Level Set 6, St. Louis CITY FC: Came in Like a Wrecking Ball...Then the Pendulum Swung the Other Way

I'll retire this image the day St. Louis makes me.

What follows is a brief history of St. Louis CITY FC, who, with just three seasons behind them, merit the brevity, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have (N/A). 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
St. Louis CITY FC came into MLS like a wrecking ball in 2023. Their inexhaustible high-pressing style gave them an advantage over teams shaking off early season rust and allowed St. Louis to run up the score against one team after the other. Over the first nine wins in franchise history – which included five straight wins in as many games – only the Portland Timbers (of all teams) limited them to two goals; St. Louis bagged three or more against every other team. But for the four losses and one draw that came between wins five and nine, St. Louis presented as a juggernaut. Brazilian forward Joao Klauss led the first wave, at least until injury slowed him down, but head coach Bradley Carnell’s system had (e.g.) Jared Stroud and Indiana Vassilev crashing after Klauss, Eduard Lowen to follow up and make the most of any turnovers. While that wasn’t good enough for a wire-to-wire performance, St. Louis rode a second winning streak of victories on either side of the 2023 Leagues Cup to a first-place finish atop the Western Conference. It’s (so very) possible I’m forgetting a thing or three, but that might have been the best debut season in MLS history after the 1998 Chicago Fire’s run to MLS Cup. Sporting Kansas City was one of the teams St. Louis steamrolled over those nine early victories – a 4-0 romp at CityPark stadium – and it was the same team that flipped the tables on St. Louis over a lopsided two-leg series in the first round of the 2023 MLS playoffs.

Philadelphia Union 4-1 FC Cincinnati: All Kinds of Things Blowing in Their Faces, Plus a Toronto FC Scouting Report!

The wind was a factor, but not an excuse.

“…I can’t imagine a world where Philadelphia pushes Cincinnati around and back like they did against the Lions. Everything I’ve seen from them tells me Cincy will defend not just higher, but more aggressively than Orlando ever did…”

Few things kick a guy’s ego harder than seeing a confident prediction (from here; scroll way down) blow up in his face in just four days’ time. The Philadelphia Union shoved FC Cincinnati into a fucking locker last Saturday, posting a 4-1 home win that left their fans merrily dooping into the night. By the time the ref blew the final whistle, Philly had made off with their lunch money, best friend and first two girlfriends.

About the Game
Both teams came to battle and both looked game for it – even after the Union forced their first goal around Cincy’s right flank a mere six minutes into the game. Related, if mostly in a vibez/spiritual sense, Kai Wagner’s decision to continue his overlapping run contained the seed narrative for the way the entire game played out. Philadelphia’s players read a bounce before Cincy’s time and time again and saw a play develop two beats ahead: whether it was a sixth sense or the sixth day into some shared Groundhog Day, everything a Union player touched turned into something a little better; they played with their wind at their backs, literally, and somehow in both directions. Another thing I noticed: Philly didn’t press, at least not in a greyhound-after-a-mechanical rabbit way; it was more pushing a 4-2-4 to the top of Cincinnati’s defensive third, daring them to play, then getting after anything that moved like a greyhound getting after a mechanical rabbit. The approach proved beyond effective. Cincy struggled to get the ball to the center-stripe and saw it roll back into their defense more times than the Union’s 14 shots (7 on goal!) suggest. Philadelphia would score two more – one at the 30th minute, which included one of those moments when you appreciated VAR for teaching refs some humility (this was an easy call in real time), the second at the 52nd when Tai Baribo wrapped up his hat trick – without Cincy showing any meaningful signs of life. Cincinnati continued to play as if running knee-deep through mud even after Evander scored A Very Evander Goal (i.e., he did it all, start to finish). I’m told Cincinnati fired seven shots somewhere from inside that void and I’m guessing three of those shots and both of the shots on goal came at the end of Alvas Powell’s run from right back to (near) glory just after the 70th minute (this made the full highlights). If this game has a “what might have been,” it was Kevin Denkey tagging his rebound off Andre Blake’s right post instead of into the goal. If that shot goes in, maybe Philly sweats a little instead of making a feast out of another turnover by way of (the impressively effective) Quinn Sullivan feeding Uruguayan striker Bruno Damiani for their fourth. The game was over before it started and Baribo is, however implausibly, the current 2025 Golden Boot leader.

Getting Reacquainted with St. Louis CITY FC, the Boomtown (Rats?) of MLS

St. Louis, as their best possible selves.

[WARNING: Between St. Louis CITY SC not having much history and me feeling like I needed to fill "X" amount of space, I got over my skis on multiple details around this team. If you want to skip the whole thing - and that's probably advisable - here's a short version: St. Louis has played two seasons in MLS, one pretty good, especially for an expansion team, the other bad. There are multiple, credible reasons for their change in fortunes, and they made changes toward the end of 2024 that have a decent chance of paying off. Still, that's only two seasons for context, and that leaves a lot of open questions going into 2025 that can only be closed by results on the field.]

Thumbnail History
St. Louis CITY FC came into MLS like a wrecking ball in 2023. Their inexhaustible high-pressing style gave them an advantage over teams shaking off early season rust and allowed St. Louis to run up the score against one team after the other. Over the first nine wins in franchise history – which included five straight wins in their first five games – only the Portland Timbers (of all teams) limited them to two goals; St. Louis bagged three or more against every other team. But for the four losses and one draw that came between wins five and nine, St. Louis presented as a juggernaut. Brazilian forward Joao Klauss led the first wave of the press, at least until injury slowed him down, but head coach Bradley Carnell’s system had (e.g.) Jared Stroud and Indiana Vassilev crashing after Klauss, Eduard Lowen to follow up and make the most of any turnovers. While that wasn’t good enough for a wire-to-wire performance, St. Louis rode a second winning streak of victories on either side of the 2023 Leagues Cup to a first-place finish atop the Western Conference. It’s (so very) possible I’m forgetting a thing or three, but that might have been the best debut season in MLS history after the 1998 Chicago Fire’s run to MLS Cup. Sporting Kansas City was one of the teams St. Louis steamrolled over those nine, not early victories – a 4-0 romp at CityPark stadium (and who knew there was drama around that?). Seeing SKC turn the tables over a lopsided two-leg series in the first round of the 2023 MLS playoffs sums up St. Louis short-‘n’-sweet history in MLS.

Total Joy Points: -1

How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
[Ed. – No need to click the above link: per the Joy Points Scale, a team only gets credit for “making the playoffs” if they progress to the quarterfinals of the MLS Cup Playoffs.]

Long-Term Tendencies
The only “tendency” St. Louis has established so far is being wildly successful on the attacking side in 2023, and then (almost) as wildly unsuccessful on the defensive side in 2024. Related, their defense wasn’t great in 2023, but it didn’t have to be.

Getting Reacquainted with the Philadelphia Union, the MLS Team on the Precipice of...?

So close and yet, etc.

Thumbnail History
The Philadelphia Union have reached three U.S. Open and lost them all. That feels like good framing.

In the grand timeline of MLS expansion, the Philadelphia Union arrived fairly early – a couple seasons after Toronto FC, one after the Seattle Sounders, and one before my Portland Timbers, aka, 2010. You can pull a couple threads out of that, but Philly did better than many MLS team using that time to sort out a reliable approach to team building. Not perfectly, by any means, but still pretty fucking well. Keeping that path linear requires a little willful amnesia, not to mention looking past at least one recent warning signs (see below). As expansion teams are wont to do, they hit the biggest rocks at the beginning, i.e., they missed the playoffs in six of their first eight seasons. Their first roster looked a lot like what it was: a Frankenstein’s monster built of scraps they reclaimed from the Expansion Draft, plus a couple hyped SuperDraftees (Jack McInerney and that season’s number one pick, Danny Mwanga) and the odd exotic signing stapled onto it (which one is it? Don't recall). As the limits of that approach became apparent, Philly put more effort into signing game-changing players – e.g., Conor Casey, Maurice Edu, and, arguably the biggest swing of those first attempts, Cristian Maidana – but those players came and went before Philly’s dry spell in the playoffs ended. While it wasn’t the Union’s first trip to the post-season (viva 2011!), 2019 constituted a turning point in their history (for now; everything’s contingent, people) Until…rather recently, the Union made the playoffs every season since; better, they won the Supporters’ Shield…if in the weird season (i.e., 2020), and strolled to a clash against Los Angeles FC in MLS Cup 2022, where they came out on the wrong side of the consensus best-ever finals in league history. The best argument for things staying sunny in Philadelphia follows from the quality of the cream they can skim from their academy system – think Derrick Jones, Auston Trusty, Brendan Aaronson, Jack McGlynn and Nathan Harriel. Players like that don’t grow on trees and that’s a luxury the Union has that (many?) other MLS teams don’t. With that foundation beneath them, Philly only needed to improve at signing impact foreign players – particularly when they had a good, steady coach staff (who think Jim Curtin will be unemployed for long?). Things didn’t really turn around for the Union until they signed players like Alejandro Bedoya (2016-present), Jack Elliott (2017-2024; [UPDATE: Just got word Elliott was a SuperDraftee; good get for Philly.]), Jamiro Monteiro (2019-2021), personal favorite, Jose Martinez (No. 6s and 8s are my people), and, more recently, a (once?) league-elite defender like Jakob Glesnes, and smart attacking pieces like Daniel Gazdag and Julian Carranza. Those two factors have helped keep the Union at, or at least close to, the top teams in MLS…until somewhat recently. This one’s tricky…

Total Joy Points: 13