’s cheeks since…or has it?

FC Cincinnati & MLS East (Mostly) Week 18 Check-In: So...How's It Going?

Forever just two personnel moves away...

And…I finally have the time/energy to post an Eastern Conference-wide check-in with an FC Cincinnati cherry on top. Huzzah.

Down below, you'll find all the teams in Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference listed in the order of their current place in the conference standings, along with the most basic factual information about each of them. After that comes a quick riff on how their 2025 looks so far based on 1) my impression of a given team based on seeing them one way or the other over the season and 2) their last 10 results, more or less.

I pulled Cincy out of the regular order and lifted them to the top with an eye to dwelling on my very own Special Little Guys of the East. If you want depth or real knowledge about individual players, I suggest you hit up local sources – something I encourage people to do in any event and often as they can - or, if you’re into that certain flavor of weird, your local team’s subreddit.

The point of the exercise is to look past injuries to key players or arguments about how totally and thoroughly unstoppable any given team will be if [Player A] would just start doing [X], or if only the stupid fucking coach would get his head out of his ass and start [Player B] or move [Player C] to left back, and to flatten the notes on each team to the cold, hard calculus of the results they’ve compiled, where and against what quality of opposition, and holy run-on sentence, Melville. The animating thought behind it seeks to correct the human habit of holding onto a detail – say, a big win over a good team – and interpreting a team through that flawed lens for weeks, or even months, thereafter. With 18 games crossed off on the calendar for most teams, MLS fans finally have a forest to stare at and, personally, that feels like a better way to clock what’s going on than, to muddle a phrase, get into the trees…and, rimshot.

With that, let’s kick things off the East’s silver-medal team:

Atlanta United FC 4-2 FC Cincinnati: Bewitched, Bedazzled & Kinda Weird

Plenty to go around, sadly.

As anyone who has interacted with the MLS Season Pass interface knows, it can still slip in the odd the spoiler. For instance, I caught the fact that Miles Robinson scored a goal out of the corner of my eye before starting the full replay, so I had that at back of mind when Atlanta United FC opened the scoring at the 15th minute. I only got halfway through, "nothing to worry about" when Atlanta scored a second goal. I spent the rest of the game hoping that the caption read “Miles Robinson hat trick.” It did not. Atlanta carried that early lead to the final whistle, and only a little uncomfortably, outrunning Cincinnati to a 4-2 win at home.

About the Game
Atlanta looked a (promising) mess over the opening ten minutes with balls played in behind to phantom runs and a full-field defensive shape that looked doomed to watch Cincinnati pull them apart; the two quality shots the visitors created – one a close solo run by Gerardo Valenzuela, the other a sparkling team effort – had the feeling of heavy knocks rattling a door. Next thing you know, Nick Hagglund went down and off on a hard charge by Emmanuel Latte Lath (“I'll show you soft, Ronny!”; weird injury, too; ribs and lung?) and, mere minutes later, Derrick Williams headed home what might have been Atlanta’s first competent pass of the game on a set piece and it was off to the races. Atlanta scored again, of course, with a tap-in by Ajani Fortune five short minutes later after Saba "Well Janice*" Lobjanidze bewitched and bedazzled Lukas Engel on Cincy’s left (* I get so much free delight from closed captioning). From there, a broadcast booth narrative developed that Atlanta had pounced on a defense still working out its assignments. That argument holds up better in a world where Latte Lath didn’t miss two massive, free-free-free opportunities (more on one of those later), all of which fell outside that crucial window. Atlanta had gilded chances at an even half-dozen goals - a rightly shocking note given Cincinnati's typically tight defense - but all those chances ran against an undercurrent of Cincy playing through them with relative ease. That's to say, this was a weird one.

No one knew the game would end where it did when Robinson’s goal finally came just after halftime, of course, especially with Taylor Twellman treating Atlanta’s woes over the first 15 minutes of every second half as a disaster to count on. That note came against the backdrop of some of the best attacking builds Cincinnati has produced all season; the chances rained and the shots poured until they piled up to nearly 30, with nine on goal. Not all of them made Brad Guzan sweat – I’d say Evander’s 60th minute effort gave his Old Spice the biggest workout – but his every save and the 21 shots off target (some of them more wise than good) meant more time playing catch-up for Cincy and with less time to get there. Another defensive breakdown – and on a set piece, again, and with the ball bouncing all over inside the six, again – restored Atlanta’s two-goal margin at the 66th minute, forcing Cincy back into a sprint. The Orange and Blue pulled within one a mere four minutes later when Valenzuela finally got his prize for a great game, but it wouldn’t take look for them to succumb to the game’s other defining feature, fully-bodied defensive breakdowns by the visitors. That hadn’t happened since the opening weeks of 2025 (e.g., the ass-kicking at Philly), but Jamal Thiare insured the win in stoppage time on what must have been Atlanta’s third clean break behind Cincy’s defense. Everything that could go wrong did, basically, and it was more than enough to erase a good amount of right.

MLS Eastern Conference Check-In, A Word at the One-Third Mark

What I have to work with...

Welcome to this broad and necessarily shallow check-in on where things stand in Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference about one-third of the way through the 2025 season. To set expectations a little:

I watch just one Eastern Conference team every week – FC Cincinnati – and most of the additional (somewhat) in-depth watching I’ve done involved teams that they played on the upcoming weekend. So, no, I’m not coming at any of this from some all-knowing, all-absorbing perch.

Against that, I sincerely believe that a lot of the week-to-week global coverage I see from this league (almost all of it from Official Organs) has a pernicious tendency to read too much into the last game played – i.e., Content, particularly the stuff around failure and progress in players, formation shifts, etc., tends to over-value the latest details, often at the expense of considering broader details like, say, did your team look like some hot-rod shit last weekend because they ran over Montreal at home? Basically, all of the everything below looks at the same things, just over a longer arc. That follows for necessity, for sure, but it’s also about patterns, particularly when it comes to results, where they happened and against which teams and in what condition.

Just to note it, I constructed the information boxes that top each section for each team from the (current) Conference Standings (that link will be stale by Sunday), the much-reduc’d Form Guide (still mourning the loss, contemplating egging MLS HQ…so long as that’s not a felony, because I can’t have another), and applying a filter one team at a time to the official stats page. (Just to note it, MLS has gutted its non-app content. Jesus fucking Christ, the home pages for must teams are like shopping malls circa 2022, i.e., tacky little ghost teams haunted by advertisements to no one.)

The teams below are listed in their order in the Eastern Conference standings and whatever comments I provide come from a combination of things I’ve read, both in the Official Organ and strays caught on Bluesky, watching highlights and longer chunks of games when I had to, or told myself I had to, and watching MLS Wrap-Up – which, to the credit of all concerned, has improved now that they have stuff to chew on.

Atlanta United FC Scouting Report: Dueling Works in Progress

Tough bunch to impress, too.

Week 5 feels as good a week as any for FC Cincinnati to get back on the right side of the results ledger. More to the point, starting 2025 with three straight losses on the road will hurt prospects and reputation…so, let’s not do that, yes? Let’s get into it.

Atlanta United FC
1-2-1, 4 pts., 4 gf, 6 ga (-2); home 1-1-1, away 0-1-0
Last Results: WLDL
Strength/Location of Schedule
v MTL (3-2 W); @ CLT (0-2 L); v RBNY (0-0 D), v MIA (1-2 L);

Broad Strokes
The furious, hydra-headed attack that MLS Wrap Up’s hype merchants tried to sell after Week 1 hasn’t survived opposition stiffer than Club du Foot Montreal. Then again, goals do tend to dry up against strong defensive teams – e.g., Charlotte FC and Red Bull New York (Inter Miami CF ain’t bad either) – so it’ll be interesting to see how FC Cincinnati holds up against what Atlanta throws at them. Because I’d already watched Atlanta’s one road game of 2025 (at Charlotte, bit of a blur by now), I split 90 minutes between their two most recent games, both played in Atlanta. They approached each team differently – i.e., they ran at the Red Bulls in waves reckless enough to make a World War I general say “goddamn!” versus a more measured, even tentative posture versus Miami – but I can’t say whether new head coach Ronny Deila’s adjustments followed from a general change in plan, or just fear of getting countered to death by Miami. The latter strikes me as plausible enough that I wonder whether Atlanta won’t go closer to broke versus Cincinnati. If they do go that route, Cincy will need their heads and swivels and their boots strapped right, because the Five Stripes can kick up a frenzy.

Personnel
Brad Guzan will start in goal (until the seas consume us, maybe even after), so let’s look at the rest of Atlanta’s likely line-up. Even if he tweaked the formation last week, Deila has called most of the same numbers so far: a back four with Pedro Amador at left back (know jack about him, fwiw), Derrick Williams and Stian Gregersen as (slightly shaky) center backs, and, after a couple of starts for Matthew Edwards, I expect to see Brooks Lennon at right back; because I think last Sunday’s 4-2-3-1 makes most sense from what I know of the players, I see Bartosz Slisz and Tristan Muyumba as “the 2,” Saba Lobjanidze, Aleksey Miranchuk, and Miguel Almiron stretched left to right across “the 3,” and big, new signing (or new, big signing) Emmanuel Latte Lath running wild, free and alone up top. (It could, on the other hand, look like this 4-3-3.)

A Proposal for League-Wide Coverage in 2025 & My Romantic Engagement with Every Team in MLS

Google "brides." Genuinely fascinating.

After more late-night deliberation than a proud man would confess to, I have arrived at a league-wide coverage model for 2025, Major League’s Soccer’s (alleged) 30th season. [Ed. – I think they just want a “big” anniversary before Messi fucks off to retirement.]

I hereby commit to following the Portland Timbers, as always (over hill, over dale, through rain, sleet, and snow, in a banana republic, or a constitutional one, forsaking none by my wife, vacations, and the occasional nap), but I hereby also recommit to FC Cincinnati (no, really this time; it’ll be different, baby!). Before anyone casts even the first whisper of aspersion, I renewed that vow before the (exciting!) domino effect dogpile of trades that ultimately sent Evander to Cincy.

I also hereby commit to watching a minimum of 60 minutes of all games involving any team that will play either Portland or Cincinnati the following MLS Match Day. That will allow me to share notes on not just what I saw in that game, but also how those teams have done in the weeks heading into the game before the most important game of their season, i.e., any game played against Portland and Cincinnati.

The posts featuring notes from the game(s) Cincy and the Timbers just played, plus (brief) notes on their opposition for the following week will go up on Sunday or Monday of every week.

I also hereby commit to watching a minimum of 45 minutes of two Featured Games every week. For the first 127 Match Days (yes, this is arbitrary), Featured Games shall involve only intra-Conference games – none of that inter-conference shit – and I will watch one game from each conference. I may stick with that \over the second half of the season, I may not; that's when the spirit takes the wheel.

Notes on those games, the teams involved and how they’ve looked in the weeks prior will top a pair of posts that will go up Wednesday evening and I’ll round those out with stray things I pick up from anything else I can get to between Sunday and Monday, plus whatever Matt Doyle (or his substitute analyst) churns out after the relevant Match Day (why do I feel like I should be capitalizing that?).

Getting Reacquainted with Atlanta United FC, the Drunken Sailors of MLS

Pick his pockets! Pick his pockets!

Thumbnail History
As noted in yesterday’s post on Los Angeles FC, Atlanta United FC started the tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging. They arrived in the 2017 season like fun drunks livening up a wedding, finishing fourth overall and with the second best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) good Toronto FC team. Atlanta finished even higher in 2018 – if, again, second-best after a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield – but coming second almost certainly got lost in the dopamine when they won MLS Cup 2018 at…well, an unfortunate stroll over my Portland Timbers. The secret to pulling that off followed from near-perfect roster construction. It started with (more or less) flipping off that season’s Expansion Draft, finding two future stars in the 2017 Superdraft – Julian Gressel was the stand-out (Miles Robinson bloomed later) – and then going nuts with trades and transfers. Atlanta’s FO built a spine out of ol’ reliables from all over MLS – e.g., Michael Parkhurst, Jeff Larentowicz, and their apparently-fovever goalkeeper, Brad Guzan - but they had to scour the international markets for their crown jewels, Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron. One gave them lightning-like verticality – Almiron, who seemed to bend time when he got on the run – while the other finally ended Roy Lassiter’s 23-season reign of terror atop the single-season record for goals scored. For two fun-filled seasons – 2018 and 2019 - defenses struggled to keep Martinez from scoring goals and all came perilously close to allowing him a goal per game. Atlanta’s Act I seemed destined to on forever, but, as every play does, the action moved on to Act II, aka, the one where the hero(es) look lost and everything looks impossible and the doom kicks in. The trouble started when Martinez tore his ACL in the first game of 2020 – he would miss the entire season – and then came COVID, chaos (aka, Gabriel Heinze) and, when it all ended, a 23rd-place overall finish in the final standings. That’s not to say Atlanta didn’t move heaven, earth and bags of money to avoid that fate: when Almiron moved on to the EPL’s Newcastle, they gambled heavily on Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, two young, (reportedly) high-upside talents from Argentina. They paid a $15 million transfer for Barco and (I think) somewhere around $10 million for Martinez; Barco played more games (81), but Martinez got more in less time (39), but he was only around for 2019-20, while Barco lasted from 2018-2020, but both players are more memorable as cautionary tales than for anything they did on the field. Coaching problems plagued the team as well, starting with the apparent sociopath, Heinze, but, with respect to Gonzalo Pineda, they haven’t got it right since. Some entry-level farting around in the CONCACAF Champions’ League aside (see below*), things faded fast and, hard as they’ve tried, the color hasn’t flushed back into Atlanta’s cheeks since…or has it?

Kidding. It hasn’t. Not really.

Total Joy Points: 10

Wrapping Round One of the Playoffs & Pondering a (Potential?) Hole in the Timbers' Roster

This machine, like pundits, lies. I am all man.

With Major League Soccer taking its annual embarrassing mid-playoffs pause (mid-playoffs! nuts!), the urge to jump in and gently pick it apart got hold of me last weekend. The Portland Timbers started their pause a couple three weeks before that, and I’m going to close with some loose notes on that, but let’s start with the post-season.

First and foremost, and as much as it made me giggle immodestly, I’m not going to join in the circle-jerk around Inter Miami CF’s early exit from the 2024 playoffs as The Greatest Upset of All Time – not with the way crowned heads fell off across MLS’s Eastern Conference. Miami’s (admittedly shocking) fall versus(!) Atlanta United FC cleared a path wide enough for Columbus Crew SC to line-dance their way to a second straight title, but they crashed out against a revived Red Bull New York before that path even opened. I’m calling anyone who claims they saw that coming a liar, not least because the Crew survived a mosh-pit of a season and (and!) they beat the Red Bulls on the road, on Decision Day. With everything they had going their way – claiming second in the league after an achingly slow start, a coach all observers mooned over like a young, slim Frank Sinatra, and a roster deep as the Marianas Trench – seeing them get swept rises every inch as high on the Shock-o-Meter as Miami’s early ouster.

FC Cincinnati’s failure to capitalize was far less surprising – especially given that long stumble down the stretch. Having to rebuild the defense late in the season had a lot to do with it, but, from my vague look from a distance, the way the goals and confidence dried up did them in as much as anything. Those particular symptoms notwithstanding, Cincy’s demise highlights a recurring theme across MLS playoffs history the positive power of momentum and its damning opposite. Pat Noonan’s team had labored since the middle of July, which makes that less backing into the playoffs than commuting to and from work in reverse every day. To be clear, nothing about that felt inevitable – New York City FC trekked across their own wilderness before a three-game wining streak lifted them past the play-in (that was with them losing at Montreal on Decision Day in the mix) – and Cincy had enough chances and half-chances to score the go-ahead in Game 3. Maybe it’s something about how long the poison stays in your system after the snake bites.

MLS Week 25 Snapshot Review: Of Life, Death, and "Postseason Hope"

Not subtle, therefore glorious.

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’, though they’re disapprovin’, keep them doggies movin’, Rawhide!

Three weeks in a row on these posts, baby. Officially hell-bent for leather…

I tried to tighten up the model this week, so we’ll see how that goes (good?). The due diligence felt…decent this week, watched a respectably stupid amount of soccer, took some notes, etc. – I even cribbed some helpful quotes from Matt Doyle’s (mostly) weekly column. I won’t bore you with the viewing schedule, but I want to close the preamble with this: I’d hoped to watch the Colorado Rapids stirring, if poorly recorded, 3-2 win over Real Salt Lake, but Apple TV+ still has that result at 2-1 and with no full replay available. Maybe they had John Denver on the tapes in the grips of a Rocky Mountain High? Or was it because it looked like a 90s-throwback night, only with shit attendance as the concept?

With that, here is your Major League Soccer Week 25, Leagues Cup Eve Snapshot Review. And, by way of chelebration, I’m gonna start big. And if anyone can remember which gutter-wine company used “chelebrate” for the ad copy, you’ve got a shiny quarter coming your way. Then again, it’ll never touch Orson Welles’ finest pitches.

1) This Is Not Postseason Hope
“Montréal’s three-game unbeaten run came to an end, but they still head into the break with real postseason hopes as they’re just one point under the red line, and just three back of Toronto in 8th.”
- Matt Doyle

In a league with all an Oprah-esque approach to the postseason – you get a berth! you get a berth! you get a berth! – the bare act of making the playoffs just means the local fans aren’t blushing at the end of the regular season. “Postseason hope" should mean exactly one thing: making the playoffs with an actual shot at doing something once you get in. Club du Foot Montreal has just three wins over their past eighteen (18) games. As you’ll see below (at No. 8), the bar for entry in the Eastern Conference hangs lower than the Count de Monet’s cuffs and Montreal’s just one of many teams who will, barring a miracle or a couple miraculous acquisitions, see their foot cut off the second it steps onto any playoff pitch they play over their heads to crash. That’s hardly unique, of course. Atlanta United FC looked genuinely good against a hot-streakin’ Columbus Crew SC in this weekend’s 2-1 win, but they’re still yo-yoing up and down in the middle of nowhere in the East. FC Dallas presents an even starker example, thanks to their recent revival – e.g., 5-3-2 in their last 10. That would matter if they could win a game on the road. Just one. So, again, when I use phrases like “postseason hopes,” I’ll be using it specifically.

MLS Snapshot, Week 13/14, aka, Figuring Out What's Really Going On

Take me to your secret garden under the sea!

Back on April 6 of this year, I posted a pointlessly premature league-wide roundup. This post both updates and revisits those early impressions and in a way that, I’m guessing, will embarrass the author in more ways than it won’t. Moreover, I’m taking an approach meant to maximize that discomfort because, to paraphrase the late Bill O’Reilly (…wait, is he dead yet?), fuck it, I’m doing this live.

By that I mean, I pulled the top-line numbers from the current standings (i.e., this link is functionally dead by next weekend) and the Form Guide (never lets one down) for every team in Major League Soccer and combined them into tidy little blocks of data. Those blocks include: each team’s current record, total number of points, goals scored, goals allowed, home and away records, where they fit in their conference and the league as a whole, plus each team’s results over their past 10 games and a note on where they played those games. Think data in high-protein, never-gonna-shit-again granola form.

On the analysis side, I decided against farting around with strength of schedule and instead went with a single snapshot-style statement on each team at this moment – which, for the record, is either 13 or 14 games for 26 teams. That’s to say, the current MLS calendar is on Week 13/14 and the great Inter Miami CF calendar is a lie.

The notes on each team will close with my impression of them as of MLS Week 6. This is where the embarrassment comes in, because I swung wide and wild on plenty of teams.

That’s it for the preamble. Everything else should speak for itself from here. As with that last post, I’m starting with the MLS’s Western Conference and closing with the Eastern and I’ve listed every team according to its current place in their respective conference standings. Finally, and as noted on Bluesky, I’m going back to following the Portland Timbers and the Timbers alone, and then posting some form of league-wide weekly round-up. Not 100%-sure what form that’ll take, I only know I want it to be smaller than this whale.

For now, let’s climb on Shamu’s back and see where he swims.

MLS Week 3: Less Brief Notes on Many Topics

What's new is old, mfs.

Grand Narrative

Major League Soccer Week 3 served up some actual upsets – e.g., Minnesota United FC shivving Orlando City SC in Florida, the Colorado Rapids stunning Rocky Mountain rivals in their fascist-adjacent stadium (i.e., America First is a bit freighted in 2024) – one head-fake upset - e.g., Club du Foot Montreal tripping MLS’s very favorite team on its way to the coronation the league wants like cocaine, fine cigars and cured meats – and at least one blowout – e.g., Atlanta United FC’s stroll over the New England Revolution. It’s all more or less normal from there, if with some noteworthy wrinkles, but there’s still 31 largely meaningless games to go. Plenty of time for rewrites in the script. For most teams, anyway.

In other news, The Mothership’s stubborn refusal to fill in the Form Guide forced me to create a sad old guy version of one (Viva Excel!), but I’m glad I did because, oh, the tiny trends that would have slipped down the memory-hole without it. Don’t get me wrong: a lot of teams are having something close to the normal ups-‘n’-downs – e.g., let’s go with Charlotte FC and RSL or, hell, even Colorado – but then you’ve got New England’s flop-sweat start to 2024, or Sporting Kansas City or Nashville SC’s dead-cat bounce string of draws. Again, these are tiny trends – and I pick at some of them below – but, with some exceptions (hello, San Jose Earthquakes!), not many of those present as permanent conditions thus far. Moving on…

I’m introducing a new segment this week. It’s nothing more or less than stuff that pops in my head as it drifts off during extended highlight sessions (see below for clarification). I haven’t come up wht of a name for it yet, so let’s go with…

Shouts from the Peanut Gallery

1) MLS should be raiding the bench of Europe’s good-to-great clubs looking for high-end depth pieces – the kinds of players the bigger teams sign as either development or insurance. That doesn’t mean they should stop looking for the latest hot, young thing from Central/South America…hold on. I think MLS is already doing this, only before they get to Europe. Still, I’m guessing there’s talent a-wasting on the benches of Europe’s more ambitious clubs, if not the bigger ones.

1a) Is it just me or has MLS essentially and/or completely given up on Central America? If so, is that wise? Half of me thinks probably, but the other half feels like they may be missing out.

MLS Week 1 Preview, Getting Hyped on Thin Gruel

Solid show, btw.

At the risk of defeating the point of this post, I’m going to start by acknowledging that none of what’s below matters at all. By allowing nine (fucking) teams from each of its two conferences to qualify, Major League Soccer has made a conscious choice to devalue the regular season to a point where I wonder why anyone bothers to tune in before August. How well a team does through, say, April could be rendered meaningless by a cratering collapse or raging success in September; I can’t stress enough how much the results from MLS Week 1-20 just don’t matter. I've reached the sad place of pining for the 2024 Leagues Cup, because I think it's my first, best chance to feel anything of consequence before September. Stakes, people. They matter...

So, why do this? I mean apart from the fact that I just really like watching soccer?

First and foremost, I’ve chosen this as a hobby. Second, in the same way a sword-maker sharpens the sword over and over until it can cut through trees (apparently; Blue Eye Samurai lays waste to trees of all sizes as if that was the point of the show), seeing MLS’s 29 teams 34 times before they arrive at games that actually matter, aka, the playoffs, gives you a pretty clear bead on which of those teams have a shot in hell at lifting MLS Cup. That number has been whittled down to, at the very most, four or even three teams over the past couple seasons, which, again, highlights just how many meaningless games are played in this league plays year after year…and yet, is that so different than what the majority of teams experience in the English Premier League every season? Hold on…maybe spectator sports writ large are the problem?

To make this even weirder, this will be the only league-wide preview post I do all season. The current plan is to post weekly Vibez Checks at the end of each “MLS Week,” which (swear to God) will be just a loose rundown of what I saw in the games and what I see for patterns in the results. On the research side, I see myself watching two full games every week – one involving the Portland Timbers, the other involving their next opponent – long chunks (45-60 minutes’ worth) of the three games that most interest me, plus whatever else I get to after that. Unlike past seasons, I really do want to keep all this on a “vibes” level – i.e., expect the random name drop (as in, “holy shit, this guy’s killing it”) and general notes (as in, “Atlanta’s on a streak that bears watching”), as opposed to in-depth blow-by-blow coverage from this game or that or deep dives into the latest analytic stats on the market. Gods willing, people who find these posts will get a breezy read and the jokes will land.

To the extent this post has a purpose, it’s about hyping me up for First Kick 2024. Some of the commentary doubles as soft predictions for what I expect from each team, but I’m also approaching all that from something like a headline level (and the intelligence gathered from this incomplete series). With that, let’s look at what we’ve got on the platter.

Getting Reacquainted with Atlanta United FC, MLS's Super-Fun Party Guy

Act II, when things always look their worst.

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

Tempted as I am to say that Atlanta United FC started a tradition of expansion teams coming into MLS swinging, that strictly applies to them and Los Angeles FC (with honorable mention to New York City FC because they didn’t actually lift a trophy until their 7th season). Atlanta announced their intentions in its very first season (2017, btw), finishing fourth overall and with the second best goal differential (+30) behind an historically (and freakishly) great Toronto FC team. They followed that opening triumph by finishing even higher in their second season (second overall, this time behind a Red Bull New York team winning its third Supporters’ Shield) and winning MLS Cup at…well, an unfortunate stroll because the team they bested was, again, my Portland Timbers (to any Timbers fans reading this, it only seems like Portland has lost MLS Cup to every team in MLS, but it was just NYCFC and Atlanta). That ended Act I in Atlanta’s history. They kicked off Act II in 2019 by finishing third overall and winning the U.S. Open…back when such things mattered. Then, Act II being what it is, tragedy (and a global pandemic) struck in 2020 and the breezes that forever blew at their back turned to blow in their faces. They ended the dread COVID season in 23rd place overall, out of the playoff picture despite a generous expansion of its outer boundaries. Atlanta’s fortunes have been mixed since then – e.g., two top 10 finishes (2021 and 2023) on either side of yet another 23rd place finish in 2022. In an expansion of theatric convention, Atlanta has stretched the third act of its early history over three seasons. The question is whether continues as tragedy or comedy.

Best Season(s)

Their Cup-winning 2018 season provides the obvious answer, what with Josef Martinez, Miguel Almiron and…[supporting cast] terrorizing all of MLS in transition, but I’m going to Atlanta’s 2018 season, when they finished third and won that Open Cup. Why? I mean, two trophies in three seasons. Think of what the future felt like to their fans…

…but, obviously, their best season was 2018. Lifting the Cup in front of your fans is a beautiful thing.

MLS Week 24 Review: Wings of a Sparrow, Ass of a (Filthy) Crow

Ready...aim...

Once again, I’m totally committing to a formula of watching (nearly) every Portland Timbers and (going forward) every FC Cincinnati game and going deep on any game involving their next opponent. As the social media ground...moves...under my feet, I move with it.

As for the rest, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write my Major League Soccer weekly roundups as narratives, not just because I feel like that’s my forte (humor me), but because I believe that beats trying to extract/conjure singular...details, anecdotes, stats...just fucking things for a bunch of games and about a bunch of teams I couldn’t possibly absorb. The goal for this post is to tell four inter-related, inter-woven stories about the MLS Week that just passed – Week 24, in this case – and to leave it there. Taking it all in from a bird’s-eye view, in other words. The subject for the four stories will be self-evident from the titles, thus endeth this part of the preamble.

WHEREAS...just fucking with you. Legal assistant joke. At any rate...

The second part of this post – and, here, the sloppiest – is nothing but the raw notes I produced by watching the highlights (the little seven-minute jobbers), and looking at things like the stats pages, the line-ups when the highlights didn’t provide them, and the (holy, bless’d) Form Guide. With this edition, I only decided to include said raw notes about seven games into the process, so I didn’t type those with readers in mind. The change comes when I started typing "TRENDS" and "GAME" in the notes/summaries, but I didn't really fully commit to the concept until the Colorado/Dallas game. So, yeah, expect gibberish, but also expect the “raw” notes to read a little less raw in future reviews.

Right. On with the stories.

Notes on MLS East
I’d call Club de Foot Montreal taking another nibble out of their lifeline (i.e., their home record) and Nashville SC getting all existential about whether they’re anything without Hany Mukhtar as the biggest stories in the East for MLS Week 24. Honorable mentions abound – e.g., a deserved New England Revolution equalizer against Red Bull New York (again, what is VAR but the same bullshit delivered after a long delay?) – but they remain honorable mentions because, e.g., that equalizer wouldn’t have changed the world or any major narratives or anything.

MLS Week 21 (Probably?) Review: All the Thoughts I Had Before Falling Asleep on Monday

Okay, forward passes enable communism!

In order to get these league-wide wraps posted timely, I’m sticking with reviews and posting on Mondays (or Tuesdays). That simplifies the format (woot-woot), which goes something like this: I list all the games I look at – some of them longer than others (and [see the brackets] after every final score) – pass on the better notes that came to me as I watched what I watched in varying degrees of consciousness, embed a link to the MLSSoccer.com game summary in the final score (but otherwise don't link to shit), then move on to the next one. Now, please make sure your seat belts are fastened and extinguish any smoking materials, because this flight’s about to take off...starting with some loose thoughts that interrupted my fugue state...

At this point in the season, a growing number of games come down to which team of the two playing have more things nailed down. About 90% of that thought comes from watching Real Salt Lake and Atlanta United FC for long stretches – and, to flag which is which, RSL always looked like they had a chance to come back; Atlanta, meanwhile, played like a team that had been conditioned out of doing anything decisive by shock collars. Start watching for this. Also, don’t expect it to be a permanent condition. Only the good teams do that.

Something else that struck me this weekend: you don’t always see a goal coming – and not just in the “against the run of play” sense of the word. I think fans still get skittish about admitting this, but this game really can deliver a whole lot of running about and little more by the scores of minutes.

Finally, I imagine every week sees a Goal of the Week that wasn’t, but, Hector Herrera’s divine-but-for attempt against Austin? Better than 60% of the goals you saw and more inspired than all of them. R.I.P.

Well, that’s it for the chit-chat. Let’s talk about the games! Or at least the ones I care about.

A Casual Fans Preview, MLS Week 9: Notes on Everything & a Showdown at the Big Tickle

Yessir, shivering, sir.

The further into the 2023 Major League Soccer season we get, the more predictable things seem – long-term, at least. And yet there’s this...

FC Cincinnati v Portland Timbers: Shivering with Antici...pation

Cincy: 5-1-2, 17 pts., 10 gf/9 ga, 2nd in East; Last 5: TWWWL (respectable strength of schedule)

Portland: 2-4-2, 8 pts., 10 goals for, 13 goals against; Last 5: LTTLW (more respectable)

My gods, where to begin?

Last Saturday was Freaky Friday, for one: the team you were sure would lose won (hello, Portland!), while the one that begged the question, “can they do it?” answered with a sulking “no.” In their defense, I read somewhere that St. Louis wildly over-performed its xG and I feel like I get that, even if I don’t entirely get xG. So, big picture, the home team wants to get back on track while the visitors want to keep things going.

Both teams also hope to get key – or, in Portland’s case, enough – players back on the field and kicking. Cincy had to play without the three-months-from-exit Brenner and Luciano Acosta last weekend – the wild card and conductor, respectively – while the Timbers finally managed to field players they’re counting on to carry them to a good season, e.g., team talisman, Dairon Asprilla, and new Ivorian striker Franck Boli. I have no clue on Acosta’s timeline for recovery, or Brenner’s for that matter (hell, I don’t even know what kept them off the pitch), but also figure Pat Noonan will want them against a Timbers defense I rate somewhere between sufficient and good enough.

For my money, the real question comes with how much and, honestly, whether Portland has improved in terms of competence and comfort on the ball. If that’s real, Cincy will have a game on their hands. Or should. More to the point, I believe the Timbers odds of actually winning this game will follow whatever improvement they’ve made on those very basics with the persistence of a shadow.

A Casual Fan's Preview, MLS Week 7: At a Point in the Season, Tales of Addition and Subtraction

The red stuff is all the birthdays I forget...

With this weekend’s set of matches, Major League Soccer officially reached the 7/34th point in the season. Big shit, in other words...

After dragging the last preview post over the line (and myself across a board filled with tacks), I promised myself I’d keep these shorter (broke me promise, sadly). The fact I’m half-assing the FC Cincinnati v Philadelphia Union preview should help - oh, and I’ll defend that choice – but I’m also going to take something like a free association approach to the blurbs. What the hell, right? Spin the bottle, find out who are what you kiss, yolo.

Anyhoo, I can’t keep this short if I don’t get going. In making the calls below, I stared at my now-wife, The Form Guide, the current standings, and plumb the befogged shallows of my memory. The short-term memory loss thing? Totally true. Anyway, let’s dig in....

FC Cincinnati v Philadelphia Union
CIN: 4-0-2, 14 pts., 8 gf, 4 ga (+4); Last 6: WTWTWW (pretty tough schedule, honestly)
PHI: 2-3-1, 7 pts., 8 gf, 8 ga (0); Last 6: WLWLLT (about 50/50; should be better)

I didn’t even sit through the highlights of Philly’s (frankly) shock home draw against SKC. I doubt it would have been informative, it’d be like watching the Union playing drunk, they’re not themselves, they’ve refused to take out the trash in weeks, it’s wearing thin, etc.

I see Cincy all the time, of course, but I don’t have any great analytic thoughts beyond, “yeah, they look good.” The one big picture thing I’d say about them is that I doubt they come out as flat this week as they did last (my only half-hearted complaint about the win over Miami, fwiw).

A couple people hepped me to the fact that Philly fielded their starters against Mexico’s Atlas in the CCL on Tuesday – and they kept most of them on the whole game (anyone else wonder if they still think it was worth it?). That probably bodes as well as anything for Cincy’s chances, as they’re unlikely to get the Union at their best. That makes these big points in mind; savvy teams get ‘em while they can, people. I don’t know Obinna Nwobodo’s status – he’ll play if he does, right? – but I’m hoping for a calmer game from Marco Angulo should he start. More than that, I’d like to see Cincy’s Big Three get going. If they don’t, this one’s got low-scoring draw or 1-0 result in either direction – if with a lean toward Cincinnati – written all over it. I see those goals-for numbers. Anyhoo, I see Philly like a pro wrestler who’s been hit with everything including a steel chair: you know they’re going to get up and rally; it’s just a question when...unless their struggles continue into the summer. Next!

A Still More Casual Fan's Review: MLS Week 6, Not the Best, fwiw, and FC Cincinnati on the Grind

More of this energy, please.

As hinted it...maybe on twitter, maybe just in my head, I’m thinning out these review posts – and mostly on the grounds that not a lot of people read them. The biggest change will be a switch from writing long blurbs about featured games – with the accompanying pain of marching through nearly all of them - to just writing a narrative that puts the prior weekend’s action in context. And categories. I can’t get enough of those goddamn things. Like popcorn that tastes like jalapeno...

To summarize/judge MLS Week 6 as a whole...it wasn’t the best. Too many ties, too much slouching toward the mid-table, too little rising, shining, showing God your glory, glory, and so on. All the ties involves crap teams and most of the blowouts saw crap teams on the logical end of that equation. It could have used a little more pizazz, basically. Not unlike the one match that will continue to feature at the top of each and every one of these reviews – any game involving FC Cincinnati. On with the show, this is it....

FC Cincinnati 1-0 Inter Miami CF: I Mean, It Was Good. No, It Was Good....

So...do the dots on The Mothership’s xG charts represent the shots on goal? For what it’s worth, I did count 10 dots in Miami’s slowly rising line and noticed how it nudged them one step ahead of a FC Cincy in the second half – at least until they very end when the host’s late chances could have well and truly sealed the game and padded the final score.

Then again, wouldn’t that have misrepresented the game just a touch?

I’d argue a goal-less draw would have provided a fairer result for a Miami team that often gave a little better than they got. A team gets what it earns, of course – and the visitors and/or Phil Neville (or an ill-advised on-field adjustment) did hand Cincy the game winner by having DeAndre Yedlin and Josef Martinez guard Yerson Mosquera at the near post – but Miami did a handful of things better than Cincinnati on the day, most of them following from winning the lion’s share of the 50/50 balls. Going the other way, Miami’s passing map tells another story with its mullet shape – i.e., thick and luxuriantly connected at the back but thinned out up front.

That, in a nutshell, is what makes the final result fair: Cincy defended very well, they didn’t give Miami many clear looks, and Roman Celentano cleaned up the rest – for instance, a shot that a largely locked-out Josef Martinez didn’t hit hard enough to rattle anyone. The only time I recall seeing Celentano really beat was the bomb Franco Negri bounced off the crossbar from the depths of Miami’s attacking third (which I imagine has to be somewhere in the highlights). For all times the visitors set up a siege just beyond the top of Cincinnati’s 18, they rarely broke through the lines, which limited them to half-looks – a reality that, for me, begs the question of why Neville doesn’t consider starting the young Shanyder Borgelin until their regular big-‘n’-bulky, Leo Campana, can tie on his starting boots.

A Casual Fan's Preview, MLS Week 6: Of Bloodlettings and Impostor Syndrome

It's raining Mcmansions.

First, holy shit, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have numbers – REAL numbers, from xG to records to goal differential – to help shape this discussion. No more building houses on clouds, people, it’s gonna be glorious. If nothing else, I should help tighten up the copy, Ahhhhhhhhhhh-meeeennnnnnnnnnnn!!

At any rate, it’s the same old format – i.e., the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati get longer previews and then smoosh all the rest of it into categories that expand or contract per my personal requirements – only updated for another week. At first glance (and it is that), I see a little intrigue, some faint whiffs of desperation and, frankly, a couple games that I expect to slip from the memory of even the most ardent local fan by the end of Saturday night. I’ll get into all that, but let’s turn to my two personal main events. For what it’s worth, I decided which team to start with by flipping a coin...it’s getting weird out here...

FC Dallas v Portland Timbers
Because we’ve had so little of it, here, in the upper left-hand corner of Oregon, allow me to start with the good news. I just caught word (typing this Tuesday freezing the thought in amber) that Evander, David Ayala and Dairon Asprilla participated in full training on (or perhaps starting) Tuesday, all in the hope of playing Saturday. What? I didn’t say how good the news was...

I kid, I kid. Even if Evander hasn’t set my cockles ablaze and I can’t say I’ve ever seen Ayala play a game that made me feel anything but anxious, I’m happy for the options. Seeing Asprilla in that mix feels better, if only because he’s more of a known quantity; he has arrived/plateaued at a solid second-banana level of contribution – which, sadly, was good enough to make him Portland’s leading scorer last season. Having more of a presence up top, or even just an attacking player able to do more than run(/get swallowed up) by the channel (never to be seen again), certainly can’t hurt an attack that currently clocks exactly one goal per game. Turning, now, to what whoever lines up for Portland will be up against...

First, and for anyone who has ever questioned my reasons for asking the Form Guide to join me in holy matrimony, I’d started mapping out an argument for how “this Portland team could never score on Dallas, a team back-stopped by a steel-plated Alamo.” As it turns out, they’ve allowed a goal in every game of 2023. Not crazy enough that Portland fans should get their hopes up – they’ve allowed six total - but the goals get in their net, even at home.

Atlanta United FC 5-1 Portland Timbers: A Festival of Waiting and Staring

Every Timber, and all Timbers.

Let’s start here:

“I mean, I don’t want to overplay the possibility Portland will be ‘the next Charlotte,’ but I don’t want to ignore it either.”

I pulled that from my MLS Week 4 preview and, while I don’t tell the future often, I would have won the lottery with a call that precise in 90% of your state lotteries. If soccer has a spin on getting kicked in the balls hard and true, it’s giving up anything north of four goals. And yet I want to pause here to present a couple arguments...hold on, before I get on the upcoming roll, the Portland Timbers got rolled like...16 drunks (that’s starters plus five subs) tonight in and by Atlanta tonight, losing 1-5 to a team that’s starting to look somewhere between plausible and serious. And, yes, as confirmed by the stats, the Timbers could have lost by a couple more on a worse day.

Back to the arguments...

I don’t blame the defense for this one. It was at least three-times removed from perfect – see the collective bumble that let Atlanta’s Caleb Wiley slip through for a long-range tap-in for their first, or the field-wide absence of anything helpful to stop Giorgos Giakoumakis from breaking his duck, and all over Portland’s defense (....and where the hell does “breaking his duck” come from and why such a dirty phrase?). Giakoumakis' goal put the game to 1-3 against Portland, but things looked lost the second Thiago Almada – from Atlanta, obviously, because how could Portland have an MVP in a 1-5 loss? – thumped in a Georgia peach of a free-kick from....where do you reckon, Zeke? 28 yards? 30? I’m trying to cut back on linking in posts. Not just on the suspicion that no one hits any of the links, but because you’re all adults and you know how to find what you like...but Almada’s free kick is worth linking to, seriously.

After that, sure, you can fault Larrys Mabiala for getting bumped off the play by a player (Almada) about two-thirds his side and I’m just as sure someone out there has things to say about how Luiz Araujo got around Justin Rasmussen, but those were the fifth and fourth goals of the game, respectively (I listed those two in order of egregiousness), and, as noted above, if there’s a team “this fucker was over once Atlanta scored three” club, I hereby sign on as Treasurer.