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...

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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.

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.]

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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…]

Charlotte FC 2-0 FC Cincinnati: Subject/Object

When they come, will you be ready?

This could be me ranting into a vacuum in response to nothing, but I’ve got something to get off my chest, so, here it is.

I see people talking and talking expectations for their team and evaluating results they’ve earned or burned with almost no reference to the quality and, more importantly, the form of the opposing team. It takes its most persistent form in assuming that what works in one game will somehow work in every game; the specific thing could be a tactic or a player, but the basic argument amounts to having a conversation about game as if half the people involved neither participated, nor played a hand in the result. I’m sure some percentage of this gripe follows from me reading a novel in between the lines (often of 280 or fewer characters), and it mostly comes up when I see people bitching about a result that should have surprised them half as much as it did, but this drives me all kinds of fucking crazy - i.e., this has become my king pet peeve in all sports.

Some of soapbox soliloquy pertains to FC Cincinnati’s 0-2 loss at Charlotte FC, though personal application may vary. Related, that hyperlink will be the last time FC Cincy serves as the subject to any thought in this post. Figuratively.

Because I had to wait for the replay on this game, I had an opportunity to absorb the post-game chatter before sitting down to actually watch (most of) the game. [Disclosure: I watched the first 28 minutes, then all the second half, so whatever good shit happened from the 28th to the 46th minute doesn’t exist for me.] As such, I went in knowing things didn’t go well, but without really knowing how or why.

If I had to tell an alien about this game, I’d start by telling Bleep-Borp (for that is its name) that most of the notes I wrote while watching pointed to things Charlotte was doing. To give a couple examples, I couldn’t help but note the energy and overall effectiveness of SuperDraftee, Benjamin Bender, or how Derrick Jones stomped around the middle of Charlotte’s half of the field like an colossus who stood 50% taller than everyone around him (this definitely applied to Luciano Acosta). I’d flag how Christian Fuchs and Joseph Mora’s names came up often enough on defensive actions/stops that I still haven’t been properly introduced to Guzman Corujo and Jaylin Lindsay, even if I’m willing to take it on faith that they actually played yesterday. And, yeah, Kristijan Kahlina made some impressive saves, but the only one that felt like robbery was his save on Acosta’s bright, shining moment at the end of the first half (okeh, yeah, I dipped back in for the last four, five minutes of the first half as well).