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…

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.

MLS Week 12 Review: A Game of the Week, 10 Thoughts, Then Bedtime, MFs!!

Yeah. You feel the breeze, don't ya?

I’ll start with a brief bad news, good news set-up. It might be good news, good news, depending on a couple things.

First, I’m busy enough with other stuff I’m excited about (music, mostly*), that I only want to delve deeply into soccer only once a week. I might sneak in a post here and there and, ideally, kick out a steady stream of polls on twitter, but I haven’t yet rearranged my mental space to make that work. Sit tight. And if you start hating the music stuff (and the politics…so, SO sorry), feel free to ignore/unfollow. Not trying to piss off anyone, just going where the spirit moves me.

Second, I count flagging Toronto FC’s Victor Vazquez early as one of my brighter insights of 2017. As such, I want to more of that and less long-form explanations and about 10 fewer “brain-farts.” Also, I intend to raise the brain-farts to the dignity of “thoughts.”

Finally, I will keep watching one game besides Portland Timbers v. _________ every week (this week's write-up, btw). Reviewing that, plus the 10 thoughts will be my weekly Major League Soccer post. And that’ll go up Sunday nights. And, hey, done with the preamble. Eat shit, Thomas Jefferson…

Minnesota United FC 1-2 Los Angeles Galaxy (of which, I really only saw the second half)

Sincerely ugly for stretches, (the second half of) this game played out with everything rolling Minnesota’s way…except when it came to moving the ball up the middle with any sort of menace. And when you think that little of LA’s Joao Pedro (like me), that reads like the Loons don’t know how to get up the middle. What they do (or just what they did against LA) well, however, is slowly compress the opposing team until they can start shelling them with crosses – and that’s not a terrible idea with Christian “7 goals” Ramirez roaming the box. (And who got the assist?)

Still, careful readers might have noticed that LA won the game – and in Minnesota (home team first, and all that). Credit LA’s Brian Rowe for that…and probably also Minnesota’s reliance on crosses for offense. For all the pressure they put on LA (and on other teams, generally), they can get impatient with their timing, and that makes a low-upside tactic go a little lower. Minnesota fought like hell for that equalizer, which only makes Ramirez’ own-goal more of a shame.

LA, for their part, has no business feeling smug. The problem begins with how a player as hot as Romain Alessandrini can produce so few goals. Gyasi Zardes has been a big part of the problem, that’s by way of being gone to start the season and rusty as nails in an old barn against Minnesota. Again, when someone’s supposed to be your team’s star…

The other thing about LA, they are wimps in the tackle (well, apart from you know who). Minnesota picked up most of its momentum just by way of sticking into their tackles. Part of me says this wasn’t an isolated incident…

Portland Timbers 0-1 Sporting Kansas City: Say, That's Not Right (But It Is)

WWWWAAAHHH!!!!

First, some context: my wife and I had gone on a date prior to the game, and that put me about two sheets to the wind at kickoff. I made it through the game, and then some, but I think I wrapped myself in Sheet 4 or 5 somewhere in there and, in every sense except actually being asleep, called it a night. With that in mind, I’m going to approach this from an impressionist angle.

A feeling sums up the Portland Timbers’ 0-1 loss at home to Sporting Kansas City: a sense of vague yet persistent frustration. Every time a Portland player faced an obstacle, he did it knowing that another obstacle stood beyond that one, and so on to what felt like infinity for some damn reason (or maybe Sheet 3, but I digress). By game’s end, most Timbers players looked not so much tired, as weary*. Enervation in game form: that’s what Saturday’s loss felt like. Running, but never moving, Sisyphus putting his shoulder to the rock again, etc.

Something told me that Portland would never score. I can’t even peg the time this occurred to me – did that come to me before or after KC scored their goal? – but I think I’d experience the former as resignation and the latter as despair, and how far are those two things, really? No team in MLS has had much luck breaking down KC this season, but the Timbers seemed likelier than most teams to do it. Instead, we got a double-layered shit sandwich: a loss at home against a Western Conference rival and an indication that KC’s has both the system and the intent to put their opponents in a submission hold for the length of the 2017 season. They’ll choke off games, basically, and that’s boring, but effective. And boring.

I just sat through the condensed game to fan the fires of memory a little, and here’s where I pick up that asterisk. * Portland’s best chances came late, so my memory failed me a little on that detail (but is that timing issue relevant? you be the judge), but I still maintain there’s a reason my chief mental impression of the night featured Diego Valeri seeming to just scream at referee, Drew Fisher. From the looks of it, it just came out as “WWWAAAAAAHHHHHH!!” It’s like Valeri performance-arted The Scream live, on-field, only instead of wailing about the horror of existence, his felt more like "do you believe this fucking guy?" as a madman's bellow. At least that’s how I remembered it…

MLS Week 22 Match Notes: Sporting KC v. Houston Dynamo

Good hustle...

(I watch the damn things, so it always feels like a waste to not comment on it. I just couldn’t figure out how to get them into the weekly MLS wrap. So I stopped trying.)

Why I Watched
This one pitted the team I count as the most-balanced in MLS (Sporting Kansas City) against the team that I have, once again, arrived at seeing as the Dark Horse of the Western Conference, if not the league, come playoff time (Houston Dynamo).

Overall (Or, Was It Worth It?)
First of all, good intensity (sending a little mental, motivational pat on the ass to both teams): players had to scrap just to get the ball off the flanks. Yeah, it was tough. The quality wasn't so great; KC sputtered pretty badly by the second half, and that came after two attempts to use Roger Espinoza as a catalyst for the attack. Also to its credit, the game was supremely balanced: Dom Dwyer scored over Ricardo Clark in the first half, to which insult Clark responded by later scoring a goal over Dwyer. Well, Clark pulling up with a busted hammy after scoring his knocks off the balance a little. Oh, so does the penalty kick call that KC didn't get. No brainer, that call: the ref absolutely blew that one. Because he couldn't have missed it. Still, it ended in a 1-1 draw, and with lots of pissy...Kansas-area people.

Notes on SKC
KC plodding performance by game's end prompted me to ask my notes whether they thought Sporting Kansas City is the Western Conference's DC United – i.e. a drably competent band of soccer mercenaries (who, bad week for the comparison, dropped freakin' six on Real Salt Lake)? Sometimes I think they play pretty, then I reflect on how much they rely on things like Matt Besler's gargantuan throw, or those blunt-instrument sprints toward the end-line for a cross. The contrast there, Benny Feilhaber's strong, occasionally elegant 2015, or some of those lightning-slick turns Nemeth turned...was it? The last time that KC played Houston, right? (Can't find it...crap.) What's most striking about KC, though, is their depth – e.g. the way they can see Espinoza hobble off and have some serious savvy like Paolo Nagamura stride on, or enough savvy, as when Jacob Petersen spelled Graham Zusi. At any rate, KC felt more energetic and competent this week than they did efficient and purposeful (sorry...terrible sentence). I have questions about their defense, too, but I'm not quite sure how to phrase them yet...think it's about Matt Besler...

Notes on Houston
So goes Ricardo Clark, so goes Houston. It's probably not that simple, but it's close. I can't think of many players in MLS in this 2015, who feel quite so central to their club's success than Clark to Houston. Other players matter (bear with me; I'll pick this up later*), but, for my money, Clark drives Houston on both sides of the ball. The better story than that? DaMarcus Beasley at left back? How cool is that? He beat a nicely-rated, if recovering right back like Chance Myers tonight, coming (defending?) and going (attacking?). Add in Nathan Sturgis – who prowled the midfield with ninja-esque invisibility and (most of the time) effectiveness – and you see why Houston has "solid" down. Attacking, though, is tricky. Some weeks, Barnes has looked as good as any attacking player in MLS. Will Bruin has a sincerely respectable haul of goals, but is it often enough with those two? And how much better would it be if, say, Erick "Cubo" Torres score one or two of those goals where Bruin gets in behind, but with too much field between him and the goal? A lot could depend on that one...

Sporting Kansas City 2015 Preview: Beating More than the Opposition

If only fixing Chance Myers was as easy...

What Happened Last Year
Matt Besler got real tired last year. So did Graham Zusi. So tired. Sporting Kansas City came into 2014 as Major League Soccer's (MLS) defending champions, only to sort of ran out of gas by season's end. New York Red Bull shoved them out in the post-season play-in and KC, presumably, settled down for a nap. KC's problems ran deeper, actually, but remembering it took some work. Injuries hammered KC in 2014. The toll hit their backline, in particular, like norovirus tearing through colons on a cruise ship. Around the time the season rolled into summer, the club's desperation for healthy central defenders was such that they threw then 17-year-old central defender Erik Palmer-Brown into a trial-by-fire that went about as well as those things generally do. Taken together, it was a massacre: Chance Myers, out for the season; Ike Opara, out for the season; Aurelien Collin missed a smaller chunk, but still missed some; regular fullback Kevin Ellis had to shift to center now and again; hell, even Palmer-Brown succumbed before the fat lady sang. The club lost players in key positions, besides, though few generated chatter like Uri Rossell's departure (see: every episode of March to the Match in which KC came up). It wasn't all an unrelenting shit-slog: forward Dom Dwyer had a great season (but, please, people, enough with his marriage) and, yeah, playoffs (wasn’t really close by the end). Still, they're pretty eager to put 2014 behind them from what I hear(d on my way to finding all the stuff above about injuries).
Final Stats: 14-13-7, 49 points, 5th in the East; 48 gf, 41 ga

What's Happened Since
Some noise, but not a lot. If only by name recognition, Roger Espinoza's return from Wigan probably caught the most headlines, but Sporting's more intriguing signing – and, arguably, departed designated player (DP) Claudio Bieler's replacement – was Hungarian striker, Krisztian Nemeth. The club rummaged around MLS for a couple more acquisitions – here, I'm thinking Jalil Anibaba and Bernardo Anor – who rate higher than spare parts (perhaps well higher based on glimpses I've caught of Anor in the 2015 preseason). The offseason saw some big losses as well, including recent-year club icon, Collin. Still, Sal Zizzo, C. J. Sapong, and Soony Saad – and, yes, Bieler – played big enough roles in KC’s set-up for 2014 to leave a few questions open. (All here...because, lazy.)

What to Expect This Year
Sporting coach Peter Vermes and U.S. Men's coach Jurgen Klinsmann recently had a spat over the latter's infamous "fitness" comments. That wasn't just interesting because few MLS coaches preach fitness like Vermes; a question lurks in there as to whether KC's high-energy style leads to fatigue, or even injury, the same way Klinsmann's regimen (allegedly) busts hammies. Anyone who hits the link above about KC putting 2014...oh, never mind, here it is again – should note Besler's comments about how KC "makes it tough on teams," because it's not gonna change. I'm not a huge fan of the pressing style (think it's ugly), but KC worked it well in 2013. And, for all their problems with injury, Sporting's goals against in 2014 fell well on the low side. Vermes does gamble a little by trusting his current defenders' parts to hold together; only Anibaba came in as a true (tested) defender. The news looks brighter news up the field. The as-yet-unmentioned Benny Feilhaber spent a lot of 2014 trying to be Rossell, which he did well enough, but he can do more to bring KC's offensive numbers up closer to goal; a more rested Zusi should help as well. At least a couple of KC's picks (Espinoza, maybe Servando Carrasco) should free up both of them to do that. Uh, already noted liking my glimpses of Anor, but have the same thoughts on Nemeth (not alone), who did a nice thing or two in here (start about 4:00 on that one). Anyway, some things to watch in there.

Overall
I think KC could very well have improved the mix on offense. The defense just has to do well enough...which makes Collin the big loss for me. Still, I bet they overcome. And finish stronger than last year...if the injuries don't bite 'em again. Man, that Vermes has cajones...