MLS Weakly, 01 30 2021: Ignoring the Big Whale in the Fish Tank

It’s been one of those weeks in the domestic soccer world in which big things have moved very, very slowly. On the one hand, sure, trades great and small continue to come together and fall apart, but an air of irrelevance will swallow them up until the relevant parties land the whale in the fish tank one way or the other…

…which refers, of course, to the ongoing negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between Major League Soccer (MLS) and its players’ union (MLSPA). Because my thinking on that has only got more muddled and frustrated, I’ve decided to bury the comments on it at the end of the post. I mean, why not pretend the lockout threatened by the owners won’t happen all the way up to the moment when it does? Let’s pull of a reverse mullet and put the party in the front and the business in the back.

A couple players moved around - e.g., Kelyn Rowe signed with the Seattle Sounders, Atlanta United signed some old dude (37) for a year, and the Portland Timbers are still somehow working on “finalizing” the signing of right back Josecarlos Van Rankin - which doesn’t give much to talk about on that front. The U.S. Men’s National Team* plays a game tomorrow against Trinidad & Tobgao - and I will watch it, thirsty bastard that I am, while refusing to give in to the hype of the countdown to kickoff timer that U.S. Soccer posted (for now) on its site, or the idea that I’ll watch anything of consequence when I turn in, never mind three of them.

[*Ed. - The U.S. Women’s National Team has three games in February and I still feel…funny, I guess about watching one national team, but not the other. The only response/defense I have is that I need a certain amount of context in order to enjoy (or, more accurately, judge something) and that leaves time to enjoy one national team, and so I stick with the one I started with…even as I believe I won’t live to see the U.S. Men win a World Cup….ooh, a poll!]

Thus beginneth and endeth league-wide news. The league released an outline of the 2021 MLS schedule, but it’s unclear at time of writing that they did that for the fans or for their own purposes - specifically, to put more pressure on the players to give in on the presently-stalled CBA negotiations. Think MLS gave the MLSPA until February 5 to captiula…or, rather, agree to a shaf…or, rather, sign the CBA and move on. Y’know, for the sake of unity, a popular argument these days.

The middle section of this post will, 1) kick around some idle thoughts on the two teams I follow, Portland and FC Cincinnati, and 2) talk as if the season will happen. To start with the easy one.

MLS Weakly 01 16 2021: Player Moves, a SuperDraft, Negotiations & No Firm Schedule

A late-winter/spring of cowboy metaphors...

The phrase “silly season” has made its annual return to the soccer lexicon, but the 2021 North American domestic season doubles down on the term. At time of speculating, nobody knows when the 2021 season will start or what it’ll look like; everyone’s counting on a vaccine to make the whole thing possible, as the fucking moronic distribution of that same vaccine races against one or more new and improved strain of COVID-19 in real-time. Also playing for Team COVID: the naked and belligerent unwillingness among tens of millions of Americans to accept reality and take even baby steps to aid and comfort other Americans.

So, this one’s less a “silly season” than a “really fucking stupid with heaping tablespoons of delusion season," which is considerably harder to navigate and/or understand.

On the other hand, that same fucking stubborn stupidity shares a distant relation to a more positive human trait - hope - and so all concerned will prepare for a 2021 season that will kick off ____________, 2021 and end ____________, 2021 (probably) skipping over one obstacle after another outbreak and so on until The Last Team Standing lifts MLS Cup 2021.

 A whiff of parody will follow these posts for the foreseeable future, and mostly because there’s nothing tangible to write about. Tucked into the notes on the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA; more later) between MLS ownership and the MLS Players’ Association (MLSPA) is the cold, hard fact that no one involved is even talking about opening preseason training, never mind planning for it, which means no preseason games to write about. People have started to talk about whether or not one MLS team or another (e.g., the Portland Timbers) have a shot in 2021’s CONCACAF Champions’ League (CCL), but that competition doesn’t have a start date either, so…

Even qualifying for U-23 soccer tournament in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo remains “slated to unfold” by the end of March, though there will be friendlies for both the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT) and the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) in January, and the USWNT has a whole damn mini-tournament in the second half of February. So, yeah, there is soccer on the horizon, if of a sort not really connected to anything but a vague, hopeful, post-pandemic future…