Cold, Bitter, and Impatient [3.1.2025 vs San Jose]
Entry 1 in the 2025 Sporting Sauce Diaries
"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.