"These little white lies / Drag you through the colder nights"

I cannot tell you how many drafts of this piece have been scrapped due to quick swerves into maudlin wailing. I swerve into maudlin wailing so frequently (and with such gusto) because it's easier than writing soberly about the situation surrounding Sporting Kansas City in 2025, but I doubt that readers will be interested in it, because I'm not interested in it (and in fact, I'm disgusted by it) as soon as I come to a stop at the end of a writing session. I have condensed this wailing, inspired by the home opening match against San Jose on March 1st, into a single Emo Villanelle, which I will post below:

With that out of the way, let us acknowledge some facts:

• Sporting KC has now lost 9 straight matches dating back to last season

• This was the first loss at home to San Jose in 10 years

• This team gave up two early goals off of defensive blunders

• That first line was correct, by the way, in stating 9 straight losses, not just 9 straight winless. It’s been losses and losses alone since September 18th, 2024: Four losses to finish the 2024 MLS Season, the US Open Cup final loss, two losses in Concacaf Champions Cup, and now two losses to begin the MLS Season. The Royals were two weeks away from clinching a playoff spot the last time that Sporting KC won a match

• This team could not score to salvage even a draw despite playing nearly the entire second half up a man

• There remain 32 matches in the 2025 Sporting Kansas City season

• Late in the season opener match against Austin, down a goal and unable to generate any attack, neutral Apple TV color commentator Kyndra de St. Aubin preached patience to Sporting KC fans

That is rarely a good sign. A neutral commentator (and not even someone with ties to SKC like Nate Bukaty, Callum Williams, or Jalil Anibaba — Kyndra's a Minnesotan) found it necessary to try to quell the frustrations of the losing fanbase during the first game of the season. Opening night is for reckless optimism! Everyone starts out tied for first on opening night! We're not supposed to crack open words like 'rebuilding year' and 'patience' until the season's lost! I think it speaks well on her personally that she felt the impetus to display sympathy for us, but she was not obliged to do so, but was apparently so struck by the hopeless display in front of her that she needed to say something to assuage (or maybe warn) SKC fans in the moment.

The Concacaf Champions Cup matches against Inter Miami were a little gratuitous. I sympathize with the team to an extent, they qualified on a technicality and were in no known universe or timeline going to get past Inter Miami over two legs in the first round of the tournament. I'm not even alleging a conspiracy here, even if a referee asked for a Messi's autograph after the match. It is simply impossible to conceive of this team beating that one over two legs. It was the equivalent of an early-season tune-up game in college football, like when Ohio State throws Youngstown State some money for the right to blow them out and get the freshmen quarterbacks some game-speed reps, except that they had to play a match here in the bitter cold and the club barely got to cash in on it because of that bitter cold.

As a result, we approached Childrens Mercy Park on Saturday evening having seen 270 minutes of abject ineptitude concentrated across the prior 11 days, with many of us having suffered through bitter cold for the privilege of watching the first 90 minutes of that sample. Only one other fanbase (Salt Lake) carried that weight into their home opener, and they at least earned their spot because they did well enough over 34 MLS matches in 2024, meanwhile we got in off of a run of four matches to become Open Cup runners-up, three of which came against teams from the second and third divisions.

This, exacerbated by the cold, the two early goals from Chicho Arango and Josef Martinez, and the aforementioned ineptitude in breaking down their 10-man defense in the second half, created the most bitter atmosphere I've ever felt for a soccer match in Children's Mercy Park. I have never seen Children's Mercy Park that lifeless. I've been to colder matches there, colder home openers, even (The 2017 opener versus Dallas was a nil-nil draw, too) but never have I felt such acrid cynicism radiating throughout the place.

The effect of the cold was layered - On the surface, everybody's uncomfortable anyway and feels like they've made a mistake suffering to see such a bad performance to begin with, but underneath that is the fact that very few casual viewers came out to brave freezing temperatures to see this Sporting KC team take on the San Jose Earthquakes, of all teams. Nobody was there to enjoy the weather, nobody was there for a fun night out after a day shopping at Nebraska Furniture Mart, and the only person in the world who would've bought a ticket for the right to see any Earthquake play at least once in their life is the one typing this sentence -- and I'd already seen Nick Lima play in a USMNT friendly a few years ago. Everybody in attendance cared about Sporting Kansas City, and many of us booed the team off of the pitch at the match's end. 

In a 2013 video on the MLS YouTube page, CCO Rob Thomson, while discussing the team's tenure at Community America Ballpark, stated "Everyone had a nice time, but no one was mad if we lost… so we had to change that culture around."

Mission accomplished! This club has cultivated a fanbase that genuinely cares, and we are really the only ones left. The number of extrinsic reasons to come out to Children's Mercy Park have dwindled - There is a shinier, newer soccer stadium across the river featuring a team that wins many of its matches, local fans who want to experience the Sporting experience for the first time have had ample opportunities to do so in the last fourteen years, they're far from the only winner in town as they were in the early 2010s, and they're nearly the only loser in town, the only Kansas City major league team not to have made their postseason in 2024, and local minor league teams like the Comets and Mavericks both made the championship rounds of their respective leagues last year. There is no social benefit to being a fan of this team anymore, there are no poseurs, no bandwagon riders, no clout-chasers left, just a few thousand folks who left disgruntled on Saturday.

32 matches remain, and that's a fairly hard cap unless this team makes a run to the playoffs, but I earnestly don't see it coming. I find it hard to see a path forward in which this team wins matches. The one unit that didn't suffer seismic turnover this year was the defensive backline, and they've looked the least prepared of any part of the team. We’re four matches and seven goals into 2025, and it’s very easy to identify each catastrophic error that caused them at this point.

Still, I believe that the attack will improve in time. I left the match feeling good about the effort and skill of a few attacking players, namely the new additions of Manu Garcia, Shapi Suleymanov, and Dejan Jovelic. At the very least, I like the impetus of starting Jacob Bartlett and Zorhan Bassong in the midfield, both of whom had good moments during this match even if the overall product wasn’t good enough. With time to jel, there is enough talent here to score some goals.

I am reduced to thinking this team might be entertaining, in that losing 4-3 is more entertaining than losing 4-0. What I really hope is that the team is endearing. I hope that they’re still fighting and putting forth effort regardless of the position in the standings, which I’m guessing will be fairly low. I had no questions about effort on Saturday, only about execution and preparation, and it seems kind of obvious at this point at whom the finger ought to point at this stage. It may be naive to say, but I don’t think this team has the same coach at the end of the season. They’re hemorrhaging fans at this point and aren’t seeing the results. To call my shot, I’m guessing the catalyst is a blowout loss in mid-May on the road in St. Louis.

I am going to scrap and claw my way to having fun supporting this team in the 2025 season, and I will reflect it in these pieces, somehow. My hope is that this is the last outwardly dire, turn-the-chair-around-and-rest-my-forearms-on-the-back-rail serious one.

I would like to come up with a better name for this series than “The 2025 Sporting Sauce Diaries,” also. I think I said that last year, too. I ought to have a better name for this than something based on an inside joke between me and two friends from eight years ago, but that’s for a later post. Perhaps that’s the topic of the next one.

We didn’t learn all that much during Week 1, and the one major thing we did learn (Brian Gutierrez is a wrathful entity somewhere between man and god who will enact his vengeance upon us all in 2025) won’t even benefit us in Week 2. But Week 2 encroaches, nonetheless.

1:15pm Charlotte FC vs Atlanta United FC - Game of the Matchday

In my eyes, Charlotte FC is the most intrigue-laden MLS team in 2025. Expansion teams tend to have earned an identity by season four: Atlanta (2020), LAFC (2021), and Seattle (2012) entered their four seasons with multiple trophies in tow, holding themselves as league-level trend-setters. Nashville (2023) was built on ruthless defensive quality. Portland (2014) had the sheer gumption that drove early-2010s Porterball. Minnesota (2020) had crafted a competitor with proven league-veterans and unheralded foreign imports. Orlando (2018), Philadelphia (2013), and FC Cincinnati (2022) entered their fourth seasons as hapless travelers in search of some sort of direction. Vancouver (2014) had employed both Eric Hassli and Camilo Sanvezzo.

But who is Charlotte FC? They entered into MLS in 2022, concurrently or after many of the big expansion team ceilings to break were already broken: Orlando showed that MLS could take hold in the Southeast again after the 2001 contraction, Atlanta set attendance records and won championships, LAFC broke the single-season points record and went toe-to-toe with the best of Liga MX, Nashville had a big soccer-specific stadium, Miami engaged in accounting fraud, Austin had so many sousaphones in their supporter stand, New York City had overtaken Kansas City's record as the team with the longest tenure in a baseball stadium, and Cincinnati had managed to maintain an energized fanbase despite three straight last-place seasons. There was little left for Charlotte to do but put their heads down, work hard, and live an honest life as an expansion club, which they've done. They've built incrementally: 42 points in 2022, 43 in 2023, 51 in 2024, and they've done it without that much bullshit or gimmick. They've been admirable, self-assured, almost noble, in a manner that reflects their symbolic north-star, the humble Sir Minty.

So we have an intrinsic facon-de-vivre, but who are they extrinsically? Who hates them and who do they hate? By year four, Seattle had chopped down Roger Levesque in front of the Timbers army, Cincinnati had that odd in-goal scuffle against Columbus, and LAFC fans had worn fatigues to a road match against the Galaxy. Who is Charlotte's bitter rival? Who hates the Crown?

By regional proximity, this should be Atlanta, but they have yet to undergo the culminative collision that truly angries up the blood between clubs -- Zlatan's strike in the first El Trafico in 2018, Red Bull's Hudson Derby touchdown over NYCFC in 2016, Sporting KC's 4-1 shocker over St. Louis in the 2023 playoff edition of The River Runner Rivalry / The Missdourbi / the Dar-B-Q / the Show Me Derby / The Soccer Ball of the Veiled Prophet / any other acceptable names for that rivalry, and the Hell is Real comeback in those same playoffs... Charlotte and Atlanta has lacked this to date, but I can foresee this Saturday serving as a catalyst for a few reasons:

1. This early-afternoon time slot supports undivided broadcast viewership across the league and in-stadium support from both sets of fans. Charlotte has always shown out for home openers to begin with, and Atlanta fans be able to make the four-hour drive up and back within the day if desired, and they'll be even more incentivized to do so with such an exciting team this season. This means that we're due for a dense, mixed atmosphere in the stadium, which should translate into higher emotional stakes on the field. It's kind of rare for me to think "I'm glad they're playing this in an NFL stadium" for any MLS match, but this is the type of match in which more space to fill should benefit the atmosphere, rather than detracting from it. I think of the Fourth of July Rose Bowl matches between LA Galaxy and LAFC that we've had over the past two seasons as examples of this as well.

2. Both teams are laden with attacking talent and still-congealing defenses, meaning that this ought to get goalsy. We have two of the most intriguing strikers in the league facing off, with Atlanta's high-priced, high-energy, and high-jumping signing Emmanuel Latte Lath (aka Big Coffee) and Charlotte's breakout youngster Patrick Agyemang (aka The Hartford Hammer. Nobody else calls him that, and in fact I didn't call him that prior to writing this sentence, but one of my goals for this year is to try to coin nicknames and see if any of them stick). This should be the debut of Wilfried Zaha in Charlotte as well, after missing the week-one match against Seattle for the birth of a child. I don't know if it'll be the most fundamentally solid soccer, but the conditions for fireworks and drama are high.

3. I think we ought to be ready to lean into the iconographic clash between the two clubs. Gimmicky as it may seem to take focus-grouped iconography on as a sincere identity, it pays off. The Crew are best when they work hard, the Galaxy are best when the stars are out, the Rapids are best when they play fast, the Loons are best when they coo mournfully off in the distance. Teams ought to embody what they say they are, and there is an obvious contrast here: Charlotte leans into the royal iconography, Atlanta leans into the railroading iconography. We have a classic blue-blood versus working-man struggle here. This should be Vivaldi versus bluegrass, Champagne versus Miller Lite, Sirrus versus Achenar, a soccer ball wearing a crown and a cape versus a train horn that blares after goals.

This might be the beginning of something beautiful, should be exciting in and of itself, and it will have our full attention on Saturday afternoon.

6:30pm Philadelphia Union vs FC Cincinnati - Apple TV+ Game of the Matchday:

NOTE: I have no idea how many matches will be free for viewing on Apple TV versus available to Apple TV+ viewers on a given weekend this year. I will highlight one Apple TV+ match per Saturday each weekend, and I believe the Sunday Night games, which I'm always going to cover anyway, will be available through Apple TV+ too.

It's difficult to shock anyone during MLS opening weekend. Every team goes through so much turnover in a typical offseason as it is, plus the best teams end up rotating their best players to ensure fitness for Concacaf, so we're left without much of a sense of anyone's true quality during week 1. On its face, Philadelphia, in their first match of the post-Curtin era winning 4-2 in Orlando on Saturday evening should've been the most shocking upset of the opening weekend, but a) Orlando seems kind of listless to begin with b) We've seen Bradley Carnell's teams press well in the Spring before wilting in each of the past two years, and c) San Diego beat the defending MLS Cup champions on the road in their first-ever match a day later anyway. However, the Union look far from dead and certainly warrant a look in the 6:30pm window as they welcome Cincinnati, a team that looks as complete as I've ever seen anyone in MLS look so early in the season.

A couple of years ago, in their schedule release video (which I reference as if everyone remembers), the Union referred to Cincinnati as "Union Jr.", as FCC hired both their GM, Chris Albright, and head coach, Pat Noonan, away from the Union prior to their 2022 turnaround. The roles have now flipped, with Cincinnati having built a consistent competitor and the Union struggling to gain footing (which is congruent with their iconography at least, given that their mascot is a snake who grew legs). FC Cincinnati now comes into Philadelphia as the giant to be knocked down, one who is still only three matches into the Denkey/Evander era, one which is in all likelihood fatigued from playing those three matches in an eight-day span, one of which they traveled internationally to get to, and if the Union cause as much havoc and finish as well as they did in Florida last weekend, it'll go a long way towards re-energizing Subaru Park in 2025.

7:30pm DC United vs Chicago Fire FC - Artisan’s Choice Game of the Week:

There was a moment on MLS 360 last weekend in which Kaylyn Kyle asked Sacha Klestjian to explain who the "Keystone Cops" were after he evoked their name to describe the defensive effort on one of the goals given up by the Chicago Fire against Columbus. I've probably heard the phrase "Keystone Cops" to refer to the mistake and blunder-prone hundreds of times in my life prior to Kyle's question, but had never thought of its source. Klestjian couldn't offer it, either, instead giving the term's definition. My intensive research (read: A Wikipedia search) indicates that the Keystone Cops were a troupe of fictional policemen created by slapstick filmmaker Mack Sennett during the 1910s.

What a testament to the silent filmmaking prowess of Sennett, that these characters were so impactful upon audiences that they've lived on in analogy for so long. When he put together the likes of Fatty Arbuckle, Al St. John, Ford Sterling, and on one occasion Charlie Chaplin to play bumbling members of the law enforcement to provide levity while the rest of the world was getting trench foot and mustard gassed in the Great War, do you think he had any idea that his creation would inspire such off-handed usage by a soccer player-turned-analyst on a streaming-only whiparound show covering an American professional soccer league like that? That Arbuckle, St. John, Sterling, and Chaplin would one day by synonymous with Gutman, Elliott, Teran, and Dean?

In fairness to the Fire, DC United was also not immune from backline errors that led to goals in week one. In fairness to DC United, basically nobody else in the league was immune from backline errors, either. Jordi Alba donned the Keystone Cap of the Keystone Cop as much as Carlos Teran and Aaron Herrera did.

I am willing to attribute this to unfamiliarity and rust at a season's beginning, but I'm not so sure that a week of training will guarantee that the two teams come out all that much less error-prone than they did on matchday 1, especially with Christian Benteke and Jonathan Bamba approaching (sadly sans accompaniment from Super Saiyan Brian Gutierrez), so we ought to expect some goals to flow in Solider Field on Saturday evening.

9:30pm San Diego FC vs St. Louis CITY SC:

San Diego is a second home of sorts for me. I lived there for a while in my mid-twenties, earned a degree from San Diego State, did all of the touristy and local stuff, set or at least tied a record for the least time spent on the beach by a Kansan transplant to San Diego over multiple years lived, and took a small part in the city's changing relationship with soccer over the last decade. I was an inaugural season ticket member for San Diego Loyal, even if I only got to attend the one game they played during that season. I was one of the few people who attended a San Diego 1904 FC match during the NISA Showcase Season of Fall 2019. I love that city to death, I've seen its love for the sport up-close, even when it wasn't glamorous to do so, and I'm excited to see what the first home crowd for San Diego FC looks like. The traveling support for SDFC showed out tremendously well in Carson last Sunday, and they were rewarded with a great performance against the defending champions.

They welcome St. Louis, the most recent expansion team, one who famously rocketed out of the gates in a similar fashion in 2023. With their home win over Charlotte FC on March 4th of 2023, St. Louis improved the record of MLS expansion teams in their home openers to 12 wins, 7 losses, and only 3 draws. Ergo, history favors San Diego, but it also favors viewers in search of catharsis. Andres Dreyer provided it for San Diego last weekend and Simon Becher came very close to doing so for St. Louis.

Another important thing to monitor about this match is its impact on the Saint Power Rankings, aka the Blasphemer's Cup, a new competition I've just invented within the MLS Western Conference. Four MLS clubs play soccer matches in cities named for saints - Joseph (San Jose), Paul the Apostle (Minnesota), Louis IX of France (St. Louis), and now Didacus of Alcala (San Diego). MLS now leads all American major professional sports leagues in teams located in cities named for saints, passing Major League Baseball (San Francisco, Saint Louis, Saint Petersburg) and the National Hockey League (San Jose, Saint Louis, Saint Paul), making MLS the Holiest Major Professional Sports League in American History.

Each of these four teams will play one another twice in the 2025 season, meaning that, at year's end, we will have the closest empirically-researched answer in world history to the question of which Saint is the best, a title that I'm certain each of them would appreciate and eagerly accept being able to hold. Saturday night pits Didacus of Alcala, a missionary who routinely took bread from his monastery's pantry to give to the poor, against Louis IX, the Capetian French king who served hundreds of poor people on a daily basis during his reign. Let's see who's the most charitable!

Sunday 6:00pm Houston Dynamo FC vs Inter Miami CF:

It's been a year and a half, I've paid my dues (i.e. Bought a ticket at face value to the first leg of SKC's Concacaf round against Miami and didn't use it out of a desire to avoid frostbite), and I think it is time for me to start finding something kind of endearing about Miami. They just shouldn't have to compete the way that they do, they should be much more dominant than they are, they shouldn't be salvaging points at home in stoppage time like they do. We loved it when San Jose did that back in 2012, but we loved that because they did it with Gordon, Lenhart, and Wondo. Miami has Alba, Suarez, and Messi! It’s disgusting! If you’re gonna be good, just be normal good, just blow everybody out! Don’t play with your food for the whole game and then choose to salvage something late when you decide you care again. Who are you, The Kansas City Chiefs?1

Writing about anything in the West at the moment is difficult, because the number of Western teams that I’m thinking probably do not deserve to make the playoffs is nearing double digits, which is a problem in a league in which the number of Western teams that make the playoffs nears double digits. I am clinging to the Vancouver Whitecaps as the paragons of consistency at this point. I can talk myself into Austin, St. Louis, Colorado, San Jose in third and don’t feel that disconnected from the material world. Houston, I feel sort of confident in stating, is not slated to be a competitor in the West, considering that they lost all of their best players and haven’t fully replaced them yet. I like Jack McGlynn, I want to see what he does as the driving force of a team, but I don’t know if I can fully get behind them. I don’t know what it means to lose to FC Dallas in 2025, either. I don’t know what it will mean to lose or draw to Inter Miami, either, given that Inter Miami just tends to win regardless of how they or their opponent play.

I only feel certain of the final positions of Seattle, LAFC, and Sporting KC in first, second, and fifteenth this year, respectively, but otherwise, the West strikes me as a formless, angsty slog of elbows and teeth. To state anything about the Houston Dynamo one way or the other here in March is a disservice to you, reader, but I will posit that they take a 1-0 lead in the first half, fail to put away a multitude of chances between minutes 45 and 80, then give up two to Messi and/or Suarez in the final ten plus stoppage.

So it goes!

The 2024 Major League Soccer season suffered from a sort of myopia among fans and commentators, in which a host of external, long-term issues and talking points overshadowed what was a genuinely interesting season of soccer. If one could cut through the constant consternation and chatter that surrounded it, get through the arguments about the playoff formats and the Leagues Cup's relevance and the US Open Cup's relevance and the annoyances that came from Inter Miami and the conservative additions to the salary structure and the Apple deal, they were rewarded with great team soccer, individual dynamism, and great drama from the season kickoff in February to the trophy lift in Carson in December. I am, of course, perpetuating this myopia by beginning my first piece on the 2025 season with this discussion, but please bear with me.

Perpetual optimist that I am, I believe that we're facing down what should be an enthralling year of Major League Soccer, and I hope that the actual soccer is what comes to define it. I intend to help define it as such by bringing back the Watch Grid, this time in a more constrained format than I originally used.

Graciously, MLS will be showcasing two games on Sundays this season, which takes some of the decision-making burden away from me. My intent is to cap these pieces at five entries each, previewing up to three matches for Saturday and two for Sunday. I'll try to get at least one free match in there if one is presented as well.

Minnesota United FC at Los Angeles FC (3:30pm Saturday)

Tuesday evening gave us our first glimpse of Steve Cherundolo's 2025 LAFC squad, who traveled to a frigid Commerce City, Colorado in Concacaf Champions Cup play against the Rapids and left with a pyrrhic 2-1 loss. They quietly hemorrhaged quite a bit over the off-season, losing starters like Ilie Sanchez, Cristian Olivera, Mety Bogusz, and Jesus Murillo. This amount of turnover, compounded by the cold, the altitude, and the fact that the Rapids honestly strike me as a very good team, makes it understandable that they came out so flat and commendable that they were able to pick up a late goal from Aaron Long off of a setpiece. I would like to dislike LAFC more than I do, but I love how they've rebuilt with proven MLS veterans like Mark Delgado, Nkosi Tafari, and Jeremy Ebobisse. Denis Bouanga is one of my favorite MLS players. Once a team loses three finals in sequence, I start to find them endearing (even when they break their drought against my team).

LAFC is not quite an automatic must-watch (and I blame this on the fact that they're trotting out two aging Frenchmen at Goalkeeper and Striker instead of younger players, it feels like they could be the team turning young and developing talents into stars instead of riding the tail-ends of already-established stars. They're also built on so much speed as it is, Giroud just seems out of place with them, like he's holding them back to an extent), but I enjoy them, especially when they're paired with Minnesota United.

I consider myself a Loons well-wisher. I have familial ties to Minnesota, I've been to Allianz Field, I've enjoyed the interactions that I've shared with Loons fans when visiting the stadium, and I've really come to appreciate what they have turned into under Eric Ramsay. They lack the obvious top-end talent of their opponent (and it showed in their matchup in the Western Conference Semis), but I loved how they punched above their weight class last year, especially after the summer transfer window.

They are the Community to LAFC's The Office, the Wowee Zowee to LAFC's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the Villette to LAFC's Jane Eyre. They're not the obvious product for the network to sell, and you have to work a little to understand the bits and pieces that come together to build them, but those willing to put in the effort will be rewarded in the end. It's the versatility of Robin Lod and Bongokuhle Hlongwane, the heroics of Dayne St. Clair (necessitated by a leaky backline that will probably again be their downfall in 2025), and the pure energy of Sang-Bin Jeong and Tami Oluwaseyi that do it for me. I just find them terribly endearing, and I suspect that they'll be even better with a full offseason under Ramsay in tow.

This was not supposed to be the season kickoff match, but will serve as such now that the Miami/New York City match was pushed back to accommodate Miami's delayed return home from their match here in frostbitten Kansas City. This should be a great showcase for what's to come from the top of the Western Conference in 2025.

Chicago Fire at Columbus Crew (6:30pm Saturday)

This is the most narratively compelling event of our first weekend. I realize, as I've sat in front of this keyboard typing nothing for the past ten minutes, that I approach writing about Gregg Berhalter with precarity, with the same tension that accompanies an offhand reference to a political figure during Thanksgiving Dinner, with the knowledge that discussing his work opens doors to tedious, cyclical, acrid conversations that will never be satisfyingly concluded, and it especially complicates what should be a fairly straightforward narrative thread underlying this match: Gregg Berhalter, in his return to MLS, will coach in Columbus against the team he led for five seasons, four of which resulted in playoff berths and one of which resulted in an MLS Cup berth amid an intentionally unstable situation created by ownership.

His last home match as the head coach of the Crew took place on November 4th, 2018 in the first leg of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, a 1-0 win over the New York Red Bulls. Gyasi Zardes scored off of an assist from Federico Higuain, and Zack Steffen picked up a clean sheet. It was six years, two coaches, an ownership change, a stadium change, an in-state rival joining the league, a pandemic, the entire Crew tenures of Lucas Zelarayan and Cucho Hernandez, a Concacaf Champions Cup final, a Leagues Cup win, and two MLS Cup wins ago. The Crew are a completely different animal from that which Berhalter left.

I would have figured that a former coach returning to the league with one of their old rivals would spark more ambivalence from the Crew faithful, but I haven’t seen much chatter about it either way. I imagine that so much winning leaves little room for bitterness, especially for a wounded old foe like Chicago - But that rivalry burned hot for a good while. I remember seeing “I’d Rather Die in Chicago than Live in Columbus” scarves displayed by Fire fans back in the early 2010s, but the Fire have been nudged out by Cincinnati and haven’t played in enough relevant matches to maintain the vitriol. Perhaps this is where it reignites.

The Crew, despite their pedigree, are coming off of a surprisingly disappointing off-season, in which they lost key players like Cucho Hernandez, Christian Ramirez, and Alex Matan, but didn’t bring in replacements. It speaks to the goodwill that Wilfried Nancy has built up in the past three seasons that I’m not worried about them. The Fire, on the other hand, have added significantly, signing attacking winger Jonathan Bamba from Celta Vigo and MLS Best XI-calibre center-back Jack Elliott in free agency. I still think that the Crew are the better of the two teams, but I’m curious to see if the Fire can start Gregg Berhalter’s tenure with a shock upset over his old team.

Charlotte FC at Seattle Sounders FC (9:30pm Saturday) - GAME OF THE MATCHDAY

It's hard to make any recommendations based on form this early in the season, but based on roster strength, this is the most interesting matchup of the weekend in my eyes (and based on the little competitive evidence we have, Seattle looks to be in pretty good form as it is). I could see this as a feasible MLS Cup matchup at the end of the year. Seattle's probably the odds-on favorite to win the West as it is. They were one late Riqui Puig assist on a bad leg away from hosting the Cup Final last season, and that was without the addition of Jesus Ferreira into the attack. If the aggression that Pedro De La Vega showed in the mid-week holds consistently, I think we're looking at one of the most complete teams in MLS to this point in the decade.

Charlotte was sort of the Eastern equivalent to the Sounders last season: Middle of the playoff standings, defensively stout, showed potential but otherwise only scraped by in the attack, played in an NFL stadium, etc. What Seattle added in Jesus Ferreira, Charlotte's adding in Wilfried Zaha. What redemption from a disappointing attacking DP that Seattle hopes to see from Pedro De La Vega, Charlotte hopes to see from Liel Abada. Though the East is loaded with more obvious contenders in Miami, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Atlanta, I think Charlotte will continue to build atop the solid foundation they've created in their first three MLS seasons and break into the upper echelon of the East this year.

Portland Timbers vs Vancouver Whitecaps FC (3:00pm Sunday) - Artisan’s Choice Game of the Week

When I was in the eighth grade, two of my classmates, Kevin and Brandon, filmed themselves getting in a fistfight in a dry creekbed and uploaded it to YouTube. The video was deleted long ago, but in 2008 it made its way around my junior high school quickly, first as whispers and rumors through the halls and then through impromptu screenings in the computer lab during typing classes, which is where I first saw “Kevin and Brandon fight at the creek”.

I was only somewhat acquainted with the two kids, but I thought they were friends with one another, and certainly not the type to need that sort of release in the woods of Lenexa in late-February. They weren’t fighters, they were drama club kids. This wasn't an act, though. I could see, even through the quality of a point and shoot digital camera probably borrowed from a parent, the sincerity in their eyes, the desperation in their futile swings, and the shallowly-seated, banal, but truthful sadness within them. Two teenage boys, bereft of direction or malice, sought truth at the end of each punch in that creekbed.

The Whitecaps and Timbers enter the 2025 season under similar terms. Their last meeting was sort of embarrassing for both of them. Vancouver had to give up their right to host the Western Conference Wild Card game to Portland because BC Place was preparing to host a SuperCross event. The Timbers squandered what good fortune and poor planning had brought them, losing 5-0 in front of their home fans. Both teams lost key pieces to unceremonious circumstances in the offseason; Vancouver fired Vanni Sartini and lost Stuart Armstrong, Portland transferred Evander to Cincinnati in a haze of angry tweets.

It's rare for such bitter rudderlessness to underlie an opening match in MLS. This should be a time for senseless optimism, but both teams enter this Sunday afternoon with severe baggage that they need to take out on someone. Perhaps Providence Park will serve as their dry creek bed.

San Diego FC at LA Galaxy (6:00pm Sunday)

I am very interested to follow the Galaxy in 2025. It's been a while since an MLS Cup felt as culminative as theirs did. Ever since Cameron Porter got everyone to believe that Concacaf runs were possible, the MLS Cup winner has entered the following season carrying an onus to use that Cup win as a springboard into continental success. The Galaxy, now sans Riqui Puig due to injury as well as Mark Delgado and Dejan Jovelic due to budgetary constraints, enter this season with the least hype that I've seen around a defending champion since perhaps the 2016 Timbers. It kind of feels like they had a window, they fulfilled it, and now they'll have to rebuild quietly off to the side before they take their next big swings in 2026. Nonetheless, they still have a lot of talented players and should be a very good team in MLS this season.

I'll have more to say about San Diego next week, when they host their first match, but I'm so glad to see the San Diego/Los Angeles rivalry in MLS. San Diegans have a reputation for being laid back, but nothing angers up their blood like Los Angeles does. It even gets me going, I only lived there for a couple of years, but the Padres/Dodgers series in the National League playoffs last year had me right back in. The long-term project of San Diego FC impresses me much more than the team they'll bring out in the 2025 season, but I am excited to see this rivalry take its first steps.

It’s been a fraught, controversial, complaint-ridden year around MLS — The half-in-half-out business with the Open Cup, the mid-year intrusion of Leagues Cup, the laser-focus on Lionel Messi and Inter Miami from the central broadcaster, the complex formatting makeup of the playoffs, the abnormally wide scope of playoffs, the international break we have to deal with right in the middle of the playoffs, the roster construction rules that have opened not enough for some and too much for others, a proposed schedule-flip that might or might not happen that would solve some problems while introducing others, San Diego’s logo, and the ad where a group of friends apparently gathers around a TV in generic MLS Shield apparel along with one salesman from Discount Tire.

The surrounding chatter too often overshadows the actual on-field play in this league (and in this sport in general), which is unfortunate, as it’s been really good this year. We have a phenomenal soccer weekend ahead of us in America: The USL-C and NWSL finals are today, the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Tournaments will get cut down to their final sixteen and eight, respectively, and we have a phenomenal slate of Conference Semifinals matches in the Major League. Let’s get ready -

The West:

Los Angeles FC (1) vs Seattle Sounders (4) - 9:30pm CDT Saturday

This match is but one node on the perhaps the most drawn-out revenge plot currently running in Major League Soccer. Five years ago, the Seattle Sounders handed the nascent LAFC its first real humiliation, ending the Black and Gold’s record-setting season in the Western Conference Final, kicking away 2019 LAFC’s chance at holding the title of “Greatest Team in MLS History” like Nouhou Tolo to a can of Dos Equis hurled from the stands at then-Banc of California Stadium. LAFC was, at the time, still MLS’s hot new thing, the paradigm-shifter, the ones redefining what it meant to be a great tof ten matches in a eam in MLS — much like Seattle had been a decade prior. It was a simple set of narratives in 2019: The savvy veteran power in the Northwest met the moment while the newly-ordained darlings couldn’t fulfill what they felt was destined. Those brash, early Sounders teams had taken their lumps from Houston, Salt Lake, and the Galaxy before eventually breaking through in 2016, and in 2019, it was the Sounders’ turn to deliver said lumps to LAFC.

This set the LAFC project off-course for a bit. They tumbled to a 7th-place finish in the West in 2020 and found themselves swiftly knocked out by Seattle in the first round. They fell out of playoff contention entirely in 2021. Quietly, late in that season, the winds began to shift: After a 2-0 loss at Lumen Field in May, LAFC answered with a 3-0 home win on October 26th. This win was not enough to get LAFC above the playoff cut-line (they’d lose it officially two matches later on the road in Colorado) and only made a marginal difference in knocking Seattle down from their spot in the first in the West. But it was the first match in an unbeaten streak of ten (and counting) over the Sounders that’s reached an absolutely abhorrent peak in 2024.

The 2024 MLS season opened with a 2-1 LAFC win in Los Angeles. This loss sent the Sounders down a miserable spiral — They were winless in their first five matches and only picked up six through their first ten. They managed to salvage things in the summer, winning six of seven from June 15th to July 17th, with a home match against LAFC set to cement their momentum into the Leagues Cup break… which they lost 3-0.

A month later, on August 17th, the Sounders were again feeling their oats. They’d made it to the Leagues Cup quarterfinals with a 3-1 win over the LA Galaxy and a 4-0 win over Pumas UNAM, setting up another match with LAFC. Again, they’d lose 3-0.

Just eleven days later, they faced LAFC again in the US Open Cup semifinals. This was, again, a chance to return to form. Seattle used to run the US Open Cup, winning four in their first six years as an MLS outfit. Even in a tough year, they could salvage something by taking that trophy for the first time in a decade. They had not only a home match, they had a home match at their intimate alternate ground in Tukwila. To make their chances even greater, LAFC was coming in fatigued, travel-weary, and demoralized only three days after losing the Leagues Cup final in Columbus. LAFC still won.

LAFC is 4-0 over Seattle in 2024, with a 9-1 aggregate score. They’re on a six-match winning streak against Seattle, one which includes last year’s Western Conference semifinals as well! The Black and Gold have fully avenged the failure of their 2019 team. They’ve won three trophies since they last lost to the Sounders. They’ve also lost four finals since they last lost to the Sounders.

Saturday night, they’ll play again. LAFC is back atop the West, and they’ll have homefield advantage throughout the remainder of the playoffs. Seattle sits in the middle of a protracted pseudo-rebuild. Lodeiro is gone. Ruidiaz has turned ineffective. Jordan Morris and Cristian Roldan are both approaching their tenth seasons in rave green. This year’s new addition, Pedro De La Vega, has been hurt at times and has disappointed in these playoffs. This year’s breakout player in Seattle has been Paul Rothrock, who (though he’s probably been my favorite MLS player in 2024) wasn’t the type of star signing they expect in Seattle. After reaching the mountaintop in the 2022 Concacaf Champions League, they seem to have fallen prey to malaise, and every time that they’re in position to take a step forward, they get smacked back to Earth by LAFC again.

Let’s not forget, though, that the Sounders’ best postseasons have come from outside of the league’s penthouse. They had to win on the road to qualify for the two MLS Cup finals that they won. In the four years in which they won the Western Conference, their highest regular-season finish in-league was 4th. LAFC may seem unbeatable to Seattle now, but they seemed that way to the league as a whole back in 2019. Seattle again has a chance to rewrite their narrative.

Minnesota United FC (6) at Los Angeles Galaxy (2) - 5:00pm Sunday

This was the matchup that I most wanted to see in the playoffs when the final whistle blew on Decision Day. In an ironic twist, it came at the expense of what had been my favorite regular-season series in the chaotic Rocky Mountain Cup games between Colorado and Salt Lake. The shine wore off of those two as the year went long, with injuries and transfers sanding down both teams into shells of what we’d seen in the summer, leaving them prey to these two exciting, attack-minded sides who found their form at the right time in round one.

I find no two teams more endearing than these two at this point. Minnesota started surprisingly strong without a coach, then suffered awful growing pains in the summer as the team acclimated to Eric Ramsay and a host of new signings. They lost six straight matches in the summer as they struggled to simultaneously plug holes in the lineup due to injuries or international duty and integrate the eight new signings they brought aboard. They crashed out of the Leagues Cup despite getting a nice victory over Necaxa due to phenomenal goalkeeping by Dayne St. Clair. This is what I wrote about them at the time:

This break represents less of a pragmatic avoidance of distraction for a team on the right track and more of a chance for a team in a downward spiral to right the ship. They've lready made a few signings to shore up the defense, they added a DP forward in Kelvin Yeboah, they will have Tani Oluwaseyi back in full alongside him in an attack featuring Robin Lod, Bongokuhle Hlongwane, Sang-Bin Jeong, and Franco Fragapane. It is within the realm of possibility that we get a decent month or two out of Teemu Pukki. Much like with Dallas, I can see a version of this Minnesota team that gets as hot as their attack should seem to be able to get, gets into the playoffs, and makes a nice little run out of the opportunity.

Diagnosis: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU DO

The Loons have thoroughly figured out what they do. They integrated midseason CB signing Jefferson Diaz into the backline to great effect — they’ve only given up two goals in their last seven matches. Joaquin Pereyra has been an effective starter on the left wing. Kelvin Yeboah has scored seven goals in his nine matches. This was already a team that I found plenty talented in attack, and they now have the luxury of bringing in Tani Oluwaseyi and Sang-Bin Jeong off the bench against tired legs. They’ve been able to overrun opponents with goals, they’ve been able to suffocate opponents defensively, they just gutted out two straight penalty shootouts.

I find them endearing, this team that struggled greatly at points but coalesced at the right time in the late-summer. I find them enviable as well. Last year, that middle-market midwestern team struggled under a long-tenured manager/sporting director. They replaced him, hired a coach from outside of the league who I’ve come to like a lot, and made really good signings when they had the opportunities to do so. Mine is sticking with the long-tenured manager/sporting director who got us here and the last two underwhelming transfer windows have me pessimistic about the opportunity for new personnel to salvage next season. I like watching them play, and they meet a team that I like watching play even more.

The Galaxy have dealt with an identity crisis since the mid-2010s. What used to be their domain (the star players from overseas, the prominent USMNT and El Tri players, the winning) has been usurped by LAFC, Miami, and Toronto to varying levels of sustained success ever since the Arena era died in a penalty shootout in Commerce City in late 2016. There have been fits and starts back into life: Zlatan dragged them to the playoffs in 2019 and that uneasy Chicharito/Jovelic partnership found its way into the Western Semis in 2022, but nothing’s been sustained past those brief single-season flickers. From 2017 to 2023, the Galaxy had, at their best, briefly attained mild success by halfway rekindling what they once did well. They seemed destined to join the Chicago Bulls and Washington Commanders (or the Chicago Fire and DC United for that matter) as teams perpetually grasping at what they once were, unable to adapt into a future that had left them.

This year’s team has been absolutely delightful in light of all of that. The heliocentrism of Riqui Puig, the speed and finesse on the outside from Gabriel Pec, Miki Yamane, and Joseph Paintsil, and the suspect but generally good enough back-line and goalkeeping play all coalesced into this team that I grew to treat as appointment viewing. I proselytized about the Galaxy to my friends with the same nervous fervor I did for Weezer’s White Album and Sonic Generations: “I know it’s hard to believe this is coming from them, but I swear it’s not even just that they’re at the level of quality they used to have, it’s that they’re doing it in a way I haven’t seen from anyone else.” They finally ceded the old Galaxy façon de vivre to Miami, LAFC, and Toronto and brought in something fresh, which, in a sense, has them feeling more like the edge-setting, dazzling, successful Galaxy of old.

It’s almost perverse how much I’ve enjoyed the 2024 Galaxy. I’ve pictured how odd this would hit 19 year-old me back in 2014, back when they were the Death Star and the league’s favorites, the ones who got the rules to change when they needed something new, the ones who brought reality to plucky underdogs like San Jose and New England, crushed forward-minded ideologues like Salt Lake and Seattle, and at least brought those nagging Dynamo teams that always beat us to heel in the finals. This year, I got those nostalgic heart swells watching the Galaxy come back to beat LAFC in the late summer normally reserved for when a thirty-something NBA vet I watched in college comes off the bench to hit a clutch shot in the playoffs. I was downright giddy seeing that stadium in Carson come back alive. I might as well have been a fan of theirs. Didn’t I used to hate this franchise’s guts?

Something about both of these teams speaks to me. I see two teams here that recognized deep-seated problems, took measures to solve their problems, and have moved into an exciting present with eyes towards a brilliant future, and I admire them both for it. I enjoy them both for it. I envy them both for it.

The East:

Orlando City SC (4) vs Atlanta United FC (8) - 2:30pm Sunday

When all the Barcelona guys touched down in Miami last year, I figured that we were at the end of an era for the Orlando/Atlanta rivalry. Orlando could turn their ire fully southward to the team that had finally spent its way to relevance as their greatest season in nine years of MLS history went under the radar. Atlanta could focus their ire two states northward at the team struggling to establish themselves in the region that they’d claimed in the late 2010s. I apparently didn’t actually finish the piece in which I laid that out, but I’ll give you an excerpt from a draft prior to their match July 15th, 2023:

This may be a tad histrionic, but I think this will be the final match of a particular era of Major League Soccer in the Southeastern US. Atlanta and Orlando were the only two MLS teams in this region for a three-season stretch between 2017 and 2019, and they hated one another intensely. At least, Orlando hated Atlanta intensely and Josef Martinez relished scoring on Orlando intensely…

With one signing, Miami will soon matter significantly more than they ever have. From my far-off vantage point, it seems like beating Atlanta has been more important than beating Miami to Orlando up to this point, but now, winning the state, considering the ballyhoo surrounding Miami, will become more important than beating United. That September 24th match between Inter and Orlando at Exploria will be the most significant meeting of the two teams since their first match to kick-off the MLS is Back Tournament in 2020. 

I’m not down there myself, but the past year feels as if it’s played out that way. This iteration of Inter Miami has been the perfect foil for Orlando City. Their early struggles left Orlando as the league’s perpetual teeth-gnasher; the furious underdog; the kid who got bullied in junior high, hit a growth spurt Freshman year, and now plays gym class dodgeball against those old bullies with a worrying glint in his eyes. They are built to seethe and ball their fists while glaring up at the glitzy giants down south that got everything they wanted without having to work for it.

In the late-2010s, that glitzy giant was Atlanta. Orlando spent three years suffering under them, and, save for 2021, have spent the 2020s thoroughly outclassing their northern foes to the point that it’s not that interesting to them anymore.

For my fellow Great Plainsians, this is like when Bill Snyder’s K-State teams really overtook Kansas in 1994 and spent the rest of the 1990s frothing in anger at Nebraska. “Orlando is MLS’s Kansas State” is probably one of my stronger analogies, but the overlap between the two sporting worlds in which they exist is so narrow that it won’t hit readers properly. They’re both purple, too.

Now, they stand in a position that’s beginning to grow uncomfortably familiar. The road to glory is wide open to them. For the third time in five seasons, they will host the Eastern Conference Semifinals in Orlando. They lost the prior two: In 2020, they fell 3-1 to Carles Gil and a New England Revolution team just about to turn from a Cinderella into a juggernaut. Last year, they fell 2-0 to Cucho Hernandez and a Columbus Crew team just about to turn from a promising but unorthodox project into one of the best teams on the continent. A third loss, this time to the lowest-seeded team ever to make the conference semis, will turn this series of unfortunate happenstances into a pattern of inability to get the job done as favorites at home in the playoffs.

They have a chance to exorcise their conference semifinal demons against the team that so frequently and thoroughly crushed them as they tried to gain a foothold in the late-2010s.

Atlanta’s suffered from a much less-protracted version of the identity crisis I described with the Galaxy. They were the class of the league for three years, then the decade turned and COVID hit, and ever since, they’ve struggled to maintain a sense of self. In the 2020s, they’ve spent big and employed dynamic players like Thiago Almada and Ezequiel Barco, but they haven’t brought the success that Miguel Almiron and Josef Martinez did. The Five Stripes don’t carry the same mystique that they once did.

That, as much as anything, has been a self-replenishing problem of Atlanta’s in the 2020s, but their last five matches reflect a team that’s finally unburdened by their past successes. Against Miami, they relished the underdog role and played it well. They subverted fans’ expectations of them: The first round’s heroes weren’t the imported supernovae for which Atlanta was once known, they were battle-worn veterans like Brad Guzan, Dax McCarty, and Jamal Thiare.

This semifinal match is entirely built on subverted expectations. There was supposed to be a southeastern rivalry played out in the Eastern semis, but not this one. Orlando’s never been the one with the high expectations, the clearest path to the finals, and pressure to win as the favorite, but they are now. Atlanta’s never been the one punching above their weight, riding on good fortune and positive momentum, and out-efforting others for road upsets, but they are now. Neither of these teams were supposed to be major characters in the story of these playoffs, but they surely are now.

New York City FC (6) vs New York Red Bulls (7) - 4:30pm Saturday

This is year ten of the Hudson River Derby. In these ten seasons, the two participants have combined for three league-level championship trophies and eighteen playoff appearances. These have been two of the most consistently high-quality sides in the league. They’re almost always in the postseason together… and yet, this is the first time that the two have met for a playoff match.

It has been slated to happen, most infamously in 2016, when Red Bull took the top seed in the Eastern bracket and City took the second. If all went chalk, we were slated for a collision between two intense regional rivals in a dramatic conference final round to determine whether not just their shared region, but the entire Eastern Conference, was Red or Blue. We ended up getting precisely that, only with a Canadian caveat: City fell to Giovinco and Toronto, the Bulls fell to Drogba and Montreal. We haven’t really come that close since.

It’s been strange to see. Every other big MLS rivalry seems to earn a postseason showdown within a few seasons of its inception. We had playoff Atlantic Cup in its first season, playoff El Trafico in its second, playoff El Capitan in its second, playoff Cascadia (the Seattle/Portland wing of it, anyway) in its third, playoff Montreal-Toronto in its fourth, playoff Hell is Real in its fifth. How has the Hudson Derby taken ten years? It’s not even a Rocky Mountain Cup situation where one of the participants is the Rapids and rarely qualifies for the playoffs; both of these teams have been really consistent!

At first glance, 2024 didn’t appear as if it would bring us a playoff Hudson Derby. The Red Bulls started the year hot and gradually cooled off over the year. They dropped three of their last four matches, the final of which saw them give up three goals at home to a Columbus Crew they were slated to meet in the first round. New York City was best defined as streaky, they won frequently in the year’s first half and drifted through the second, feasting on low-scoring draws en route to a series with an FC Cincinnati team who, despite having clearly regressed from their form in 2023, still seemed a class above that of the Pigeons. Just like in 2016, the slate was poised to give us one regional rivalry match, but reality proved otherwise.

They finally meet in a moment of anti-climax. 2024 for Red Bull felt like a proof-of-concept season setting them up for next year, it felt for City like an unspectacular mid-point between eras, post-MLS Cup win but pre-whatever comes with the World Cup and the new stadium. We’re well-past Viera, Villa, and Lampard versus Marsch, Wright-Phillips, and Kljestian. These are not the star-studded New York teams that used to snatch headlines, both of these teams are unglamorous, oddly considering the metropolis they share with Judge, Rodgers, and Brunson.

City is a tremendous defensive suffocator built on quality domestic defensive players like Keaton Parks, James Sands, Tayvon Gray, and Matt Freese. Their attack runs through Santi Rodriguez, one the best attacking midfielders in MLS, who is somehow underappreciated despite being the best player in New York. The Red Bulls have looked at points like a phenomenal team unit under Sandro Schwarz, piloted by Lewis Morgan and Emil Forsberg, and it finally came to fruition against Columbus. This edition of the Hudson Derby, though bereft of the ballyhoo of the mid-2010s, nonetheless will be the biggest and perhaps most tactically intricate of its first decade.

It’ll happen at Citi Field, City’s second home, which will be restricted in attendance because the Mets had already started the winterization process after falling in the NLCS. In perhaps the best accidental metaphor of the 2024 MLS playoffs, fans in New York will need to walk by the circus across the street to see this.

The first-order reasoning for this is obvious: We have two playoff spots open in the East and four teams still alive to claim them. DC (8th, 40 points) and Montreal (9th, 40 points) can stay in with draws, Atlanta (11th, 37 points) and Philadelphia (12th, 37 points) can break through with wins and losses by either of the two teams ahead of them. Somehow, for the second year in a row, a team on the cusp of playoff qualification (Toronto, in 10th) is off on Decision Day and is guaranteed to miss out on the playoffs. It will be a simpler race than on previous Decision Days, as if all teams end up with 40 points at the day’s end, they’ll also end up tied on the first tiebreaker (10 wins each) and there’s a significant disparity in the second tiebreaker of goal differential for each, one which would vault the two lower teams ahead of the higher teams if all four ended up at 40.

I feel like this is self-explanatory stuff: These four teams are fighting for the chance to play another week. Their ceilings are merely the Wild Card round at this point, but as we saw last season in the case of Sporting KC, one’s fate is not sealed to an immediate exit against the top seed if they qualify for the Wild Card round. Hope is on the line, the 2024 season is on the line, a chance for a home stadium to sell-out hosting Lionel Messi again is on the line — they just need to take care of business this Saturday.

But I find the second-order intrigue far more interesting: Outside of Cincinnati, who is locked into the third seed in the East, the opponents of our friends straddling the cut-line will jockey for seeding in the middle of the pack. Orlando sits currently in 4th with 52 points, NYCFC sits currently in 5th with 50 points, and Charlotte sits currently in 6th with 48.

These teams will not be playing with the sense of desperation that drives their opponents, but evidence from last year’s limited sample size indicates that finishing in fourth provides some extra benefit to teams. Sporting KC was, ultimately, the only lower-seeded team to progress out of the first-round; the other 7 contests went in favor of the higher-seeded team. It would be sensible for these three mid-table teams to give weight to these final matches, as it might be the difference between progressing and checking out after a single round.

That one of the teams with a must-win game, Philadelphia, is not only playing but hosting a Cincinnati team locked into third-place, also adds intrigue here. On paper, this is the toughest matchup of any of the four, but FCC could basically take the match off and see nothing change for them if they so desired.

For my sake, though, we have an absolutely delightful conundrum staring us down if only a few contests go a few specific ways this weekend.

Consider if this is a feasible sentence, reader:

Atlanta travels south to Orlando and wins; New York City travels north to Montreal and wins.

I think you could consider that feasible, couldn’t you? Montreal has come up short of their goal on the each of the last three decision days (though ‘making the playoffs’ in 2021 and 2023 is a far different goal from ‘Winning the Supporter’s Shield’ as it was in 2023). Atlanta, at one point, used to dominate Orlando. If this scenario takes place (or even if Orlando draws with Atlanta and NYCFC beats Montreal by 4 goals), we’ll see New York City finish in 4th place, dropping Orlando City to 5th place, setting up a first-round series in which the Pigeons host their 2015 expansion brothers in Game 1, which should take place sometime between October 26th and 29th if last year’s schedule is predictive.

Now, gentle reader, I know that many of you likely have little to no interest in Major League Baseball, but I should tell you that, at time of writing, it’s very feasible for both the New York Yankees and New York Mets to advance to the World Series. Both are alive, even in good positions at time of writing, in their respective League Championship Series. The World Series, if this outcome occurs, would then take place between these two teams between October 25th and November 2nd, with days taken off on Sunday the 27th and Thursday the 31st.

This would leave the Pigeons in a bit of a bind. Ideally, they’d host their first round game at Yankee Stadium. To this point in their history, they’ve hosted 7 playoffs games, five of which took place at Yankee Stadium. Each of those home playoff games at Yankee Stadium (which I should denote was primarily constructed for the purpose of hosting Major League Baseball games for those unaware) came after the conclusion of the New York Yankees’ season, be it from a playoff loss or a failure to qualify for the playoffs entirely.

In the cases that a Yankees playoff series has intersected with an NYCFC playoff game, the Pigeons have moved to their secondary home of Citi Field (also primarily built for baseball’s New York Metropolitans (aka Da Mets) franchise). This happened first in 2019: The Yankees were in the ALCS against Houston and had a chance to be in the World Series on October 23rd, 2019, when NYCFC’s first playoff game against Toronto FC was scheduled. This was announced all the way back on October 1st, 2019. The Mets were well out of the playoff picture at this point, so it just made logistical sense, even if the Yankees’ season ultimately ended on October 19th anyway. NYCFC’s 2022 playoff game against Inter Miami was also moved to Citi Field for the same reason.

The trouble here is this: If Yankee Stadium has been in use, or even been in the position to potentially be in use, NYCFC has historically been able to move a home playoff game to Citi Field. If the Yankees win two more games and the Mets win three more games in the NLCS, though, Yankee Stadium and Citi Field will both be in use during the span of time in which the first round of the MLS Playoffs would take place. Both NYCFC’s preferred and fall-back baseball stadia would be in use.

Though there are days in which one or both venues wouldn’t be in use during the World Series, City has twice needed to move out of Yankee Stadium to host games that didn’t actively interfere with Yankee games, so I think it’s possible that the Yankees don’t want NYCFC hosting in Yankee Stadium while the Yankees themselves are still in play. I would assume that the Mets would act the same way — Why would you allow your stadium to be briefly reconfigured for soccer during the World Series?

If this is the case, and neither stadium is open for the Pigeons to use, then what do they do? I guess that’s the question at heart here.

The most obvious path would be to travel across the Hudson to Red Bull Arena, but that’s their rival’s stadium and their fans notoriously dislike traveling there for home matches. Do they bear the indignity of doing so? Would The Red Bull allow them to do so?1 During situations in which Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Red Bull Arena are unavailable (Most recently for Concacaf play in 2022), NYCFC has used Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Connecticut, as a home ground, but that’s even further away than Red Bull Arena is. Would they have to use Belson Field at St. Johns in Queens, where their giant-killing Open Cup Cinderella MLS Next Pro team plays? Would we see a switcheroo akin to the 2012 Eastern Conference semis, when Hurricane Sandy pushed MLS to flip hosting dates between DC United and The Red Bull?

We likely won’t need to find out — I think it’s quite likely that Orlando takes care of business and renders this entire discussion moot (though it’s not impossible that a Subway Series could disrupt the second game too) but I would like to see it. I love it when this sort of thing happens, and I know with NYCFC’s new stadium in a few years, it won’t even be a problem anymore.

You just can’t seem to shake this sort of thing fully out of MLS, though. Maybe there’s less visible duct tape holding the whole endeavor together now, but we catches glimpses of it peeking out from time to time, a little glint of silver in the autumn sun. Soccer in America rarely presents to us what we think we ought to have, but it always presents us something fascinating to behold through the right lens.

So, to our friends in New York, Atlanta, New York, and New York, please pull through. I want to see where this goes.

Charlotte FC (2 points, -1 GD):

This was a beautifully pyrrhic Leagues Cup run. They managed to notch probably the biggest win in their team's history by beating to this point in the year unstoppable Cruz Azul on penalties (I know it technically was a draw, but we must fudge a bit considering that this is a young club whose trophy case currently consists of two MLS Next Pro Goalie Wars belts) and they managed to get a couple of weeks off. While every team in MLS is theoretically gunning for the same few trophies, there are always a couple of teams whose ambitions are pragmatically constrained by the time-consuming nature of building. This was Houston last year, Cincinnati in 2022, Vancouver in 2021, Orlando in 2020, Minnesota in 2019, and so on, and so forth. There's almost always at least one team that's clearly and praise-worthily on the rise, who is moving up but who we don't expect to really break through this year. In 2024, this team is... well, it's most aptly Colorado, but it's also Charlotte.

As of writing, the Crown...team (The Crowns?) sit at sixth in an Eastern conference, seven points clear that disgusting fleshy mass wriggling from spots 8^th to 15^th (two of whom will have to participate in this year's playoffs) and within punching distance of the 4^th place spot that would secure them two home games in the first round.

The Leagues Cup, for Charlotte, could have been a shiny distraction from the genuinely obtainable prize of a decent playoff seed and a chance to advance in the playoffs. They now have a few weeks free to train, get healthy, and integrate Tim Ream for the final stretch.

Diagnosis: Minor setback but focus on your real, attainable goal

Minnesota United FC (3 points, -1 GD)

The Loons' tournament is not that far from Charlotte's. They (or, more specifically, Dayne St. Clair) gave the fans a truly enjoyable home performance in the win over Necaxa, they only really lost out on goal differential because Seattle couldn't pull through, and Tijuana didn't hold up on their end of the bargain to get us a theoretical Reynoso return match in Minnesota either, so they can't even really feel too badly about that. I will go to my grave believing in the 2024 Minnesota United team. I still have them categorized in my head with the LA and Rocky Mountain clubs as competitors in the Western Conference, when in reality, they're barely clinging to a playoff spot at the moment.

This is only partially their fault. Nobody saw their roster continuity so decimated by this summer's international tournaments as Minnesota did – for the early June international window, they lost nine players! They've never quite been the same since, with only a single MLS win (at home versus San Jose) in their last eleven matches.

This break represents less of a pragmatic avoidance of distraction for a team on the right track and more of a chance for a team in a downward spiral to right the ship.1 They've already made a few signings to shore up the defense, they added a DP forward in Kelvin Yeboah, they will have Tani Oluwaseyi back in full alongside him in an attack featuring Robin Lod, Bongokuhle Hlongwane, Sang-Bin Jeong, and Franco Fragapane. It is within the realm of possibility that we get a decent month or two out of Teemu Pukki. Much like with Dallas, I can see a version of this Minnesota team that gets as hot as their attack should seem to be able to get, gets into the playoffs, and makes a nice little run out of the opportunity.

Diagnosis: FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU DO

Real Salt Lake (3 points, -2 GD)

The unfortunate reality of the Leagues Cup is that the groups are built off of what happened last season, which is a fool's errand in a competition featuring two teams in which there is so much volatility. There are certain groups with three good teams, certain groups with two good teams, certain groups with only one good team, and one group had to squeeze two advancements out of Nashville, New England, and Mazatlan. Salt Lake ended up on the opposite side of this spectrum, sharing a group with Houston and Atlas. Somebody had to lose out, and it was them.

RSL is definitely the best MLS team and probably the second best overall team after Monterrey to go out in the group stage. They are still on cusp of Supporter's Shield contention and should be adding a DP attacking midfielder to help them reach that goal once the season resumes. This is a setback of sorts, as I don't think it was at all improbable for them to have won the Leagues Cup with their squad, but they still have a lot to play for this year.

Diagnosis: Setback but focus on on the slightly less attainable but by no means impossible goal

Atlanta United FC (2 points, 0 GD)

Atlanta United has speedrunned (speedran? spedrun?) the arc of becoming Major League Soccer's version of the Chicago Bulls, or the Dallas Cowboys, or the Miami Hurricanes, or the Louisville Cardinals, or the Nebraska Cornhuskers, or DC United – A team that reached dizzying heights and now must adapt to being one of the normal ones among us. The key pieces to the team they built with ambitions much higher than a sixth-place finish in-conference last season has been sold off, stripped to the foundations, beginning another rebuild in Georgia.

They have the financial capacity to make it work. The path for Atlanta, with their resources and front-office talent, to get back to prominence feels fairly straightforward – They have the budget to import good players, a club president with a proven track record of winning in MLS, and an academy producing players adept enough to play for US youth national teams. It's easier to see them getting back to where they want to be than it is to see Montreal, or Kansas City, or, and I may regret saying this,Philadelphia getting back where they want to be.

But my goodness is there absolutely no buzz around Atlanta anymore. I think the most unfortunate aspect of Atlanta's current situation is how obligatory it feels now. This was the team that delivered those beautiful full-team goals in the 2018 MLS Cup, beat Club America in the Campeones Cup, broke every attendance record in MLS history, had 73,000 people doing the “We Ready” song with the phone lights, delivered Atlanta its first major league championship in two decades, had a massive crowd at their victory parade, and brought thousands out to every road match they played in the South... But now I'm hardly even surprised by them dropping out of the Leagues Cup early for their second season in a row. The two shootout losses felt sort of fitting for them – There was a point at which Atlanta came through in those big clutch moments, they no longer do.

Now, they have to figure out what to do with the rest of this season. They are obligated to play it out, and, morose as I have been here, Atlanta still sits just above the playoff cut-line at the moment and could almost accidentally find their way into the postseason by staying the course. I think we're really all just waiting for the winter to see what shape the rebuild takes, though.

Diagnosis: Get set to rebuild again

Nashville SC (1 point, -2 GD)

I was in the midst of a crying jag during the latter half of the Nashville/New England match on Tuesday evening (one completely unrelated to the events of the Nashville/New England match, but I will admit that it was playing on a TV in the same room at a low volume), one of those crying jags that you have to prepare for, one of those jags that I knew was going to hit at some point, but that I was able to sort of chamber over the course of the preceding workday, but that I also knew I'd need to let happen prior to the next day lest something trigger it on the highway or in the check-out line at CVS or while talking to a colleague at work, so I kind of fell into it on Tuesday evening. I am talking one of not just with the tears but with the stifled breaths and the mucus backing up the sinuses and the ugly, vocal, vowel-laden, non-masculine sobs during which the final half-hour of a professional soccer match and most of the ensuing penalty shootout can be lost in the throes of the jag.

I finally returned to Earth, from beneath or above I couldn't say, with nine penalties taken, one missed by New England, and Alex Muyl stepping up to take the winning shot. This shot would win his team absolutely nothing but pride, and not even that much of that, but amid a season in which nothing much of anything has been won by Nashville SC, it was a chance to win something. Muyl missed the shot. I had the wherewithal at that moment, thoughts still swirling and cheeks still wet, to think to myself “Oh, poor Alex.” I felt it sincerely. “After what happened in the 2021 playoffs, it would have been nice for him to have come through there.” It is astounding, among all of the self-pity driving the crying jag, that a memory of a particularly poorly taken penalty against Philadelphia in the 2021 playoffs, one which ended up nestled among the Sons of Ben, could sneak its way to the front of my mind there. I meant it sincerely, and I mean it sincerely now that I wish Alex Muyl well.

Brandon Bye then stepped up and made his penalty. Again, I thought “It's nice to see him make that after that injury left him sidelined for so long.” Trivia (well, I wouldn't call that trivia, as it's very significant to the arc of his career, but most people I meet out in the world do not know who Brandon Bye is, let alone which of his ligaments have torn) about another American MLS outside back wormed its way to the front of my mind. Right there. Snuck its way in.

Dan Lovitz then stepped up. I thought “it would be good for him to make this given the criticism he's received after getting subbed on during the 2019 Gold Cup final.” Then he missed it. I doubt that Dan Lovitz was thinking about that at that moment. He is a grown man who has had, all things considered, quite a good professional soccer career, and he converted a much higher-pressure penalty in the Leagues Cup final against Miami last year. I think my capability to drudge up little tidbits of knowledge about American soccer is a strength of mine, at least it's something I like about myself. I cannot deny that it's abnormal, but it's far from a curse. It may be this ability to care so deeply about so many thing that leaves me vulnerable to these sorts of debilitating jags but ultimately I'm a fan of it.

I felt something of a kinship with Lovitz, Muyl, Bye, and everyone else going through a pointless shootout at the end of a sort of sad match for the right to progress to be, in all likelihood, defeated soundly, if not by New York City in the first round of the knockouts, then by Tigres, Pachuca, Columbus, or Miami, all of whom present imminent danger on that part of the bracket. Why make them do this?

I think they still have a quality roster with which they can chase a playoff spot at the very least. We'll have to wait and see what B.J. Callaghan's capability as a head coach in MLS is, though that Mazatlan loss will leave a poor taste in fans' mouths over the next few weeks.

Diagnosis: Look you will have to play out the remainder of the season regardless of whether you want to do so or not

I kid, I kid. I have too much respect for the Campeones Cup, the MLS is Back Tournament, and the Orlando City Invitational to speak so brazenly. Regardless of the outside noise, I’ve enjoyed the second iteration of the full-scale Leagues Cup to this point. As abnormal (globally-speaking) as I recognize the mid-season pause to be, I find its effects equally fascinating. I like getting the final eight-match sprint once the tournament’s over, I like that we see high-ceiling/low-floor teams already out of the Shield race getting another chance at a trophy, and I think it’s good for all of the MLS teams to get competitive matches against Liga MX teams. 

It also gives us a chance to really dig into the pyrrhic quality of an early Leagues Cup exit. I did one of these last year, and I’m doing it again now, first with the MLS teams that were eliminated before the third round of group stage matches:

Chicago Fire (West 4, 0 Points, -3 GD)

The Chicago Fire had a rough go of it in this competition. The prior sentence can apply to every competition involving the Chicago Fire since about 2012 (with the 2017 regular season definitely excepted and that run in the mid-2010s when they made the Open Cup semifinals in five of six years maybe excepted). Is it coincidental that the Fire’s run of bad form started immediately after the NBC Primetime Drama that shares their name began in October 2012? Yes, almost certainly. 

Both Fire losses in the 2024 Leagues Cup looked similar: Georgios Koutsias scored an early goal assisted by Brian Gutierrez to take a one-nil lead, which the Fire then squandered over the latter two-thirds of the match via poor set-piece defending and bad giveaways. The first of these happened on the road against a Kansas City team slightly lower than them in the MLS standings and the second of these happened at home (but not at home, given that it was in their old new stadium in Bridgeport rather than their new old stadium off of the lakefront) against a Toluca team that has started unbeaten if unspectacular in the Apertura to this point. 

It is hard to draw any conclusion about the Chicago Fire other than “That Gutierrez kid is good,” and this tournament reflected that. It speaks to the malaise that has defined the Chicago Fire over the last decade that nobody’s too shocked by this failure. Also evident of this malaise is how eager I am to finish this paragraph and get to what will be the final paragraph in this section on the Fire, thus allowing me to stop thinking about the Fire, which I will do now.

The Fire now have three weeks to get themselves prepared for a nine-match sprint during which they can make something (relatively-speaking) significant happen: If we look at the Eastern Conference Standings at this moment, we see that Chicago, despite sitting in 14th place in the conference, is only three points beneath the playoff cut-line. In fact, only seven points currently separate 8th-place Toronto from 15th-place New England. Somebody has to occupy those eighth and ninth-place spots, no matter how much people complain about how many teams make the playoffs. Chicago, despite another bad season, can very easily qualify for postseason soccer for the first time since 2017, and they have three weeks off to get prepared for doing so. Georg Heitz has three weeks to either sell Shaqiri or convince him to care, Frank Klopas has three weeks to practice celebratory pelvic thrusts, and the team in general has three weeks to figure out how to turn what will be a Soldier Field torn up by Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears into a competitive advantage. 

Diagnosis: Not that disappointed, not that surprised. Your goal now is to shoot for ninth.

New York Red Bulls (East 6, 2 points, 2 shootout losses, 0 GD)

I figured that The Red Bull might be a sleeper candidate to make a deep run in this tournament (Of course, I didn’t write this thought down anywhere, so you’ll have to take my word for it) because of their defensive prowess and their prolific drawing form to this point in the year. They’re tied with Miami and Columbus for the fewest losses of anyone in MLS, sit right in the middle of the pack with Seattle, Houston, and Charlotte on wins, and stand tied at the top with St. Louis for draws. The Red Bull has been quite good at not losing matches in 2024. They continued to avoid losing matches in the Leagues Cup group stages, but couldn’t convert the penalties they needed to hold on in the tournament and thus are out of the tournament. 

This will sting a bit because losing like this reflects the clutch scoring woes that keep biting them during the playoffs. In 2023, they lose 1-1 on penalties to Cincinnati; in 2022, they lose 2-1 to Cincinnati; in 2021, they lose 1-0 deep in stoppage time to Philadelphia. Outside of the wild card round and the Leagues Cup round of 32 last year, they struggle to pick up more than one goal in high-stakes matches. 

I will choose to see this as somewhat aberrational. The expected goal-total of their match against Pachuca (RBNY had 2.3 xG to Pachuca’s 0.6) reflects this and the fact that they’ve already surpassed their 2023 goal-scoring total in MLS with nine matches left does as well. They’re still a challenger for a top-two seed in the East (it’s hard to see they nor anyone else catching Miami for the top spot in the East at this point) and could make a deep playoff run if the breaks go their way, but I can’t shake the sense that this was their best remaining chance for a trophy in 2024. It’s hard to see them among the field of the most obvious Cup competitors, and it’s hard to see them in the second tier of obvious cup competitors either. 1

Diagnosis: Ominous but Not All That Bad

FC Dallas (West 3, 0 points, -3 GD, lost to both St. Louis and Juarez):

Seattle and Atlanta last year showed that it is not necessarily the worst thing to crash out of the Leagues Cup. I am not recommending that anybody explicitly or intentionally throw the group stage of the Leagues Cup, but getting a few weeks off in preparation for the remainder of the MLS Season can actually help a middling team to get right. 

• Seattle was stuck in purgatory with injuries and malaise for much of 2023, got zero points in the Leagues Cup, then finished with a run of four wins, five draws, and only one loss in their final ten matches afterwards to place second in the Western Conference. 

• Atlanta was defensively miserable for much of 2023, gave up five goals over their two Leagues Cup matches, and finished last in their group. After the Leagues Cup, they added Tristan Muyumba and Saba Lobzhanidze to bolster their midfield, switched to a more defensively-stout formation, and finished with four wins and four draws in their last ten matches. 

In a sense similar to Chicago, 2024 has been a stormy season for FC Dallas which nonetheless still holds a glimmer of hope for salvation. I think Dallas’ outlook is somewhat better-founded than Chicago’s, given how good they’ve looked at points since the departure of Nico Estevez and installation of Peter Luccin in early June. They’ve taken good wins over Portland and Austin, shut out that dynamic LA Galaxy attack, they’re seeing production out of Petar Musa, they’re seeing more consistency from the breakout players who stabilized the team in 2023, and it’s looking like both Alan Velasco and Jesus Ferreira will be back from injury for the last stretch of the season. They’re only three points beneath the ninth-place cut-line, and though they don’t have an easy schedule down the stretch (that five of their last nine are on the road is problematic, particularly for a team yet to rack up an MLS road win to this point in 2024), a strong finish that sets up a postseason run feels feasible. 

They now have a couple of weeks to continue getting healthy in preparation for a postseason run, and they stand to get there with a solidifying defense, a quality goalkeeper, and an attack looking to add two of the most dynamic young playmakers in MLS back in alongside an All-Star striker. 

Diagnosis: Rest well, get healthy, be prepared to make good on your potential

—

I’ll have to wait until the end of the group stage for the other MLS teams. Montreal, Charlotte, San Jose, and Minnesota, are at the mercy of others to decide their collective fates. Orlando, Atlanta, and Colorado control their own fate against Liga MX teams. We’ll get another round of Houston/RSL to determine their fates on Monday night, and finally, on Tuesday, we’ll see New England take on Nashville in a match best described as “Contractually Obligated”.

I would really like for Sporting Kansas City to succeed. I like the team, I like the players who make up the team, and I want them to do well. I try to gin up the righteous fury that other people feel about the team and I can’t do it. In fact (and I blame this on my proximity to the Charlie Weis/David Beaty era of Kansas Jayhawks football when I was in the marching band in college) I find myself even more endeared to the team in their suffering. I do not wish ill on these people and I do not resent these people. I want, more than anything, for this painful stretch to result in a player making the best of the chance that they get, or for something to just click into place for a struggling player. I would like to see Stephen Afrifa get an honest shot at MLS minutes now that he’s in his second year. I would like to see Khiry Shelton have a Steve Clark or Nick Hagglund-esque late-career swan song season with the time he gets in the next few months. I would like to see everything turn around and the team salvage something out of 2024 like they did in 2023. 

The third thing does not appear to be in the cards. This is going to be a bad year. At this point, we’re hoping that Sporting outpaces San Jose for the 28th-place spot, maybe makes a run in the Open Cup, and I suppose gets out of the group stage in the Leagues Cup at least, and that at least a few of the players on Sporting Kansas City show promise for the future. This is eerily similar to the way that I approached KU Football during my time in college - Win multiple games, outpace Iowa State for 9th place in the conference, and hope that one of our standout players is able to work his way into a chance at an NFL training camp spot that eventually turns into a good career where he manages a punt return in the playoffs nearly a decade later. 

Kansas Football and Sporting Kansas City have swapped places in my soul, a fact which has colored these sad Sporting matches with a sort of wistful, nostalgic tint, akin to how I fondly remember the awful Sodexho sheet pizzas we’d eat for lunch on the last days of each session at the summer camp where I worked as a teenager. Miserable, yes, but familiar. 

I noticed another miserable, but familiar feeling rising back up surrounding the game against the Galaxy on Saturday. I spent the hours preceding the 9:30pm kickoff curious. What was I going to look for during this match? What was I showing up for tonight? What got me interested even if the dreams of a playoff spot, let alone a Cup run, let alone a Supporters Shield have been all but dashed in mid-June? I might not enjoy it, but I’d find a way to enjoy something about it, probably. This was to be a venture in solitude. I went out with friends to a bar to watch the season opener, back when we were all excited and optimistic, but I don’t want to put anyone else through the whole rigamarole here with me. 

All of this - the solitude, the hedging, the intense wanting for this blue-colored entity to pull through and subsequent disappointment, it reminded of a recursive childhood experience: The Sonic Cycle. 

I was born in 1995, which to some meant I never spent a day conscious during the golden era of Sonic the Hedgehog. I personally think there were some good outputs under his name up to about the mid-2000s (those Game Boy Advance games are perfectly good), but regardless, the era of my most intensive dedication to the little fellow coincided exactly with his darkest times. 

But I wanted to see him (Sonic, I mean) succeed worse than anything. I would get on the GameFAQs message boards and trade posts with my fellow fans convincing ourselves that the next game was to be our boy’s return to the forefront of gaming. We’d read the magazine previews, send hate mail to the GamesRadar editor that inevitably dropped a 5/10 on the game, and, yes, I may have penned a little fanfiction about him. 

My friend Rob has a theory that some kids attach themselves so intensely to Sonic because he's an easily digestible figure of both virtue (he cares about his friends, the environment, doing the right thing, et cetera) and rebellion against unjust authority in a fashion similar to another significant figure in the lives of many American children, but delivered to us in a fashion that required less reading and getting dressed up in stuffy clothing on Sunday mornings to appreciate. Despite being beset upon by reflections of the problems facing boys growing into adolescence, like rivalries (with allies such as Knuckles or mysterious figures like Shadow the Hedgehog), annoying girls (his arms-length, but respectful relationship with Amy Rose, who is a pink hedgehog who carries a big mallet everywhere), and automatonization (the existence of Metal Sonic, an evil robot version of the regular Sonic), Sonic takes everything in stride, with an admirable sense of aplomb and elan. He also taught us about bodily autonomy.

I so badly wanted him to do well. I wanted to take one of his games home, play it all the way through, and feel that the Hedgehog’s character was well-reflected by the product in which he starred. Yet, the cycle repeated about the same way every time. It happened at least once yearly, if not more - I’d save up allowance, I’d cajole one of my parents into driving me to a store that sold video games, in many cases I’d have to ask the clerk to get the new Sonic game out of a big glass case1, I’d hand over my $50, I’d spend the entire ride home reading that copy on the back of the case and try to convince myself it’d be different. He turns into a werewolf in this one. He has a sword in this one. He romances a human woman in this one. His heart’s constantly on fire in this one. It’ll be the one that the critics, the encroaching trolls from the other GameFAQs boards, the friends who had long abandoned the Sonic hype train, were all wrong about. 

I’d then get home, I’d put the disc into the machine, and I’d get disappointed. The werewolf bits were tedious and poorly-built. He didn’t need a sword, his whole back was built out of little swords. You had to get through hours of running errands in a little town before you even met the human woman. The entirety of the game in which his heart was constantly on fire was an extended tech demo of what the then-new Nintendo Wii could theoretically do and even its best parts grew boring with repetition. I’d sit there, alone, on my couch, controller in hand, and think “Maybe the next one will be better,” knowing full well that love would draw me out to experience it, regardless of whether logic would accompany it in the thrust. This cycle drove many of us to hysterics.

—

Saturday evenings of 2024 evoke echoes of that emotional cycle – It’s miserable, but familiar. 

My eyes on Saturday night were drawn again and again to Memo Rodriguez in central midfield. I knew beforehand that this was a significant match for him, as it always is when one encounters their old team. I don't know the precise circumstances that led to his release by the Dynamo at the end of the 2022 season, but it's easy to intuit how getting cut loose by a team with whom one spent over a decade of his life leads a man to seek vindication. He also came out with a bleach-blond haircut, which was difficult to ignore.

Memo was really going for it. He fought to win duels, went aggressively into tackles, and took chances on goal that he hasn’t frequently taken to this point. Though his effort was at points overzealous and error-prone, it was a sincere effort. I found it endearing in contrast with the rest of the SKC performance, which, to put it bluntly, lacked the juice.

This was disappointing to see, especially against Houston. This is the Dynamo — The team that knocked us out of the playoffs last season, the team that has knocked us out of the playoffs five times in the club's history. The Dynamo are a barometer for Sporting Kansas City, a rival for whom antipathy has been built off of a history of shortcomings. I think it matters to me to see Sporting KC beat the Dynamo in the same way that it matters for the USMNT to beat Mexico, or Kansas to beat Kansas State in college football. It is so frustrating that this team, in a rivalry matchup like this, can come out so flat and unmotivated, but that's how it felt from my vantage point throughout the match.

I admit that I'm a maximalist when it comes to this team’s rivalries, but I feel it sincerely. There are four teams that get my blood running hot due to proximity or history or some combination of the two. Sporting played all of them in the last four matches, didn't win in any of those matches, and came out looking especially uninspiring in the last two. These are the matches in which a team is supposed to come out and play with more intensity — the new rival from across the other side of Missouri, the new-ish rival within the region that we play all the time, the old-ish rival that with whom we’ve engaged in a series of gutsy rock fights since meeting in the final a decade ago, and the old rival who always seems to have our number — and I just haven’t seen it.

And so, here we are, for the third year in a row, in the midst of a disappointing start, and this year, I struggle to see how things gets better. Granted, I didn't see how things could get better last year, and they turned around, but I feel this way nonetheless.

There is still time for the season to turn around (especially in this shambling wreck of a conference) but the catalyst for a turnaround will be more complex than last year’s. For as much as fans (myself included) bemoaned it as an excuse during the early part of 2023, getting our three highest paid players (Pulido, Kinda, Radoja) back from injuries was significant for turning the team’s fortunes around. There are again injuries this year, but they’re not as widespread and devastatingly long-term as last year’s were.

I will say that I trust the front office to make the most of the summer transfer window, as they've done so in the last two seasons. Erik Thommy and Dany Rosero, probably the two players who have put in the best performances overall for SKC this season (and who were both missed badly against the Dynamo) were mid-season signings. I thought getting Felipe Gutierrez in the summer to take some of the minutes burden off of Radoja was one of the unsung decisions that sprung the playoff run last year as well. Especially considering the loosening of the roster restrictions which will come into effect in the summer, I don't think it's unrealistic to believe that valuable signings will be made in the summer.

The most obvious positions which need reinforcement are in central defense. Houston's second goal looked to be a direct result of fatigue from Radoja (who couldn't close down Griffin Dorsey as he dribbled towards the box) and Fontas (who couldn't get his boot out in front of him quickly enough to disrupt the pass from Dorsey to Aliyu). This team needs more depth at those positions, as one should expect those two veteran players to be susceptible to fatigue as the minutes build up in the heat of summer.

Getting Rosero and Walter back from injury (and I've heard there's a chance that Logan Ndenbe plays this year, but I don't know when we can expect it) will help as well, but it’s a fool’s errand to rely on always having the your best team healthy and fit. Again, with a team this veteran-laden, one must prepare for injuries to rack up. There are other teams in this league with key defensive players over the age of thirty (we’ve lost to three of them in Houston, the Galaxy, and Miami) who are able to supplement the fatigue that hits veteran defenders with younger players off of the bench, but it looks as if Peter Vermes doesn’t believe this team has players of high enough defensive quality on the bench to justify bringing them on late in matches.

Whether this is a case of capable defensive bench players not being given chances to perform or a case of capable defensive bench players not being signed, the blame lays at the feet of Vermes.

There's little else to be optimistic about for the moment. Sporting is still in the Open Cup, playing Tulsa FC next week. Nobody really jumps out as a clear favorite from the remaining sixteen teams. As the second East-most remaining MLS team in the tournament, it's kind of easy to see a path to the final in which SKC ducks every other MLS team, but given that it took 120 minutes to put away Omaha last week, that is cold comfort.

Basically every MLS team remaining in the tournament, short maybe of LAFC, is also trying to mine a silver lining out of a disappointing start to the 2024 season, so I don't even think we'd be able to hold that over our opponents if it came to that. I don't know what to expect out of anyone in this year’s edition of the Leagues Cup, especially now that the novelty’s worn off and everyone’s going to be exhausted from summer international tournaments anyway, but I'm skeptical of this team's chances there as well.

I just don't see how this team salvages anything out of this season, unless they absolutely ace the summer transfer window and another player makes the most of a chance the way that Jake Davis did last year.

This feels like a significant moment in the history of the club. I don't really see how Peter Vermes makes it through to the end of this season unless, again, there's a massive turnaround akin to what happened last year. Even as we’ve seen intriguing strategic flexibility from Vermes in his efforts to use the 4-2-3-1 formation with Agada and Pulido and we’ve seen him give chances to younger attacking players in recent weeks, if it doesn’t start working sometime soon, he’s going to continue to take the blame for the team’s issues.

Years like this happen in MLS, when things that had worked between a coach and a team just stop working, when a successful era comes to an end in a relatively quiet and unspectacular burn-out. It happened in Minnesota, Portland, and Colorado last year. It happened in Los Angeles and DC in 2021. I suspect it's happening in Kansas City, Nashville, and Seattle here in 2024. I suspect that we’ll see a record number of head coaching jobs open up all over the league by the year’s end1 due to increased pressure brought about by the league’s increased visibility as a result of the Apple deal, the Miami phenomenon, and the upcoming World Cup.

It will be a difficult transition, but unless something massive changes, I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.

I never do the 'surrender cobra' thing. I grew up a self-conscious kid during the era of the snarky sports blogsites like SB Nation and Deadspin, which made a habit of screen-shotting the mosaics of stunned home fans putting their hands to their heads in disbelief after suffering some shock misfortune. I was mortified of accidentally becoming the kid at the Michigan/Michigan State game in 2015, and even after the worst moments I've seen, I keep myself lucid enough to avoid making that pose.

After Miami's second goal, a loping curler from Lionel Messi that, for a moment, looked to be heading into the Arrowhead Stadium stands before dipping just under the crossbar, I felt my hair poking through my fingers and my eyes straining at their sockets. Years of anxious training against absentmindedly assuming a pose worthy of ridicule were no match for what played out in front of me.

I succumbed completely to the moment on Saturday. Every undercurrent beneath the match flowed through me at points forcefully enough to drown out the kvetching and bitterness that the cynical part of my brain wanted acknowledged. In the moment, I saw Arrowhead not as an oversized venue chosen to kowtow to neutrals but as the place where I learned to love the sport, where I first knew this club. I felt the spectacle as not overly-corporate and plasticine but as a joyous, carnivalistic event. I saw the star of the evening not as annoyingly-hyped and advertised but as the genuine article of peak footballing genius and artistry. I took the match itself as not the infuriating display of ineptitude from a team on a troublingly unstable path but as a high-quality match of which my team came out on the losing end.

I should have been upset about the club moving this match to Arrowhead. The easiest reading to make on it is a cynical one - The club had chosen to move the match from our normal stadium to a larger stadium for the sake of placating and selling tickets to likely neutral if not antagonistic fans. It was not a move made necessarily for the benefit of Sporting fans, but for the benefit of people chasing a chance to see a player on the opposing team. 

For as much of a cash-grab as this might've been, I was grateful to go back to Arrowhead for soccer once more. Arrowhead was where it all started for me. In the summer of 2006, one of the assistant coaches on my rec-league soccer team took us to a Wizards/Columbus Crew match. I didn't yet know to recognize the swathes of empty seats as embarrassing, the play on the field as low-quality, or the lack of permanent Wizards iconography as indicative of an unsustainable tenancy. The Wizards were our team, and Arrowhead was where they played.

My dad bought two season tickets in 2007. That year, among paltry crowds of a couple-thousand at best, I learned the sport and the league in which it was played. I learned about offside, penalty shouts, dives, and howlers. I had a few glimpses of beauty from players soon to depart our shores for better opportunities elsewhere. I saw players mononymous to MLS but anonymous to the exterior world - Shalrie, Jaime, and DeRo, among others. I also learned why Dallas opted for "FC" over "Burn", why New York took the name of an energy drink, and how to pronounce "Real". Our games featured a big funny green dragon who rode an ATV around the ground, Homer Simpson "D'oh" sound effects when opponents scuffed shots, a minute during which a Wizards goal would earn fans a free pizza, and occasionally, some tremendously exciting soccer action. It was where I first felt the primal urge to stand up when forward beat a defender en route to goal, first clapped along with the drums in the supporter's section, and first learned to love club heroes like Jimmy Conrad, Eddie Johnson, and Davy Arnaud. That season at Arrowhead, flawed as it was, set in motion a love for the sport that I still carry, and I carried it closely into the goal end at Arrowhead last weekend.

The evening was tinged with a spectacular quality absent during those old days. Everybody seemed abuzz, even when faced with lines and long walks to get into the stadium, the atmosphere was lively. Events with so many in attendance from opposing fan bases typically carry an edge of antagonism, but I didn't feel any of that. There was a lot of mixed-company; I saw families with one kid in pink and one in blue, friend groups split between SKC and Miami jerseys, one kid in a Ronaldo jersey, one kid in an LA Galaxy Beckham jersey, and the odd Rapids and St. Louis City jersey here and there as well. 

I was taken by how much of a pro-Sporting crowd it felt from my vantage point, though. When we started the call-and-response "SPORTING / KC'' chant in the Cauldron, we were met with a thundering response from the rest of the stadium, one produced by a group larger than Children's Mercy Park could hold. I had honestly expected a worse ratio.

I don't know the mindset nor makeup of the rest of the crowd, but I know that soccer fandom in this country is multitudinal. One may have their local team in MLS, NWSL, USL, NISA, NPSL, the NCAA, or elsewhere, and you may divide interest between a cross-section of each (I assume I'm the only one split between Sporting/Current/Wave/Orange County in the bunch). Then you may have your team external to the country, which may be that of your parents and grandparents, or may be the one whose logo you liked as a kid, or the one who was always playing on TV when you were growing up. You may have your favorite individual player as well. I'm sure there were people there who grew up going to see their local team, be that in KC, or any of the many places whose license plates I saw represented in the parking lot– Arkansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa– and marveled at Messi's play in the World Cup or Champions League from afar. I’m sure for many, this was an opportunity to see a hero they never thought they'd get the chance to see perform in America, which is something that I understand, even if it wasn’t what drew me here.

This is not my story - I don't count myself among his many individual fans, the ones who followed him from Barcelona to Paris to Miami. I've never owned a jersey of his, I'd neve made it a point to watch one of his matches for the sake of seeing him specifically until the Leagues Cup last year. Messi is an all-time-great player to me, one who I wanted to see play as much as I'd wanted to see many of the greats who have faced off against Sporting KC in the past, but this was not a near-religious pilgrimage to see a personal hero of mine as it was for others. This was a chance to see my team play against one of the best ever to do it.

He lived up to that description on Saturday. The two goals to which he contributed left me astounded. In the first half, he flicked a skipping little ground pass out into the box, one which turned from an errant mistake certain to roll out for a goal kick into a perfectly-placed set-up for Diego Gomez on a cutting run past our center backs in the span of a second. He and Gomez had galvanized chaos into perfection in a fashion I've rarely seen before in years of attending sporting events. There are moments in which a player seems to be seeing their craft on a plane different not just from those opposing them, but to those in the stands as well. 

I can't describe it in a way that fits. All I can grasp at is the feeling I got when I lived in Quebec, picking up bits and pieces of French sentences spoken to me in a panicked rush, my comprehension a step behind the speaker, getting the thrust of everything just a beat too slowly, their point fully finished to them while still unintelligible to me. That would've been enough, but his goal in the second half was even greater.

I have been privileged to be in the stadium to see some of the best go to work. Though I haven’t seen as many as others, I have seen MVPs, future hall-of-famers, and all-time greats without the barrier of a screen between us. I saw Ohtani in his first season in the majors, I saw Embiid and Mahomes as developing college players, Davies and Butler as young early-career professionals, Rapinoe, Trout, and Ichiro in their primes, plus Donovan, Sorenstam, and Cuauhtemoc after theirs. I remember the up-and-comers through flashes in which the quality they’d grow to refine shined through. I remember the greats in their primes through the way their quality imposed itself upon me throughout the entirety of their games. 

Those great players nearing the end of their careers, though, they prompt me to put effort into paying attention. When one event will likely be the last time, or only time, that I see them perform, I can’t allow myself to miss anything. This was the case with Messi on Saturday. There were moments in which he looked truly mortal, in which he misplayed passes, arrived late to duels, and missed free-kicks off-frame, but there was always a shared focus in the crowd whenever he had the ball at his feet. The din of the conversations happening outside of our section would quiet at first, then after a few touches, a murmur would grow up out of the silence. People would rise to their feet. More often than not, the moment fizzled with a pass away or a missed shot, but the potential was always felt and always present. 

The moment had little time to build for the goal in the 51st. There was a pass intercepted by Busquets, a pass back to Ruiz, and another forward to Messi past the lunging leg of Felipe Hernandez. Messi took a single touch forward and struck the ball with his left, arcing it over Tim Melia into the top-right corner. The ball was in the net before I even had the chance to register what I was seeing. I stood, hands to head, in a pose that would’ve been fodder for memetic diffusion had any camera been aimed so far back into the stands to see it, for a good ten seconds. I looked at Mike, who shook his head and shrugged. I looked to my dad, who did about the same. The goal fit the moment, it made that sensation of drowning in the spectacle of the evening feel sensible. That goal alone would’ve been worth the price of admission for a neutral fan and, even though it came against my team, I felt fortunate to have seen it. 

I have no idea how many of those neutral fans came into the match knowing much of Sporting KC at all, let alone of the quality of Erik Thommy, but they learned about him on Saturday night just as well. His first was a well-placed shot across the goal from inside the box, capitalizing on the time and space that Nicolas Freire gave him to patiently pick a spot and aim. His second, coming only seven minutes after Messi’s, was another one of the best I’ve ever seen. The ball had ricocheted high into the air off a corner, high enough that I had time not just to identify Thommy’s run-up but also to ask if he’d be daring enough to go for goal at that moment. As soon as the question ran through my mind, he’d made perfect contact off the volley, rocketed the ball past Julian Gressel, off the post, and into the net. 

I didn’t believe it’d gone in at first. I thought it’d hit the stanchion behind the goal and rippled the net from behind. I sighed in disappointment, bemoaning the miss but appreciating the gumption it took for Thommy to try in the first place. It wasn’t until I saw Thommy doing his bow-and-arrow celebration, galloping towards the stands with his team chasing him that I figured out what had happened. I had to wait until the scoreboard changed to really believe it. It didn’t seem real. One of the best goals I’ve ever witnessed had been followed up with another within a span of ten minutes. 

This was a phenomenal night of soccer in Kansas City, and I wish it had been a better night for our team. The game was basically decided off of a few poor clearances in the second half, again displaying this team’s defensive woes late in matches. Points were dropped in this match the same way that they were in the Portland and Galaxy matches. This team is too thin defensively, they tire out in the second half, and Vermes doesn’t trust his bench enough to sub anybody in. They make crucial mistakes when they most need to be disciplined, and it leads to goals. It’s the same problem rearing its head over and over, and it seems like a fundamental personnel issue more so than something that can be fixed within the unit as it stands. The club’s been quite good with mid-season signings in the past few years, and they’ll have looser restrictions on signings with the roster construction rule changes coming from the league, so I think there’s a good chance that this problem can be stemmed to some extent over the course of this year. I’m doubtful that it’ll be resolved before then, though.

This should have left me furious. I should’ve been muttering and fidgeting in ire around the Arrowhead Stadium concourse after the match’s completion. It’s not just that there’s a problem, as there are always problems, but our coach seems disinterested in even trying to solve this one. There are no proactive subs and there are few attempts made to get bench defenders match time. This will repeat and repeat and repeat. In the moment, I just didn’t feel like that. In the moment, I walked out to the concourse, shaking my head in disbelief, appreciation for the night, for the spectacle, for the match overtaking my frustration for the moment, leaving it to fester until I wrote this paragraph. 

I say with a bit of embarrassment that I left Saturday evening enchanted. Perhaps I should have sneered at the glitz of the night. Perhaps I should have felt betrayed by the club for moving the match. Perhaps I should have been apoplectic about another disappointment at home. However I am grateful that I can still feel enchanted by sports like that. 

I will save my acrid cynicism for when we drop a lead to St. Louis this Saturday.

We are fortunate to have missed the era of the guillotine.

I suppose that there's no method of execution that wasn't laden with a terrible sense of dread immediately before taking place, but the guillotine feels uniquely awful because of the visual imminence it presents to its victim. Laying down, neck a few feet beneath the blade, victim able to see the glint of the sun off of its edge, able to watch as it makes its final descent, able to understand in that short, but still processable span of time, that their end was arriving.

I know painfully little about the French revolution for someone who holds a degree in that language. I don't know if they forced people to watch it come down or not. I don’t know which part would be the worst: There’s the first part, in which one can observe the blade rest stationary, laden with potential energy, the second part, the shortest, in which the blade descends, and the third, the longest, in which the victim dies. Certainly, the physical effect of the blade is the worst part, but the psychological impact of seeing it primed to fall is a terror of its own.

I now see the blade.

It all changed so quickly on Sunday afternoon. There was a penalty missed by Sporting, a penalty given to Portland, a penalty scored by Portland, and a second goal scored by Portland in a matter of minutes. I found myself dazed, shaky. A laugher had turned into a funeral before any of us had the time to recognize it as either.

The worst part of this collapse was having to sit in it for the next fifteen minutes before the blade dropped. I have never been more certain that this team would give up a goal than I was during this period. When it finally came, it came from Eric Miller of all people, notching his first MLS goal in the middle of his eleventh season for his sixth team. He got his first start running the right wing in Montreal with Justin Mapp! He got his first assist in TCF Bank Stadium! Now he’s had his first goal to complete a terrible collapse that’s becoming commonplace for Sporting KC in 2024. A perfectly bizarre catharsis to complete a perfectly bizarre match.

I will not be able to ignore the blade from here out. Dropping a 1-0 lead to Philadelphia early in the year against the backdrop of a referee work stoppage is an unfortunate event. Dropping a two goal lead in the second half to the Galaxy was worrisome, but still potentially abberative. A third defensive collapse in four home matches, a second match in a row in which this team has given up three unanswered goals is a pattern. Dropping points in the second half is not only something of which this team is capable, but it's something that we have reason to more or less expect out of them. There will be no lead in 2024 that isn't, to some extent, tinged with the knowledge of the blade's capacity to drop, of this team’s capacity to drop otherwise insurmountable leads.

If nothing else, this will render the match-going and match-watching experience fascinating. There will be no dull moment with this team. This is my first year with season tickets, so I will be present for every one of those non-dull moments. The certainty that I’ll be face-to-face with each match has brought a sort of perverse excitement to the knowledge that I'll never feel secure this year. I may see blowout wins at Children’s Mercy Park this season, but I won't believe that they're real until the final whistle blows and we’re doing the song. I will not allow myself to look away, as I might miss another astounding collapse. This will help build my attention span. This will make me more emotionally resilient. This will give me more time to interact in a healthy, controlled space with disappointment and dread. This will help me build resilience in my bladder and help me to sit with hunger. I will grow as a person over the next months, I will learn to love that which may decide to travel perilously downwards at any moment.

We’ve got the guillotine; I cannot run.

If I go to a match solo, I try to find a spot high above the pitch, from either the bridge or the South Stands. From this vantage point, I can observe the teams' shapes and tactical makeups. I can watch plays develop. There are so many fascinating styles played in this Major League - The Crew's possession, the Atlanta counter-attack fast-break, the Dynamo's wingbacks crashing the box from both sides, the Taurine press in Harrison and St. Louis, the Sugar Free variant of which is developing in DC, Miami's thing where they let you take as many shots on goals as you want, letting Drake Callendar make inhuman saves on half of them and letting the Pink Aura force you into scuffing the rest, then limping into the box and burying the two or three chances they take off of you... There are many great opportunities that this league presents you, but I happened to take this vantage point against the Earthquakes.

Luchi Gonzalez's San Jose team looks lost in the woods, a sincere last-place threat, holding zero points at the beginning of the year and little tactical identity. They should have at least a competent MLS roster, pocked with some of the league's best at their positions (Cristian Espinoza, Daniel), some proven MLS talents (Jeremy Ebobisse, Carlos Grueizo), and a few promising young prospects (Preston Judd, Niko Tsakiris). I was a little disappointed that the apparent trainwreck they'd rode into Frisco was amended to a more reasonable 4-4-2 formation, one which proved more competent than I wanted for the sake of both my reasonable desire to see Sporting take 3 points and my perverse desire to see tactical foundery -- Though it made for an entertaining game.

I kept reflecting on my early-season experiences in 2023 throughout this match, particularly after San Jose scored first off of a set-piece. Early in last season, Sporting conceding a goal would cause the edges of my vision to go black and my brain to start spot-composing emo poetry:

April 9th, 2023:

Our ruin is Rubio's.

Borne of mortal scorn and

mutual betrayal. It stings -

Youthful, exuberant Yapi, or

that Manon Lescaut in Maroon,

Cabral; I could sit in.

But Diego, whose name I sang

in triplet triplet,

quarter quarter quarter

for years from the same stand

supporting my melancholy this brisk

night in March. It lingers-

My pain all-encompassed

My teeth gnashing futilely

My downfall

Rapid

This year, I'm more confident in this team's cohesive capacity to get one back if they take a hit early on. I never had this sense with last year's team. When last year's team won, they won sprinting from the first whistle. Over the full season, they were resilient, but in-game, I didn't have that sense. Even over the last stretch of 2023, the matches felt like either 4-1 blowout wins or 1-0 slog losses. It must have been the weight of that full-season turnaround that instilled this belief in me at the outset of this season. I believed that an equalizer would come, and it was delivered by Dany Rosero, diving into a header off of a corner.

Dany was one of the two under-acknowledged signings who drove the turnaround in the latter half of 2023 (the other I'll get to in a moment). Dany's been nothing but solid in central defense, winning aerial duels, making up the space that Andreu Fontas (or Robi Voloder in this case) can't, and actually providing an aerial threat off of corners that I can't remember seeing in an SKC uniform since Aurelien Collin. The other under-acknowledged signing who turned last season around was Nemanja Radoja, whose game I tried to specifically take in from that upper-level vantage point. 

He is the face of total control in our midfield, a stabilizing presence at the number 6 position basically necessary for success in this Major League. It was my experience watching Steven Moreira and Obinna Nwobodo control the shape of that match from the back rows of Lower.com Field last summer that got me interested in watching Radoja from the same vantage point. A good central defensive midfielder is always present - They slow the opponent's attack and they get the counter started just that bit quicker. Radoja provides that for us. He and Rosero don't provide the flash that fills the highlight reel, but they create the circumstances for the flash to occur. They are the rhythm section of this team, a Novoselic and Grohl (perhaps Radoja's closer to Smear with his prowess on corners providing an extra wrinkle) for this ensemble.

The defensive stability of Radoja and Rosero provides leeway for Jake Davis to throw himself fully into every tackle he possibly can. He leans into each of them, succeeds more often than not, and even if he fails, he's quite good at recovering in time anyway. Defense in this sport is such a subtle art, one that’s been difficult for my American brain, built first on the countable shot blocks, PBUs, and put-outs, to appreciate. Jake’s tackling prowess and get-go feels comfortable and exciting to that part of my mind, even if I’m aware it might not be sustainable when Joseph Paintsil and Jordi Alba come rambling up that sideline. I’m always aware, seeing an opposing winger making his way up his side of the pitch, that Jake will take a chance on him, which keeps the eyes drawn. He even had an attacking piece in what was the culminatory piece of the match, one of the best team goals I've ever seen, a pleasure to see develop from afar.

It was so clean - Thommy sent a ground pass forward to Salloi, who dribbled forward, pivoted, and waited, twice baiting the Earthquakes defense, first into attempting a tackle before he passed it outside to Johnny Russell, then again as he ran centrally to take pressure off of Russell. Russell found Davis inside, who tapped his pass back to him headed towards the touchline. Russel then threaded a little scoop into the middle of the box for a Pulido tap-in. Salloi doesn' get an assist for it, but his patience in releasing Russell on the side, affecting the shape of the Quakes' defense, and the trust in Russell's vision keeping him from making a play on the cross to Pulido should be praised.

The second half brought unwelcome nerviness. There was hardly an attack to speak on from Sporting down the stretch, which bodes poorly for the team going forward. San Jose couldn’t capitalize on the few chances they had – Rosero had a clutch last-second clearance to save a chance, a goal was called back for a handball by the VAR, a late-stoppage time chance from Tsakiris hit the post – but Sporting struggled to make many of their own. The Earthquakes certainly played with a defensive tilt down the stretch, bunkering with the intent of an equalizer off of a counter or a set-piece, but our inability to close the door on San Jose gives me some pause and keeps me from reeling off into full-blown delirious optimism about this season. 

This second half prompted a central question about this season: A team with a veteran-laden starting unit like this one should be able to consistently put this team in winning positions. Will the team be able to finish from those winning positions? The answer lies in the closing ability of young talent from off of the bench, like Willy Agada, Steven Afrifa, and Alenis Vargas, who I felt played well in the minutes they had out there, and it lies in whether Peter Vermes feels he can trust them to do so consistently. If this doesn’t happen, then we’re likely to see tired legs give up goals and over-extended players succumb to injuries.

Regardless, I can acknowledge that I feel better after four weeks of the 2024 season than I did after four weeks of the 2023 season. The stadium is again full of life, the team is again showing panache and cohesion, and I am again cautiously optimistic.

Again, for I’m putting far more faith in Dallas and Vancouver than I probably should. If they disappoint me again this year, I’m going to put them both at the bottom of the West. I think Seattle’s going to have enough depth and continuity to run through a relatively weakened Western conference, while the East’s best are all probably going to get a bit run down due to Concacaf fatigue and struggle to catch up. I worry a little about Miami due to fatigue and injury issues, but they’re deep enough to stay afloat as one of the league’s best even if that catches up with them.

Orlando is such a well-constructed team, they remind me a bit of the 2021 NYCFC squad — Battle-tested over years of getting close but losing in big games, who overcame a relatively low playoff seed with clutch goal-scoring from young forwards, and great defending and goalkeeping from their veterans.

I was between Monterrey and America for Leagues Cup, I just think the Liga MX teams are going to come in furious to this year’s tournament after how last year went. America’s been smothering everyone defensively to start out the Clausura (though the trip down to play their first CCC round in Nicaragua seems to have damaged their mojo in recent weeks), which should serve them well in a single-elimination tournament.

Miami’s going to turn their focus towards Concacaf and qualifying for the 2025 Club World Cup early on. I put next-to-no thought towards the USOC prediction, it’s hard enough to predict as it is, and the fact that we don’t even know which MLS clubs will participate makes that even tougher. I though it’d be kind of funny to put one of the independent Next Pro teams down for it, though it looks like Jacksonville Armada’s not playing in Next Pro until next season… But anything can happen in the US Open Cup!

Finally, for the mid-table shuffles: Colorado and Chicago’s pragmatic in-league shuffling will pay off in a playoff qualification for both, Minnesota’s roster is good enough that they’ll grow into having a new coach, and Gary Smith loses the room in Nashville. I worry that I’ll regret the Houston, RSL, and Portland placements, though I could see basically every slot beneath my top 3 in flux in the West. The East had such a defined upper echelon in their top seven last season, and that continues here — I have Miami and NYCFC replacing Nashville and New England this year. NYCFC’s youth could crater them as much as it could propel them, but I’m buying while their stock’s still low.

—

This is going to be a fun year — at least, I’m going to commit to having fun, even with all of the controversy swirling around the league at the moment. I’d like to keep something like the Watch Grids going, though a re-shuffling of my work and life commitments (all of them positive changes) made it much more difficult and much less fun to come up with 3000+ words on the upcoming matches each week by the year’s end. I also have season tickets for Sporting this year, which will affect the way that I see the upcoming weekends. Regardless, I look forward to whatever this year brings!

2024 will be the first year of a historical era for soccer in the United States, containing the first summer of a stretch that should define the 2020s as The Soccer Decade in the US. From our vantage point in February 2024, we stare down (FIFA's decision about 2027 pending) five-summers, during each of which, a globally-significant tournament is hosted on American soil: Copa America in 2024, the expanded Club World Cup in 2025, the Men's World Cup in 2026, the Women's World Cup in 2027, and the Olympics in 2028. These summers will have a significant effect on the sport in this country. Future generations will not be able to tell the story of this sport in this country without considering the effect of the summers of the mid-2020s, for better and worse.

Every American soccer league should be understood through his lens during this period. These tournaments will represent a watershed era for the sport in the United States, bringing immense attention and interest to the sport internationally and domestically. Every domestic professional league will have an exigence to capitalize on this. Because of its status as the top men’s league and the signing that brought about a paradigmatic shift within the league last year, I’m particularly drawn to view MLS through this lens this year.

Regardless of whether one would like to admit it, or necessarily enjoys this effect, there are more eyes on MLS because of the Lionel Messi signing than there ever have been. These viewers may or may not remain around once Messi leaves Fort Lauderdale, and they might not watch more than a single match each week, and might not buy more than one ticket this year, but this is a level of interest around Major League Soccer that we've never seen before. No MLS team has ever had the metrics in online support that Miami has, no MLS team has swung season ticket packages the way that Miami has, no MLS team has done an international series of friendlies at the scope that Miami has, and no MLS team has caused international incidents at the level that Miami has. This is the first full season to be imbued with that notoriety.

These two aspects -- the potential of the upcoming soccer summers on the international level and the suffocating intrigue of the league's new darling franchise -- make this moment feel unique, and big, and bright, and significant, and new. It's never been like this before.

Yet, it's always been like this, hasn’t it? Soccer is the sport of the eternal future in the US, always the next big thing to overtake what's there, a sport with, in the eyes of many, no history, no roots, but so much delicious potential. It's been the next big thing, just a generation away from taking over for each of the past four generations. The 2020s are to be the American Soccer decade just as the 1990s, 1970s, and 1920s were. The show-stopping international megastar is playing on our shores in a moment as unprecedented as it was in 2007 and 1976. It's all happening for the first time again.

It's not just those things: Chunks of this season will be affected by the best players leaving for the Euros, Copa America, and the Olympics. MLS and Liga MX will have to deal with an inter-league tournament, made popular by the new overseas signing who scored phenomenal free-kick goals, entering its second iteration without the novelty of the first. The referees are involved in a work stoppage. Charlotte is starting the year with a new coach from outside of the league. The Revolution are making progress on having their own stadium. New York City is making progress on having its own stadium. Inter Miami is making progress on having its own stadium. Arrowhead Stadium will host soccer. Frank Klopas has to parlay a relatively successful interim stint as head coach of the Chicago Fire into a long term role. Eduard Atuesta will be in the midfield for LAFC. Sam Vines will play fullback for the Colorado Rapids. The top division of American Men's soccer is trying to leave the US Open Cup. A team will wear a jersey that reminds everyone of Charlie Brown. The college football team representing an institution that awarded Joe Bush a diploma will travel outside of city limits to play games at an MLS stadium during the MLS season due to construction on their home stadium.

There is also newness that should be noted - For the first time ever, we'll see Minnesota United play MLS matches without Adrian Heath at the helm, LAFC play matches  without Carlos Vela, and a team under the Sporting Kansas City name play with neither Graham Zusi nor Roger Espinoza on the roster. We'll see more teams than ever, over a third of the league, playing in Concacaf. We’ll also see eras quietly ending: We’ll see Seattle without Lodeiro and an MLS season taking place without a new expansion team for the first time since 2016, an Open Cup without full MLS participation for the first time since 2011, and a full BC Place sellout for Whitecaps soccer for the first time since 1983. 

These contradictions: The sport's eternal potential, the league's ever-replenishing novelty and its concealed glories -- They are a part of what draws me in so deeply. That's what I seek to illuminate on this site in 2024. There is a lot to see here, a lot of fun to be had, laughs to be shared, frisson to be felt, and I will do my best here to help illuminate it, wherever it is.

Shout out to me for taking a photo of my TV on the MLS logo two years ago

We have only two windows this evening: At 5:00pm Central, the East kicks off, and then at 8:00pm Central, the West follows.

This is one of the instances in which I think the ESPN+ Multiview Boxes of yore (or the MLS Live Multiview Boxes if that’s yore to you, or a DirecTV Picture-in-Picture with MLS Freekick is yore to you) could come in handy. Maybe you can use the Two-TV method, maybe you bring out a laptop or a phone for multi-screen fun, maybe you could just watch the MLS 360 coverage, or maybe you’ll be in my situation: At the stadium, relying on scoring updates from the jumbotron. 

With so much going on at once, I needed to put together a system for determining which matches will be the most interesting to follow. What I’ve come up with is the Tricategorical Interpretive Protocol for Observation on Decision Day, or TrIPODD. I’ve separated each match into three categories: 

Fun – Which is simultaneously self-explanatory and impossible to truly explain, but it’s really about the amount of combined fun that both teams seem to be capable of having and producing. If both teams look like they’re ready for the season to end, the fun score will be lower, and if both teams look excited for the next step, the fun score will be higher.

Stakes – This is about what the two teams stand to achieve or lose in this match. I find that there remain four major thresholds to play for in the playoff picture as it stands, now that the #1 seeds in both conferences are locked up: 4th Place in conference ensures two home playoff matches (if necessary) in the first round series, 7th Place in conference ensures that one avoids the play-in round, 9th Place in conference ensures that the season remains alive, and, as it stands because of to the way that a few things shook out in Leagues Cup – 5th Place in the Supporter’s Shield standings will secure somebody a Concacaf Champions Cup spot. (8th Place in Conference, thus the right to host the play-in match, is also somewhat significant, and 6th place in the Supporter’s Shield standings will leave you a team in the catbird seat for a Concacaf spot if someone who’s already qualified for a Concacaf spot1 wins the MLS Cup. If both teams can stand to gain, the stakes are higher, if neither team can get much from it, the stakes are lower.

Quality – This is partially about the shared placement in the standings between the two teams, and partially about the shared form of the two teams. Even if it’s a higher seed and a lower seed, if both have been playing well, the quality score will be higher.

All component scores are marked out of five, then added together for the total TrIPODD score!

5:00pm - The Eastern Conference:

Inter Miami CF (14, eliminated) at Charlotte FC (12)

TrIPODD Score: 9 (3/4/2)

Charlotte had a chance on Wednesday in Fort Lauderdale to make this a far less interesting match, but they gave up a late equalizing goal to Inter’s Robbie Robinson and find themselves on 40 points and three spots beneath the cut-line entering into the match. It’s not quite simply a win-and-in scenario for the Sons of Sir Minty – If Montreal, Red Bull, and Chicago all win, Charlotte will still finish beneath the playoff line on the first tiebreaker of matches won – but Charlotte absolutely has to win this match to have any hope for the playoffs (even in a situation in which Montreal loses to Columbus and NYC wins against Chicago, Charlotte would still be behind on wins to Montreal and goal differential to NYC). This has a chance to be the first truly triumphant moment in Charlotte FC history: a must-win match in front of a raucous Bank of America Stadium for the opportunity to do what they fell just short of accomplishing in 2022 (sneaking into the postseason). Both of these teams are flawed, especially Miami sans their main guy, but they played a chaotic, fun match on Wednesday and hopefully we get something entertaining in North Carolina.

Atlanta United (6) at FC Cincinnati (1)

TrIPODD Score: 11 (4/2/5)

This might be the highest combined quality matchup this evening, certainly in the Eastern Conference. Atlanta’s been playing at a very high level post-Leagues Cup, Cincinnati won the Supporter’s Shield but has even started to look better down the stretch of the year. If both teams had something really riding on this, I’d call this the best match of the evening, but Cincinnati’s locked into first place, Luciano Acosta probably has the MVP sealed, and Atlanta’s locked between 5th and 7th place, unable to break into neither the two-home-matches-in-the-first-round tier that a fourth place finish nets you nor a Concacaf Champions Cup spot. I still think this has the potential to be a fun match, but both teams are relatively sealed into their positions. 

CF Montreal (8) at Columbus Crew (4)

TrIPODD Score: 14 (5/5/4)

This, however, is a perfect storm for entertainment this evening. Both teams are playing for something significant here – Montreal is only a point safe in the playoffs. They can maintain their standing and ensure that they host the play-in round with a win in Columbus tonight. The Crew, because a lot of stuff broke MLS’s way in Leagues Cup, thus leaving the fifth-place finisher in the MLS table a Concacaf Champions Cup slot, are in the driver’s seat to qualify for international competition with a win or a draw in this match. These two teams also complement one another: Montreal loves to get dramatic late-match equalizers and winners, and Columbus loves to give up dramatic late-match equalizers and winners. Add in the intrigue of the still-lingering scar tissue of CF Montreal playing against Wilfried Nancy and I think we have the makeup of the most watchable match of Decision Day at Lower.com Field.

Chicago Fire (11) at New York City FC (13)

TrIPODD Score: 10 (3/5/2)

New York City is not technically out of it yet, though they’ll need a win and a lot of help in order to sneak into ninth place. Most of the intrigue here for this match lays with the Chicago Fire, currently in 11th on 40 points. Chicago hasn’t qualified for the playoffs since 2017, currently the longest drought in MLS. They can break that streak (though I suppose there could be a discrepancy between Play-In round and Playoffs if we want to nitpick) by getting a win at Citi Field tonight and some help from Nashville. It’ll be impressive for this Fire team, which we must remember saw their coach sacked amid a miserable start back in the Spring, to qualify for the postseason at all given how bad this season seemed to be for them from the outset. I suppose that you could say that for basically everyone from 8-13, save perhaps for Charlotte, but a qualification here might keep Frank Klopas at the helm and might provide Fire fans with a tangible artifact of progression under the ownership tenure of Joe Mansueto. Certainly not enough for a fanbase searching for a return to their glory days, but it’d be something. Neither team has had me speaking in tongues with excitement about their play-style this season, so I don’t know that we’ll get a truly fun match on the small pitch, but there is a significant potential result here. NYCFC actually currently sits on the second-longest playoff qualification streak in Major League Soccer right now at six seasons, stretching back to 2016, a mark that they hold in tandem with their cross-I95 rival in Philadelphia, trailing only their cross-river rival in the Red Bulls, and they’ll lose that unless a lot of things break their way to finish off a season in which very little has broken their way.

New York Red Bulls (10) at Nashville SC (7)

TrIPODD Score: 10 (2/5/3)

The Red Bull. has not missed the playoffs since 2009! The last time that they finished up a Decision Day without a playoff match to look forward to, they did it from the artificial turf of Giants Stadium following a 5-0 win over a Toronto FC team captained by Jim Brennan, with goals scored by Macoumba Kandji, Juan Pablo Angel, and Matthew Mbuta. The last time that the Red Bulls missed the playoffs, they finished 15th in the league and 7th in the East. 7th in the East in 2023 leaves you not even breaking a sweat about your playoff chances, which is the case for the Red Bulls’ host in Nashville SC. The Yotes can get all the way up to fifth place in the East with a win, a Revolution loss, and an Atlanta loss or draw, which I suppose makes this meaningful, though I’ll say this: If any MLS team is content with qualifying for the playoffs in any position and choking their opponents out in ugly 1-0 slugfests and 0-0 draws settled in penalties, it’s Pablo Mastroeni’s Real Salt Lake. However, very close behind them is Gary Smith’s Nashville SC. The Red Bulls have history on the line here. I don’t know if their fans will be sated by keeping the playoff streak alive, but it’d surely be better to make them than to miss them. Neither team has played particularly fun soccer, both teams are pragmatic and defensively-minded, but with a playoff spot on the line, I expect for this to be somewhat enjoyable.

Philadelphia Union (3) at New England Revolution (5)

TrIPODD Score: 12 (2/5/5)

We have two teams, both of high quality far above the playoff line, and at least New England has a fair amount to fight for here, as they’ll maintain their hopes for a Concacaf spot with a win. They can jump all the way up to third in the standings over Philadelphia if they can manage to win by three goals, too. It’s hard to see it happening, as the Revolution have been in a sordid, ever shifting headspace since the departure of Bruce Arena. They’ve lost their last three and haven’t beaten a team currently in the playoff picture since prior to the Leagues Cup, but they have a chance to salvage something for both 2023 and 2024 at home against the Union. Philadelphia is in a place similar to Nashville, where I don’t think it matters that much how or where they enter the postseason – I suppose it would be better to finish higher, but as long as they’re in the bracket, they’ll have a fighting chance to make it out of the East. They almost remind me of the late-2010s Sounders in that regard, as long as they were somewhere in the bracket, you had to consider them capable of breaking through. 

Orlando City SC (2) at Toronto FC (15, eliminated)

TrIPODD Score: 4 (1/1/2)

You can probably miss this one, neither team stands to gain much other than pride with a win or loss. This will be the final match at the end of a great, long career for TFC’s Michael Bradley, so I hope that we see him get a nice send-off.

8:00pm: The Western Conference

Real Salt Lake (5) at Colorado Rapids (14, eliminated)

TrIPODD Score: 8 (2/4/2)

The barrier between the top and bottom half of the bracket in the West is more permeable than in the East. I’m basing this mostly off of a hunch, but the potential to host two matches in the first round, and in particular not to have to travel to the first match in the first round, will be significant here, so that fourth place spot has a lot of value. Salt Lake’s done something akin to righting the ship after their post-Leagues Cup and post-Pablo Ruiz injury, and jumping up into the fourth spot will help secure them a bit more. There’s a little rivalry intrigue, but it’s less fun when one of the two teams has struggled so much. I want to see Colorado infuse some of the young talent that helped Rapids 2 to such a successful season this year, otherwise the Rapids have little to really play for outside of giving their fans something better than they’ve otherwise received to finish the year.

Minnesota United FC (11) at Sporting Kansas City (10)

TrIPODD Score: 12 (4/5/3)

Here we are! Who would’ve even thought it possible, amid two disappointing seasons put together by two clubs from whom we’ve come to expect otherwise consistent quality, that they’d both be matched up at year’s end for the chance to sneak in, with a little help required from elsewhere in the conference, to the playoffs? It’s real, it’s possible! It might just happen! It also might not happen, but whatever! I think the most important thing here, among all else, is that we finally might see potential passion turn kinetic from the “Nicest Rivalry In Sports”, a conflict which has, in its seven years of existence to this point, only seen both teams competing on relatively equal standing a few times. It peaked at exactly the worst moment for a rivalry to peak: the 2020 season, which featured a stoppage time comeback from Minnesota in front of no fans in Orlando at the MLS is Back Tournament and an instance of the Loons absolutely pantsing Sporting KC in front of a very limited crowd in the Western Conference Semifinals. My acting theory states that, if that playoff match had happened in a capacity stadium with a full traveling section of Minnesota fans at Children’s Mercy Park (which has no upper deck in which one can stow away the traveling support) gloating for the entire second half, this would be a much more intensive rivalry than it has been between the fans. This one, while it’s only for the right to qualify into a play-in round that allows one access into the full playoff field, rather than the obvious high-stakes of the Western Conference Semis, will bring drama, high-stakes soccer from two teams that have been fighting for their lives over the past weeks, and hopefully a genuine intensity between the two clubs that justifies its prominence in Heineken Rivalry Week scheduling for years to follow.

FC Dallas (8) at Los Angeles Galaxy (13, eliminated) - 

TrIPODD Score: 7 (1/4/2)

This one will have an impact on the playoff standings, but, boy howdy, has Dallas been a weird team to watch down the stretch. They haven’t won a match since mid-September, but they haven’t lost a match since late August. They’re unbeaten in their last eight matches, but seven of them have been draws, and only one of those has seen them score more than a single goal! This is exactly the opposite of what I thought we’d see from FC Dallas this season – With Alan Velasco, Jesus Ferreira, and Paul Arriola in tow, I figured that we’d get a goal-scoring juggernaut, but it’s really been the defensive development of Nkosi Tafari, Sebastian Ibeagha, and Ema Twumasi that has defined FC Dallas this year. This squad should be one of the best teams in MLS, but they’ve struggled down the stretch and just from my eye-test, they look kind of miserable out there. One of the strangest aspects to their recent form is their tendency to drop an early goal, immediately wake up and equalize, but then never capitalize well enough to actually come through with three points. They did just this at home against the Rapids on Wednesday, but they couldn’t follow up Velasco’s 37th-minute equalizer with a match-winner over the next fifty minutes. 

Dallas will face a beatable team without much to play for in the LA Galaxy, but I see this as an ominous matchup for the Hoops: We have a highly tense team watching a good season slip away traveling to Carson to play a team in a state of soccer jouissance, unaffected by the concepts of winning, losing, qualifying, or whatever. Their match against RSL last weekend is perfectly indicative of this: They went up 2-0 with a gorgeous goal, in which their two strikers, Billy Sharp and Dejan Jovelic, hit two perfectly weighted passes to set up their central midfielder, Douglas Costa, for a far-post goal. They then proceeded to give up the two-goal lead and finish with a 2-2 draw. They’re playing footloose and fancy-free in all manners good and bad. 

This is the quintessential artisan’s choice matchup of the week, it’s only fun for the wrong reasons, and it’ll be a colossal disappointment if the Hoops can’t pull through.

Houston Dynamo (4) at Portland Timbers (7) - 

TrIPODD Score: 13 (4/5/4)

Portland has turned their season around so thoroughly since the departure of Giovanni Savarese, but their last two matches have been so strange. They had to scrap back a point from the Galaxy on the road on September 30th, and they dropped an ugly one 4-1 on the road in Montreal. I thought that they’d be knocking on the door of that 4th-place spot in the West by now, but they’re still not quite safely in the playoff picture, and they’ll need a win to guarantee themselves a spot, as a draw would put them beneath a theoretical winner of the SKC/Minnesota match on tiebreakers. They’ll play a Houston team that needs a win to stay above that fourth place line, which is significant given the discrepancy between the Dynamo’s home form (11 wins, 2 losses, 4 draws) and their away form (2 wins, 9 losses, 5 draws). Those two home matches may be the difference between the Dynamo winning and losing in the first round series. Both teams should approach this match with the belief that they’ll need a win, we’ll have a raucous atmosphere at Providence Park as always, brought on just as strongly by the Timbers Army in the loping Northern end as it is by the wealthy patrons of the Multnomah Athletic Club watching the match from their exercise bikes on the southern end. The Dynamo have come into Portland and ruined a season before. 

Austin FC (12, eliminated) at San Jose Earthquakes (9) - 

TrIPODD Score: 9 (2/4/3)

The Quakes, quietly, have struggled to make the postseason about as badly as their 2003 MLS Cup final counterparts in the Chicago Fire. They have only two postseason appearances since their 2012 Supporters Shield-winning campaign (2017 and 2020), both times as the last team in the Western bracket, and they’ve gone out in the first round both times. They haven’t won a playoff match since the first leg of the Western Conference semis in 2012 in Los Angeles, and haven’t won a round in the playoffs since beating the Red Bulls in the 2010 Eastern Semis (it was a weird era). All that they have to do to make the 2023 postseason is defeat a miserably inept Austin FC side at home. They’ve been this close and faltered before – lest we forget how the Quakes dropped the final six matches of their 2019 campaign to finish four points out of the final spot, or how they came up just short in 2013 despite a seven-match unbeaten run to finish the year out, losing the final Wild Card spot to Colorado on tiebreakers. Just win at home and you’re in, Quakes! This will probably not be a fun one, as Austin’s had a slow, monotonous descent into their current place beneath the cut-line to this point and the Quakes truly should win handily.

Seattle Sounders (3) at St. Louis CITY SC (1)

TrIPODD Score: 12 (4/3/5)

There’s a good chance that these two teams see one another again in the postseason, but this game will decide if that would need to be in the conference semis or the conference final. Seattle can get all the way up to the second seed in the conference with a win, but a loss could, theoretically, drop them as far down as sixth place. St. Louis has been positively dominant at home this year, they’re currently tied with Houston for the most home wins of anyone in the Western Conference in 2023, and they’re locked into first in the West regardless of what happens this evening. I think the importance of this match really rests in the mentality that the winner will carry away from it: The Sounders know that they’ll likely need to win in St. Louis in order to progress to the MLS Cup final, as they typically have (for their four MLS Cup final appearances under Brian Schmetzer, they never entered the postseason as the top seed in the West) and this could be a significant confidence play for them. 

Los Angeles FC (2) at Vancouver Whitecaps FC (6)

TrIPODD Score: 14 (5/4/5)

I think this is our match of the evening! Both of these teams have something big to play for: Vancouver could theoretically get all the way up to third with a win and getting the two home matches at BC Place would be huge for them: In big matches, BC Place has become a tough place for road teams to play in, as shown by the two straight Canadian Championship finals they’ve won there. LAFC can get a Concacaf spot with a win and some help from Philadelphia and Montreal (this is why I have this at a 4 for stakes, we will know if LAFC has Concacaf hopes by kickoff). We have Best XI-caliber talent in the attack from both sides: Denis Bouanga basically has the golden boot locked up and can seal it in this match, while Ryan Gauld and Brian White have both been phenomenally prolific this season. This may even be a preview of a first-round playoff matchup depending on how things shake out. 

There’s been a certain ritual that I’ve appreciated with the new Season Pass landscape, in that BC Place matches tend, even if they’re in a crowded window with other 7:30 Pacific Time kickoffs, to serve as a sort of nightcap for the MLS matchday. There always seem to be points taken and dropped on that neon-green turf as Vancouver closes the night out for us viewers. Here’s hoping that we get a final entertaining Vancouver Nightcap to close out Decision Day and the 2023 MLS Regular Season. 

Before we finish, I want to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who has read Score Secondary over the course of this season! It’s been a lot of fun, there’s been some great soccer played, some poor soccer played, some weird soccer played, the Revs had to delay a match due to bee problems, but it’s been such a great experience to write these over the course of the year. I have some plans for the playoffs incoming, so look out for those, and of course, as always — Enjoy the Soccer!

The idea of this “Echoes” series is to put current events in MLS and American Soccer more broadly into historical context, to provide a sort of richness to the soccer-viewing experience akin to the experience of densely layered disappointment that engulfs me after Minnesota Vikings playoff games. Many new people have come to soccer in the US in the recent past, be it due to the creation of a new local expansion team, a favorite foreign player signing on our soil, or perhaps they’ve been charmed by the efforts of an eccentric blogger who burns through legal pad paper every week. This is where I’ll take the chance to play teacher and to compare what’s happening now with what’s happened over the past twenty-eight seasons. As with every title I’ve ever come up with for any series I’ve ever done (here on Score Secondary or otherwise), I’m not overwhelmingly happy with “MLS Echoes” as a name for this series, but I haven’t thought of one better yet. In the case that I do, I will change it from that point on and update you about it.

We have become used to successful expansion teams in MLS. There’s no guarantee nor expectation that an expansion team immediately comes in and finishes near the top of the league by any means (it took Cincinnati three seasons to finish outside of the exact bottom of the league, for example) but we’re not shocked to see a new MLS team come in and play respectably. I don’t even think we’re that shocked to see good expansion teams in American pro sports in general anymore, now that we’ve seen the Vegas Golden Knights and San Diego Wave make playoff runs in their first seasons, anything is possible. It seems like American leagues have taken steps to ensure that they don’t repeat the lengthy spells of ineptitude that introduced teams like the expansion Cleveland Browns, the Charlotte Bobcats, and every team placed in the Tampa Bay area to the world.

With all of that said, what St. Louis City SC has done this year is genuinely unique by a few metrics. St. Louis will finish this year atop the Western Conference. They’ve already had the best expansion season in league history by one metric, breaking the 2018 LAFC team’s record for the most wins by an expansion team with 17. They’re in a good position to tie the record for the highest ever league finish in an expansion season, too - At time of writing, with a match to go, they’re in third place in MLS, which would match the 1998 Chicago Fire. All of this being as it is, there are a scant few firsts and records that this phenomenal St. Louis team will be unable to claim in 2023.

Today’s prompt is: St. Louis will not be the first expansion team…

To Make the Playoffs:
1998 Chicago Fire, 1998 Miami Fusion FC, 2009 Seattle Sounders FC, 2017 Atlanta United FC, 2018 Los Angeles FC, 2020 Nashville SC, 2020 Inter Miami CF

There have been twenty-two expansion seasons in MLS history, and seven (eight including the upcoming St. Louis appearance) culminated in a playoff appearance in that first season. That is more than a third of the time, a far higher rate than in other American major leagues – The NFL hasn’t seen it happen since the NFL/AFL merger, the NBA hasn’t seen it happen since the 1967 Chicago Bulls, and it hasn’t happened in the post-integration era of Major League Baseball. There are plenty of reasons for MLS expansion teams’ atypical rate of success, probably most significant being that expansion MLS teams can bring prospective talent into the league from overseas. Atlanta, LAFC, and Nashville each signed future league MVPs (Josef Martinez, Carlos Vela, Hany Mukhtar) from outside of MLS prior to the beginning of their first season, which is nearly impossible to do with the relatively closed-off player pools of other major American leagues (or at least it hasn’t been done yet). St. Louis did this themselves by bringing in high-caliber players from overseas in Joao Klauss, Roman Burki, and Eduard Lowen, and they’ll join seven other expansion teams as playoff qualifiers in their first year.

Making it to the playoffs is one thing – It’s far more rare to win once you’re there. 

To Advance in the Playoffs:
1998 Chicago Fire, 2020 Nashville SC

More astounding to me than the regular season success of expansion teams is the ineptitude that’s stricken so many upon getting there. The playoffs are a different beast than the regular season, and teams unaccustomed to their pressure and intensity get caught on their back feet more often than not! Many of those who have succumbed to first round exits came in very strongly, too. Some even hosted their first round matches, but they couldn’t keep the regular season success rolling into the first round. 

This was not the case for the two Miami teams, both of whom snuck into the playoffs at the bottom of the bracket – the Fusion were the fourth of four Eastern Conference teams in 1998 and predictably lost to the DC United juggernaut, and Inter was the tenth of ten teams to qualify for the Eastern playoffs in 2020 (the Eastern playoff field was expanded in 2020 as the conferences were re-shuffled to reduce travel during COVID-19, which ended up giving the East two more teams than the West), and they couldn’t make it out of the play-in round. 

The 2009 Seattle Sounders came into the playoffs placed third in the West and fourth in the league overall, matching up with a Houston Dynamo team that they had beaten once and drawn once during the regular season.

The first leg in Seattle went scoreless, a match in which Seattle’s best chance suffered a goal-line clearance from the Dynamo’s Brian Mullan, who went on to become a pariah to Sounders fans for a much different reason only a few months later, and the second leg went into extra time before Houston’s Brian Ching scored the match-winner in the 95’ off of an impressive half-turn volley. Ching made something of a habit out of scoring critical late-match playoff goals in Houston, doing so with such frequency that this one might not even crack his top three critical late-match postseason goals.1

The most surprising first-round exits befell the MLS 3.0 vanguards of Atlanta and Los Angeles. The 2017 Atlanta United team finished fourth in the East, hosting Gregg Berhalter’s Columbus Crew in the first knockout round. Atlanta, who had scored 70 goals in 2017, the second-most of anyone, were shut out over 120 minutes by a Crew team that was only a week out from learning that their owner intended to move the franchise to Austin. Columbus couldn’t score either, leaving the match to finish on penalties. Zack Steffen made eight saves over the course of the match, then saved three in the deciding shootout to knock Atlanta out at home. 

LAFC set a (now broken) record for expansion team success in 2018 with 16 wins and finished third in the West. They matched up with Real Salt Lake, a team that had found itself watching Decision Day from home due to the league’s uneven number of participants that season, who had only snuck into the playoffs when the Galaxy lost a two-goal lead at home to Houston in the second half of their final match. The match that followed was fascinating – There was a controversial LAFC goal that came shortly after Nick Rimando was hit in the head by detritus from a cup thrown out of the 3252, RSL’s Damir Kreilach scored off of an amazing crane kick volley from outside of the box, and the match winner came off of a Walker Zimmerman own goal. 

The two outliers here were both in unique situations for their first playoff rounds – The 1998 Fire joined Miami as the league’s first expansion team, and they were able to beat a Colorado Rapids team attempting to repeat Cinderella run to the 1997 Cup in a three-match series. They did so with only two goals, both of them from Lubos Kubik penalty kicks. The first match, a 1-1 draw at Soldier Field, went to an NASL-style run-up shootout after 90 minutes had finished.2 Kubik scored the lone goal in game 2 in Denver, which sent the Fire on their merry way (details of this merry way will follow shortly).

Nashville had the good fortune of meeting the aforementioned 2020 Inter Miami team in the Eastern Conference’s play-in round, and then graciously saved us (and I mean us both, me because I would’ve had to write it and you because you would’ve had to have skimmed past it) the trouble of trying to determine whether to include them on this list on a technicality because of the discrepancy between a win in an ad hoc 7/10 play-in round as it relates to a win in the playoffs themselves by going on the road to defeat #2 seeded Toronto FC and MVP Alejandro Pozuelo on the hallowed ground of Rentschler Field of Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford, Connecticut. The match-winner came off of a late rebound by Daniel Rios following a truly impressive Hany Mukhtar run between three very gassed TFC defenders to get a shot off. The expansion Yotes’ miracle run finally came to a halt in added extra time in Columbus during the next round – Pedro Santos’ 99th minute winner robbed us of getting to see Nashville, the 7th-seed, hosting New England, the 8th-seed, in the Eastern Conference Final. 

St. Louis has the opportunity to join a very exclusive club if they can win their first-round series against whomever accidentally finds themselves winning the 8/9 play-in round in the West – I’m guessing San Jose, but I’ve been constantly wrong about them this year. They’ll have the opportunity to join a club about as exclusive but even more prestigious if they can win out from there:

To Win Hardware:

1998 Chicago Fire, 2009 Seattle Sounders FC

To step into the writer’s studio for a moment,3 I really was hoping to make a big thing out of putting the 2007 Toronto FC team into this category due to a Canadian Championship win. I’d be like “It’s been a great season, but if they don’t at least win the Western Conference playoff bracket (which gets you a trophy), St. Louis can’t even sniff, let alone touch the heights to which Danny Dichio’s 2007 TFC team soared, like so many giveaway free seat cushions thrown into the Ontario sky.” I checked, though, and the Canadian Championship wasn’t first hosted until 2008, and a still-USL Montreal Impact team won the 2008 tournament anyway. So, no, there are simply two excellent teams left here, both of whom I’ve already covered to some extent in this piece.

Prior to their playoff exit in Houston, the 2009 Sounders had already won a trophy: The U.S. Open Cup. In September, they traveled out to RFK Stadium and defeated DC United, with Roger Levesque providing what would prove to be the match and tournament-winner in the 86th. The 2009 Open Cup win was the first of three straight that Seattle racked up to begin their history in MLS. 

Then, finally, the gold standard among expansion teams: The 1998 Chicago Fire. The ‘98 Fire were champions of the US Open Cup and MLS Cup. It might be a bit odd to consider them an expansion franchise, founded so early on in the league’s history, but they started from scratch in 1998, entering into a relatively top-heavy league, and they beat a few of its best en route to winning the double. They beat the Columbus Crew, of Brian McBride and Stern John, with an Added Extra Time goal in the USOC final, beat the (retroactively awarded) Supporters Shield champions in the LA Galaxy, whose points-per-match average of 2.13 stood as the best in MLS history until it was broken by the 2021 Revolution, to win the West and make the league final, then finally beat DC United, who had a claim to the title of “Best Team in the Western Hemisphere” after defeating Brazil’s Vasco da Gama in the 1998 Copa Interamericana final, to win the MLS Cup. 

I see some similarities between the ‘98 Fire and this St. Louis team: The Fire supplemented lesser-known but productive European attacking talent – Chicago had Piotr Nowak and Roman Kosecki, St. Louis has Lowen and Klauss – with otherwise unsung domestic players. Chicago had acquired Zach Thornton and Diego Gutierrez in the expansion draft, found CJ Brown and Ante Razov toiling in USISL D-3, traded with the Galaxy for Chris Armas, and leveraged Bob Bradley’s familiarity with Jesse Marsch dating back to their Princeton days to bring together a truly excellent team. 

Much has, rightfully, been made of St. Louis’s penchant for finding players cast off by other MLS clubs: Orlando couldn’t get production out of Nicholas Gioacchini, Minnesota didn’t prioritize holding on to Aziel Jackson despite him making Next Pro Best XI in 2022, and Seattle couldn’t find first team minutes for Samuel Adeniran, but they’ve all found roles in which they’ve thrived in St. Louis this season. They’re atop a Western Conference in what seems like constant flux, but they’ll likely have to get through perennial contenders like Seattle and LAFC, proven knockout tournament winners like Houston and Vancouver, or the unknowable chaotic enigma that is the 2023 Portland Timbers – and then beat whomever progresses to the Cup final out of a loaded Eastern Conference – if they’re going to repeat what Chicago did 25 years ago. Regardless, no expansion team has ever set themselves up better in the regular season than St. Louis has in 2023. 

Window One (2:30pm)

Window Winner (By Default): Vancouver Whitecaps FC at New York City FC

We have a weird one on a Saturday afternoon in Queens! These two don’t meet often, being on opposite coasts and in different countries and all, so there’s a degree of novelty that I suppose could bring you into this match. This is the Whitecaps’ first match in the House that Mix Built since 2018 – the two played to a 2-2 draw in that one, with goals from Nicolas Mezquida and Erik Hurtado for the Caps and goals from Jesus Medina and a then-teenage Argentine striker on loan from Torque named Taty Castellanos, who scored his first goal with NYCFC in that match. Both of these teams are in the midst of hard-to-define seasons. The Pigeons have gone on stretches of decent mediocrity (the Spring, when they couldn’t lose at home and couldn’t win on the road), near-total mediocre equilibrium (the Summer, when went unbeaten in eight matches, seven of them draws) and now they’re fresh off of breaking a three-match losing streak in a 2-0 defeat over CF Montreal. Their transfer of Gaby Pereira in July seemed like something of a white flag for the season, but they showed that they still have some life on Wednesday. 

Many, myself included unfortunately, started to dig Vancouver’s grave after they gave up a late goal to lose their last match at BC Place to San Jose before starting a 7-match stretch of road games. Vancouver, like NYCFC early on in the season, has been very unsuccessful on the road and fairly good at home over the course of the year, and they looked poised to suffer through this stretch. However, I’ve come to find out that it’s quite hard to dig figurative graves in that BC Place artificial turf, and the Caps have taken surprise wins in their last two matches in Portland and Chicago, and they stare down a team that should probably be a beatable, or at least drawable, foe on Saturday afternoon. 

Window Two (6:30pm)

Window Winner: Orlando City SC at FC Cincinnati

There was a moment or so last week in which it looked as if Cincinnati’s leisurely trot to the Supporter’s Shield was in some sort of doubt. They were blown out by Columbus, then lost in the Open Cup semis, but just as the question of “Could St. Louis challenge for the Shield?” started to play its way across our collective lips, they smashed New York City at home and came back on the road in Atlanta with the help of exactly what they needed to see: Some Lucho Acosta wizardry and a dependable Brandon Vazquez tap-in. Now, here they are, ten points clear of St. Louis, games against Charlotte, Toronto, and the Red Bulls ahead of them over the rest of the Sprint, and at least a hand firmly on the shield. 

They welcome Orlando to TQL Stadium, who finds themselves in an absolutely delicious situation for them: They’re flying under the radar, they’re no longer the most-discussed team in their own state, they’ve quietly won or drawn eight of their last nine league matches, and they’re not drawing a ton of eyes or chatter for it. Here, Orlando has an opportunity to reach up and slap the team at the top of the league in a fashion similar to what the Crew were able to do a few weeks ago. It’s hard to get a road win in Cincinnati, but if they do, the Lions have a chance to get up to second place in the East. 

Cincinnati’s most recent losses have come at the hands of teams featuring either the best player in the world or a defensive midfielder like Aidan Morris or Dax McCarty putting in a great shift, and Orlando just brought back their longtime stalwart in the defensive midfield, Junior Urso. If they can hold Acosta and Vazquez back enough, Aaron Boupendza doesn’t find the form that FCC spent so much to see from him, and one of their consortium of potential goal-scorers steps up, Orlando could get a huge win here. That’s easier said than done, of course, as most everybody who doesn’t employ a Ballon D’Or winner that has challenged the full-strength Cincinnati team in TQL has found out this year. 

Window Three (7:30pm)

Free Window Winner: Charlotte FC at Nashville SC

Both of these two are coming off of tough draws in the mid-week. Nashville’s had a whirlwind of a past week, getting blown out on the road in Atlanta before holding Miami scoreless on the road, while Charlotte saw what would’ve been a great week turn into a still-very good week when they followed up a 1-0 win over LAFC by dropping a 1-0 lead to Orlando’s Martin Ojeda in the 88th minute. Charlotte has yet to decide if they’re going to be a consistently good team this year, and I worry that they’ll forget to do so before the season ends with them again just outside of a playoff spot, but they will definitely be consequential. Most of the current Eastern playoff field will play them once more before the season’s end, and the Miami team that needs to more or less go unbeaten between now and the end of the year to slip into the ninth-place spot will play them twice in a four-day span. Charlotte has a phenomenal chance to mess up somebody’s chase for seeding, and they can still fight their way into the playoffs. Nashville looked so good coming out of Leagues Cup, the addition of Sam Surridge alongside Hany Mukhtar seemed certain to put them firmly in the East’s top four, but somehow they’ve fallen to seventh at this moment in time. Fortunately for them, Charlotte’s defense has been the cure for struggling attacks, so we might see Nashville execute to their offensive potential at home the same way that they executed to their defensive potential in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday.

Season Pass Window Winner: St. Louis CITY at Sporting Kansas City

Sporting KC is in a peculiar spot right now – For the second year in a row, SKC is healthy, scoring, winning big, and looking like one of the best teams in the West right in time for the playoffs to be more or less out of reach. It’s not impossible, but the margins for error are very, very thin, and the remaining schedule is very hard – Every remaining team on the SKC schedule either currently sits above their conference’s playoff line or employs Lionel Messi. In comes St. Louis, still first in the West, who beat the hell out of the Wiz during the two teams’ first match back in May, who will in all likelihood be playing a de facto home game given the gulf in jadedness between the two fanbases and the closeness in proximity between the two cities. Some KC fans, I’ve heard, are even kind of okay, sort of spitefully satisfied with the idea that the front office will have to look out of their suite and see just how badly they’ve lost their fanbase, but that is an unsubstantiated rumor. 

It would be wrong to say that St. Louis can more or less end Kansas City’s season here if they play their cards right – SKC’s playoff hopes were dashed back in April – but they can basically ensure that any hope the team on the other side of the East still holds for a postseason bid is dashed. Sporting has to win this, both to stay in the playoff race and to make up for the embarrassment of the match the two played in May. Outside of the match against Chivas in the Leagues Cup, there is no single more important match that Sporting KC will partake in this season, and Sporting KC looked about as good as they have in any match all year in a 3-0 rout of San Jose last week – so, neutrals, if you’re going to watch a single Sporting KC match this season, make it this one! We have the top team in the West against a team that, when healthy, can play like one of the top teams in the West! 

And if St. Louis dominates, I think there is high potential for the KC fans to genuinely turn. I think, to an extent, that Peter Vermes is coaching for his job here, less likely in the immediate, Giovanni Savarese sense unless it gets really bad, but man, if he ends this year with no playoffs for the second year, two (maybe three!) bad losses to an ascendant St. Louis, and mediocre performances against the cavalcade of other rivals (it is sort of funny that, if St. Louis doesn’t definitively kill Sporting’s season this weekend, all of Minnesota, Houston, Salt Lake, and St. Louis for a third time will get the chance to do so in September and October), I cannot see that year-end interview going well. 

Window Four (8:30pm)

Artisan’s Choice: Colorado Rapids at Real Salt Lake

What the hell has happened to Salt Lake? It wasn’t even a full month ago, it was August 4th, that they were beating the brakes off of the defending champions of Concacaf in the Leagues Cup, and since then, they’ve been outscored 12-2 in their last four matches across all competitions! I was thinking we had a genuine Western Conference contender out in Sandy, now they’re in free-fall! I know that the answer is basically that Pablo Ruiz is very good, and the knee injury that has sidelined him since that Leagues Cup loss to LAFC has correlated precisely with the team’s downfall, but my god, to fall this badly is just astounding. 

A few weeks ago, I put forward a theory defining the post-Leagues Cup Colorado Rapids as Major League Soccer’s control group. We have done all of the learning we can about Colorado this season, and all that is left to do is use them as a point of comparison for everyone else. So far, LAFC defeated them 4-0 at home, and Minnesota defeated them 3-0 at home. From that, we can make what I think is a reasonable syllogistic inference that Los Angeles is a goal superior to Minnesota at this moment in time. 

I make that point to say that we will learn something about Salt Lake from their performance in the Rocky Mountain Cup this weekend. 3-0 win? The past four games have been an aberration! 1-1 draw? You’re definitely on a slide, but it’s not as bad as some say. A loss of any kind? OH GOD, NO, MAYDAY! MAYDAY!

Window Five (9:30pm)

Game of the Evening: Houston Dynamo FC at LA Galaxy

Who do we have, but the two hottest teams in the Western Conference! That’s right! Houston just beat a really good Columbus team at home and dominated Salt Lake in Utah. The Galaxy, who have struggled all year, are coming off of a 3-0 win over Chicago and just outlasted San Jose 3-2 on the road! Both are unbeaten since the Leagues Cup break!

I don’t know what this version of the Galaxy is, but I want to see it continue to work. They made a series of signings in August during their Leagues Cup vacation – 2023 Artisan’s Choice XI Watch-list member Michael Barrios from Colorado, Edwin Cerillo from Dallas, 2022 Actual Best XI snub Diego Fagundez from Austin, veteran striker Billy Sharp from England’s Sheffield United, and veteran Center Back Maya Yoshida from Germany’s Schalke 04. Yoshida was a favorite player of mine during my Premier League-fan days, which is normally a bad sign given how long ago my Premier League-fan days were (I still have a Southampton jersey floating around my closet though), but he’s been a pretty solid addition to the Galaxy back-line so far! 

He’ll have to stand up against the rapid-onset… of The Corenaissance. That’s right, The Baird of Avon, the Grizzly Baird, the Stanford Stunner, is here. Corey Baird has scored in his last three MLS matches and six of his last eight across all competitions. 

The Galaxy, much like Sporting KC, still technically have a shot at making the playoffs, have only lost one match since the end of May in MLS, and have found the offensive edge that had me believing in them as an MLS Cup favorite way back during those optimistic days of February. This really could be a fun one in Carson!

Window Six (Sunday at 6:30pm)

Window Winner By Default: New York Red Bulls at Philadelphia Union

The Bulls died last weekend against Miami, when they ceded basically everything including their gift shop to Lionel Messi. Philadelphia can bury them further on Sunday evening. 

To The Social Media Team of The Red Bull: I fully consent to and encourage you to put this in your Twitter video when you end up sneaking into the playoffs again at the year’s end

Window Seven (Sunday Past Bedtime)

Game of the Evening: Inter Miami CF at Los Angeles FC

I had something of a bit planned in which I wouldn’t mention any Miami matches from here to the end of the season, but their nearly-impossible-but-not-fully-impossible chances at a playoff berth are a weakness. They’re still in it – They have ten matches left in MLS (plus the Open Cup final), at the moment the likely number to cross to finish ninth place in the East will be around 42 points (this is based off of current ninth-place Chicago’s points-per-game rate multiplied by 34), they’re currently on 22 points, so they’ll have to keep up a 2 points-per-game pace to get there. This is a tall task, and getting only a draw in the Nashville match on Wednesday, one of a decreasing few home matches remaining in which Miami will have their full-strength lineup including Messi, Drake Callendar, and Benjamin Cremaschi among others. It really would have helped them to have won that one on Wednesday, especially as they’ll have to travel all the way across the country to play LAFC, which will kick off at 11pm Eastern on Sunday night. 

LAFC has been about as good as ever this season at home, and particularly at home against opponents from the Eastern Conference – In three home matches against opponents from the opposite coast in 2023, they’re unbeaten, and haven’t conceded a goal in any of them: 4-0 over New England in April, 3-0 over Philadelphia in the second leg of the CCL semis in May, and a mid-week 0-0 draw against Atlanta in June. That East-to-West coastal trip has been generally brutal to teams traveling cross-country this year – Out of twelve matches across all competitions, teams located in states or provinces bordering the Atlantic have won only two matches in Pacific states and provinces: Charlotte defeated the Galaxy 1-0 in Carson on May 27th and Atlanta defeated the Sounders in Seattle 2-0 on August 20th. 

Miami’s already facing off against one of the best teams in MLS, and all of the additional stuff (fatigue, climate, travel, international duty) just adds to the uphill challenge they face in this one. Still, this will be Lionel Messi’s debut in Los Angeles! Miami still hasn’t lost a match since the beginning of the Leagues Cup! It’s yet another big challenge for this new-look, now-contending Herons team: Can they go to Los Angeles and get a necessary result against the defending Cup and Shield winners? Maybe the formula they developed in Harrison last weekend, in which they pack it in and defend for the first hour or so before bringing on Messi to put in a kill-shot, will work again here. It’ll be much harder to keep Denis Bouanga and Carlos Vela out of the net than it was to keep the Red Bulls’ forwards, but it is as good of a formula as any. 

The odds are long, but they’ve been long many times over the last few months, and Miami has found a way to pull through in every match they’ve played so far. If you’re able to stay up for it, you might see Miami’s playoff hopes take a severe blow, you might see another incredible bit of Messi artistry, and, regardless, you’ll see a great atmosphere at the Banque for it. 

Who’s Off This Week:

Toronto FC! You’re off this week. I don’t know what you guys do for fun there, even when I lived in Ontario I didn’t figure out what you guys do for fun there — I don’t know if you get Amazon Freevee up there, but there is a channel that airs Kids of the Hall reruns 24/7 if you need something to fill your time.

Everybody else, enjoy the soccer!

Window One - 6:30pm

Game of the Weekend: Nashville SC at Atlanta United FC

Inter Miami had a sort of heliocentrism over the course of the 2023 Leagues Cup, presenting something of an interpretive canvas upon which opponents could judge themselves. They played six MLS teams en route to the Cup win, each interpreting their result differently. What we have here is a matchup between the team that left their Heron encounter feeling the worst about themselves in Atlanta against the one that left their encounter feeling the best about themselves in Nashville. 

Now, maybe the Union left feeling worse than Atlanta did because they hosted, their expectations were higher, and the loss further cemented an unfortunately and ironically snake-bitten run for them, but certainly nobody looked worse in their performance against Miami than Atlanta United did. My order of best to least, for the record: 1. Nashville, 2. Dallas, 3. Orlando, 4. Charlotte, 5. Philadelphia, 6. Atlanta

Despite the fatigue that may set in after having played a few additional matches compared to the rest of the league, I think Nashville has to feel good about their chances over The Sprint. The addition of Sam Surridge, who played very well for them in the Leagues Cup run, with three goals in the tournament and an assist in the final, to a team that’s already set up quite well in the Eastern Conference. Though the Supporter’s Shield is an unlikely target due to the 13-point difference between the Yotes and FC Cincinnati at the moment, they should believe themselves capable of making a run for a high seed in the playoffs, and their Leagues Cup run should give them the confidence that they can make a deep run once they get there, unlike in the last two years.

Despite the tumult of this year and their flame-out in the Leagues Cup, Atlanta finds themselves at the same point total as Nashville and only a spot beneath them in the Eastern Conference standings. Despite their road-game woes and their defensive ineptitude so far this season, Atlanta’s coming off of a shutout win in Seattle off of two goals from Giorgios Giakoumakis. They had maybe the second best response of any team that failed to make the Leagues Cup knockout round (St. Louis’ domination of Austin being the best) and now they have the chance to knock down an excellent Nashville team at home and reposition themselves in the top half of the Eastern Conference playoff race. 

We have two confident teams with rising expectations, both featuring genuine stars in the attack. There’s always a sizeable chunk of traveling fans in this rivalry due to the proximity of the two cities, so the atmosphere will be fun, and I think the play on the turf at the Benz will match it. More eyes may have turned to another team in the Southeast, but we should get a phenomenal battle for the region in Atlanta tonight.

Season Pass Window Winner: Inter Miami CF at New York Red Bulls

I’ve had this one circled since the Messi signing was announced, though it’s not exclusively for soccer reasons. There’s the historical aspect – Though David Beckham’s first appearance in MLS play had already come, his first start and the moment of his real arrival in MLS regular season play happened on the road against the Red Bulls in a 5-4 barnburner in August 2007. Though it’s uncertain whether he’ll start, there is something cool about Lionel Messi’s first MLS regular season appearance potentially coming against the Red Bulls as well. That game happened in the old Giants Stadium, while this one’s happening in a building with an odd history in Red Bull Arena. There have been significant matches at Red Bull Arena since its opening in 2010: It hosted the Eastern Conference finals in 2015 and 2018, the USL Final in 2016, and an ill-fated Men’s World Cup Qualifier between the United States and Costa Rica in 2017. It is a really nice stadium, and the Red Bulls have consistently played good soccer there, but it’s lacked the sell-out crowds and raucous aura of other MLS stadiums built around the same time, like Philadelphia’s Subaru Park or Kansas City’s Children’s Mercy Park. 

Well, this one’s a sell-out. There will be a lot of people there on Saturday, many of whom, probably most of whom, will be there to see Inter Miami and more specifically Lionel Messi. We’ve seen the traveling Miami circus breathe liveliness into buildings like Dallas’ Toyota Stadium and even Miami’s own DRV PNK Stadium that we hadn’t seen in a long while, if ever before, and I’m really interested to see the energy and atmosphere in Red Bull Arena on Saturday. Red Bulls fans are a unique bunch of their own – proud, long-suffering, and often spiteful –and I don’t imagine that they’ll be completely gracious hosts to the influx of Messi-obsessed newcomers, either. Especially if the Red Bulls get off to an early lead, I think it’ll be a fascinating match to see develop. 

I’m Interested In This: St. Louis CITY SC at Orlando City SC

Here’s a fun quirk – It’s the first ever matchup between two teams named “City SC” in MLS history! We’ll call it the Tale of Two Cities Derby or something like that. More interestingly, both teams are coming off of big wins last weekend! Orlando went on the road and beat Chicago 3-1 and St. Louis got the bad taste of their Leagues Cup performance out of their mouth by blowing out Austin 6-3 at home. Much like Atlanta/Nashville, both of these teams must feel good about their chances over the remainder of the season at this point in time. St. Louis still has a good shot at challenging for the the Supporter’s Shield, especially if Cincinnati’s recent struggles continue, and I think that they’ve silenced, or at least quieted, many of those who believe this season to be a fluke success so far. One negative trend that St. Louis can reverse here is their poor road form against Eastern Conference teams: They’ve lost to Columbus, Nashville, and Chicago twice on the road so far this year across all competitions, though they did pick up a win against hapless Toronto in July. Though Orlando started slowly considering the high expectations that they brought into 2023, they currently sit at fourth in the Eastern Conference, and I think they’re enjoying the relatively low profile that they’re keeping at the moment considering their Floridian partner’s new additions. I could see them quietly continuing to win over the coming weeks, maybe we see them finishing the season in second or third when the dust settles – They have a chance to keep building momentum with a great home showing against a strong St. Louis team tonight.

Window Two - 7:30pm

Free Window Winner: Austin FC at FC Dallas

This is our first peek at FC Dallas in twenty days! Do you remember that night in early August? Messi and Miami looked beatable, FC Dallas looked like the pacey attacking team we thought they’d be this year, Alan Velasco looked like he was worth the price, and the game that played out adjacent to the US Soccer Hall of Fame looked like it belonged within its walls! Though they lost on a truly incredible collapse – one of unfortunately many for FC Dallas, this one rivaling George John’s own goal in the 2010 MLS Cup final against Colorado and Chucky Lozano’s stoppage-time winner for Pachuca in the 2017 CCL Semis – I think many left that match feeling pretty good about FC Dallas’ chances over the remainder of the 2023 season. Though they’re currently sitting outside of the playoff race, they have a chance to make the same sort of statements that a number of other teams (Certainly St. Louis, Houston, and Columbus, and probably Atlanta, Minnesota, and Orlando as well) did last weekend with emphatic wins – They deserve to be considered competitors over the rest of the season. 

Their first opponent is one of the stranger entities currently shambling their way through MLS at the moment: Austin FC. Austin had the chance to show themselves as Western competitors last weekend, and they instead stepped on a rake and hit themselves in the crotch, America’s Funniest Home Videos-style. This weekend, they have to face their in-state rivals in Frisco, and for the sake of their emotional health, they desperately need to step up for this one. If they follow up their terrible Leagues Cup showing with two straight embarrassing losses, there’s a potential for a terrible collapse over the rest of the year – Jesus Ferreira and FC Dallas will relish the opportunity to set it in motion.

This has turned into a bitter rivalry for both teams over the past two seasons, and there’s a potential for this match to have knock-on effects over the rest of this season. FC Dallas wants to remind everyone that they are the team we saw go toe to toe against Messi and Miami, and Austin just needs something to go right for them. 

Window Three - 8:30pm

Window Winner (By Default): Houston Dynamo FC at Real Salt Lake

What a week for the Houston Dynamo! They blow out Portland last Saturday and they took a dramatic win over Real Salt Lake to qualify for the US Open Cup final on Wednesday. Both participants in that mid-week match in the oppressive heat of Shell Energy Stadium that went into added extra time will meet again this weekend, this time in Utah. I imagine that both are very fatigued, so I can’t imagine we’ll see a virtuoso performance from either side, but that game also got fairly chippy, and as a former summer camp counselor, I know that tired, hot, and spiteful can be a volatile combination. 

Window Four - 9:30pm

Artisan’s Choice: Vancouver Whitecaps FC at Portland Timbers FC

It began and ended with the same thing: A humiliating loss to the Houston Dynamo. The long arc of Oregonian history that came to an end with a 5-0 loss in the Shell last Saturday had its seeds paradoxically planted on the artificial turf of Providence Park on November 5th, 2017. The Timbers, first in the West, with league MVP Diego Valeri, saw both the match and Western Conference semifinal round which contained it slip away as Mauro Manotas fired from well outside of the box, saw his shot skip over the hands of Jeff Attinella, and scored. He ran to the corner flag in front of the Timbers Army and put his hands to his ears, well aware that he’d sent the Dynamo on to the next round. Caleb Porter was fired, Giovanni Savarese would be brought aboard, and he’d send the Timbers on a fantastically entertaining and broadly successful journey over the following seasons. The Savarese era brought about Two Western Conference championships, the first MLS Cup Final ever hosted in Portland, and, god-willing, the only MLS is Back Tournament trophy ever to be awarded. Savarese’s Timbers made their bones off of sneaking into the playoffs and having miraculous runs to the final, and it seems like they’ve run out of them over the last two seasons. Too much became too much last weekend after the Dynamo racked up five goals on Portland in just over an hour.

This weekend, we’ll see a talented, but inconsistent Timbers side attempt to get back on something of a track. They’re only five points beneath the playoff line as it stands, and they face a fellow Cascadian team in Vancouver dealing with a similar crisis of consistency. I think all three of them are dealing with that this year. Vancouver’s struggled to win on the road this season, so if the Timbers are going to get their new interim coach, Miles Joseph, a win to begin his tenure, they stand a good chance of doing so here. 

Window Five - 3:30pm on Sunday

Window Winner (By Default): Seattle Sounders FC at Minnesota United FC

For Free, on FOX, we have the Seattle Sounders, a group whose bruised pride was only further bruised with another home loss last Saturday, traveling to Minnesota to play a Loons team feeling absolutely great about themselves after shutting out New York City on the road. I was a little worried about Minnesota’s psyche after their dream run to the Leagues Cup quarterfinals was ended so violently in Nashville, but they look to be getting right back on track! It looks like Bongokuhle Hlongwane, who left the NYCFC match with a knee injury, won’t need surgery for his injury and will be out there on Sunday, which is significant, especially given Teemu Pukki’s lack of influence thus far in black and blue. I consider Seattle to be basically listless until further notice, I have no idea what’s going on there. It was almost sad watching them against Atlanta, it was a little like when a college basketball powerhouse limps into the NCAA Tournament as a low seed, where you recognize the jerseys and some of the players, but the gravitas they used to carry is gone.

As a graduate of one of those college basketball powerhouses, this game has me thinking back to my time in the marching band watching our woe-begotten football team (I was a late-Weis, early-Beaty veteran). We’d frequently have matchups in which our game in which our Beloved Jayhawks, winless save for the FCS buy-game, would welcome an undefeated, #4 ranked Oklahoma or Texas or Baylor team into our stadium. We’d have this phrase — We could have a “Trap Game” — to which we clung in order to have some semblance of faith in our chances that weekend. “Trap Game” implies basically that the other team would be so much better than ours that they’d forget to care about playing our game at all and we’d sneak out an upset. This feels like it’d have to be a “Trap Game” if it will be an interesting game at all.

Who’s Off This Weekend:

The Rapids! Oh, thank goodness that you guys get a weekend off. I sympathize with you and this awful season through which you’re suffering. Do what you guys do! Bike out to the mountains, kayak down a river, see somebody at Red Rocks, spark up a DuBois, or ideally all of those within the span of a few hours. Everybody else, enjoy the soccer!

Eep Eep

Dundundundundun / dundundundundun

Dundundundundun / dundundundundun

Eep eep

Dundundundundun / dundundundundun

Dundundundundun / dundundundundun

AAAAAAARE YOOOOU READYYYYYYYY

*energetic, painful-sounding scat-singing*

ARE YOU READY FOR THE PLAYOFF CHASE? ARE YOU READY FOR TEN OR SO MATCHES OF ALL-OUT HIGH INTENSITY PROFESSIONAL SOCCER? WE’RE FUCKING BACK TO NORMALITY AND IT HAS ME HALFWAY BENT OVER AND LIKE GYRATING AND SHOUTING INTO A MICROPHONE LIKE DAT-DAT OOH DAT AHH AH D’UNH D’OOH AH AH!

The Leagues Cup was great. It was an interesting and enriching experience, or at least it was up until my team was knocked out, at which point I saw behind the curtain and realized it to be a cynical, pretend, cash-grab tournament built to drive Apple TV subscriptions and ticket sales. That nightmare is over now: Miami and Nashville will play for a trophy on Saturday, and on Sunday, we get back to our regular grind. 

As I stated last month, there was a fun sense of novelty surrounding the 2023 Leagues Cup tournament. Along with the obvious new addition in Florida, we’ve also been able to learn and adapt in real time to so many brand new concepts. We learned about the wait of shame for those who underperform in the group stage, we got to experience the pitfalls and joys of tiebreakers that come from three-team groups, and we tasted truly unique varietals of sour grapes that we’ve rarely if ever had the opportunity to experience in such quick succession. Some novelties remain: Will a Leagues Cup hangover affect those who make deep runs as heavily as the CCL hangover does? Where does a Leagues Cup trophy rank in the hierarchy of possible trophies? Have the Union earned a place up to turn the holy trinity of snakebitten MLS teams (New England, The Red Bulls, and Dallas) into a tetrad? Is there some irony to the Union being snakebitten given that their mascot is a bipedal snake? 

Finally, what does this final stretch of the season look like? MLS is now presenting us a post-Leagues Cup condensed final sprint to the finish line. The jostling that so defines the regular season will only intensify into something like a churning or a quaking. Teams currently considered safe will fall to pieces, teams currently grasping for straws will reach said straws, contenders will be cemented, both in the sense that some will be locked into a contending position and the sense that others will have the equivalent of the unique footwear fashioned by mobsters applied to their shoes and find themselves awash at the bottom of a river. I’ve never seen something like this in MLS, where so much is on the line in such a condensed time period, so I really don’t know what to expect to see — other than the Rapids missing the playoffs — but I’m very excited to see it come to fruition.

Off we go!

Note: Out of Necessity, I’m trying to coin “The Sprint” as the phrase I’ll use to describe the stretch of the season after the Leagues Cup but prior to the playoffs.

Window One (6:30pm):

Game of the Weekend: FC Cincinnati at Columbus Crew

We kick off our return to the regular season with the best team in the league over the first two-thirds of the season meeting what I consider the most narratively interesting team over the first two-thirds of the season in a heated rivalry matchup at Lower.com Field. The Hell is Real was unique for a bit, in that it had the heat and venom and Being Pissed Off of many other MLS rivalries despite the fact that the two teams had not met while both stood in playoff qualification positions before this year. Before 2023, the most significant Hell is Real was still probably the original match from the 2017 US Open Cup, when Djiby Fall and the still-USL FC Cincinnati team upset Gregg Berhalter’s Crew. Incongruence and mediocrity can render a rivalry quickly dormant. Just look at what’s happened to the Atlantic Cup, once the pre-eminent showdown of the Eastern Conference, now not even the Window Winner for the 6:30pm slot this weekend. The Ohioans were able to keep the flame of being pissed off at one another alive despite this.

Both teams are entering on equal amounts of rest, having lost out of the Leagues Cup Round of 32, and both bring in new blood in the attack. Cincinnati’s striker Aaron Boupendza scored in his first MLS match on July 15th against Nashville, who has already helped Brandon Vazquez awaken from what had been an under-performing campaign in 2023. Vazquez totaled five goals over Cincinnati’s three Leagues Cup matches, one more than he’d scored in MLS so far in 2023. This new attacking outburst, combined with the near-MVP form of Luciano Acosta and one of the league’s best defenses (second at the moment to Nashville for fewest goals allowed in 2023), Cincinnati looks set to cruise to their first Supporter’s Shield.

The Crew present another novelty of the Leagues Cup — A team that has changed significantly since the middle of July. Lucas Zelarayan, their maestro, the hero of the 2020 MLS Cup, the Crew’s centerpiece Argentine number 10 for the 2020s following the lineage set by Guillermo Barros Schelotto in the 2000s and Federico Higuain in the 2010s, is gone, his contract bought by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Fateh. In his stead, they’ve added a few new players: They signed USMNT wingback Julian Gressel from Vancouver, who’s been one of the league’s best crossers of the ball since his early days with Atlanta. They signed French center-back Rudy Camacho from Montreal, reunited with coach Wilfried Nancy after anchoring the defensive backline for Montreal’s near-Shield winning effort in 2022.

Immediately after the sale of Zelarayan, they made perhaps the most significant signing, bringing in Uruguyan midfielder Diego Rossi from Turkey’s Fenerbahce. Rossi had a phenomenal tenure with LAFC — He was a part of the 2019 Shield winners, made All-Star teams in 2019 and 2021, and made the Best XI team and won the Golden Boot in 2020. Rossi was a quietly phenomenal player during his time in LA, overshadowed in the spotlight by the magnificence of Carlos Vela, so to see him returning to the league on such an exciting team I think is reason enough to watch this one.

This was a summer defined by significant signings — The glitz and ballyhoo of Miami’s near-total midfield overhaul in July is the most obvious, but a number of good teams made moves for the sake of gaining ground during The Sprint: Salt Lake signed Chicho Arango, Nashville signed Daniel Surridge, Vancouver signed Richie Laryea and Sam Adekugbe. I don’t know that any good team did as much to get better as the Crew did, and this new-look team has its first test at home against a bitter rival that also happens to be the best team in the league. This will be an intense battle, there’s going to be a huge contingent of traveling fans from Cincinnati as always, the match is sold out, I will be attending (!!!), and the emotional stakes here that either team can take from a victory are huge: Cincinnati can, much as they did against Nashville before the break, re-establish themselves as this year’s juggernaut, and Columbus can finally punch above their weight and establish themselves among the conference’s contenders in the season’s final stretch.

I’m Interested In This:

Minnesota United FC at New York City FC

I was prepared to write about Minnesota as one of the teams feeling the best about the potential to improve their MLS standing post-Leagues Cup, but the bitter taste of the 5-0 domination they suffered in Nashville complicates that a little bit. They had been one of a group of Western teams struggling to hold on to a pre-established identity in 2023 along with Austin, Seattle, and the Galaxy (truthfully, something like half of the West can list themselves in this category to some extent), but they appeared to find themselves again during the Leagues Cup, with the connection between Emanuel Reynoso and Bongokuhle Hlongwane proving fruitful. The defensive identity off of which they sustained themselves early in the year faltered during the tournament, as they gave up thirteen goals over their last four matches of the tournament. I’ve considered New York City something of an enigma, one certain to make a big signing in the summer to help put themselves back on track, but they didn’t really do that (as much as I like Maxi Moralez) and the Neymar rumors never came to fruition. They’re in danger of slipping from “enigmatic” to “completely listless” in a manner of weeks; Minnesota might be able to give them a nudge in that direction. 

CF Montreal at Toronto FC

I suspect that I’m being a bit too nice by still considering New York City ‘enigmatic’ and ‘liable to slip into listlessness’ rather than already there, but I know what listlessness looks like this year, and it is Toronto FC. Toronto was simply flailing out there, and now they’ve shipped their most effective young piece across the country to Vancouver. This match against Montreal might be their final chance at feeling some semblance of pride in 2023, after this, I don’t know what they do. They remind me (and I apologize to my Canadian readers for dropping an American reference like this into your section) of my college days in the mid-2010s with the University of Kansas Marching Jayhawks. Our football team in those days would secure a losing season mathematically by the seventh or eighth game of the season (and would have spiritually secured it about a game and a half into the season) and leave us watching with vague hopes that something slightly interesting might happen – Baker Mayfield might make a lewd gesture at us, for example – completely auxiliary to the football actually happening. This is what we might watch Toronto for. Maybe spoil Montreal’s season to some extent on Sunday and call it a year.

Window Two (7:30pm) 

Window Winner: Orlando City SC at Chicago Fire FC

Both of these teams came into Leagues Cup strongly, both probably feel alright about their performances in the tournament, and both have current playoff positions to protect over The Sprint. These teams are defined by polar opposites – Chicago has Xherdan Shaqiri, the quintessential well-compensated late-prime European MLS midfielder while Orlando has Fecundo Torres, the quintessential well-compensated early-prime South American MLS midfielder. At striker, Orlando has a young player of the year candidate at Duncan McGuire while Chicago has one of the longest-tenured players in the league in Kei Kamara. In goal, Orlando has the proven international-caliber veteran in Pedro Gallese, while Chicago has the rising domestic talent in Chris Brady. Orlando turned from a disappointing to promising once they finally started scoring goals in late-June, while Chicago went from listless to promising by finally racking up some shutouts in late-June. These are two strong, complementary teams, with a shared exigence of retaining the positive momentum that carried them into the Leagues Cup break, and that should produce a fun match at Soldier Field on Sunday evening.

Window Three (8:30pm)

Window Winner: Austin FC at St. Louis CITY SC

We have two good teams here, both of whom have been stewing on disappointing Leagues Cup exits for three weeks. These two both left the tournament with zeroes in the points column, neither of them accruing so much as a point off of a shootout loss, and unlike Toronto or Colorado, that was something of a shock for both of them. I imagine they’ll both be raring to prove something in this match, both to themselves and to the rest of the league, which has not had to think much about either of them in the interim period. I expect both teams to come out with something of an emotional edge here. 

I think it’s a little more significant for Austin, who looked really good in June and July and I imagine still feels miffed about the way that their first meeting in Austin back in February went down. Any result here will have a toll on them – Win, and you’ve beaten the best in the West and positioned yourself to compete in a still very winnable conference. Draw, and you’ve taken a tough point on the road and shown a resilience that you’ve lacked. Lose, and oh fucking god here we go again. We’re fucking doomed, it’s fucking over, punt on the season, trading Diego Fagundez was the team basically signalling that they’ve known it all along.

St. Louis is just hard to pin down at this point, aren’t they? They’re obviously good. However, it’s not a good thing that I have to keep reminding myself that they’re obviously good. The 2023 St. Louis season actually reminds me quite a lot of the 2022 Austin season – unexpected, undefinable, with success found in spite of what the advanced metrics guys might say should happen – but with a key difference being the way they’ve been prone to laying eggs in big matches in a manner that Austin wasn’t during the 2022 regular season. Austin had those two huge wins over LAFC last year, and St. Louis has lacked statements like that since the end of the Spring – They had chances to do so against Nashville, LAFC, and even Club America, and did not, or at least did not make the statements they wanted to. They’ll be on center-stage at 8:30pm, playing the only game of the window, and they’ll have the chance to wash the memory of those Leagues Cup flops away from our minds and get us all firmly back on board with their expansion season of destiny.

Window Four (9:30pm)

Window Winner: San Jose Earthquakes at Vancouver Whitecaps FC

The schedule-makers could not have given us a better pairing for the return of After Dark MLS action. What two teams have provided late-night silliness like these two? We have, on one hand, the team whose supporters routinely grow more and more shirtless as a mass as the night rolls on, and on the other, the team that went into 19 rounds of penalties on the first night of the Leagues Cup. We have two eccentric spirits colliding: The Quakes team trying to rekindle the ‘Goonies Never Say Die’ era against the Vancouver Nightcaps, who are committed to entertainment once the sun sets, sometimes at their own expense, but this year primarily for their benefit. They both come in as playoff contenders, San Jose currently in 6th and Vancouver in 7th in the West.

Both have made some interesting additions – Vancouver’s added potentially the best right back in the league in Richie Laryea and bring back an international-quality left back in Sam Adekugbe. San Jose’s added American forward Matthew Hoppe, and though I’m not sure how he’ll fit in among a very good set of forwards, he might come on as a late sub and provide the sort of late-match goal scoring we expect from the Quakes and the late-match goal concession that we expect from the ‘Caps. 

Artisan’s Choice: Atlanta United FC at Seattle Sounders FC

Here, we have the third of three matches between teams who failed to qualify out of the Leagues Cup group stages, and I think this is the most perversely intriguing, as both teams seem to be in fascinating emotional states. Both teams are defined by a sort of paradox – By the numbers, they’ve been successful in 2023, but that success has been accompanied by an undercurrent of dissatisfaction from their fanbases. Both are above the playoff line as it stands, which would be an improvement over their 2022 finishes, but they both set such high standards for themselves in the late-2010s that mere playoff qualifications are inadequate to supporters. They both had moments of genuine impressiveness early in the year, like Seattle’s 3-0 domination of the then-Shield leading St. Louis and Atlanta’s 5-1 thrashing of Portland, but both fell into a sort of uninspiring swampiness in the summer. They’ve both been prone to dropping games against rivals – Seattle’s lost to Portland, Vancouver, and LAFC this year, Atlanta’s suffered losses to Orlando, Miami, Nashville, Charlotte, and the Red Bulls if we still consider that last one a rivalry – and their shared Leagues Cup ineptitude felt microcosmic. Atlanta’s defense was completely picked apart by Leo Messi and Miami, which we could’ve expected, but their vaunted attack was gormless when they needed to come through the most. Seattle was completely overwhelmed by Salt Lake and then dropped an early lead against Monterrey at home. 

When I think of both of these teams, I see that moment in Mortal Kombat matches that comes between the depletion of the losing fighter’s lifebar and the enactment of the fatality, when the loser stands still and rolls their head around in a daze, waiting for the final blow to finally come for them. I hope that we see these two show some sign of life here, some sort of the intensity and hot-bloodedness they’ve both lacked to this point in 2023, let those humiliations in the Leagues Cup drive you to get better, or at least let them get you mad enough to lash out in an entertaining fashion.

Who’s Off This Weekend?

A solid chunk out of everybody’s off this weekend. If you played in the Leagues Cup semifinals or were scheduled to play against a team that played in the Leagues Cup semifinals, you’re off this weekend. If you’re [INSERT WINNER OF THE LEAGUES CUP FINAL ON SATURDAY NIGHT], enjoy your victory! Everybody else, enjoy the Sunday soccer!

This is a continuation of the idea from yesterday’s post. Nine MLS teams failed to qualify for the knockout round of the Leagues Cup. They now have time off that they didn’t want to have off. What follows is how I think they should interpret this time off, presented as the final word of this sentence:

These Empty Weeks Are Filled With...

Ego-Death:

Atlanta United FC –

Atlanta came into the Leagues Cup in bizarre circumstances. For the Galaxy, this was it, this was genuinely their one chance to do something of substance in 2023. Atlanta is still in the playoff picture in the East, entering the Leagues Cup break in 7^th with the caveat that it was hard to believe in them as a contender for the MLS Cup due to their defensive ineptitude. I can't say that my interpretation of Atlanta's defensive prowess has gotten much worse due to their performance against Inter Miami and Lionel Messi – He's scored with ease against much better defenses in much better leagues – but it certainly didn't help their case. The more damning statistic was the one goal scored between their two matches. They couldn't do the one thing they do well against a Miami team that could be forgiven for not bothering to defend and a Cruz Azul team that entered the Leagues Cup break with the worst Goal Differential in Liga MX. So what are they, now? In a tournament that has featured all manner of 4-3 and 3-2 scorelines, I thought an Atlanta team whose only real option seems to be outscoring opponents was a feasible contender, but this was not the case. Who is this version of the Five Stripes, then?

You have three weeks to figure this out. The fans are currently entering what I call the Fire Zone, where incredible success at the franchise’s start makes a decline to mediocrity sting even worse. It’s hard to go from expecting MLS Cups and Champions League runs to accepting playoff appearances as successes, but this is what they must re-orient themselves to accept during the break.

Austin FC –

The 2023 Austin FC season reminds me of the 2021 Vancouver Whitecaps season, in that they make me wish there were more people around me in my general life who cared about MLS outside of just their home team to share revelry in the literary perfection of a team's season. The diptych of Austin's charmed 2022 season, one defined by gorgeous soccer and underlined by a brash supporter-base, coach, and owner waging a season-long session of gripes against the season-preview articles that ran on the league website in March, culminating in effigies of Extratime Radio hosts set aflame, being followed in 2023 by perhaps the three worst and loudest extra-league losses any MLS team has suffered, first to Haiti's Violette in the Dominican Republic and Liga MX doormats Mazatlan and Juarez at home, all while nobody cares to notice their high-effort, genuinely interesting and in-a-sense inspiring regular season turnaround, reflects a tale of pride coming before the fall so unreasonably cut and dry that it ought to be acted out by Goofus and Gallant.

In a strange sense, I'm probably most optimistic about how Austin can take this break. Austin is in the midst of one of the tropes of fiction with which I have found myself most enthralled in the past few years, the Imbruglianic nude-and-sobbing-on-the-bathroom floor moment of recognition that the peeling wallpaper of pretense and gravitas can no longer hold, that the lying to oneself must cease, that the cards have been dealt and it is time to accept one's lot and place for the moment – Gloucester at the bottom of the cliff, Don Gately flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, Woody the Cowboy yelling at Buzz Lightyear in the Pizza Planet parking lot – Austin FC is a Major League Soccer team. They must first accept this. They must first win something within MLS, they must commit themselves first, foremost, and only about winning in Major League Soccer before they can try to ascend it once again. The West is vulnerable, Driussi is healthy, Zardes is producing, and I suppose they've now lost Diego Fagundez, which is not beneficial for this cause, but they now at least have only the one and can focus only on it.

Re-Centering:

San Jose Earthquakes –

The Quakes, scoring no goals in losses to Portland and Tigres, performed about as disapppointingly as Atlanta and Austin did, but they did so much more quietly and less distressingly. The mindset I had around the Quakes was actually similar to that of Atlanta, in that they'd shown a propensity to outscore opponents when necessary in MLS this year, which I thought could put them in a good place for this tournament. It would not have shocked me if they'd not only made it out of the group, but made a deep run in the tournament, and it would not have shocked me if they'd fizzled out like they did. They're in a boat very similar to Austin's in the Western standings, one could even say identical on points, so these weeks will give them the opportunity to rest and ready themselves for a still possible run for the top of the West.

St. Louis CITY SC –

I decided in May to stop reading too deeply into anything surrounding St. Louis. Every time that I think the carriage has turned back into a pumpkin, they'll look like the best team in the West, and every time that I think they're a serious contender, they'll lose and lose badly. This is why they're here in re-centering and not in one of the more panicked categories – In their short history, I have only ever been wrong about St. Louis. They're still atop the West, they're going to be a playoff team, they're more than a gimmick, et cetera, and any statement that they should be emotionally dislodged at the moment will surely prove hyperbolic once they cruise to the top seed in the West, win their first series, then lose to a more experienced team in the second round to proud applause from the faithful at CITYPARK.

This should be good news to St. Louis fans, as for any other upstart team, losing the way they did at home to Club America could absolutely shatter a group's psyche. There were some true out-classings that took place in the Leagues Cup group stages: NYCFC 5-0 over Toronto, RSL 3-0 over Seattle, Monterrey 3-0 over RSL, and Miami 4-0 over Atlanta as standouts in this department, but I don't think anyone else was so thoroughly outclassed by an opponent the way that St. Louis was. There was a bit early on in that match, as Club America easily passed their way around and through CITY's pressure to a chorus of Oles from fans of Las Aguilas, in which of the commentators said “They're not used to their fans being outnumbered here” and I really think that had an effect on them. For the first time, everything that had just worked for St. Louis stopped against Club America, the magic and joy that's defined their season was hit head-first by an uncaring external presence, it reminded me most in MLS terms of Salt Lake losing at home to Monterrey in the second leg of the 2012 Concacaf Champions League final and most in extra-MLS terms of this clip from Peep Show. We don't know yet, and I tend to be wrong about them, but this is the sort of humiliating loss that can destroy a team's mystique. Other teams have survived them, and they probably will as well, but that was bad.

They were, I believe, the first MLS team eliminated from the competition (though Montreal played their last match two days before St. Louis did, they had to wait for DC and Pumas to decide their fate a day later on the 29^th), and they also don't get the benefit of playing a tired team on their first match back, as they host fellow non-qualifiers Austin FC on August 20^th. I have a feeling that this will be a significant one, as both teams fell to Earth in Leagues Cup, but I'll touch on that in a few weeks.

Seattle Sounders FC –

What an enigma this team has become. The Sounders, the first MLS team to have any sort of Leagues Cup run, the team that has beaten the most Liga MX teams of anyone in MLS – Tigres UANL, Santos Laguna, Club Leon, and Pumas UNAM – in the past three years, flamed out of the 2023 Leagues Cup in an almost depressing fashion. West 2 might have had the most historical intrigue of any group. Monterrey and Real Salt Lake met again in the same place where it all went down in 2012, for one, then Seattle and Monterrey had their past intersections in CCL in the early 2010s as well. Seattle and Real Salt Lake's intersection here had layers and layers of intrigue. RSL served, alongside the Bruce Arena Galaxy teams, as the cruel truth that crushed the plucky upstart Sounders in so many playoffs around the turn of the 2010s, and they took down the Sounders in an infamously suffocating fashion during the 2021 playoffs. There are few thorns in the Sounders' side quite like RSL, and they presented perhaps the only foil for Seattle in terms of a Leagues Cup-specific historical sense.

This is a statement that I'm sure would be considered a Hot Take if anyone cared enough to dispute it, but I will bravely make it anyway: Of its pre-historic era, meaning 2019-2022, the Leagues Cup is most haunted by Real Salt Lake and the Seattle Sounders. Other MLS teams had their stamps – The Galaxy were the first to win a round, Sporting KC was the first to outwardly shirk the competition entirely – but nobody made a more forceful stance on the pre-2023 Leagues Cup than Salt Lake and Seattle did. They both took the pre-2023 Leagues Cup seriously in different senses – Seattle took the 2021 Leagues Cup seriously by competing treating it earnestly as a competition worth winning, and they nearly did so, and RSL took the 2019 Leagues Cup run seriously by treating it as a cynical cash grab, chasing after a cat and having their head coach get fired for verbally abusing a referee. They both built this tournament, in a sense, Seattle lent it competitive credibility and RSL lent it the extra-athletic weirdness that I feel defines authenticity in American soccer just as much. For RSL to defeat Seattle the way that they did, I feel it put a stamp on the tenor of the whole tournament: This will be more entertaining than serious and more eccentric than efficient.

I said last month that Seattle struck me as depressed more than anything, having no more worlds left to conquer as an MLS team, so I think they have to take these weeks to just figure out some reason to get back in gear for the remainder of the 2023 season. I keep saying that the West is open, the West is vulnerable, and part of the reason why I keep saying that is that the Sounders are vulnerable. The Sounders (and the Timbers) have been the Western Conference over the last deacde, and when your vanguards are limping, your whole conference is limping by proxy.

They've been in the Top 4 since the beginning of the season, and yet, they've rarely been able to find the dominating gear that I think we all expect them to find around now. With Cristian Roldan out again with his unfortunate recurring concussion issues, I don't know how they find it. They tend to do so, they've almost always done so in my lifetime, but they have to find that consistency that's best defined them under Brian Schmetzer again. Maybe these free weeks provide them the space to take a condensed, spiritual gap year in which they find themselves again. Maybe they go backpacking around the forests of Northeast Washington rather than the forests of Southeast Asia.