MLS Week 23 Review + a Wee St. Louis Scouter: May the Good Vibez Continue

A bit too on the nose...

So…fun fact: I took a longer look at three of the games I said “did not interest me” for the most American reason of all: I don’t like draws because they don’t give me much to work with. I am bound neither rules nor man…

I wouldn’t call MLS Week 23 “bad,” not in the formal sense, but the ground under my feet feels firm enough for me to argue that not a lot happened. Yeah, yeah, name an MLS Match Day when that doesn’t hold, but my feet won’t take one step off this soapbox till I’ve said my piece. That’s not the biggest deal, not with 11 games still remaining for most teams, but the gap between the good, the mid, and the irrelevant tightened a little on Saturday. For reference, the relevant lines break as follows, and in both conferences: 1-5 = good; 6-9 = mid; the rest = bad. That’s right, I said it. I’ll speak better of the teams below when they do better week in and out.

Speaking of, nearly every team the league has a midweek game this week. To paraphrase the inimitable, yet much-mocked Hudsucker Proxy, your future is now.

With that, it’s time to kick around last weekend’s results. As with every week’s edition (which have always existed and been reliably delivered since 1996, no, I have not shut down this blog three to four times), I value some results more than others and thus spend more time on them. In a reverse of last week’s post, this week’s post starts with those results, then speed-runs the rest. In the order I looked at ‘em…

Columbus Crew 3-0 Colorado Rapids
The prime directive here was to determine whether or not Colorado, of the now 2-9-1 road record, could win any road game. The highlights showed a team drowning over the opening 30 minutes and, despite spending most of the game only 0-1 down, never really recovering. The Rapids caught up on the numbers side before the final whistle, if just a little, but a Columbus team that hadn’t won in five games padded the final score smartly courtesy of goal contributions by new kid, Gonzalo Tapia; his tricky-shit goal, Columbus’ second, for reference. As for the Rapids, their home record (8-3-0 currently) looks like a good bet to get them to the playoffs, but all signs point to them needing to host if they want to go anywhere.

A Seattle Sounders L'il Scouter & Portland v the Dregs of the West

Step One: less of this.

The Eastern Conference Re-Entry post took a pretty linear shape (and thanks to anyone who read it!), but, for reasons of local rooting interests, this Western Conference Re-Entry post will take a different shape.

It’ll start with a brief Scouting Report on the Portland Timbers’ next, dreaded opponent, the Seattle Sounders (aka, the Spoiled Rich Kids of the Middle North, aka, Cascadia’s Somehow Successful Fail-Sons). The section that follows expands on the template for the Eastern Conference Re-Entry by flagging all the teams within reach of the Timbers in the standings, whether above or below, and the post ends with a speed-run through the teams in the top half of the Western Conference table. With Portland closer to the bottom of the table than the top, that last section will be reduced or cut entirely as time allows…fwiw, I don’t know if it’s going to happen anymore than you do. Every day is a surprise/miracle. Even if neither are very good. [UPDATE: That section was cut, notes on the top eight in the West are written into the record indirectly and by suggestion.] Ahem. Getting on with it!

Before looking forward, I wanted to link to the long look back I posted right before MLS turned off the lights for the World Cup break. It was fairly straightforward, content-wise - just listing all the players and what I think of their contributions, talents and individual potential; you won’t see many rays of sunshine in there, because the sun struggles to get all the way down to 13th place. With that in mind (including the post), I wanted to start with a glance ahead to the next four games – e.g., at Seattle, v Dallas, v RSL, v Seattle - regardless of who’s lining up and giving direction to the starting eleven. (At time of posting, that is still interim head coach, Jack Cassidy), but Jeremy Peterman posted a quicky to Bluesky saying that the Timbers may report a new head coach this week.) The two things I liked to see:

1) Coherence in the Attack
Too often under Phil’s “guidance,” the Timbers functioned as a competitively dysfunctional improv troupe – i.e., too little “yes-anding” and too much “fuck it, guess I’ll just kick the ball.” Seeing the attacking pieces coordinate as they move on Thursday would be enough to make me coin the word "delief" (a delight meets a relief).

Level Set 6, St. Louis CITY FC: Came in Like a Wrecking Ball...Then the Pendulum Swung the Other Way

I'll retire this image the day St. Louis makes me.

What follows is a brief history of St. Louis CITY FC, who, with just three seasons behind them, merit the brevity, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have (N/A). 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
St. Louis CITY FC came into MLS like a wrecking ball in 2023. Their inexhaustible high-pressing style gave them an advantage over teams shaking off early season rust and allowed St. Louis to run up the score against one team after the other. Over the first nine wins in franchise history – which included five straight wins in as many games – only the Portland Timbers (of all teams) limited them to two goals; St. Louis bagged three or more against every other team. But for the four losses and one draw that came between wins five and nine, St. Louis presented as a juggernaut. Brazilian forward Joao Klauss led the first wave, at least until injury slowed him down, but head coach Bradley Carnell’s system had (e.g.) Jared Stroud and Indiana Vassilev crashing after Klauss, Eduard Lowen to follow up and make the most of any turnovers. While that wasn’t good enough for a wire-to-wire performance, St. Louis rode a second winning streak of victories on either side of the 2023 Leagues Cup to a first-place finish atop the Western Conference. It’s (so very) possible I’m forgetting a thing or three, but that might have been the best debut season in MLS history after the 1998 Chicago Fire’s run to MLS Cup. Sporting Kansas City was one of the teams St. Louis steamrolled over those nine early victories – a 4-0 romp at CityPark stadium – and it was the same team that flipped the tables on St. Louis over a lopsided two-leg series in the first round of the 2023 MLS playoffs.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: A Little Satisfaction, a Little Future Trepidation & a Wrap Up of the West

With, like, a lot of shit left out.

This post also counts as my first/second stab at a new format/concept. On the most basic level, it involves: 1) kicking around (or just kicking) the Portland Timbers’ most recent result; 2) a quick tour around the relevant parts of the Western Conference for perspective on the grand scheme; and 3) a quick check-in with the team Portland plays next (the Dread Pirate Minnesota). I’m going to hit this at the highest stream-of-consciousness speed I can manage – about all I can do four days late, but I pledged to drag myself through this, gritted teeth, bad taste and all.

Close readers may have noticed I identified this as a first for a new format and, paraphrasing one of the worst we'll-do-it-in-post moments in the Star Wars universe, that’s true from a certain point of view – specifically, I switched the order after the sections on last Saturday’s game, so that the Scouting Memo (I tightened it up), aka, the only forward-looking portion of the post, comes at the end, which is the opposite of what I did for the FC Cincinnati post. (No need to read that; already forgotten.)

There will actually be a third iteration this weekend, when I post notes on the game and then the other bits later. At any rate…

I just sat through the highlights to reconnect with this game. The first that struck me was the full minute of the 7:30 burned on the VAR review for the Andres Dreyer “goal” called back for offside around the 30th minute. I had a joke in the hopper about that being the only actual event of the game, but the rest of the highlights and the final stats painted a better memory for this game than the World of Imagination in my mind. It was still pretty damn dull, but, hey, little Ws have big hearts.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers
About the Game, Briefly and Broadly
Is it possible that Corey Baird, formerly of FC Cincinnati (formerly of Houston Dynamo FC, formerly of LAFC, formerly of Real Salt Lake), coming off was the single most significant event of the game? It’s possible, sure: he played two drop-flicks that sent Dreyer free-‘n’-easy behind Portland’s back line, including the one that teed off Dreyer’s offside shot. The drought only looked more apparent thanks to San Diego’s failure to post even one shot on goal over the second half. They had a couple, just not many. Even so, I wouldn’t have believed MLS’s newest kids put just one shot on goal all game if the stats didn’t swear to it…and, yep, even that one shot on goal followed from the earlier Baird/Dreyer connection. The sum of that feels a tenuous combination of promising (for Portland) and significant (for San Diego), with the emphasis on tenuous.

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers: Paging General Buck Turgidson

Didn't get the joke in this character's name till I saw it spelled.

So, St. Louis CITY FC was about two times better, by some raw numbers? I figured they had a firm grip on the edge, but there go the judges handing them the decision...

St. Louis CITY FC 2-1 Portland Timbers
About the Game
The Timbers scored the first goal for the second match day in a row and by a cleaner strike from the same player – David Da Costa - within a mere foot or three of where he scored last week’s winner. Santiago Moreno played the (surprisingly easy) ball that slipped Da Costa behind St. Louis’ midfield, thereby challenging the defenders to do anything but back up. They backed off, allowing Da Costa to squeeze his shot through a tangle of legs not much bigger than a mousehole – and good for him!

Portland’s goal came more than a little against the run of play, even with St. Louis failing to mine many chances out of their possession and general upper-handedness. That also typified what passed for the game-state of the first half – i.e., the Timbers met St. Louis’ overall attacking prowess at a 1:3 of raw, undistinguished shots, while making something dangerous out of their best moments (e.g., that slick overlap between Da Costa and Jimer Fory that squeezed some sweat out of Roman Burki; per the full highlights, Da Costa woulda done better to pull back to Kelsy instead of shooting). Portland carried a 1-0 advantage into the halftime locker room…but the numbers were against them even then and that was the last happy memory I have.

Credit for the decisive moment goes to St. Louis’ Tomas Ostrak, who climbed his way up the spine of midfield, one vertebrae at a time, shaking off Timbers defenders on two of them, before forcing the ball forward to where Marcel Hartel (still a funny name) roofed it into Maxime Crepeau’s goal. That moment pinned the tail into the competitive heart of the game: whether Portland could keep finding their slashing paths to chances on St. Louis’ goal versus the weight of St. Louis’ attacking and counter-pressing pressure.

St. Louis CITY FC Scouting Report: Despite Everything You Will Read, I'm Not Taking This Lightly

The MLS website, one month ago...

With all due respect to the opposition, I didn’t remember the last time the Portland Timbers played a tough game until I checked Ye Olde Form Guide – which, just to note it, will be rendered useless by the overbearing ads on the right side within weeks. Some days, I think Don Garber has made crushing the spirit of amateur independents his personal mission…

At any rate, I’d date Portland’s last tough games to the second half of May when they played Seattle at home followed by a road game in Orlando. Just one point from six in there. Counting forward, they have two more soft-on-paper games to go before, per the proverb, shit gets real. That starts with…

St. Louis CITY FC
3-12-6, 15 pts., 21 gf, 34 ga (-13); home 2-4-4, away 1-8-2
Last Results: LDLLWLDLLL (1-7-2)
Strength/Location of Schedule
v SD (1-2 L); v SKC (2-2 D); @ MIN (0-3 L); @ COL (0-1 L); v SJ (2-1 W); @ POR (1-2 L); @ LAG (3-3 D); v ORL (2-4 L); @ HOU (0-1 L); @ RSL (2-3 L)

Those are the (brutal) basics, but let’s unpack some further details.

There’s the (comparatively) stronger home record, I suppose, though 12 match days separate St. Louis’ two home wins. Perhaps noteworthy: they have been good for one home draw per month since April, generally in the middle of the month, so arguably they’re due.

In all seriousness, 2025 has put a lot of hurt on St. Louis and their fans and, outside a two-hour window between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. PST Sunday, they have my sympathy. I don’t know enough to offer a deep read on everything that has gone wrong, but I do see they’ve been without some expected heavy contributors – e.g., Eduard Lowen, Tomas Ostrak and, to a lesser extent, Henry Kessler – for two-thirds to half of the season. (I have vague memories of people hyping Rasmus Alm, but…) I’d check the current availability report for additional, or even new, injuries, but that looks to have been abandoned as well…

Portland Timbers 2-1 St. Louis CITY FC: Anchor & Inspiration

Antony's contribution: a visual

The Portland Timbers have a long history of slow starts to the regular season. Now off to what I’m told is their strongest start to a season since 2013, and perhaps with a nostalgic glint in their eye to how they once had to rescue entire seasons, the Timbers have acquired a late habit of starting at half speed, even spotting the opposition the first goal.

I flagged the latter as potential kiss of death in one preview thread our another on Bluesky, but, for the second match day in a row, Portland snatched victory for the slackening jaws of defeat with a 2-1 home win over St. Louis CITY FC. Who knows? Maybe the Timbers only feel like their true and best selves when chasing something, whether season or game?

About the Game
Whether due to players they had missing (Eduard Lowen) to caretaker coach, David Critchley, trying to teach his old team new tricks, St. Louis rewrote my expectations by keeping the ball on the ground and working it forward from the back. They stretched the field occasionally (see the first attempt in the full highlights), but they looked up to playing through Portland and, for most of the second half, the Timbers seemed open to allowing it. While not totally helpless – a couple slip passes sent (I think) Santiago Moreno and Kevin Kelsy just behind St. Louis’ last defender – Portland spent most of the first half a step behind both the most recent play and the game. They escaped the first half without giving up a goal, but even that took a double save from James Pantemis on two (or three) clear, close shots jointly gifted to St. Louis by some light dicking around at the back and a clumsy touch by Joao Ortiz. Portland saved their best moments for first half stoppage time – including a shot at redemption for Ortiz that he side-footed softly to nowhere – but the cobwebs lingered long enough into the second half for Portland to give up the first goal 50 minutes in. Former Timbers academy kid, Akil Watts, put St. Louis up 1-0 when he created and capitalized on a wee crisis in front of Pantemis’ goal. Watch the highlights on that goal and you’ll see Watts have time to both give up on the play then get back into it before any Timbers defender even noticed him. You hate to see it, but, stick around. It gets better!

As with last match day’s win over Colorado, this game turned on a vividly decisive moment – specifically, Antony alley-ooping the ball over Tomas Totland, then backing Henry Kessler into his own 18 before equalizing just around the defender’s left shoulder. It was a move sweet and classy enough for The Mothership to give it a long-form puff highlight of its own. From that point to the final whistle, the Timbers played like a stalled car jump-started by a king-sized battery. Legs came to life, movement improved all over with David Ayala acting as an all-purpose gear box that kept the machine running and racing, shifting slower and faster as needed; they even forced Roman Burki to reprise Pantemis' first-half double save in order to keep the game from running away from them. While St. Louis never fully faded out of the game, I have this line in my notes about “losing their nerve, grasping for chances instead of creating them” that sums it up nicely. Had you split the game between St. Louis’ best period and Portland’s, I’m still guessing the Timbers outplayed them over the sum of it, but the final numbers broke close to even and St. Louis are no doubt gnashing teeth and rending garments over not just losing Ayala on the winner, but failing to see him at all. Just heartbreaking defending, but Ayala fully earned a slab of the log after that performance.

St. Louis CITY FC Scouting Report: Needing and Wanting. Or Vice Versa

Why not 9 center backs? Why not 13?

To get the big dodge out of the way, who knows what to make of St. Louis CITY FC right now, what with Olof Mellberg getting shit-canned for an unmissable lack of results and, I’m told, a hard kink for fielding eight center backs in his starting XIs? At any rate, he’s gone, replaced by interim head coach David Critchley…who, for the record, guided the team to its first win since mid-March.

To compile this dossier, I jumped around about…65 minutes’ worth of real-time footage of St. Louis’ 0-1 road loss at the Colorado Rapids and their gently weird 2-1 home win over the San Jose Earthquakes. Normally, I’d put more time into the road game, but suspect the coaching change to color their approach in enough ways that I think that anyone bored and restless enough will benefit more from watching long outtakes of the San Jose game. If nothing else, and barring injuries (looking at Cedric Teuchert here), I’d expect the team that lines up against the Portland Timbers on Sunday will look more like the starting XI versus San Jose. I’ll dig into that more below, but let’s start with…

The Facts
Record/Stats
3-8-5, 14 pts., 13 gf, 21 ga (-8); home 2-3-3, away 1-5-2
Last 10 Results: LLDDLLDLLW
Strength/Location of Schedule
@ SKC (0-2 L); v CLB (1-2 L); v VAN (0-0 D); @ LAFC (2-2 D); @ SEA (1-4 L); v SD (1-2 L); v SKC (2-2 D); @ MIN (0-3 L); @ COL (0-1 L); v SJ (2-1 W)

Clearly, things have gone coach-firingly bad for St. Louis this season and, based on the time I put into the San Jose win, I’m not sure now firmly they’ve turned the page. Big picture, St. Louis kept games tighter until recent weeks (see losses at Seattle and Minnesota), but the defense still tilts toward the stronger side of the league average. The attack, unfortunately, leans harder in the other direction. Still, soothe – which bring me to…

Talking Point No. 1: The Timbers Have to Match “Playing for Their Jobs right now” Intensity
That’s it. St. Louis looked listless and gun-shy at Colorado, at least until they had to chase the game after Darren Yapi’s 41st minute goal forced them to chase the game (weird one; also kinda notable; here's the other one by Josef Martinez). They also defended deep (to the point of nesting) in the stretches I watched and played like they forgot St. Louis’ hard-pressing tradition. Maybe the game plan tilts toward allowing shots from range, or maybe that's just what Mellberg's approach encouraged indirectly by way of tactics. I saw more pressing versus San Jose and, again, I expect to see that against the Timbers, road game be damned. St. Louis may press and foul half as hard as they used to, but Portland should come ready to battle…like, really battle.

MLS Western Conference Check-In, More Words at the One-Third Mark

I'm coming for yer place, Soccer Don.

Careful readers who visited last night’s Eastern Conference check-in may notice I cribbed that preamble for this one. Fuck it. Who reinvents the wheel when he doesn’t have to? Ahem.

Welcome to this broad and necessarily shallow check-in on where things stand in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference about one-third of the way through the 2025 season. To set expectations a little:

I watch just one Western Conference team religiously – my Portland Timbers – and most of the additional (somewhat) in-depth watching I’ve done involved teams that they played the upcoming weekend. So, again, I’m not coming at any of this from some all-knowing, all-absorbing perch.

Against that, I sincerely believe that a lot of the week-to-week global coverage I see from this league (almost all of it from Official Organs) suffers from a pernicious tendency to read too much into the last game played – i.e., Content, particularly the stuff around failure and progress in players, formation shifts, etc., over-values the latest details, often at the expense of considering broader details like, say, did your team look like some hot-rod shit last weekend because they ran over the Los Angeles Galaxy (ha!) at home? All of the everything below looks at the same things, just over a longer arc. That follows for necessity, for sure, but it’s also about patterns, particularly when it comes to results, where they happened and against which teams and in what form.

Just to note it, I constructed the information boxes that top each section for each team from the (current) Conference Standings, the much-reduc’d Form Guide (still mourning the loss, contemplating egging MLS HQ…so long as that’s not a felony, because I can’t have another), and applying a filter one team at a time to the Official stats page. Just to note it, MLS has gutted its non-app content. Jesus fucking Christ, the home pages for must teams are like the shells of abandoned houses with all the copper piping and really good built-ins stripped out.

A Proposal for League-Wide Coverage in 2025 & My Romantic Engagement with Every Team in MLS

Google "brides." Genuinely fascinating.

After more late-night deliberation than a proud man would confess to, I have arrived at a league-wide coverage model for 2025, Major League’s Soccer’s (alleged) 30th season. [Ed. – I think they just want a “big” anniversary before Messi fucks off to retirement.]

I hereby commit to following the Portland Timbers, as always (over hill, over dale, through rain, sleet, and snow, in a banana republic, or a constitutional one, forsaking none by my wife, vacations, and the occasional nap), but I hereby also recommit to FC Cincinnati (no, really this time; it’ll be different, baby!). Before anyone casts even the first whisper of aspersion, I renewed that vow before the (exciting!) domino effect dogpile of trades that ultimately sent Evander to Cincy.

I also hereby commit to watching a minimum of 60 minutes of all games involving any team that will play either Portland or Cincinnati the following MLS Match Day. That will allow me to share notes on not just what I saw in that game, but also how those teams have done in the weeks heading into the game before the most important game of their season, i.e., any game played against Portland and Cincinnati.

The posts featuring notes from the game(s) Cincy and the Timbers just played, plus (brief) notes on their opposition for the following week will go up on Sunday or Monday of every week.

I also hereby commit to watching a minimum of 45 minutes of two Featured Games every week. For the first 127 Match Days (yes, this is arbitrary), Featured Games shall involve only intra-Conference games – none of that inter-conference shit – and I will watch one game from each conference. I may stick with that \over the second half of the season, I may not; that's when the spirit takes the wheel.

Notes on those games, the teams involved and how they’ve looked in the weeks prior will top a pair of posts that will go up Wednesday evening and I’ll round those out with stray things I pick up from anything else I can get to between Sunday and Monday, plus whatever Matt Doyle (or his substitute analyst) churns out after the relevant Match Day (why do I feel like I should be capitalizing that?).

Getting Reacquainted with St. Louis CITY FC, the Boomtown (Rats?) of MLS

St. Louis, as their best possible selves.

[WARNING: Between St. Louis CITY SC not having much history and me feeling like I needed to fill "X" amount of space, I got over my skis on multiple details around this team. If you want to skip the whole thing - and that's probably advisable - here's a short version: St. Louis has played two seasons in MLS, one pretty good, especially for an expansion team, the other bad. There are multiple, credible reasons for their change in fortunes, and they made changes toward the end of 2024 that have a decent chance of paying off. Still, that's only two seasons for context, and that leaves a lot of open questions going into 2025 that can only be closed by results on the field.]

Thumbnail History
St. Louis CITY FC came into MLS like a wrecking ball in 2023. Their inexhaustible high-pressing style gave them an advantage over teams shaking off early season rust and allowed St. Louis to run up the score against one team after the other. Over the first nine wins in franchise history – which included five straight wins in their first five games – only the Portland Timbers (of all teams) limited them to two goals; St. Louis bagged three or more against every other team. But for the four losses and one draw that came between wins five and nine, St. Louis presented as a juggernaut. Brazilian forward Joao Klauss led the first wave of the press, at least until injury slowed him down, but head coach Bradley Carnell’s system had (e.g.) Jared Stroud and Indiana Vassilev crashing after Klauss, Eduard Lowen to follow up and make the most of any turnovers. While that wasn’t good enough for a wire-to-wire performance, St. Louis rode a second winning streak of victories on either side of the 2023 Leagues Cup to a first-place finish atop the Western Conference. It’s (so very) possible I’m forgetting a thing or three, but that might have been the best debut season in MLS history after the 1998 Chicago Fire’s run to MLS Cup. Sporting Kansas City was one of the teams St. Louis steamrolled over those nine, not early victories – a 4-0 romp at CityPark stadium (and who knew there was drama around that?). Seeing SKC turn the tables over a lopsided two-leg series in the first round of the 2023 MLS playoffs sums up St. Louis short-‘n’-sweet history in MLS.

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.]

Long-Term Tendencies
The only “tendency” St. Louis has established so far is being wildly successful on the attacking side in 2023, and then (almost) as wildly unsuccessful on the defensive side in 2024. Related, their defense wasn’t great in 2023, but it didn’t have to be.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: (Complicated) Glory! + League-Wide Shit!

Oh, I'm just getting warmed up....

I was out of town for the Portland Timbers checks-all-the-boxes 1-0 win over a (punch-drunk) visiting Seattle Sounders team, but tracked the game from afar on the socials (i.e., reddit and Bluesky). People bitching about the broadcast team (Taylor Twellman and Jake Zivin, I think) popped up here and there and…I just don’t get how anyone can’t screen out the chatter, never mind get caught up in the relative amount of praise they heap on one team or the other. In my experience, color commentary follows the “broken clock” rule, with some hacks hitting the mark more often the others.

Why start there? Perhaps because some thoughts and arguments floated below may fall short of expectations for proper fandom. Let that come as it does, I’m squeezed a lot into this one post. Because it has surely been kicked around both hard and long enough, I won’t burn too many words on last Saturday’s game – which, to be 100% clear, was pretty damn awesome and nifty…it just needs an asterisk, maybe two.

The (Righteous!) Big Picture
Apart from giving up what (giving the Timbers’ history) felt like two games worth of corner kicks in the first half alone, I don’t recall a time when Seattle looked to have the upper hand last Saturday. Even if Portland’s chances weren’t all gilt-edged, the thought process behind them shone through; half the time, they failed due to some combination of a runner being half a step ahead or behind or the angle on the pass 10-degrees off. With key starters like Felipe Mora and Jonathan Rodriguez absent courtesy of varying amounts of bullshit (now half-corrected!), that shouldn’t surprise anyone. With the chance creation that little bit off, the happy deflection that transfigured Juan David Mosquera’s goal into a thing of beauty felt right at home. As for the play that led to it, what was that but vintage Timbers soccer?

The brighter notes played on the defensive side of the ball, and mostly through Timbers defenders throwing themselves in front of the best chances Seattle created. Dario Zuparic stood out there, with his block on Seattle’s not-yet budding star Pedro de la Vega as a stand-out moment (if it's not in here somewhere...crime). Kamal Miller got caught behind the ball now and again, and both fullbacks got burned 1-v-1 more often than any Timbers fan wants to see (Mosquera, in particular), but all concerned recovered well enough and generally played for one another. Now, about all that…

Portland Timbers 4-4 St. Louis CITY FC: To the Spoilers Go the Spoils

Tough one at the office today...

I can identify five criteria by which one can judge the Portland Timbers' 4-4 home draw versus the stain-stubborn St. Louis CITY FC team that came a-callin’ tonight.

1) A Bad Result
Because the Timbers suck on the road – not St. Louis bad, mind you, but pretty shitty – they need to get the best out of every home game. They did not.

2) A Great Response
Portland went down four times in this game – by two goals at one point, in heartbreaking fashion at another – but they kept punching back, firing a truly heroic number of shots and scoring a glorious late, late equalizer nine minutes past death through a deliciously vicious Evander free kick. They did better than never give up.

3) The Deeper Problem: Why That Was Required
With allowances for the truism that every goal your team scores is brilliant, every one they allow an embarrassment, the Timbers defense let in some dogshit goals tonight, and so many of them. I doubt it’s worth ranking them in terms of incompetence (and yet, what the Hell, from the most incompetent to the least: 1) Araujo’s dumb tackle (2nd goal; gotta watch the full highlights; Eduard Lowen PK); 2) Simon Becher unmarked in the box (1st goal); 3) Cedric Teuchert free and naked as the day he was born in Zone 14 (3rd goal); 4) Nokkvi Thorisson's step-inside assassination), because it’s the variety of failures that hurts. That's like Achilles  having four heels, instead of just the one.

4) The Primacy of the Individual
The Timbers executed a marvelous, fluid movement to score their first goal, aka, the one that made it interesting. A move that started with Santiago Moreno catching a stray pass at the center stripe and ended with a tap-in by Jonathan Rodriguez, but the best parts of it passed through Evander and Felipe Mora, who fed Rodriguez with a brainy, perfectly weighted pass to the back post. I’d call that an outlier, because all the other goals a) looked pretty goddamn scrappy and relied on the kind of spontaneous inspiration and technique – mostly through Evander – that’s tough to replicate. That idea – Portland needing something special from someone to make anything happen – was all over this result.

St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 Portland Timbers: A Loss and the Rest of the Season

Never, ever forget: the pig enjoys it.

I sat on posting this for a number of reasons – everything from still mulling it over to feeling like I didn’t have anything to say beyond, “say, that didn’t go well,” to feeling like a carcass Saturday morning – but the primary reason I took a breath for putting up a post about the Portland Timbers' 1-3 loss at St. Louis CITY (wNbc!) FC was this: I thought they played reasonably well given the givens…

…the secondary reason was a plan to shift to weekly, more context-rich posts (we’ll see how that goes). At any rate…

I took the usual time to tip through the subreddits – e.g., posts about how hard (and deep) Portland sucks on the road, how hard the defense shits the sheets, how everything would have been better had Evander not limped off…let’s go with disturbingly early (no low-hanging updates on that, btw) – and all those arguments and talking points make enough sense. And yet…

“Combative; looks like a foul-free war”

“midfield/middle of field, total melee”

Those rhyming phrases slipped into the notes I took during the game, 60 minutes apart. Between that and re-reading my post from Portland’s goal-less draw at St. Louis earlier this season, this Leagues Cup tilt delivered the game I expected. St. Louis disrupts more than they play, which makes them hell to play through: “forcing turnovers in advantageous places” (aka, pig-wrestling) has made them the MLS team they are today, for good (2023!) or ill (2024! probably!). Sure, Portland struggled to connect passes, but what is that but the whole damn point of that approach?

And, yes, any fan wants to see his/her/their local team play through that – but that’s exactly where I took comfort in the loss. Portland created enough chances to win – they even had two bites at scoring first (e.g., Juan David Mosquera somewhere around the 30th and Jonathan Rodriguez’s how-the-fuck-did-that-guy-miss chance at the back post (has to be in here, right?) – but they didn’t make them count. In defense of anyone ripping his/her/their hair about how few total chances Portland created, the official stats put a very real cap on how hard I can push back on that point, but the Timbers could have ridden Claudio Bravo’s gods-kissed banger to a draw, but for…well, St. Louis doing something like the same.

St. Louis CITY FC/Leagues Cup Scouting Report: A Mirror Into Portland's Past

legend.

Won’t lie. I would have loved to see the Timbers draw FC Juarez. If you haven’t watched the penalty shoot-out for their loss at St. Louis CITY FC, do yourself a solid and watch it. I’ve never seen a ‘keeper do that and it was a delight…

Speaking of Portland’s actual opponent…

In the interest of making these posts more reddit-friendly, and with apologies to people who come to this space for long-form content, I’m reducing Scouting Reports to literally five things I’d tell anyone about St. Louis CITY FC…well, aside from some basics – e.g., they have struggled to actually win all season, even at home, and that they have experienced some heavy turnover of (very late; farewell, Tim Parker, sweet prince). With that out of the way…allons y.

1) A Smarter Press, an Absent Wrecking Ball
St. Louis still defends quite high and leaves a fair amount of (exploitable) vertical space within that shape, but I haven’t seen them run the drunk-octane high-press that served them so well in 2023. The wrecking ball from the subtitle is Joao Klauss, who did as much as any player to make that work. He hasn’t appeared a ton in 2024 and hasn’t even made the bench during this Leagues Cup. At any rate, they have pressing triggers within that high defensive line and release them pretty effectively if a team can’t take them out of it. Related…

St. Louis CITY FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: Feeling Good (No, Really) Context-Free

A young Paul Giammati was the butt of the "wNbc" bit.

I don’t actually have a ton of blow-by-blow notes for the Portland Timbers' goal-less draw at St. Louis CITY FC (“wNbc!”), even though the game amounted to a series of isolated escapes from a general muddle. In all honesty, I’m mostly thrilled to see the Timbers keep their second clean sheet of 2024.

That’s not to say St. Louis didn’t come close here and there – e.g., Timbers understudy ‘keeper, James Pantemis, made a save on a Celio Pompeu shot through a thicket of bodies toward the end of the first half and Portland came within the width of Claudio Bravo’s lower leg of going down 0-1 in the 75th minute – and even that immediately followed Eduard Lowen hitting the right far post with a free kick. Tim Parker came close with a header at the 15th too (or thereabouts), Zac McGraw had to run down a through-ball (hat-tip to Joao Klauss for whiffing the shot!), but I doubt even the most rabid St. Louis fan would argue they stormed the castle. You’ll see nearly all of that in the highlights, but about 60% of the total run-time is devoted to dudes picking up yellow cards, with most going to St. Louis.

Portland had their chances – e.g., Jonathan Rodriguez’s shot to the far post around the 3rd minute (before he largely faded into anonymity) and another shot by Evander around the 17th – but their shooting statistics and lowly xG get the story mostly right.

And yet, even if this arguably counts as the Timbers least impressive attacking performance of 2024, it might count as something just as important: one of their more coherent playing performances. Unlike countless prior outings (well, not countless; they’ve played literally 18 games, so this can be quantified), Portland players looked generally connected and less like total strangers than they have across multiple halves of multiple games this season. Given how rare (more or less) wire-to-wire competence has been this season, I see that as something to celebrate.

The Portland Timbers, at My (First) Break of 2024

It's early and the outcome is uncertain.

Between being 24+ hours late and a lack of inspiration, I never got around to posting something on the Portland Timbers’ 2-3 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps. On the whole, that loss borrowed details from the handful of games that came before – e.g., the borderline paralytic slow start called back to the loss at New York City FC and, with a nod to the home loss to the Philadelphia Union, Portland's defense found fresh, new ways to give up stupid goals. The only thing missing was the failure to put away good chances that pissed away the piteous road loss at Houston Dynamo FC.

With that in mind – and because I’m taking the next week off - of which, damn the timing, because the road game at Sporting Kansas City strikes me as the most important game of this young season – I wanted to put a pin in where things stand for the Timbers in…let’s call them the teenage years of the 2024 MLS season.

To start, I see these as the dominant questions facing the team:

1) Defensive Boners. (That’s right, I called ‘em boners.) The Timbers gave up six goals over the past two games. Each revealed a unique flaw in Portland’s defense, depending on how you held it to the cold, hard light of a slow-motion replay, but, to skip the metaphors and put it bluntly: giving up even two goals hobbles a team to limping; giving up three is the soccer equivalent of a death wish. It just has to improve. Like next weekend.

2) Will Portland’s Real Midfield Please Stand Up? Because I live and participate on the Timbers subreddit, I hereby acknowledge that plenty of Timbers fans hold a version of Portland’s midfield in their head that is both ideal and available to play. More or less. (How is Eryk, btw?) I’m taking the fact that multiple candidates exist as evidence that the question of the ideal midfield has not yet been settled. I can’t name one myself, I just know that my best current midfield has some game-wrecking teeth in it…which means, sure, I’d try to start Cristhian Paredes and David Ayala, or even keep starting Diego Chara and experiment with those two as second-half subs. The bigger issue revolves around…

Getting Reacquainted with St. Louis CITY FC, the Humiliation of Fatherhood

Keep talking motherfucker. Day's coming...

[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

They came, they saw, they straight-up rolled some teams – including five straight to start the season. Hell, St. Louis CITY FC even rolled Sporting Kansas City 4-1 at home all the way at Week 32 of the season. The fact the same team that put them to the sword over a lopsided two-leg series in the first round of the 2023 MLS playoffs sums up St. Louis short-‘n’-sweet history in MLS: impressive, but visibly incomplete.

Best Season

I feel good saying 2023…

Long-Term Tendencies

They went wildly over the median on goals scored – i.e., 62 scored versus the 46.8 average – and, as well as the defense did, it seized failure with both hands often as not. Almost certainly related, St. Louis played an aggressive press, aka, one of soccer’s great “yes/no” propositions, there is no try, only do, etc.

Identity: Your son beating you at a sport for the first time.

Joy Points: 1, because making the playoffs in your one and only season makes your history brighter than eight other teams. (Also, index for how these work is below*.)

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

Where They Finished in 2023 & What the Past Says About That, If Anything

First in the Western Conference and a genuinely impressive fourth overall. To be completely frank, I did not like this team from the jump and wanted them to fail – mostly because I hate pressing teams. Shit’s ugly. Going the other way, they effectively ambushed the six of the first eight teams they played and staked them to 18 fast points early in the season. And yet, and to their very real credit, St. Louis picked up a healthy share of wins throughout the season. I won’t pretend I don’t think they’ve been found out, but they had a great season for any team, never an expansion team.

Notes/Impressions on the Current Roster/State of Ambition

I don’t know enough to comment on the St. Louis front office’s state of ambition beyond acknowledging they did pretty damn all right in Year One. Even with the occasionally useful Niko Gioacchini and the infatigable (and pissy) Jared Stroud moved on to new and exciting professional opportunities, St. Louis comes in to 2024 with a good core. Having 2023’s goalkeeper of the year and MLS vet Tim Parker to organize the defense looks like a sound foundation to me and, so long as you have that and a competent midfield, all it takes to get your local team close to competitive is a couple smart attacking pieces. They seem to have those in Eduard Lowen and Joao Klauss, so long as he can stay fit. My best guess puts this team at playoff-competitive in 2024; add some talent – I hear they have an open DP spot- and they could make some actual noise in MLS’s Western Conference…that said, I’m still waiting for this team to get found out. The way they could go either way feels like a big deal for 2024.

MLS Western Conference Reset

Due to the long, long tail below, I’m going for an all-time short preamble for this post, as well as the one for the Eastern Conference. The goal here is simple: remind readers where all the teams in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference left off going into the Leagues Cup break (also, re Leagues Cup, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em), pass on short note as to how each Western Conference team did in that tournament, flag any (potentially? arguably?) notable comings into and goings out of the roster, and look ahead to the next eight games or so for all involved.

Here are the sources I consulted: the current conference standings, the bless’d and holy Form Guide, the group stage standings and knockout round brackets from the Leagues Cup, as well as the list of results, and the “all transactions” page on MLSSoccer.com. Oh, and I watched a lot of the highlights from the Leagues Cup.

I believe the rest speaks for itself, so, with no further ado. (And, goddamn, here’s to crushing the preamble.)

St. Louis CITY FC
13-8-2, 41 pts., 23 games played; 43 gf, 27 ga (+16); home 8-3-1, away 5-5-1
Last 10 League Results: WLTLLWWWLW
Strength/Location of Schedule
Tricky to read, honestly, due to the five wins in that mix: v HOU, @ SJ, v COL, @ TFC and v (pre-Messi makeover) MIA. And anytime they’ve come against one of the West’s better teams, regardless of venue – e.g., @ FCD, v RSL – they’ve lost. Maybe it’s that simple?
So, How’d Their Leagues Cup Go?
Not at all well, really. The fates dealt them a tough hand – i.e., Columbus Crew SC on the road and Mexico’s famous Club America at home – but, since this is a discussion about long-term prospects against your better teams....
Fresh Moves
Nothing major. They signed an Icelandic winger with highly-tenuous ties to the Icelandic national team named Nokkvi Thorisson and picked up defender Anthony Markanich from the Colorado Rapids.
Expectations for the Stretch Run
St. Louis plays five of their next eight games on the road, most against the decidedly middling middle of the Western Conference, but, honestly, their record speaks for itself at this point. And seeing them sort things out going into the Leagues Cup break gives me enough faith that they’ll stay somewhere around the top of the West. They’ll avoid the worst fate – i.e., missing the playoffs – in any case.

MLS Week 22 Preview: On the Clout Maintenance Parade

Apt. And possibly copyrighted.

Gonna just kind of riff through the match-ups. Make it conversational...if in the espirit d'escalier vein.

Just to note it, I have two questions in my head when talking about any game: what is the likeliest result and how much would any other result matter?

To be clear, I mean the word “matter” in the context of Major League Soccer, a league where meaningful change occurs at geological speed. On with it...

Major League Soccer’s Week 22 kicks off smartly with the New England Revolution visiting FC Cincinnati – and no doubt scheming about how to batter or otherwise breach the walls of Fortress TQL. I imagine the U.S. Men’s pulverizing of St. Kitts & Nevis means Cincy won’t have Matt Miazga for another week, so maybe that’s the lever to finally crack Cincy’s home form. Only bad gamblers believe random events can be in any way “due,” so I’ll only say this: a Revolution win would make a good argument that they’ve pushed through their blues. Related/unrelated, FC Cincinnati has built a reputation they’re now damned to uphold until that burden falls from their shoulders.

That theme carries through a lot of the other games, or at least the good ones. I’d call...let’s go with “clout maintenance” as the primary theme of Week 22. To wit: Club de Foot Montreal will want to maintain his Cincy-esque home form – and their lifeline – by beating a limping New York City FC; the same goes double for the San Jose Earthquakes, who face the horror of waking up Sunday morning knowing that thousands observers will no longer say “yeah, but their home form,” with the same breezy confidence that people say, “yeah, but it’s a dry heat” (as you’re sweating off eight pounds just talking to them) if they hand even one point to the visiting/suffering Los Angeles Galaxy; finally, St. Louis CITY FC should expect to feel a similar heat (now, with humidity!) if they drop points to a visiting Colorado Rapids team with a straight-up shitty record of picking up any points no matter how hard the other team drops them. Another commonality in all those games: wins by any of NYC, the Galaxy or the Rapids won’t change many minds or raise low opinions.