Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC & MLS Week 7: re Asking the Right Questions

MLS Week 7 felt like a good week for defenses to let a player run from the midfield stripe to goal. And that’s watching just one game over half of them.

As hinted at on Bluesky (not sure how many people who find this site are on there, but it feels like most), I’ve tweaked the formula for these posts…yet again, so we’ll see where this goes. Per the Next Five-Year Plan, there will be:

1) a post about the Portland Timbers game, plus the round-up of MLS action for the relevant week, six games will be covered, if more contextually than specifically; and

2) a preview post for the Timbers opponent for the MLS Match Day to come.

Social obligations have put this post a couple hours further behind deadline, so I’m cutting off the preamble there, whatever doesn’t make sense shall become apparent, the first shall be last, the meek will get the best seats at the opera and dolphins shall walk the Earth, moving on to this week’s main event, which had a sweet, sweet chaser…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC
What Passes for a Match Report
Regular readers of my preview posts know that the real payoff is all the shit I get wrong. After making a firm, reasonably empirical case that LAFC wouldn’t rotate their roster much, they rolled in with most of their regular starters except Denis Bouanga and Nkoski Tafari resting on the bench, it looks like Son Heung-min didn’t even travel, and so on. That set this up as Portland versus LAFC’s Youth Academy, bench players and the two aforementioned starters, which kicked the game off with an opportunity for the fully-loaded Timbers and plausible deniability for LAFC.

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.

Facing Up to the Stretch Run for FC Cincinnati: I've Seen Worse

De nada.

The concept is simple, maybe even pointless. [Ed. – Don’t listen to him.] The post below has the simple, direct purpose of looking backwards and forward for every Major League Soccer team that “poses a threat” to FC Cincinnati’s chances in the very much alive Supporters’ Shield race. As noted/argued in my previous post on Cincy’s win over the (full disclosure, and) my Portland Timbers, Cincy has succeeded in picking up points whilst surviving injury – and to the tune of second/tied on points for Shield-Quest with San Diego (probably?) FC.

Not every team below necessarily belongs in the Shield conversation, but I opted to take a wide view for this post. While I provide a lot of details on each team – e.g., their record over the past 10 games and their remaining schedule, mainly – I’m neither equipped to nor interested in strapping in for much analysis; related, while I acknowledge trades that have happened since the beginning of August, only a handful of the names rang a bell, so I don’t have much to offer beyond their name and the letter that connotes their position on the field. The notes I have will focus on past results, players that seem worth noting, and some informed speculation on the games they have left – and they won’t be lengthy or linky.

As a quick, hopeful editorial note: I intend (emphasis on intend) to spend the rest of the season focusing on the teams either closest to FC Cincinnati, or the one that did something on the past weekend that feels worth flagging. Caveat lector: that’s more concept-in-progress than work-in-progress.

Think that’s everything. Let’s start by framing…

1st) FC Cincinnati
16-7-4, 27 games played; 52 pts., 42 gf, 34 ga (+8); home 7-3-2, away 9-4-2
Last 10 Results: WWWWLWWDLW (7-2-1)
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ NE (1-0 W); @ MTL (3-1 W); @ ORL (2-1 W); v CHI (2-1 W); v CLB (2-4 L); v MIA (3-0 W); @ RSL (1-0 W); @ MIA (0-0 D); v CLT (0-1 L); @ POR (3-2 W)
Remaining Schedule: v NYC; v PHI, v NSH; @ LAG; v ORL; @ RBNY; v MTL
Additions: Ayoub Jabbari (F); Samuel Gidi (M)
Losses: DeAndre Yedlin

Don’t love the Yedlin trade in the here and now – though, to be clear, I’m open to embracing whatever value it ultimately provides – and hope it doesn’t bite ‘em. Ayoub Jabbari and Samuel Gidi are names I have read on the internet. Obligatory “hope they’re good,” and…moving on…

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:

FC Cincinnati Wins! & an Eastern Conference Round-Up

I've got this! Nothing to worry about!

For readers who follow me on Bluesky (not verified, never will be, but I am me!), this is where the latest iteration of The Plan comes together. Faced with the coming of the annual tradition that is Major League Soccer’s long, largely meaningless summer, the idea of identifying and flagging minute shifts within two teams started to weigh more than I could bear. When something has to give, it’s always going to be FC Cincinnati, i.e., my MLS side-piece.

To announce the next Five-Minute Plan (named for how long these tend to last): I’m sticking with Cincy as a center-piece for coverage, but instead of writing stand-alone posts for them, their games will be one of three Eastern Conference games – or game that involve at least one Eastern Conference team (see below) - featured in a weekly wrap-up post that rolls what they did in with the East as a whole. By way of showing that I still love ‘em true, Cincinnati will be the only games I watch all the way through; I wound up spending between 40-50 minutes on this week's other two featured games – with time added in both cases searching for periods where one of the teams improved in some visible way. (In both cases…they did not.)

The inspiration for the shift follows from a desire to watch more footage and write less about it. If I like this well enough, my Portland Timbers may get the same treatment. Oh, and the Scouting Reports probably are really dead at this point. The Mothership stopped embedding links into the Form Guide (fuckers), and that added at least an hour on the linking/sourcing side. With that, let’s get to the first featured game:

Chicago Fire FC 2-3 FC Cincinnati
The Game, Briefly
Lively, and certainly better than expected. Both teams gave as good as they got, or close to it, and pulled off some smart in-game changes to manage the other’s tactics. The Fire started stronger and arguably (scratch that, definitely) got burned when a trip by the referee opened a full-field counterattack and Cincy’s first goal. Outside a very healthy blip at the start of the first half, the visitors had the better of the game, due mostly to a high-press that 1) flustered a Chicago team compelled to play out of the back by its eccentric, yet popular head coach, and 2) led to Cincinnati’s second goal, when Sergio Santos caught substitute CB Sam Rogers admiring the ball near Chicago’s left corner flag. One of the aforementioned in-game changes – alternating the outlet pass between the channel and the sideline – gave a Chicago a goal in between (31st minute, fwiw), when Jonathan Bamba slipped around a wildly over-committed Miles Robinson and played Hugo Cuypers into a foot-race versus Matt Miazga. Chicago came out determined to erase Cincy’s lead – and made a damn good fist of it (is that phrase real?) – but the Orange and Blue gradually shoved them back and started picking off stray outlets passes. Evander capitalized on one of these when Luca Orellano played him into a one-v-one against Jack Elliott. The Brazilian’s secret power of lulling defenders to sleep then suddenly moving really quickly, omigod(!) kicked in from there and Evander five-holed Chicago ‘keeper Chris Brady from, at most, a 20-degree angle. Cincy wasn’t going to lose a two-goal lead and they generally looked more like scoring their fourth goal than Chicago getting their second, but Miles Robinson had one more gaffe to give, and one more goal to gift. That’s a bit harsh against what happened – i.e., Robinson had already stood up Cuypers when Andrew Gutman bumped into as he chased the ball – but the penalty was given and scored by Brian Gutierrez…

Charlotte FC 2--0 FC Cincinnati: On Keeping the Powder Dry and, Oh, Well!

DC has a character called "Everyman." Huh.

While this constitutes extreme (literal) Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking, I do stand by the argument I made for resting players in my Charlotte FC Scouting Report. That’s less to say that Pat Noonan got it wrong than to suggest that giving key starters time to process the CONCACAF Champions League might have been better than immediately throwing them back in the deep end and yelling “SWIM” at them…

…then again, I saw the “Hell Is Real” episode of The On Side and now have no doubt as to which of the above options came naturally to Pat (would not want to golf with him, not as a youngster). With that, let’s talk…

About the Game
Pretty much what one should expect from Charlotte v Cincy in these dark days of the middle 2020s: a game decided by a combination of mistakes, saves, and chances yanked out of ye olde magician’s hat. About 20 minutes passed before the “real” game got started and, for a while, it featured two teams setting up, from wherever their first touch happened, and then sending a more or less successful attack at the opposition’s defense. A good, competent battle between two capable teams, in other words, and that dynamic held until Cincinnati made its first fatal mistake. The game didn’t necessarily end when Pavel Bucha’s ill-advised header gave Liel Abada and Patrick Agyemang(?) a head-start in the foot race toward Roman Celentano’s goal, but Charlotte's first goal did shrink Cincinnati’s odds of getting back into it to a 1:1 ratio with the reputation of Charlotte’s defense – more on that later. With Cincy in Democratic levels of disarray, Charlotte raised the pressure. It took all of three minutes – which, for the record, included time for celebrating the prior goal and the usual amount of milling about – for that to pay off with Charlotte’s second goal of the night and that's where things ended, 2-0 to the home team. Credit to Charlotte – and to Brandt “Every Guy” Bronico for the simple, yet slick assist on the insurance goal – for making all that work against one of MLS’s better defenses (the 2nd half of 2024 excepted), but the likely winner of this game was always going to be the team that scored first. The highlights reminded me that Cincy fired more good shots than I remembered and, on some level, I find that encouraging, even as I continue to have questions about the packaging*. I’ll dig into those details some more below, but I’m still hung up on why Noonan didn’t take 90% of the sting out of any loss out of this game by starting a rotated starting XI. Maybe plausible deniability means more to me than it does to Noonan, maybe he quietly committed to winning the Supporters’ Shield until the possibility evaporates, but the odds of Cincinnati winning this game sucked from the jump, and I thought the mental space of “sure, we lost to Charlotte in March, but we were missing a lot of guys” feels like a good psychological wild card to have later in the season. If nothing else, it beats dragging the regulars through 90 minutes of, again, likely futility. I suspect Cincinnati got their first glimpse of the real tendencies of a new player, but I’ll hold that thought till the talking points.

Charlotte FC Scouting Report: Rest on the Seventh Day

Picard = Zaha

There is no fucking way that errors don’t start slipping into the little info-blurb below, but, consider this the official line till then…

Charlotte FC
1-1-1, 4 pts., 4 gf, 3 ga (+3); home 1-0-0, away 0-1-1
Last Results: DWL
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ SEA (2-2 D); v ATL (2-0 W); @ MIA (0-1)

FC Cincinnati has seen plenty of tough games in this early season – including, the live-or-die scenarios MLS teams only see in the playoffs (didn’t end so good, but ain’t that the CONCACAF Champions’ Cup?) – which gives Cincy fans a body of evidence for weighing how hard Charlotte on the road will be. Everything I’ve seen – e.g., a preseason game against my Portland Timbers (Wilfried Zaha was there!), plus the second half of Charlotte’s 2-0 win over Atlanta United FC and about 40 minutes of watching them come ever-so-close scoring (if only 3-4 times; see the highlights) playing a man up in last weekend's loss at Inter Miami CF – tells me to expect one of those grinding chess matches we usually don’t see until the post-season…or when two sturdy defensive teams come together at any date on the calendar…

…speaking solely in my capacity as a man who has aged to where he appreciates certain things more than others, would that this were not so.

The Big Picture
Dean Smith loves him a 4-3-3 and he has stocked that formation with (give or take) the same players across Charlotte’s first three games of 2025. The back four (from left to right) features super-veteran Tim Ream, Andrew Privett, the really solid Adilson Malanda and, as more wingback than fullback, Nathaniel Byrne. While former Timber Eryk Williamson slipped in there once (and struggled), Smith has stuck with (again, left to right), Brandt “Two-Team Journeyman” Bronico, “Gone with Wind” Ashley Westwood, and Pep “Rally” Biel in his three-man midfield and Zaha, Patrick Agyemang and Liel Abada across the front three. If I had to call any of those three lines Charlotte’s particular strength, I’m going to go against a (possibly imaginary) grain and go with the midfield – or at least that feels right given how goddamn hard they are to play through. With a foundation that sound, all Charlotte needs to do is score. Right?

Charlotte FC 2-0 Portland Timbers: About the Thing That Happened and the Thing to Happen

Evander II is dead, long live [Evander II.]

Over the opening six to eight minutes of today’s final preseason game, the Portland Timbers played some of the finest soccer I’ve seen from them since the salad days of mid-June to mid-July 2024. The defensive lines pressed high and disrupted 90% of what Charlotte FC tried to do and Diego Chara sat deep, playing balls long wide to Jimer Fory on the right and…Eric Miller on the left.

Treat the words after the ellipses as a short way of saying that the lineup that Portland started today – a 3-5-2 (probably?) with Felipe Mora and Kevin Kelsy up top, Fory and E. Miller on either side of a midfield block built around Chara, Joao Ortiz, and David Ayala, a back three of Dario Zuparic, Zac McGraw, and Kamal Miller, and Maxime Crepeau in goal – was not and, ideally, will not, could not, and cannot be Phil Neville’s Plan A for the 2025 campaign. I have no insight into how long regular starters like Santiago Moreno, Jonathan Rodriguez, Juan David Mosquera and [New Evander] will get back on the field. I can only hope that start trickling in soon enough to take advantage of one of the softer opening stretches the Timbers have seen for gods know how long. Between First Kick and mid-April, Portland has four home games, three of them winnable and one against a dismantled and limping Los Angeles Galaxy team, and even if Nashville SC has improved (rumors of a flawless preseason have reached this monitoring station), I’ve seen tougher road games. That’s 24 points up for grabs, the balance of them for the taking. Gods know a strong start would do this team good.

Getting back to today’s 0-2 loss to Charlotte, the remaining 72 to 74 didn’t go so good. Even when the game was somewhat even – aka, the first half – Charlotte managed to turn possession into chances before Portland could. Worse, the Timbers faded out of the game, both gradually and quickly (neat trick, btw), and to a point where forcing a draw looked like the best possible outcome for a generally impotent Timbers team. That possibility went “poof” when Charlotte opened the scoring at the 65th minute by working the ball up Portland’s left and finishing the play by findin Kerwin Vargas in a half-space, in the channel (with the butcher knife). From there, there was nothing left to do but let the clock run out…but then new guy, Joao Ortiz, squared the ball one step away from Tyger Smalls (great name, no notes) and he literally lumbered out the field and finished off one of the clumsiest goals I’ve ever seen scored by a professional (which you can relive through the link above, if you so choose). In a world where Portland looked like they’d ever score, that might have a hurt a little. On this one, it just felt like finishing a thought.

Getting Reacquainted with Charlotte FC, "a Team That Plays in MLS"

I am No.1 player on [MLS Team].

Thumbnail History
I have a nasty habit of picturing Charlotte FC as a team wholly composed of Brandt Bronicos, but that’s a personal problem, not a history. Charlotte only joined MLS in 2022, but they’ve proved to be 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 – but thar be pitfalls on the road to progress. For instance, Charlotte only scored one more goal in 2023 (45) than they did in 2022 (45), but they still allowed the same number of goals in both seasons. 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 (as always, I assume they did this for Miami). Another fun fact: they scored 46 goals in 2024. If you can find a sports book that will spot you generous odds on Charlotte scoring 47 goals in 2025, one could make a dumber bet.

Most of the spicy stuff happens on the player side with this team – e.g., the failed experiment that was DP forward Enzo Copetti, the low-simmering drama around their relationship Polish forward/all-time leading scorer Karol Swiderski – but there is a lot of “Charlotte FC is a team that plays in MLS” level of buzz around the team – at least so far. They have done well with attendance – second-best in MLS in 2024, if Wikipedia’s to be trusted – but I’m guessing they’ll need get a sexier product on the field if they want to stay that high after the new-team novelty wears off.

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; still evening out on zero points beats eating the -1 for missing the playoffs entirely.]

Long-Term Tendencies
While they have been nearer (2023) and farther (2024) from doing so, Charlotte has never scored over the league average for goals scored.

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 Week 23 Snapshot: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Where They Largely Don't Matter + Up From the Depths!

Best sidekick eva! Woo-woo!

Just like that, I’m on a roll. League-wide posts two weeks in a row. Woo-woo!

The preamble for this series/concept went up in last week’s post, so I’m going to just refer anyone who wants to know the “why” of this post back to that one. To give the short version, these aren’t detailed posts for two related reasons:

1) the details generally don’t matter; unless…

2) they either rhyme with or emphasize trends that have been going on for a while.

That doesn’t mean I’ll never flag details – i.e., three of the talking points below are only in here because I spent more time on a result that tickled my fancy – but these posts will mostly traffic in trends. Fans of deep cuts can always mosey over to Matt Doyle’s weekly columns (which I only skimmed this week; on a schedule), or lose as many hours as they’re willing to burn in the distinctly non-local MLS Season Pass archives, but it should take more than some random dude scoring a banger (e.g., Cristian Dajome, for a still-woeful DC United team) to make this short-list…which, for the record, is still longer than the specs said it would be. Dammit.

With that in mind, let’s dig into the notes for MLS Week 23 (again, yes, this is Week 23, look at the current standings (effective for reference only through Wednesday morning, July 17, which a bunch of games get played). Here are 10 Things That Happened on or Before MLS Week 23:

1) Nothing Happened to the Supporters’ Shield Race, Ignore MLS Content
I don’t have a sense of the overlap between the people who find this tiny corner of the internet and who subscribe to the MLS Kickoff newsletter, but Monday’s edition dug into race to the Supporters’ Shield – specifically, all the league-topping teams that lost games last weekend. The list includes, FC Cincinnati (waylaid by Charlotte FC! (see below)), Real Salt Lake (drummed out of Providence Park (see below)), the Los Angeles Galaxy (who couldn’t get going at FC Dallas (see below)), and, in the one game that actually felt like it mattered, Los Angeles FC, who got all but drawn-and-quartered against Columbus Crew SC in LA. Here’s the thing: that didn’t change anything about the relative position of any of those teams. Not one of them. Did a couple distant rivals gain ground on all of those teams? Sure, but only one team looks like it has a real shot at catching up with the pack…hold on...

The Loss v Charlotte FC, Wailing, Lamentations, and Acceptance

The cruelest serving.

You ever get to the end of a long-form math equation only to realize that you did something wrong somewhere and wound up with the wrong result? That’s what the past three match reports I’ve posted (here, here, and here) feel like after the Portland Timbers fucking bummer of a 0-2 loss at Charlotte FC. I’ll get return to the math problem, but let’s start by wrapping up what happened last Saturday with the brevity it deserves.

I don’t see the point of breaking this game down because the work of litigating what went wrong feels like writing the same thing for the…how many games has Portland played in 2024? Eleven? So, yeah, but for some time off early last month, I’d be flagging a lot of the same issues for the eleventh time.

Face-planting disasters in defense? Check! Hell, the Timbers got a two-fer-one out of Zac McGraw last Saturday (see all the way below for links). Struggles with ball progression? Covered! Not on the same page? They weren’t even reading the same goddamn book. It was so bad (how bad was it?), Charlotte’s Enzo Copetti scored a goal in open play. Timbers fans got a brimming plateful of more of the same, basically, only without the thrill of a late rally or the pain of watching an early lead slip away. Another week of dining in Hell’s cafeteria…

Over those past three match reports, I’ve pointed to a green shoot here (Felipe Mora’s back!), a bright spot there (the Timbers’ first complete game of 2024!), and maybe even sprinkled some fairy dust around both to brighten them up a little (Evander will know what to do!). Again, and I cannot possibly stress this enough, the set of problems outlined above has appeared in some form or another in every game this season and the sum of the green shoots + bright spots – (the same problems X 11) = 12th in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference and 24th overall.

Where is the line between looking past bad results and ignoring them? Is it still a green shoot if it doesn’t grow?

Charlotte FC Scouting Report: Yes, I'm Over-Committing Again

Blasphemy.

This one had to go up early due to outside life obligations. Which, rather incredibly, I still have…

Some Basics
Charlotte FC comes into the weekend loitering at 11th in Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference (and 20th overall; at 22nd, your Portland Timbers), on 11 points with a solid home record (3-1-1) and a shit road record (0-4-1, fwiw, but that’s not important right now). They’ve won some real ones – e.g., the controversial 2-0 win over Columbus Crew SC in Week 5 (or Week 6, by the Inter Miami CF calendar) and, more recently, a 3-2 win over Toronto FC (hold this thought) – but one number jumps out for me more than the rest: the 10 goals they’ve scored in 2024. Given the sad state of the Timbers’ defense, what’s better than a feeble attacking team? (That’s right, karma. Bring it.)

The Lineup
Over their past six games, first year head coach Dean Smith has toggled between a 4-2-3-1 (for example) and a 4-3-3 (for example...and, shit, I forgot they signed Junior Urso), if with a slight lean toward the former for home games. The personnel moves around, though not wildly. Kristijan Kahlina consistently starts in goal and Andrew Privett in the center of defense. Privett has partnered with either Adilson Malanda or Bill Tuiloma (hi Bill!) for the most part and Ashley Westwood and Djibril Diani anchor the midfield in front of them. Smith fields a fair mash-up of players in front of that foundation, most often with Belgian midfielder Brecht Dejaegere in either midfield or the frontline, (old (35), and notably non-DP) Scottish midfielder Scott Arfield when he’s available, their new, flashy (aka, expensive) Israeli youth international Liel Abada on or around the left wing, and Kerwin Vargas on the right. Finally, expect to see either Enzo Copetti or Patrick Agyemang starting at the “1” in the 4-2-3-1 or in the middle of the three in the 4-3-3.

As of note as all that, Charlotte hasn’t had a “the man” since Karol Swiderski got loaned out at the start of this season(?). Their highest scoring players – Agyemang and Vargas – both have just 2 goals and 1 assist to their names and it’s a lot of ones and zeros from there. I’ll get into this more later, but I’d rather see Copetti in Charlotte’s starting XI than Agyemang. Speaking of…

Some Reviews from the Local (i.e., Charlotte’s) Subreddit
“Just again reminding people that [Copetti] spent most of his career as a winger and right back in lower division [Argentine] football. How he ended up a DP with a transfer fee is beyond me.”
- Dizzy_Dare_2353, front a post shitting on Copetti, far from a rare sentiment, fwiw

MLS Week 5: Surprises, Pleasant and Unpleasant

Do, or eat, the things that make you happy.

Grand Narrative

First, we’re in the magical time on Major League Soccer’s calendar when nearly every team can talk themselves into believing they’ve got a shot at something better than last season. Hell, they’ve got Minnesota United FC as a live example. That has a lot of teams playing wide open and I love that like Paula Dean loves butter!

Some teams play open and wild and don't go far as they'd like – I’d lump Chicago Fire FC and, if they had any other way of playing besides pedal-to-the-metal, I’d go with DC United and St. Louis CITY FC – and, on the flip side of the same token, that’s why you’re seeing some hot names from 2023 continuing to smolder in 2024, aka, the Ohio teams, aka, FC Cincinnati, Columbus Crew SC. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some surprises, pleasant and unpleasant – beyond Minnesota, you’ve got Red Bull New York, Toronto FC, and a rejuvenated Los Angeles Galaxy team on the pleasant side, and Inter Miami CF on the unpleasant side, because fuck those guys – but I’m still seeing at lot of the usual suspects careening this way and that in the demolition derby already taking shape in the middle of the table.

Even so, the biggest surprises arguably lurk at the bottom of both conferences. I mean, yes, of course you have the San Jose Earthquakes and Austin FC in their natural state (sucking wind, lagging behind), but dream of the riches you’d see had you bet anyone that the Seattle Sounders and New England Revolution would be at the bottom of their respective conferences and playing like they’ll be rooted there for some time.

That’s it for the preamble, only the round-up remains. I believe the format explains itself with the exception of the symbols you’ll see after each result below (all of which include a link to The Mothership’s game summary for the relevant match). Here those are:

* more or less skipped it, coasting on the fumes of past impressions.

(H) – I watched the highlights and checked the box score to update the opinion.

({Numbers]) – those represent the parts of the full game I watched, before raiding the box score.

Getting Reacquainted with Charlotte FC, aka, What a (Stupid) Rule Change Has Wrought

Aww, cute! (But also profoundly embarrassing.)

[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

Charlotte FC joined the league in 2022. They missed the playoffs that season, but made them in 2023. After that, I have a nasty habit of picturing them as a team wholly composed of Brandt Bronicos. Oh yeah, and they lured Bill Tuiloma from my Portland Timbers and I was always something of an overzealous Tuiloma stan. He and I are both thankful that I never figured out where he lived while he was with Portland…

Best Season(s)/”Long-Term” Tendencies

2023, if with a Derringer’s bullet. The only difference I found between 2022 and 2023 was the fact that they scored one goal less in 2022 – i.e., 44 versus 45 in 2023. That’s literally it. Charlotte allowed the same number of goals both seasons (52) and finished 19th overall in both seasons. In other words, they fielded an utterly middling team in both 2022 and 2023, but, because 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, Charlotte cleared the lowered bar. Hold on, it gets better. Their defense actually performed worse against the goals allowed average in 2023, when the average for goals on both ends was 46.8, than it did in 2022, when that same average was 50.3.

Why’d MLS do it? I’m guessing they knew Messi was coming, so they lowered the bar for making the playoffs a little. Sure, that reads like a conspiracy theory, but, GODS, that’s an embarrassing thing to do in any case. To repeat the question that gets asked every fucking season, why does MLS bother with a regular season? Why do any of us? Worse, it's not like this did Charlotte any favors, who got slaughtered in the pointless play-in round.

Identity: Meh, almost distilled meh.

Joy Points: 0, which feels entirely and depressingly apt.

[Ed. – There is no point to a “names to know” section on a team entering its third season…]

The Weakly, MLS Week 11 & 12: A (Long) Telephone-Style Conversation Between Two Weekends

And we are sad about it.

Just a wee wrinkle to the formula for this week’s Weakly: I’m making these posts more of a dialogue with the previous week’s post (here you go, for reference). So long as these Weakly reviews amount to an examination of expectations, why not build the Grand Narrative from that?

Also, and to spare all y’all a little time, I’m going to reduce the review notes for MLS Week 11 into a succession of bullet-points with some links tossed in. With that, let’s have...

The Story of MLS Week 11...
...and in the order they played the games.

New York City fed the doubting rumors about their road form with a 3-2 road loss at a Charlotte FC team suddenly showing the faintest of pulses; Enzo Copetti scored a nice pair.

FC Cincinnati keeps doing the business at home – where they are perfect, btw – with a 2-1 win over DC United (and Alvaro Barreal's net-buster deserves a shout!), while DC reverted to playing the valiant losers...and here’s where I acknowledge that, yes, we have no bananas...I mean, I won’t be doing stand-alone Cincinnati posts anymore. No audience, you see...

Inter Miami CF both exceeded expectations in their 2-1 home win over Atlanta United FC and supported my theory about Atlanta’s shaky defense – i.e., it’s the second shakiest in the East (hello, Charlotte!) and tied for the second-worst defense in MLS with...fuck me, the Portland Timbers. Josef Martinez stepped into history (100 goals scored) with a fun one.

Did Club de Foot Montreal turn the corner with its 2-0 home win versus Orlando City SC, or has Orlando simply become the living symbol for MLS famed unpredictability?

Red Bull New York has looked nothing if not beatable all season long, but would a CCL-weary Philadelphia Union team be the victims they need? Nope! Philly won 1-0 on the road and Gerhard Struber hit the road this morning. Tidy!

The San Jose Earthquakes also got a potentially innervated side, but, as noted below, I think that only helped them see out their 2-1 home win over Los Angeles FC.

MLS Week 4, The Casual Fan's Guide: Hubris & Depth, Plus a Nice Dusting of Disruption

Kinda looks like it's doing The Charleston...

Don’t know about you, but I’d call that a solid weekend. Decent number of goals, some compelling early storylines, a couple teams lifting themselves off the mat, a couple failing to, plus a couple more that leave you feeling those kind of midnight doubts that haunt you in the day. Speaking of the Portland Timbers...

Portland isn’t stumbling alone...and am I thankful for that, but I have extended notes on their gut-wrenching loss to Atlanta United FC in a separate post. The upshot, even with the injuries, they shouldn’t look nearly as dire as they do. Atlanta United generally, and Thiago Almada in particular, backed up the rumors by flaying the Timbers defense like a spatch-cocked chicken (that’s not the word? shit!), though it’s worth noting the teams they’ve beat on their way to the second-best record in MLS.

Moving on, I had Atlanta v Portland in a group of games that I called “On the Edge of Now or Never” in my Week 4 preview post. The basic thought was pretty simple: some teams had to get going before the going gets too far ahead of them. Two teams pulled it off – Club de Foot Montreal and Houston Dynamo FC – while Sporting Kansas City, like, the Timbers, did not.

The results by Montreal and Houston count as disruptors in this early season – i.e., scores that feel like snagging your sock in the carpet – but those weren’t the only kind. I framed another set of games around teams who had perfect records after the first two weeks, only to lose in MLS Week 3. They had better or worse shots at proving they still had the proverbial "it," but here’s the thing: only one of those teams – the New England Revolution – backed up their early start. The rest failed (Inter Miami CF and, especially Orlando City SC) or fell short (Seattle Sounders...huh...skipped that one), and what’s that but more disruption?

All in all, call it a week that poured some sugar in the ol’ gas tank. Nothing crazy, but it kept things lively. Seattle v Los Angeles FC aside (why? Pffft...), I touch on every game below – and that brings me to one more thing that churned my butter (a bad thing, fwiw). I was promised (you promised!) access to full-game replays by the Apple TV package and, near as I can tell, the platform left me hanging on a couple games I would really liked to have seen more of. Given that I’m fully subscribed – and to the point where I still haven’t got around to asking them to refund my original payment – I’m not sure what the hell’s going on, I only know I don’t like it. I don’t like it enough that I could very well make a phone call, maybe even ask to speak to a manager...that’s right. I’m Karen-pissed.

The Weakly, MLS Week...3 (Right?) Review: March or August...Does It Matter?

So...goes he become dicky?

First: if you came here looking for a comprehensive review of Major League Soccer’s 3rd week of action, hit this link (which goes to Matt Doyle’s weekly self-flagellation), listen to ExtraTime Radio, or your favorite local soccer podcast, etc. etc.

Think of this as a review for the casual fan – i.e., people who want to a big-picture sense of which teams look good versus the teams they can see and breathe a sigh of relief when they come to play their local team. In other words, expect the analysis to top out at “they looked good for the win” and “this player seems to be working out” instead of arcane mathematical formulas, charts that look like five-pointed explosions, or chatter about false 9s, inverted fullbacks, and xDAWG...which sounds like something that comes after “bro” sometime around 2:00 a.m.

I say that less to disparage that level of analysis (even as I despair of making sense of those 5-pointed explosions...and don’t even think of trying to explain them because LA LA LA LA LA!) than to more or less admit that I don’t want to think that hard about the game. Knowing the specific ways your team uses its right back and in what formation is neat, sure, but it’s decidedly less significant than the Greatest Question of All: Is It Working? I put aside my “Nate the Great” fantasies a couple decades ago.

Now, let’s kick around MLS Week 3...and I’m going to pull something from Doyle’s column for framing:

“Matchday 3 is in the books, and it gave us all a wonderful reminder of what a grind early-season MLS typically is. Year after year this is the lowest-scoring point of the season because teams just don’t have enough reps to be sharp with the ball – they’re more likely to disorganize themselves than their opponents up until about Matchday 6 or so.”

Confident as I am that he crunched the numbers, I’m looking at Week 3’s four draws and four 1-0 wins and thinking it doesn’t look so different than what we’ll all see come late summer/early fall. There’s an inverse to that argument – specifically, the idea that, as the season (very seriously) wears on, defenses get better, struggling teams invent new and shittier ways to suck the fun out of games, and so on. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt that argument's a hard to sell to anyone who endured the final months of the 2022 regular season.

MLS Weakly, Week 2 Review: At Least 1/3 Interesting

Department of Curt Explanations

The editorial note first: I’ve decided to separate the weekly review and weekly preview posts. It turns out posting content in the literally dead middle of relevant events wasn’t a great idea. Who knew?

I can’t call MLS Week 2 important, but it did entertain here and there. Sadly, it failed to do so in the games starring the two teams nearest and dearest to my heart, the Portland Timbers and FC Cincinnati. I watched all...or enough of those games and wrote extended, sometimes speculative notes about each game. While both played on the road, and neither lived up to their own, or even their fans' expectations (then again, in Portland’s case....), Cincy had the better afternoon and by a fair stretch. Coulda won that one...the Timbers, meanwhile, were fortunate to salvage some dignity after a first half to forget. At any rate, if you’re interested in those extended, speculative notes hit the links below.

Orlando City SC 0-0 FC Cincinnati
Los Angeles FC 3-2 Portland Timbers

To get back to the plot, Week 2 had some clunkers. While I’m not going to ignore those games entirely, I am going to bury them at the bottom of the post and dismiss them with a curt explanation of why I didn’t care about that game and/or your local team. As for the rest, I’ve adopted a new model for these reviews:

I’ll take deeper dives into a total of four games every week, two because the teams involved play either Portland or Cincinnati the following week(end), and two more because they seem important/interesting/amusing.

After that, I’ll review highlights and box scores for any game that strikes me as worth the time – three this week, for the record – and close by spitting on the dregs...oops, shit. Already covered that. Right, on to the big picture.

It’s Week 2, obviously, so, no, none of these results actually matter. Between history and the...things I’ve seen, I expect to see just one of the two teams now topping each conference in the same place by season’s end (Seattle), but I’m also an easy-going kind of guy who’s here for the thrillz, so what can I say but surprise me? Going the other way, I’m not unconvinced that we’ll see, at most, a team or two swap out of the top half of the Eastern Conference as now constituted – i.e., the “Playoff Half” – by the time the 2023 playoffs roll around. The West just looks more fluid to me right now...but can I seriously say that I can’t picture all five of the teams now below the line (for reference, Sporting Kansas City, the Colorado Rapids, the Vancouver Whitecaps, the Los Angeles Galaxy and Houston Dynamo FC) ending in the same mire? No. No, I cannot.

The MLS Week 1 Preview, The First & Only That Goes in Naked

So fucking hot. Like the Rockettes...

A couple things...

First, I’ve decided (tentatively; always tentatively) to return to the Review/Preview formula I’ve used off and on since...2021(?). The broad concept is to very briefly review the action from the prior weekend – and that’s mostly because I’ll be posting on Wednesdays, i.e., well after the rest of you have already read and watched a whole bunch of other shit – and then look forward to the match-ups for the week ahead. The point of the exercise is less to tell you what’s what - I mean, I barely use analytics - than to talk about why this or that match up for the upcoming [MLS Week ___] looks like the bee’s sexy knees among a crowd of bee’s knees.

The review portion will be headlined by a Game of the Week and, if all goes right, that will be one of the games I noted in the prior week’s Review/Preview. And if that doesn’t make sense, it will soon, trust me, I swear to all the gods high, low and venal, etc.

Now, the bigger change.

People who find these posts via twitter already know that I didn't take MLS HQ’s nu, improved playoff format...well, and that included a brief panic over how I’d keep the love alive through 34 more or less meaningless games.

The good news: I came up with a coping mechanism!
The bad news: It will satisfy no one and nothing besides my yen to keep the viewing fresh.

The plan (so far): I’m going to watch and write about the first five games for the Portland Timbers (schedule) and FC Cincinnati (schedule), the two teams I always follow. That’ll change with the first match in April when I (tentatively) plan on watching every other Portland and Cincinnati game. I'll keep to that schedule until...call it August 30, for now, i.e., the end-run, i.e., my best guess at the time things will actually get interesting for both of them. On the weekends I’m not watching those two teams, I’ll be tuning in and writing about two games featuring entirely different teams. I’ll choose based on trends, curiosity about a player, or maybe something truly freakish like a Chicago Fire FC winning streak. I’ve spend more time on either teams for the past five, six years, so why not take advantage of the AppleTV thing and a six to seven months’ worth of meaningless games?