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, 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…

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…

What Kansas City Has That Portland Needs

Once called "cads," now just douches.

"KC wasn't good tonight, really, but any team with enough talent, or even just a reliable trick up their sleeve, can steal any game against the Timbers on a night when they don't score...”

I dropped that into the post reviewing the Portland Timbers road draw against Sporting Kansas City about a month back. Terrible sentence, obviously, but who knew how well it would serve to explain what went wrong Saturday night against KC? And yet there's something, for lack of a better word, fitting about the goal that decided Saturday’s game.

A couple little known facts: first, I have a particular fascination with two vintage national teams, one of them being the Hungarian National Team of the 1950s, the so-called Magic Magyars (or maybe "Mighty Magyars") who welcomed the English National Team back to the international game with a massive slap upside their over-inflated heads. That team has conditioned me to expect...perhaps more than I should from Hungarians players. Second, Liverpool is "my English team," or they were before I officially tied the knot with Major League Soccer all those years ago. That brief connection to Liverpool affects me in much the same way as the thing with Hungary. Basically, and whether rationally or not, put the words "Hungary" and "Liverpool" in the same sentence as any given player’s name and you have my attention.

So, Krisztian Nemeth: I am on record as coveting him, and since preseason, where he put in some visibly next-level performances. He's no Sebastian Giovinco, but it doesn't surprise me in the least that Nemeth has posted solid numbers as an MLS "rookie." Though One-hundred percent capable of making his own shot – and he produced a noteworthy Exhibit A Saturday night - it's more significant, in the end, that Nemeth does just about everything he needs to well and consistently. I smiled in spite of myself on watching Nemeth spin three Portland defenders on his way to scoring the game's lone goal (four, if you count Diego Chara twice, as seems fitting), because, yes, I do rate him that highly, even as I'm forced to wonder why all that "Hungary" and "Liverpool" has done less for his career than a half dozen months in the American Midwest. Yes, yes, the past informs the present, etc. Moving on...

I lead with Nemeth (and, again, flirtatiously wink in his general direction; come to Portland, Krisztian, we have so much culture) to frame a key question: who is Portland's Nemeth? Who has Portland been able to look to this season with the ability and mindset to hoist the team onto his shoulders to lead, really lead, the charge on the opposition goal? There is no clear answer to that question. We have a couple candidates, true, but the way no answer leaps to mind is the sum of Portland's 2015 season.

MLS Week 23 Review: GOTW, SOTW, ROTW, Plus A Lot of Comparisons

A moment most MLS fans have had to contemplate.

Well, the good news is, I finally wrestled one these weekly reviews to under three pages. Huzzah! And...that's the preamble: let's get to Major League Soccer's Week 23.

Week 23 could be called the Week of the Inflated Result, with several teams (see: Columbus Crew SC v. Colorado Rapids; or, Sporting Kansas City v. Toronto FC; or Los Angeles Galaxy v. Seattle Sounders FC). posting scorelines that looked bigger on paper than they did on the field. It could also be called the Week of the Outside of the Boot Goal (examples  #1 and #2). More than anything else, though, Week 23 brought with it some sign of separation among clubs, with the clearest example coming with what the Vancouver Whitecaps did to a Real Salt Lake side that tried to sneak a B-team onto the pitch (see: methodical pounding), which worked about as well as trying to put out a fire with a paper towel.

My personal highlights of the week included a mom in Colorado doing the “earmuffs” with her kid in the hope of saving him from what I assume was the "you suck, asshole" chant. It's that or Felipe's trouser blowout against New York City FC. Video for both moments was, by definition, hard to find. Actually, the video department is totally slouching this past weekend. Maybe they’re losing interest…so, watch those mini-games, yeah?

All in all, I believe that very little happens week to week in MLS. I wish I could frame all this better than, “so, a bunch of stuff happened, and here’s some of it.” I don’t, though, so what comes below are just a collection of notes that came to me as I watched all the mini-games during MLS Week 23... and the following three games in full (and, yes, the Conifers & Citrus Interest Rankings have been updated!):

Portland Timbers v. Chicago Fire (full, grumpy write-up here)
Colorado Rapids v. Columbus Crew SC (brief, barely worth reading write-up)
Los Angeles Galaxy v. Seattle Sounders FC (write-up)

Uh, last thing: I'm replacing the ol’ beer-'n’-shots motif with a straight-up Top 10 thoughts for the week. Actually, I’m just moving “the shot” (e.g. the big, heavy-hitting idea) to a separate post…look, it’s a work in progress, all of it. At any rate, join me on a tour of MLS Week 23, starting with The Honors!