Level Set 2, Sporting Kansas City: 2025 & History, A Legend/System Falls

Ride the rainbow.

What follows is a brief history of Sporting Kansas City, 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’ll always quietly love them for coming into the league as the Kansas City Wiz and with a rainbow motif on most of their early kits. The fact they thought switching “Wiz” to “Wizards” made it better? Chef’s fucking kiss. The team itself, however, has never been particularly lovable. Preki, one of MLS’s first, great attacking players, lined up for them over their early seasons (and caught the eye of U.S. Soccer doing so), but most of SKC’s most famous players are defenders – e.g., Nick Garcia, Richard Gough (briefly, I think), Matter Besler, Ike Opara, Jimmy Conrad (fungi) – defensive midfielders – e.g., Matt McKeon, Diego Gutierrez, or, quite possibly “the most SKC player” ever, Roger Espinoza – or goalkeepers, e.g., e.g., Tony Meola, Jimmy “White Panther” Nielsen, and Tim Melia. They’ve had some fun teams – think the 2021 team when both Daniel Salloi and Johnny Russell had banner seasons, or the Benny Feilhaber years (2013-2017, effectively) with Krisztian Nemeth, peak Dom Dwyer, and Claudio Bieler running in front of him, and SKC Eternal Graham Zusi pitching in from the wide spaces. Those teams had some successes – MLS Cup in 2013, a cold fucker played on the U.S. equivalent of the Russian steppes, but mostly U.S. Open Cups – and, despite the fact they scored more goals in my head than they did on the field, those teams still represent the beginning of a time when this team finally put some effort into entertaining. Still, I have never stopped thinking of them as the team that rode Meola and an 11th-minute goal by a Danish forward on a professional pit-stop (Miklos Molnar) to victory in one of the dullest MLS Cups ever played (2000). While I wouldn’t quite say their best days are behind them, the trophies have gotten smaller since their 2013 MLS Cup, and then stopped coming altogether after 2017. To be clear, that doesn’t represent some kind of radical drop-off – SKC has made the “real playoffs”(i.e., the quarterfinals or better) in five of the past eight seasons – they’re just not winning anything…and most of those playoff experiences stalled at the quarterfinals. And yet, that combined record raises them to sixth-best all-time team on the Joy Points Scale. I suspect most long-time fans of MLS associate them with seemingly eternal head coach Peter Vermes’ aggressive, grinding approach to the game, but that doesn’t hold up as well as it used to. And that could be what’s going wrong. Or was going wrong…

MLS Western Conference Round-Up: Checking the Blowouts & the Wrong End of the Standings

I go with the wind, I am the wind. That is me. True story.

If all goes according to plan – and if you’re holding your breath, by the gods, I urge you to stop – I will top next week’s version of this post with Portland Timbers’ match reportage. For anyone who’s curious what that will look like, it should be something like the Eastern Conference round-up posted to this same channel last night. But also shorter. I posted earlier on the Timbers letting two points slip away versus LAFC last Saturday, but fuck it, it’s early and Portland’s in fourth place and when’s the last time that happened. For the record, this used to be the kind of thing I would look up, but The Mothership has stripped a lot of the links and connectivity out of their archived material, which makes that kind of thing a lot harder…what a bunch of assholes.

A final programming note: most weeks, I will watch whichever team the Timbers have next, but there’s no goddamn way I’m sitting through Austin FC beating the Galaxy by one damn goal when I’ve already stared at both of those teams more than anyone but their biggest fans should have to.

Right, let’s kick around what happened in MLS’s Western Conference last weekend. Just the good shit.

Seattle Sounders 3-0 Nashville SC
Why This Game?
A combination of trying to figure out what’s going on with Nashville and keeping your enemies close…

The Game, Briefly (watched 1-45)
First, both teams rested their share of regular starters, if for reasons unknown – Albert Rusnak and Jordan Morris for Seattle, and Edvard Tagseth, aka, Nashville’s Engine – and, against the even numbers in the final stats, the game was over by the 34th minute. As confessed above, I only watched the first half (fine…most of it), but I caught at least five of Nashville’s shots on goal in the full highlights and never saw them serve up anything more threatening than a kitten in a sombrero. One li’l curiosity to note: wily veteran Andy Najar played some role in at least two Seattle goals, one by commission (the first goal), the other by omission (what was he doing so far from Paul “Everyman” Rothrock on that third goal?). Pedro de la Vega got a lot of hype in the Official post-game chatter (aka, MLS Wrap Up...gotta stop watching that bilge), but even he credited Obed Vargas for teeing up his goal. The Sounders overwhelmed Nashville, no question, and took just 15 minutes to bury them. Sometimes a game just gets away from a team.

Sporting Kansas City Scouting Report: Mind the Banana Peel

See it, know it, avoid it. Also, cool shoes!

If that home loss to a limping Los Angeles FC side wasn’t in the sample, I would feel a bit less nervous about this one. Which is to say, I’m still a bit nervous. And that’s very much despite this…

Sporting Kansas City
1-5-1, 4 pts., 8 gf, 12 ga (-4); home 1-2-1, away 0-3-0
Last 5 Results: LDLLW
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ DC (1-2 L); v MIN (3-3 D); v LAFC (0-2 L); @ FCD (1-2 L); v STL (2-0 W)

Notes from the Field
Because they’re more mystery than I like, I clocked time over two of Sporting KC’s recent home results: the salvation draw versus Minnesota United FC from some weeks back and last weekend’s first-of-2025 win over St. Louis CITY FC; for reasons that look more misplaced with each passing week, I only glanced at their more recent home loss to LAFC…I got nuthin' besides, hype sticks, man...

Somewhat related, and no doubt because I only watched them at their best, I don’t get how Sporting KC isn’t better this season. Sure, Minnesota lit them up for three goals before they stirred – two of them easy as you like, the other a bomb from Hasani Dotson – but they kept their heads, stuck to what looked like the plan (still under Peter Vermes, fwiw), and fought back for their first point of the season. They never looked actually bad in that one, at least not any time I was watching, and most goals against played out more as a Minnesota sucker-punch (TM) than failure. Against that, Timbers fans should review some or all of the win over St. Louis to appreciate the worst-case scenario. Official stats be damned, SKC all but dissolved St. Louis’ press and strung together extended, suffocating spells of possession over both periods I watched (1st through the 15th, then 65-85). Any time St. Louis got on the ball, they struggled to do much with it; SKC defenders even shoved around Joao Klauss here and there. It took them most of the game to score their first goal and it took them many, many passes to create that goal. It felt like 20+, some under pressure, all of them under control, but the final look was clean, even slick. Just to note it, that could very well be the greatest moment of Sporting Kansas City’s season so far.

Getting Reacquainted with Sporting Kansas City, MLS's Good Team Going Through Some Things

What passes for thrills in KC, in player and shirt form.

Thumbnail History
I’ll always quietly love them for coming into the league as the Kansas City Wiz and with a rainbow motif on most of their early. The fact they thought switching “Wiz” to “Wizards” made it better? Chef’s fucking kiss. The team itself, however, has never been particularly lovable. Preki, one of MLS’s first, great attacking players, lined up for them over their early seasons (and caught the eye of U.S. Soccer doing so), but most of SKC’s most famous players are defenders – e.g., Nick Garcia, Richard Gough (briefly, I think), Matter Besler, Ike Opara, Jimmy Conrad (fungi) – defensive midfielders – e.g., Matt McKeon, Diego Gutierrez, or, quite possibly “the most SKC player” ever, Roger Espinoza – or goalkeepers, e.g., e.g., Tony Meola, Jimmy “White Panther” Nielsen, and Tim Melia. They’ve had some fun teams – think the 2021 team when both Daniel Salloi and Johnny Russell had banner seasons, or the Benny Feilhaber years (2013-2017, effectively) with Krisztian Nemeth, peak Dom Dwyer, and Claudio Bieler running in front of him, and SKC Eternal Graham Zusi pitching in from the wide spaces. Those teams had some successes – MLS Cup in 2013, a cold fucker played on the U.S. equivalent of the Russian steppes, but mostly U.S. Open Cups – and, despite the fact they scored more goals in my head than they did on the field, those teams still represent the beginning of a time when this team finally put some effort into entertaining. Still, I have never stopped thinking of them as the team that rode Meola and an 11th-minute goal by a Danish forward on a professional pit-stop (Miklos Molnar) to victory in one of the dullest MLS Cups ever played (2000). While I wouldn’t quite say their best days are behind them, the trophies have gotten smaller since their 2013 MLS Cup, and then stopped coming altogether after 2017. To be clear, that doesn’t represent some kind of radical drop-off – SKC has made the “real playoffs”(i.e., the quarterfinals or better) in five of the past eight seasons – they’re just not winning anything…and most of those playoff experiences stalled at the quarterfinals. And yet, that combined record raises them to sixth-best all-time team on the Joy Points Scale. I suspect most long-time fans of MLS associate them with seemingly eternal head coach Peter Vermes’ aggressive, grinding approach to the game, but that doesn’t hold up as well as it used to. And that could be what’s going wrong. Or was going wrong…

Checking in at MLS Week 19: Trends, Hard Facts and Notes!

Quicksand is a major theme for this one.

Welcome to the MLS Week 19 Round-Up – and, again, with 14 teams on 19 games played, 12 teams on 20 games, and the remaining teams below that, this is MLS Week (Fucking) 19.

With the rush to stack the schedule before Leagues Cup 2024, plenty of games have taken place since my last global review of “Where Things Stand” in MLS (dated May 19, 2024) – five to six for most teams, seven for some outliers, and just four for the freakshow that is Columbus Crew SC – so today felt like a good day for an update to global picture.

The format for this one departs from past editions in that I’m going to lead with some top-line trends, i.e., items that, now that we have enough season behind us, feel sticky enough to feel real. I’ll close the post with the biggest picture stats for every team in MLS – e.g., their record, the results from the past 10 games, and where they played them – plus the one thing I’d tell someone about them if they asked. Full disclosure, I’m basing that note less on deep, first-hand knowledge of any given team, than on where those biggest-picture stats suggest they’re trending. Speaking of, let’s talk about those trends:

1) The Top 3 Teams From Each Conference
All three of Inter Miami CF, FC Cincinnati and Los Angeles FC have between seven (Miami) and eight (Cincy and LAFC) wins over the past 10 games. All three of Real Salt Lake, Red Bull New York and the Los Angeles Galaxy have racked up fives wins over their past 10. A few other teams are keeping that five-win pace – e.g., Columbus Crew SC, my Portland Timbers, (stunningly) Charlotte FC, and, if in a very much less promising way, New York City FC (see No. 3 below) – but those teams are piling up those Ws from a deeper spot in the table. That’s to say, the top 3 in both conferences look pretty secure for now, even if the Red Bulls have both Charlotte and Columbus nipping at their heels (and the Red Bulls have at least one warning light flashing). The have v have-not gap feels more real in the West and, so far, involves more teams than it has in recent past seasons. We’ll see how long that holds, but to flag one detail that helps explain the widening gap between the top teams and the ones getting sucked to mid-table…

2) The Three Straight Losses Club
All seven of the following teams have lost their last three matches: DC United, New York City FC, the Philadelphia Union, Toronto FC, Minnesota United FC, the San Jose Earthquakes and Sporting Kansas City. Two of those teams – San Jose and SKC – have seen an actually horrifying number of losses fall upon them whilst looking up from the bottom of a pit, but that run of crap form has real potential to tank the 2024 season for the rest of those teams, if with the arguable exception of NYCFC. Fairly related to that…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Sporting Kansas City: It Ain't What You Do, It's the Fact That You Did It

To any Portland Timbers fans feeling underwhelmed by last night’s 2-1 win over Sporting Kansas City, please see the lament from a handful of SKC fans at right.

Real Quick Game Summary
Neither team did much over the first half, even if, in keeping with the final score/numbers, Portland did a little more. There was feeling up, out and everything in between and the Timbers getting the best traction with long balls to Jonathan Rodriguez. SKC had space to play – and that made them look better at times – but Portland erased that at the start of the second half by pushing their line of engagement into SKC’s half. That rattled out a turnover in a good place that Portland exploited through some next-level play by Evander (love the way he swims through that first challenge) and the kind of subtle cross Portland pays him to deliver. Even if the final result lacked for elegance, SKC equalized by paying the Timbers back in the same currency – i.e., they just got on Portland as they tried to play out of the back – but Portland ultimately got their foot on the ball and found the winner through Evander after playing volleyball between the channels (video below). They had to wait a few for Drew Fischer to bless it – as he should have, because Antony wasn’t active in the play – but both the goal and the win stood up, if with a late, great save from Maxime Crepeau to haul it over the line.

Now, before anyone gets carried away about last night’s defensive performance, know it came against a team that, counting last night's loss, hasn't won in eight games and that has lost its last five. Sporting Kansas City is a bad team. I can’t say how much they lost when Erik Thommy went out, but I’m highly confident it didn’t help. The Timbers had to win this game. And, credit to them, they did. The next one’s coming soon and, gods willing, I’ll squeeze in something on that, but I’m going to close this post with (new feature/concept!):

Getting Reacquainted with Sporting Kansas City, aka, MLS's Barely Magical Wizards

When at his best, that's when you gotta watch out.

[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
Seeing Sporting Kansas City as the fourth-best team in MLS history makes sense and doesn’t at the same time – especially given all the ups and downs (more than I expected or remembered, certainly) and the fact that they had their last championship season 11 years ago. They alternated between success and failure more over their first 14 seasons, reaching MLS Cup here (e.g., in 2000 and 2004) and missing back-to-back post-seasons there (e.g., 1998 and 1999 and again in 2005 and 2006). SKC became more consistent over the back 14, missing the playoffs just three times, but, after their second MLS Cup, the trophies got smaller and then stopped coming. They’ve fielded some famous goalkeepers – e.g., Tony Meola, Jimmy “White Panther” Nielsen, and Tim Melia – and as many famous defenders (e.g., Ike Opara, Jimmy Conrad, Matt Besler), and I suspect most long-time fans of MLS associate them with seemingly eternal head coach Peter Vermes’ aggressive, grinding approach to the game. Kings of the 1-0 win, basically, or even claiming the game in penalties after they throttled the life of the other team’s attack and couldn’t shove in a goal of their own: that’s probably unfair, but that’s the reputation I hold in my head. We’ll see how that holds up below, but I’ll always quietly love them for coming into the league with beautiful rainbows on their kits and literally starting as the Kansas City Wiz. The fact they thought switching “Wiz” to “Wizards” made it better? Chef’s fucking kiss.

Best Season(s)
I might get some dissents on this call – particularly given the way it centers MLS Cup 2013, a game they won on penalties over Real Salt Lake in the coldest final in league history – but I’m going with 2012 to 2017. Despite some shaky finishes (e.g., 10th overall in 2014 and 2015), SKC added three U.S. Open Cups (in 2012, 2015, and 2017) to their second MLS Cup. The counterpoint is 2000, the season they did the double (winning Cup and Shield), but the league had such claustrophobic margins back then and I genuinely believe they built their best, most stable long-time roster in the 2010s.

Long-Term Tendencies
The loose impression holds up pretty well, honestly: a couple exceptional seasons aside (some recent, e.g., 2018, 2020, and especially 2021), SKC generally sticks at average or under it in terms of goals scored (18 of 28 seasons) and generally gets at average or under on goals allowed (17 of 28 seasons). Think a lot of stacked ‘n’ stubborn defenses, combative midfields and an occasionally-interrupted succession of attacking stars to turns Ds (or Ts) into Ws. For what it’s worth, I do think this is shifting, if slowly, and with Vermes’ blessing. He’s mellowed. Except when it comes to working the refs.

FC Cincinnati 3-3 (4-2) Sporting Kansas City: My Butthole Is Still Puckered

The bar for a bad performance, in green and black.

I doubt any team in Major League Soccer can make as strong a case that they should “save it for league” as FC Cincinnati. When you’ve got a shot at a record-setting season, I mean, why not?

At the risk of overselling the argument, what happens to Cincy’s chances of winning the Shield (which I covet) if, say, both Matt Miazga and Obinna Nwobodo went down?

Cincinnati fans may or may not have got a glimpse of that in yesterday’s freakishly nervy, overtime, skin-of-their-teeth-and-chinny-chin-chins 3-3, plus 4-2 in PKs win over a Sporting Kansas City team that usually slums in every house they visit. SKC came within a minute of winning the game outright, but, per the recent run of results, they self-sabotage often and with alacrity. Now...the tale of the tape.

The conversation about how much squad rotation hurt the cause starts with Nick Hagglund’s nightmare start, which featured two mistakes so glaring and close enough together as to give aid and comfort to the reigning MLS King of Boner performances, Austin’s Kipp Keller. Hagglund bookended his three-minute nightmare with a net-bursting own-goal on the front end and a blown marking assignment on a set-piece on the back end that gifted SKC’s Danny Rosero a point-blank header – the Mullet of Mistakes, if you will (that’s, uh, business in front, par...never mind).

Cincinnati responded on the field before it showed up on the scoreboard. They worked the historically vulnerable right of SKC’s defense with their own historically (very much) preferred left side of their attack like an early-80s pro wrestler struggling to get into the figure-four leg-lock – and do hold that thought because it became a major theme of the night. SKC punched back harder than expected: in keeping with head coach Peter Vermes’ theory of where they are, Kansas City does, in fact, move the ball quite fluidly; they got from their end of the field to Cincinnati’s well throughout the first half, sometimes artfully. One sequence in particular – e.g., the one that ended with Johnny Russell almost breaking in but-for Yerson Mosquera’s trailing leg – had the broadcast declaring this one of SKC’s best games of the 2023 season. “Vintage Sporting Kansas City” they called it...

MLS Week 8 Review: Upsets & Threat Assessments

Old Steve Buscemi movie. Parting Glances. Huh.

First, here’s literally everything that happened.

Charlotte FC 2-2 Colorado Rapids [Skipped]

Columbus Crew SC 1-1 New England Revolution [Skipped]

Club de Foot Montreal 0-1 DC United [Skipped]

New York City FC 2-1 Nashville SC [Glance]

Toronto FC 2-2 Atlanta United FC [Skipped]

Red Bull New York 1-1 Houston Dynamo FC [Skipped]

Austin FC 0-0 Vancouver Whitecaps [Skipped]

Chicago Fire FC 2-2 Philadelphia Union [Glance]

FC Dallas 2-1 Real Salt Lake [Glance]

Minnesota United FC 1-2 Orlando City SC [Glance]

Portland Timbers 4-1 Seattle Sounders [a celebration, aka, my match report]

San Jose Earthquakes 3-0 Sporting Kansas City [Glance]

St. Louis CITY FC 5-1 FC Cincinnati [some defensive mourning, aka, my match report]

Los Angeles Galaxy 2-3 Los Angeles FC [Glance]

Now, let’s do our best to make sense of it – or to squeeze meaning out of it at the very least.

To start with the housekeeping, Again, I link to The Mothership’s match summary-fest inside the final score for every game. Next, when you see “Glance” between the brackets, that means I watched the highlights and scoured the box score, etc. “Skipped” means I didn’t bother with anything beyond big-picture context, because my mama gave me good sense. The rest of whatever flows through my fingers below comes from looking at the current standings (blink, or you might miss ‘em), the Form Guide, and Matt Doyle’s weekly burden.

With all that out of the way, let's start with the biggest of pictures. I think we can all agree that this weekend dished out some dynamite upsets, most of them toward the tail end of Saturday. MLS Week 8 continued to keep things lively by having a couple teams live up to their promise – e.g., Dallas with the home win over RSL and NYC with the home win over Nashville. On the one hand, it’s a lot of draws and garbage games after that (e.g., watching DC United beat Montreal at home has the unwholesome feel of conceptualizing a bad over-50 team play a good U-12; still, good for DC, even if I skipped it). So, all in all, not a bad weekend, there’s enough have/have-not stuff going on to goose the story lines going forward, and so on...

...but you’re still thinking about it, aren’t you? Why did I choose the six games I glanced at, while skipping the other six games? And Columbus v New England was one of them? Son....

Please, let me explain.

Portland Timbers 7-2 Sporting Kansas City: A Viking Funeral for a Dinghy at Sea

Oh, how I laughed. So, so loud.

When I went to see the live-action Speed Racer, I went in with expectations as low as I was high. I walked out on Cloud 9, wearing one of those smiles that doesn’t go away till you fall asleep and, I’m guessing, pupils big as saucers. I expected nothing, basically, and walked out feeling like a won the lottery. Then again, the same thing happened with Cats. Cats was fucking terrible, but, goddamn, did I have fun watching it…

That’s the only experience I can come up that matches what happened tonight in the Portland Timbers positively rolling 7-2 win over Sporting Kansas City. Everything thing I’d seen and read going in prepped me for SKC to compact its defense and for the Timbers to smash tiny fists against it for 90 minutes, plus stoppage time. Instead, the second half happened, and very early on.

Because drawing talking points out of a blip within a blip feels like the greatest fools errand since the invention of the snipe hunt, I won’t let the magic of seven goals scored carry me too far in either direction; I’ll neither hype the result, nor wallow in its flaws. In the biggest of pictures, the fact that SKC has sucked more than their share this season falls well short of a state secret, so I didn’t expect anything more from them than energetic resistance. And, to give a general opinion, how have they not moved on from Peter Vermes? His shit’s been baking in the sun for a year or three by now…

In my mind, the entire game turned on SKC handing Portland the first goal, and so cheaply too. The defenders parted and, lo, goal opened wide for Bill Tuiloma. Nothing about that goal made sense; all that time to organize and you let a guy shoot free from eight yards out. The game didn’t end there, of course - they had a whole damn second half of slapstick ahead - and SKC briefly threatened to get back into it. I put that period into the space between the 10th minute and the 25th, and it produced a couple shots from range, but not much more. Things loosened up a bit over final 20 minutes of the first half, but neither team did much; as recorded in one strand of the mini-multiverse of twitter threads I had in this game, I begged for someone, anyone to find inspiration around Portland in the first half, because I could not.

An MLS History Project: 1997, The First Great Roster Build

Drawing your attention to the two dumb, squat trophies in the foreground...

Dang. It’s already getting harder to keep shit straight. I’ve got a thin prompt for one – mostly a table of standings, a handful of names (specifically, top goal scorers, players of the week/month), and who finished where – and digging much more than that violates the spirit of the project (started with 1996). So, I won’t…

Fortunately, I have a ready-made theme for 1997 – one based on the simple, accidental reality that I moved from Portland, OR to Washington DC in early ’97 (by Amtrak; I can’t recommend the method enough, young people). As noted in the post on 1996 (link up there), the first MLS Cup churned my loins into a passionate froth, so I was already in the tank for DC United when the logic of moving there made enough sense to get me there. The season had started before I arrived, but I still bought season tickets and spent the year going to RFK. Alone, too. I had company for a couple games, and I was lucky to have some close friends in the area at the time, but I still went to and watched* the overwhelming majority of games all on my lonesome.

To share one memory from those games at RFK, one that really stuck with me, there was a concourse between the set of seats in the field and the one immediately behind it, and my tickets were in that second tier of seats. Just about every game there, some very young woman in summer dress (e.g., tube-top, tank-top and short shorts, it hardly mattered) would walk that concourse to a chorus of cat-calls, whistles, and other unmentionable sounds. Genuinely icky, obviously, and that’s just 25 years ago people and that chorus was loud.

To turn to a happier memory, I also saw DC host Chivas de Guadalajara that year in an early iteration of the CONCACAF Champions League. The game ended in a draw, and DC looked all right doing it too. To be clear, this was an American team, with a couple Bolivian ringers (Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno) playing mighty Chivas to a draw. Sure, it was in DC – probably helped it was August, and I remember the tournament rules somehow bending in MLS’s favor as well – but I was so used to watching DC win by then that it all made sense.

The Late Tackle, 11 29 2016: Riding the Coaching Carousel

All carousel horses should like exactly like this...

Outside a couple fairly specific places, this wasn’t a big day in the domestic soccer world. From my tiny corner of it, it feels like most people are waiting for Toronto and Montreal to kick off – and, there, the most interesting thing I read today posed the pertinent question of which of those two teams would give fans and neutrals the best game (no spoilers…).

Coaching Carousel (Note the One With a Shot at Grabbing the Brass Ring)

Peter Vermes signed a contract extension with Sporting Kansas City, something that would have pissed me off were I an SKC fan (related: I’d really like to poll that fan-base, ‘cause I don’t like Vermes at all; maybe they do, though). Elsewhere, Minnesota…hold on, I wanna get this right…there it is, Minnesota United FC hired former Orlando City SC head coach Adrian Heath to guide them into their first season. The most this one gets out of me is a shrug; I had a hell of a time caring about Orlando over the last couple seasons, but, when I did check in on them, Orlando looked like a team with a rock-star set-up (e.g. Kaka & The Other Soccer Players) and issues with in-game discipline. Heath seems middling, basically, pending further evidence…

…though let the record show that I’d like to see Minnesota do all right in MLS.

The situation in Los Angeles, on the other hand (see note), positively teems with possibilities good, bad and franchise-busting. Only now do I realize that I tracked Bruce Arena’s re-ascension to the U.S, Men’s National Team without ever really finishing the thought. Arena leaving must feel at least a little like a “dad has a second family, and they are better” moment for Galaxy fans – and with good reason. It’s not so much that there aren’t a lot of coaches like Arena in U.S. circles: it’s fair to ask if there are any. With Robbie Keane departing, the next year in LA has a very real “without-a-net” quality to it. Soccer By Ives’ write-up flagged a couple worthwhile talking points as well – e.g., the preference/philosophical discussion for a domestic coach, rather than a foreign one; an intriguing list of names for building blocks (e.g. Giovani dos Santos, Jelle Van Damme, Gyasi Zardes and…wait for it, Sebastian Lletget). At any rate, that whole transition ought to be fun…and with reasons for falling in some truly fascinating places.

The Transfer Tracker (and Its Discontents)

Today, MLSSoccer.com teased fans with a headline/photo combo that reads, “The Tracker: Four Clubs Announce Roster Moves.” This isn’t an issue of passing on bad information – it’s actually great to have all those details in one place – so much that it’s almost impossible to find those four particular moves amongst, well, all those details. Maybe just put the word “UPDATE,” or even just an asterisk in front of the new ones, yeah?

Again, Why I Started Doing This

A young American (of whom I knew nothing, and know only a little now) played for Italy’s Fiorentina this past weekend – and against AC (Freakin’) Milan. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Josh Perez.

And, finally, yo, where was The Kickoff this morning, MLS? I mean, I’m just a one-man shop and I’m posting crap…wait. Goddammit. I forgot something. Screw it. Tomorrow. I'll get it tomorrow...