I’ll admit it. I was wrong.

When Matt Wells said the Colorado Rapids would endeavor to ‘dominate their opponents’ in a series of press conference appearances, I was beyond skeptical. And could you blame me? Since I started following this team, I’ve heard loads of promises from every Johnny-Come-Lately manager the Colorado Rapids have employed. I remember being abandoned by Oscar Pareja just before the 2014 season. I remember Pablo Mastroeni refusing to use advanced metrics in his game-planning by saying ‘Stats will lose to the human spirit every day of the week,’1 and his ‘defend to the death, let luck take care of the rest’ approach. I remember Anthony Hudson being the chosen coach to deliver Colorado to the promised land of ‘The Rapids Way.’ Which turned out to be a wrong turn.

Of course there was Robin Fraser’s relatively mild-mannered, pragmatic tactical contribution: a very balanced approach that pressed some, defended some, counter-attacked in transition some, and was perfectly adequate for finishing mid-table and getting dog-walked in the first round of the playoffs each year. And lastly, there was the Chris Armas way: an attacking football that could sometimes be fun, but was prone to defensive errors, set piece inadequacy, and a general inability to find their footing after Djordje Mihailovic left.

Matt Wells said his Rapids were going to dominate opponents, which sounded like the boast of a villainous and cartoonish foil to James Bond before threatening to blot out the sun unless he was delivered the contents of Ft. Knox. And yet, here’s the Rapids possession statistics to date:

I did the math. That’s 56.9 % possession through 11 games. That’s insane. That’s the fifth-highest in MLS this year. Since 2015, Colorado has only had a 50% or greater possession season once, in the cursed Covid-shortened 2020 season.

Now, that said, possession doesn’t win games. It would not be a great leap forward for the ‘Pids if Matt Wells were just a younger, more articulate version of Peter Vermes, minus the drill sergeant crew cut. For as much as Vermes experienced success in MLS, he demonstrated that controlling possession match after match does not equal success. The Wells Way is not, however, simply possession. It is also a particular emphasis on pressing and counter-pressing. It is playing out of the back and never launching a goal kick that results in a midfield 50-50 duel. And it is picking out quality opportunities to strike.

It’d be exhausting for me and boring for you if I went all X’s and O’s for 10,000 words on ‘The Wells Way’. And CU-Boulder won’t be handing me a PhD if I went full-dissertation mode anyhow. So here’s three gifs that I think show some interesting aspects of ‘The Wells Way’™. Plus a bonus link to a video I found of him when he was goofy young academy coach. You’re welcome.

Rafa Navarro, Fulcrum False 9

Here’s Rob Holding slicing a ball on the ground through the defense to Rafa Navarro vs. LAFC on April 22, a game that ended 0-0 but was the first non-defeat of the Rapids at BMO Stadium ever.

Navarro is playing very, very deep for a center forward. Sometimes, like in the Kei Kamara and Jack McBean era, the Rapids would loft a long aerial up to the striker just past the center line for him to knock down. But those were more ‘direct’ and low risk attempts to get up field with strikers that were either good in the air, or a chance for that big forward to knock down the ball into the path of a speedy dribbler so they could go on the break and take a shot. That’s not what’s happening here.

Navarro is receiving on the ground, back to goal, deep, and then turning, running, and passing. Those tactics are normally reserved for Attacking Midfielders, but Rafa’s good enough on the dribble and in the pass that he can be that guy. I hate to go back to a cute tactical reference from Ted Lasso, but it’s kind of perfect: Wells isn’t going to Rafa, he’s going through Rafa. Just as Jamie Tartt once suggested – ‘don’t go to meh, go fhru meh.’

This is not an isolated incident. Here’s the last two passing/average position maps for the Rapids.

That’s Rafa (‘CF’) playing as deep as midfielder Paxton Aaronson (‘RCM’) and left back Miguel Navarro against Vancouver in that top map, and in the bottom map, playing !deeper! than Wayne Fredrick (‘LCM’) against LAFC. Rafa’s playing like a fourth midfielder, or a false nine, because Matt Wells has identified that he’s got the skill set to do it and it works. This is a clever way to get fast wingers with good noses for goal, like Darren Yapi and Georgi Minoungou and Dante Sealy,2 to act as if they were strikers, so Rafa can serve less as a target and more as a facilitator. This also allows Wells’ 4-3-3 formation to play like a 4-4-2 or a 4-5-1 in buildup in ways that allow for midfield numerical superiority. Which is good if you want to … maintain possession.

It’s creative and clever. And so far it’s working – Rafa’s 10 Goals + Assists is the best in MLS.3

Rob Holding the High Line

Am I JUST SO DAMN excited to use our podcasts’ name as a pun for a thing that actually happened last week? ABSOLUTELY.

That’s Rob Holding … holding a high line along with Lucas Herrington and Kosi Thompson, then stepping into the lane to intercept the ball before giving it to Rafa, who passed to Dante Sealy for a great one-v-one and shot. But notice that Holding follows the play and stays in the attack. Bruv is also WAVING LIKE A MADMAN like ‘Yo I want the rock!’ This is Holding, living every centerback’s dream of momentarily being a striker.

Is this ‘The Wells Way’? Well, it’s not that atypical for a player to ‘follow the attack’ after picking off the pass. But the high line and step is a bit atypical and aggressive - under another coach, the centerbacks might be deeper and would generally be discouraged from jumping the lane, since there’s a bit of risk if Holding misses and an LAFC player like Dennis Bouanga or Son Heung-Min gets loose all alone. So the aggression and the fearlessness feels Wellsian to me.

Sometimes dominating possession is about the shots you DON’T take

Here’s a lovely moment from last week’s game against Inter Miami.

Hamzat Ojediran receives the ball deep from Kosi Thompson. Rather than do the safe thing and recycle back to GK Zack Steffen, Hamzat dribbles out of the press and past Lionel Messi and Rodrigo de Paul, which I imagine is a feeling slightly better than having sex with a supermodel.

He pings a dope slicing ball up the gut to … Rafa Navarro, who plays it wide to Kosi Thompson.

Thompson drives forward, pulls up, plays a 1-2 with Wayne Frederick, then recycles it all the way back to Rob Holding and they start over again.

Rather than push forward and take an ill-conceived shot, Colorado reboots from scratch. That’s how Colorado frustrated Miami for possession all day, ultimately winning that battle 62-38.

I’ll also note that this 1-2 comboing tight down the touch line is another feature of the Matt Wells system. In central midfield, it’s line breaking vertical passes. On the wings, it’s two and three-man overloads that allow for a player to play out of pressure.

Of course I should mention that Colorado didn’t win any of these last three games. There was a 3-1 loss to Vancouver in which they had 55% possession. There was a 0-0 draw against LAFC with 73% possession. And the 3-2 loss to Miami. That said, these are literally the three best teams in MLS, and Colorado matched up well against all of them. They probably left a point on the table against Miami, but I’ll take 1 point from this stretch.

We’re still learning about Matt Wells. But we’re eleven games in, and I like what I see.

(Oh yeah. And, as promised, here’s a 20-something Wells talking in a video about midfield overloads and the importance of winning possession. It’s tactically interesting, and also he’s scruffy and young and adorable.)

It was the height of irony that not 24 hours after I started posting about my successful bets on MLS games, MLS announced that they were banning two players, Yaw Yeboah and Derrick Jones, for life, for betting on MLS games.

It’s neither the first time I’ve bet on MLS games, nor the first time I’ve clucked my tongue about betting in MLS games.

So we have to talk a little about betting on MLS . This might be a little high minded and philosophical, but hey, I’m nothing if on brand in that respect. So in this article I’m going to ask:

• Whether betting on sports is smart, or moral – or dumb, and immoral.

• Whether the league should be advertising betting at all, or whether that is either a conflict of interest or morally dubious when simultaneously marketing to families and children.

• Whether a writer or journalist can write objectively about sports AND bet on the same teams they write about.

And once we’ve explored those issues, I’ll share my own approach to betting on soccer. These are some of the principles I establish in order to bet responsibly on soccer. I don’t promise that this will work for you.

Only an idiot, or a scumbag, bets on soccer

This article was inspired by a recent ‘Fresh Air’ podcast I listened to, with host Tonya Mosley. Mosley interviewed McKay Coppins, a writer for The Atlantic, the author of a recent piece entitled ‘My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler,’ which I didn’t read because it’s behind a paywall and I already pay enough for reading and viewing material, thankyouverymuch. But Coppins outlines several big emerging ideas. 1) Because of the Supreme Court legalizing it, betting on sports has exploded since 2018 into a $140 billion industry. 2) According to Nate Silver, 99% of all bettors lose money. 3) The Atlantic gave him $10,000 to bet on sports. After a year, he had lost about $9,800.

That quote I started this article with, from the Talmud,1 notes that a dice player or a pigeon racer – two ancient forms of gambling – disqualify someone from serving as a witness or a judge in a legal case. The Talmud goes on to explain how and why: if a person is a ‘professional’ gambler, they are disqualified. A person with a day job, who gambles for fun on the side, though, is still ok. The explanation is that a gambler effectively isn’t a reliable person - because they engage in something called an asmachta - their whole business is about reliance on something is not not necessarily so. And what they mean by that is: a gambler thinks they know something that nobody else does - they see that the math is against them, that the house has an advantage. And yet they say to themselves ‘I have a system; I know better than the house. Even though the math says the house will win 54% of the time,2 I can outsmart the house.’ And the Talmud’s response is ‘that shows questionable judgement. And we can’t have someone like that judging cases.’

But morally speaking, gambling isn’t understood here as a moral vice on par with stealing or assault - it’s not a crime, but it is a bit unsavory. It’s more in the same category as drinking, smoking, or doing drugs. My moral tradition holds it out that, in moderation, all of these things are ok.

So that’s the background for the question of ‘is this smart, moral, dumb, or immoral?’

When gambling, you really have to say to yourself, ‘I have this money, and I am ok losing it.’ The first time I engaged in this online betting was two years ago. There was a hat for sale at Goorin Brothers. I have a kippah on at all times, and no hair. So I’m into hats. And that hat was $180, which is a lot for a hat. Rather than buy the hat outright, I put $75 into a betting app and said ‘if I turn this into $180, I’ll buy the hat.’ I called it ‘Hat Money.’ In about 4 months, I was at $0. I threw in another $50. About 2 months later, I was broke again. A couple months later, I pulled two funerals in two weeks, and rewarded myself with … the hat. Delayed gratification, I guess.

It was dumb, but not immoral. If my family was brought to wrack and ruin; if the bookie I bet with broke my kneecaps or threatened my kids; if I gambled away the rent or a car payment, well THEN it becomes immoral. As long as you’re gambling only small amounts, and you set limits, and it’s fun, I’d argue it’s still moral - but definitely, based on the math, still pretty dumb.

A big part of what is driving the betting on sports is both advertising, and the placement of the advertising IN the very games you are watching. Soccer fans have been seeing kits and hoardings in European soccer with ‘Bet365’, ‘PaddyPower’, ‘Hollywood Bets’, ‘Leo Vegas’, ‘888’, and ‘Caesars’ for years. And for about the last four years, as an American sports fan, we’ve seen ‘Bet MGM’ and ‘Draft Kings’ and ‘FanDuel’ dominating our TV broadcasts.3

This head injury timeout is sponsored by … Draft Kings!

Is it wrong for the leagues to be profiting from betting? Well, it certainly is dangerous. When the people that make the rules for the teams, and control the way players are employed and the schedule, and the people that hire the referees also get money from people who have a given financial incentive for certain outcomes, it can become uncomfortable. What if a league official has insider information about a player injury an hour or two before a game? Might the league, under pressure from a gambling house, assign or hire referees with certain tendencies for cards and penalties?

Let’s say that those conspiratorial fears are overblown. Still, how can a league in which betting becomes widespread maintain integrity?

Personally, I’ve of the mind that the most dangerous element in modern online betting isn’t the advertising or sponsorships of teams or leagues - it’s in-game prop bets.

Max Alves and Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah were all guilty of doing something that had little impact on the game, but made a huge difference to gamblers: they drew yellow cards. That’s pretty easy to do in soccer. Give a guy a shove, or call the referee a fucking prick and complain vigorously about a call he made, and you can guarantee yourself a yellow. In Max’ case, that one act allegedly earned him $15,000. Most of us have to work for about 3 months to pull that kind of cash. Max did it in about 3 seconds. Those kind of bets need to be made illegal.

Can MLS be a family sport while flashing ‘Draft Kings’ ads every 30 seconds from the electronic signboards? Maybe. We love sports because sports are fun and dramatic and human. If sports were purely a mechanism for speculating on outcomes for personal enrichment, well then it’d be the stock market. There’s a reason families don’t gather around a TV and watch the commodities crawl on Bloomberg or buy tickets to the latest Silicon Valley IPO: they aren’t fun, or interesting, or human. But there is a danger: horseracing in America is overwhelming enjoyed regularly by gamblers and gamblers only. Horseracing is a sport where almost the entire audience has bet a little, or a lot, on the outcome, and historically, it’s been a very male, very seedy audience. I will admit that for those very reasons, I’ve never been to a horse race. I think any sport has the potential of heading down that path.

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If Matt Pollard calls and tells me he saw Paxton Aaronson drunk at a bar the night before a game, how much should I bet against the Rapids?

Should a writer/pundit/podcaster like me be placing bets on MLS? Is that a conflict of interest? Well, Matt and I, just like MLS teams, already profit from sports betting. I checked our last HTHL podcast, and the lead ad was from … a betting site called thescore.bet. Matt and I, obviously, don’t pick our advertisers. Bleav, our podcast host, does. But they send us a payment every 3 months, and clearly a portion of that ad revenue comes from gambling.

I don’t think there’s a sports writer or TV broadcaster or commentator today that isn’t indirectly receiving money from gambling. And I’m not affective the games, nor do I have any insider information. I’m just a guy who pays a lot of attention to MLS Western Conference games, and that means I think I have a little bit of a sense of how those games might go. So this year, I decided to try and bet MLS again.

And this year, I’m doing Hat Money again. I’m calling it ‘Kit Money’ - because I saw the new NY Cosmos4 second kit and I WANTED IT SO BAD.

But it’s $95, and I need yet another kit hanging in my closet like a hole in the head. So I put $25 onto a betting app and I’m trying to EARN that $95.5 So far, it’s going pretty good.

Week 1 I won $16.67 by picking San Diego over St. Louis.

Week 2 I won $16.74; I won win SD over SKC and lost $5 betting on an Austin-Charlotte draw.

Week 3 I won all of $3.83 on LAFC over Dallas.

And Week 4 I won on $20.90 collectively on five different bets.

Altogether, I’ve won $58.14 so far. I am beating the odds so far, and hopefully I can do it a little longer in order to get up to $95 and buy that kit.

And I think, because I don’t have insider info, and because I don’t have an ability to affect the games, it is ok for me to bet on Colorado Rapids games, or for any other journalist, to bet on a team they follow.

This might raise some eyebrows. But - all of us podcast pundits do predictions on our shows. Matt asks me every week whether I think the Rapids will win or lose. This past week, I said I though the Rapids would tie NYCFC on the road. And I really did think that - the Rapids are on a hot streak, but NYCFC is good too, but home field advantage, but also this years Rapids team looks good in tight spaces, which Yankee Stadium definitely is. So I bet $10 on a Rapids draw at +320; in the event of a draw, I would have made $22. The Rapids lost 3-1.

#KitMoney, and nothing more. How to not lose your shirt while betting on soccer.

My approach to betting, I’ve mentioned in fits and spurts throughout this article. First, I come with a small and reasonable amount of money to bet, and when I lose it, that’s it. And I also set an amount at which I am ‘out’ if I win it: this time it’s $95 for a first kit, and $95 for a second kit after I buy the first. Because the Riverhounds third kit this year is STRAIGHT FIRE.

A second betting principle I’ve learned, from my disastrous results the first time out two years ago is: no parlays. Parlays are a suckers bet.6

I figured that out after I had lost my money by doing the simple math. In a regular sports event like a basketball game, say you make a three-game parlay bet: Lakers over Suns, Bulls over Nets, Knicks over Celtics. Pretend all the teams are even. Your odds of winning that bet are 12.5%: that’s 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2; or 1 out of 8 odds. Those are terrible odds; and even if you bet a favorite at home and maybe the odds were 2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3, you’re still only at 28.7%.

But wait. In soccer, it’s much worse. Because there are THREE possible outcomes for each game: win, lose, and draw. So a three-game parlay in soccer where all the teams have equal odds? It’s 1/3 x 1/3 x 1/3, or 1/27 odds. That’s a 3.7% chance of winning. So unless a $10 pays out $270, it’s a bad bet. News flash: the parlay payout is never that good. Stay away from parlays.

Lastly, MLS soccer has a few quirks to exploit. Home field advantage in MLS is huge, so overweight the home team. Also, keep an eye on xG from week to week - a team that produces a high xG but maybe isn’t getting results and converting goals, the sports books tend to weight their wins and losses moreso than whether their xG let them down. Note that this can also be down to a ‘good team with a bad striker’, so use your judgement here. But, for example, in the early goings of the year, St Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Orlando, and LA have all wildly underperformed their xG.

Philadelphia are a mess and I wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole. But the others are giving indications that the sports books will put them as underdogs, when they might just be unlucky. SKC are the ‘bet against’ team in MLS right now: they have 4 pts but only 1.83 Expected Points, and a -3 Goal Differential on a GD-xGD of 2.71. That’s bad.

But this early in the season, xG is a little less instructive than it will be in 10 games. Right now, last years bad teams that didn’t make improvements are still bad. San Jose are flying high right now with Timo Werner. The big four of Seattle, LAFC, Vancouver, and San Diego are very good, and when they are at home, almost unbeatable, especially when facing a bottom-six team. LAFC, San Diego, and Seattle are undefeated at home. Vancouver are 2-1 at home, and their one loss came from Seattle. Those bets only yield a -150 or -300 (a bet of $150 gets you $100; a bet of $300 gets you $100), but I’d still take em.

When a stronger team plays a weaker team on the road, I lean towards betting a draw. Usually the odds are high. Most betting apps also allow a double option - ‘win or draw’ - but the odds aren’t as tasty.

…

I don’t think I’m that smart, or special. I think so far this season, I’ve been lucky. Odds are that, if I make very calculated bets, and keep an eye out specifically for lines that feel like they aren’t reflective of the true nature of the game, I’ll be ok. But once I’ve been successful for a little while, the key is to get out.

I used to cluck my tongue and look down on sports gambling as uncouth, dangerous, and seedy. I don’t anymore. Maybe that’s the success of a decade of advertisements. Maybe it was because I’ve bet a little on sports and the sky didn’t fall. Maybe it’s because MLS hasn’t (yet) had their version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Whatever it is, gambling on MLS is here to stay. The only question is the degree to which it is ensured that gambling on MLS does not interfere with the integrity of the game itself.

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The new 2026 swag is here! We’ve got a very useful, fits-in-you-pocket bottle opener/keychain, absolutely free for all our paid subscribers. And some free stickers, good for water bottles, snowboards, random neighborhood electrical poles, etc.1

PLUS you can order another HTHL scarf for just $8.

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This is part 2 of the WC preview. For part 1, click here.

It’s prediction season! All the pundits - and I really mean all of them - have opinions about who finishes where.

Backheeled did theirs: that’s Joe Lowery and Matt Doyle (friends of HTHL) and Ben Wright, Andrew Claussen and Brian McKay. Give ‘em a read. Here’s the chart of their Western Conference predictions.

And the MLSsoccer.com tv personalities did theirs too. They did the whole league as an aggregate compilation, but I included their specific prediction for the Rapids below, too.

That’s 20 pundits. Two pundits have the Rapids dead last in the WC. Three pundits have the Rapids in the playoffs. The other 15 soccer experts think this team will finish between 11th and 15th. Pretty grim! In fact, it was so infuriating, Matt Wells mentioned in the opening press conference that he showed the rankings to the players as motivation. Here’s Wells:

I actually showed something to the players this morning in the meeting. Something’s come out from, I think, various journalists, pundits, analysts in the MLS, their predictions of where we’re going to finish this season. So I showed the players that and said this is going to be a hell of a story, because we’re not going to finish there.

This is a classic coaching move. “EVERYBODY DOUBTS US.” I mean, sometimes coaches tell that story even when it’s literally only one pundit that hates on them and the rest of soccer illuminati pick their team to win the league. “THEY ALL HATE US WE’LL SHOW THEM!” Amidst the Rapids hate1 there are some other interesting takeaways. To wit:

• Everyone agrees on what I said in the Western Conference Preview, Pt 1; which is that the top 4 are definitely LAFC, San Diego, Vancouver, and Seattle. Also interesting that nobody thinks San Diego can repeat as the WC champions.

• Folks are really high on the LA Galaxy bouncing back from a terrible 2025 where they finished 14th; most pundits have them around 5th. That seems a little insane to me, and smacks of ‘name bias’, a term I just made up, where folks are just assuming that the Galaxy are good because they’re the Galaxy.

• The Backheeled guys are pretty high on San Jose, even though they unloaded Christian Espinoza, Cristian Arango, and Josef Martinez, because they got Timo Werner. Interesting.

• The punditocracy is not high on RSL, which I strongly disagree with.

• With regard to the Rapids being doubted, I mean, yeah. It’s a team with a spotty track record for well nigh a decade. And the specifics of ‘not in the playoffs but not terrible’ vs ‘not in the playoffs AND terrible’ are pretty irrelevant. So as much as the team brass is probably angry … I’m not. At all.

On to the last eight previews. Because before I can tell you who finishes where - we have to prove that I, you know, actually know what the fuck I’m talking about.2

Portland Timbers

Finish in 2025: 8th place, 44 points, 11-11-12 (WTL); Beat RSL in the Wild Card round, then in round 1 POR took San Diego to a Game 3, then shat the bed and lost 4-0 in Snapdragon3 Stadium.

Goals For in 2025: 41

Goals Against in 2025: 47

Key Additions: D Brandon Bye, M Cole Bassett, D Alex Bonetig

Key Subtractions: M David Ayala, GK Maxim Crépeau, M Cristhian Paredes, D Dario Zuparic

Got better? Or got worse?: About the same, but it’ll look a little different. ↔️

Portland had been a little clunky and weird in 2023 and 2024, but really made some changes in 2025 that seem to be moving in the right direction. Overall, with the notable and dramatic exception of Diego Chara, the team is pretty young. The teams leaders in minutes were 22-year-old mid David Ayala, 21-year-old CB Finn Surman, 24-year-old winger David Costa, 22-year-old defender Juan David Mosquera, and 23-year-old attacking mid Antony. They sold Ayala off to Miami, and brought in Rapids homegrown Cole Bassett, which should be a fairly like-for-like move.

I’m not sure what look coach Phil Neville is going to go with - they kind of did a little of everything in 2025. I think they’d look best as a fairly straightforward 4-3-3. Both Antony and Felipe Mora are dangerous enough, but one could be concerned that this team doesn’t pack a lot of firepower – their 41 goals for in 2025 was second-worst in the Western Conference. All that taken into account, I think Portland will be battling again for those final two spots in the playoffs again this year, but based on the Rapids and RSL’s moves offseason, I think that’ll be enough to push Portland down to 10th or 11th this season.

Minnesota United

Finish in 2025: 4th place, 16-10-8 (WTL) 58 points; Lost to SD in Western Conference Semis.

Goals For in 2025: 52

Goals Against in 2025: 36

Key Additions: M James Rodriguez, GK Drake Callendar, W Mauricio Gonzalez,

Key Subtractions: M Robin Lod, GK Dayne St. Clair, LB Joseph Rosales

Got better? Or got worse?: About the same ↔️

Minnesota starting 2025 well, going 4-4-2 in their first 10 games thorough May 10. Sure, it included beat downs of some of the weakest teams in the league like Montreal and San Jose, but it also included a 4-1 shellacking of Inter Miami on May 10 in which emerging star Tani Oluwaseyi, Bongi Hlongwane, and Robin Lod got the best of Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, and Lionel Messi.

But Minnesota were more of a middlin’ team towards the end of the season at the start - going 4-2-4 after Leagues Cup to finish 4th in the Conference. That slump came right at the time Minnesota sold winger Tani Oluwaseyi to Villareal.

It might be that Minnesota simply were a little more statistically lucky in 2025 than they had the right to be. Minnesota held opponents to 36 Goals Against in 2025, but their Expected Goals Against was a much higher 51.32, according to American Soccer Analysis. Overall, they had 58 points, but their Expected Points, which is a mathematical regression linked closely to Expect Goal Differential (xGD) was just 48.71. That’s a pretty big split.4

This is why, despite Minnesota signing exciting5 midfielder James Rodriguez, and despite finishing 4th in 2025, the pundits all thing Minnesota will be worse this year. The guys at Backheeled all think they’re finish between 6th and 10th. I do think Drake Callendar is a better keeper than Dayne St. Clair6, or maybe ‘as good’. And I think it was time to move on from Robin Lod. It’s possible that the defense really did have an unnatural ability to keep out goals that the math models think should have gone in. But my guess is that Minnesota are MLS’ best candidates in 2026 for regression to the mean - and I do literally mean ‘mean’ - this team is likely gonna finish 7th or 8th.

LA Galaxy

Finish in 2025: 14th, 7-9-18 (WTL), 30 points

Goals For in 2025: 46

Goals Against in 2025: 66

Key Additions: CF João Klauss, CB Jakob Glesnes, CB Justin Haak

Key Subtractions: M Diego Fagundez;

[AM Riqui Puig is out for the season with a knee injury, too]

Got better? Or got worse?: Better 📈

On May 24, 2025, LA Galaxy, mired in the midst of a 15-game winless streak, went to San Diego in search of a win. They played good soccer, took a lead, immediately gave it back, and were holding a 1-1 draw after 90’. Then Chucky Lozano scored in Added Time to send the Gals home with zero points, again. As I watched that I thought, ‘Yeah, pretty much.’ In 2025, the Galaxy were often a good team for 80 minutes. But the backline was quite porous; and when Gabriel Pec or Joseph Paintsil either came off or were out of gas, this team sputtered offensively. And so they lost a lot - perhaps more than statistically would have been indicated. It was MLS’ bad luck team of the year. Their Expected points was 41.23, but they only actual registered 30 points. Portand had a worse xPts - and they made the playoffs.

• Two other notable defeats that summed up this team’s woes a 7-0 drubbing against an NYRB team that finished 10th,

• and a 1-0 loss to SKC in which Sporting DID NOT TAKE ANY SHOTS. That’s never happened before in MLS history - a team taking zero shots and winning the match. I watched that game. It was just horrific.

LA made some good offseason moves: João Klauss is a really talented striker, and should combine nicely with Pec and Paintsil. Glesnes and Haak aren’t top-tier talent at CB, but they’ll be much better than Maya Yoshida or Carlos Garcés or Mathias Jørgenson. For 2026, the Gals have moved from ‘woeful’ to ‘decent’; maybe 10th? Maybe as high as 7th? But until Paintsil and Puig’s DP contracts expire at the end of 2027, I don’t LA have any shot at winning MLS Cup any time soon.

LAFC

Finish in 2025: 3rd place, 60 points, 17-9-8 (WTL); Lost to VAN in WC Final

Goals For in 2025: 65

Goals Against in 2025: 40

Key Additions: M Stephen Eustaquio, AM Amin Boudri, W Jacob Shaffelburg

Key Subtractions: Yaw Yeboah, Frankie Amaya

Got better? Or got worse?: A tiny bit better, but they were already on paper the best in the West. ⬆️

…

LAFC were once Chivas USA - AKA terrible, and organizationally aimless. But since the expansion/rebrand7, they’ve been unstoppable. This teaches a few lessons.

1. Forget the stupids gimmick like being ‘Barcelona America’ or having a clever mascot or cute colors. Spend real money on good players, and hire smart coaches.

2. Don’t share a stadium. Build your own stadium.

3. Supporter culture matters.

4. You have 3 DP spots. Use them. Use them on world class players that could be starters on any team in any league.

LAFC have gone from Carlos Vela and Harry Kane to Dennis Bouanga and Son Heung-Min without missing a beat. And they always build around those DPs with the highest quality TAM players like Eddie Segura and Aaron Long and, this year, Stephen Eustáquio.

Marc Dos Santos is an accomplished coach who, I thought, Vancouver should have never fired. But they did, and now he’s with LAFC, and that’s a good coaching pickup that will likely continue the success they’ve had.

You’ve also paired Bouanga, the Golden Boot runner-up on 24 goals, with Son, who scored 9 goals in 10 games. I think Son will go for 20 goals and 10 assists this year, and Bouanga has a chance to join MLS’ 30 goals club, which is occupied by only three guys: Carlos Vela, Josef Martinez, and Zlatan Ibrahimović.

All the pundits are picking them to win the WC - and you can put me down, too. I think they might win the conference by 10 points.

Houston Dynamo

Finish in 2025: 12th, 37 points, 9-10-15 WTL

Goals For in 2025: 43

Goals Against in 2025: 56

Key Additions: M Mateusz Bogusz, M Hector Herrera, W Guilherme, CB Lucas Halter

Key Subtractions: RB Griffin Dorsey, AM Amine Bassi, GK Andrew Tarbell, CB Daniel Steres, M Brooklyn Raines, M Sebastian Kowalczyk

Got better? Or got worse?: Better ⬆️

According to transfermarkt, fully 24 players listed on the Dynamo roster at the end of 2025 have been shipped out to start the season, and 16 have joined, which is bonkers. They went full send on a rebuild, although bringing back Hector Herrera, who spent 2025 with Toluca in Liga MX, isn’t exactly the normal way to do that. Bogusz is a huge get - he was a fantastic mid for LAFC in 2024, with 15 goals 6 assists. And then Cruz Azul bought him for $9 million, and then they only played him 1,258 minutes over two seasons, getting 2 goals and 3 assists from him, and now he’s been sold to Houston for $6 million plus up to $4 million in incentive fees.

Along with Jack McGlynn and Ezequiel Ponce, this should be a solid team for the season. It ain’t perfect, though: the roster’s average age is 29.1 yrs old, compared to an average age of the players they faced in 2025 of 26.8. There’s a lot of players on this roster that seem a little anonymous. Who is 31-year-old Argentinian journeyman Augustin Bouzat? How about Hannover 96 castoff Lawrence Ennali? Is Czech winger Ondřej Lingr any good?

I think Houston need a pure goalscorer and an upgrade at GK over Jonathan Bond, but they should show improvement over being kinda meh in 2025. We are, however, putting a lot of stock in Mateusz Bogusz being exceptional, and the cast around him being good. That’s not necessarily how it works out. So they got better, but so did a lot of teams in the WC, so it won’t matter enough to get them into the playoffs.

FC Dallas

Finish in 2025: 7th place, 44 points, 11-11-12 WTL

Goals For in 2025: 52

Goals Against in 2025: 55

Key Additions: M Herman Johanssen, M Ran Binyamin

Key Subtractions: GK Maarten Paes, M Sebastian Lletget, F Pedrinho, M Paxton Pomykal

Got better? Or got worse?: About the same, minus some respected veterans ↔️

Playing mostly in a 3-4-3 with wingbacks for the second half of the season, FC Dallas Head Coach Eric Quills made opponents run with the Toros, and most of them struggled. Bernard Kamungo and Logan Farrington and Shaq Moore would move fast and stretch the field, and as long as they could get into the final third, Petr Musa would score goals. Boy did he score goals.

This team was solid. Luciano Acosta was sold to Fluminese on August 8, and Dallas didn’t care and went 5-4-1 the rest of the way anyhow.

FC Dallas are probably the Western Conference’s most ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ team. Pencil them in for 7th again.

Colorado Rapids

Finish in 2025: 11th, 41 points, 11-8-15 WTL

Goals For in 2025: 44

Goals Against in 2025: 56

Key Additions: RW Dante Sealy, M Hamzat Ojediran, CB Lucas Herrington, LB Miguel Navarro

Key Subtractions: M Cole Bassett, LB Sam Vines, M Oliver Larraz, F Calvin Harris, CB Andreas Maxsø

Got better? Or got worse?: Who in the hell even knows, man?

Compare the season’s opener lineup from 2025 to the opening lineup in 2026:

Out of 11 players, four are the same: Josh Atencio, Reggie Cannon, Rafael Navarro, and Zack Steffen. The Rapids, under Matt Wells and Pádraig Smith, have embarked on a radical teardown and rebuild. There were some known quantities to start 2025: we knew what Cole Bassett could do, which was outwork and out run every player in the league. We knew Ollie Larraz put in tackles, but wasn’t the cleanest passer. We knew Cabral was fast but ineffective. We knew Mihailovic could pass and finish and was exceedingly economical with his touches. We knew Maxsø was kinda meh, but still a dependably league average centerback.

The Rapids made changes because 2025 wasn’t good. But nobody knows whether these are the right moves. Are Noah Cobb and Lucas Herrington ready to be starting centerbacks? Is Hamzat Ojediran the real-deal destroyer he says he is? Is Paxton Aaronson ready to put the team on his shoulders, offensively? Is Dante Sealy good? Who will play LW: an out-of-position Darren Yapi, or an out-of-position Ted Ku-DiPietro?

Sunday against Seattle looked bad, but we always knew it was going to be, because the Rapids are generally bad in road openers, and generally bad against the Sounders (9-7-27) (WTL), and REALLY bad against the Sounders and CLink/Lumen Field (2-3-17). We kind of excuse it?

But there were also very ominous signs. Particularly that Matt Wells had spent pre-season talking up the Rapids high press/possession offense, and then for the first 45 minutes, the Rapids could barely get out of their end. They were out-possessed, out-passed, outplayed on 50-50 balls, and pressed into oblivion. The only possession in offense – was some dull passing along the backline after the 20th minute when Seattle took their foot off the high pressing gas pedal.

There’s 33 more games. There will be tactical adjustments, and roster adjustments. But overall, the Colorado Rapids haven’t paid for the caliber of players that other teams have paid for. There are 45 Designated Players earning more than the Rapids highest paid player - Paxton Aaronson ($2.23 million). Now, salary doesn’t have a one-to-one correlation to quality. But overwhelmingly, you get what you pay for. And so for the Rapids, we’re looking at wringing ever drop of value out of the players they have just to be mid-table.

Clearly, I’m pessimistic about this team, but trying to figure how pessimistic is tough to calibrate. I’m basically where I was on this team last year: if it goes well, the Rapids squeak into the playoffs in one of the last spots. If it doesn’t, they finish 11th or lower.

Regardless, because its the Rapids, I’ll derive as much joy as I can from it. I’m worried, though, that this season, the moments of joy will be few and far between.

Austin FC

Finish in 2025: 6th, 47 points, 13-8-13 WTL

Goals For in 2025: 37

Goals Against in 2025: 45

Key Additions: F Facundo Torres, LB Joseph Rosales, LW Jayden Nelson

Key Subtractions: M Osman Bukari, F Diego Rubio, Jader Obrian

Got better? Or got worse?: Better ⬆️

I’ll keep this one short. Owen Wolff had 7 goals and 7 assists, and Brad Stuver is great, and Facundo Torres is back in MLS after a stint in Brazil – in his two years with Orlando, he scored 14 goals each year. John Gallagher is great. This is a very solid team, and they play an upbeat, fun brand of football. A top-five finish plus a run to the Western Conference Final seems totally in the realm of the possible.

…

Rabbi’s Prediction for the Western Conference Table

1/ LAFC

2/ San Diego

3/ Seattle

4/ Vancouver

5/ Salt Lake

6/ Austin

7/ Dallas

8/ Minnesota

9/ LA Galaxy

10/ Portland

11/ Colorado Rapids

12/ San Jose

13/ Houston

14/ St. Louis

15/ Kansas City

The MLS Western Conference is very much looking like it separates into three distinct tranches: the top four, who use all their DP spots on big name players and has a reputable supporting cast; the mid-pack teams that rely on one or two very good players to carry the club into the playoffs; and everyone else. Those top four are almost certainly LAFC, San Diego, Vancouver, and Seattle – although Minnesota’s signing of James Rodriguez is going to give them a shot at clawing their way into that group.

The bottom five this year are all financially unambitious clubs without a clear vision for how to get out the mess they’ve made. If you watched at least 8 MLS matches last year, and I say the name of a team, and you can’t immediately tell me the name of a player on the team, or you can’t identify which player on that team has been deemed a ‘Designated Player’, then congratulations, you can tell me what teams will be missing the playoffs.1

It feels like the distance between the top and bottom has never been farther apart. Blame the DP rule, blame billionaires, blame expansion, blame whatever. Everybody knows that Colorado fans will be exceedingly pumped for Son Min Heung and Thomas Müller and Anders Dreyer; less so when SKC’s Magomed-Shapi Suleymanov or St Louis’ Marcel Hartel come to town. You’ll put on an extra layer to see Seattle come to town, even if its cold out at Commerce City. I’m not even sure you’ll look up from scrolling through your phone when the Rapids play Dallas or Houston this year.

But not every team can be owned by a devil-may-care spendy-spend lunatic that wants to WIN. AT. ALL. COSTS. Some, unfortunately, are owned by undercapitalized or absentee owners that just want their asset to maintain its value with minimal upkeep. And so you have 4 or 5 teams trying to be top of the league, and 10 teams who give their GM a modest allowance and then say ‘we expect you to sneak into the playoffs and earn us a few extra bucks in home playoff game gate revenue.’

It’s the fans that then put their hearts and souls behind the colors and players, hoping against hope that they’ll transcend the spreadsheets and the transfer fees and produce a bit of magic to justify our 40 hour a week drudgery behind a laptop for a rush of adrenaline and a few pints with our gals or our mates. So that even when it’s two bottom-table teams slugging it out for pride at season’s end, it’s still worth it to a bunch of us.

It should be a fun season. Let’s see who’s in the Western Conference and what I think of em.

This year we’re doing the previews in … reverse alphabetical order! Because I’ve done it in so many other ways, and I just figured, why not?2

Vancouver Whitecaps

Finish in 2025: 2nd, 63 pts, 18-9-7 (WTL); Lost MLS Cup Final to Inter Miami

Goals For in 2025: 66

Goals Against in 2025: 38

Key Additions: LW Bruno Caicedo, LW Cheikh Sabaly, DM Oliver Larraz

Key Subtractions: M Ali Ahmed, LW Jayden Nelson, Nicolas Fleuriau Chateau

Got better? Or got worse?: A little worse. ⬇️

The Whitecaps were just on fire for most of last season. From February 22 to June 8, they lost one game. Brian White scored 16 goals. Thomas Müller scored 7 goals in 7 games. Sebastian Berhalter had a breakout season as a sizzling midfield threat at the age of 23. They were fun, and fun to watch - they looked good on the break, they defended well, and goalkeeper Yohei Takaoka did a great job, particularly in the playoffs.

And there’s depth, too! The team had only 4 outfield players with more than 2,000 minutes and were missing offensive spark Ryan Gauld almost all season, and it didn’t really matter - they were still great. The departed Ali Ahmed was a very good player, and it isn’t obvious who on the roster could step up and replace his 8 assists from 2025 in this upcoming season, but overall I’m not that concerned, since he only started 12 games out of 22 played. On the other hand, he did lead the team in Goals Added (G+) at 2.39 in just 1449 minutes.

Vancouver are bringing in an Ecuadoran winger named Bruno Caicedo who is only 21, and a 27 year old veteran of the French league named Cheikh Sabaly who scored 15 goals for Metz in Ligue 2 in 2023-24, plus a familiar face to Rapids fans in Ollie Larraz, who is probably d-mid depth (as he was in Colorado). Most importantly, they’ll have a full season of Thomas Müller, and Ryan Gauld will be back in April, and they have White and Berhalter plus the very dangerous Emanuel Sabbi and capable midfielder Pablo Vite.

All that should put all the attention on the Caps soccering. Alas, it sounds like things are troubling on the business end, and that’ll be a season-long distraction for pundits, fans, and players alike. In the offseason, the team went looking for investors, and when they opened their books, ESPN reporter Jeffrey Carlisle reported that CEO Axel Schuster said “not a single one is interested in buying even 1% of this club.” Apparently the problem is Vancouver are locked into a stadium lease at BC Place that gives them very unfavorable terms. And the lease can’t be broken. And there’s no realistic situation when the team can build their own stadium. Because real estate in Vancouver is basically insane - the team could legitimately construct a floating offshore stadium out of old cruise ships and privately helicopter in all the fans, and it’d probably cost the same as buying land downtown.

Overall, it feels like this team will likely stay in the top four of the Western Conference this year. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever done previews of VWFC and felt confident about that pick, too.

Sporting Kansas City

Finish in 2025: Last [15th out of 15 teams], 28 points, 7-7-20 (WTL); Didn’t collect the Wooden Spoon though! DC United were worse, and technically so were Atlanta and Montreal (tied on points but SKC had more wins).

Goals For in 2025: 46 (20th in MLS, better than the Rapids!)

Goals Against in 2025: 70 (Last in MLS)

Key Additions: W Calvin Harris, LB Jayden Reid, CB Wyatt Meyer; Manager Raphaël Wicky

Key Subtractions: W Eric Thommy, CB Joaquin Fernandez, CB Robert Voloder

Got better? Or got worse?: ⬆️ Better

Seattle Sounders

Finish in 2025: 55 pts, 5th place, 15-10-9 (WTL); Lost in 1st round of playoffs

Goals For in 2025: 58

Goals Against in 2025: 48

Key Additions: D Ryan Sailor3, Max Anchor

Key Subtractions: M Joao Paolo, M Obed Vargas, M Danny Leyva

Got better? Or got worse?: ⬇️ Worse

Hey, remember that time that Seattle missed the playoffs and didn’t win any trophies? No, you know the year I’m talking about: they were bad, they didn’t have any stars, and they played terrible soccer. It was the same year that Sinbad was in a genie movie and the Buffalo Bills won the Super Bowl I think.

That opening paragraph is a silly attempt to express an insane (and annoying) fact: since their first year as an MLS expansion franchise in 2009, the Sounders have made the playoffs every. single. year. Except one. That was 2022, when the club was the first MLS team to win the modern incarnation of the Concacaf Champions League.4 And they’ve always had a star player or two. Clint Dempsey and Nico Lodeiro and Raul Ruidiaz and Jordan Morris and Obafemi Martins and Albert Rusnak and Ozzie Alonso. So no matter what happened in the offseason, you’d be insane as a pundit to pick this team lower than 5th in the Western Conference table, because simply put, in the 17-year history of the club, that’s only happened once.

That said, it does feel like Seattle are a little vulnerable right now, or potentially ‘in transition’. With Joao Paolo retiring and Obed Vargas being sold to Atletico Madrid, the Sounders are entering a reinvention phase. The leading scorers from 2025 are Danny Musovski (14 goals) and Albert Rusnak (11 goals) and Jordan Morris (5 goals) are 29 years old, 30, and 30, respectively. DP attacker Pedro de la Vega is coming back from and injury, and Christian Roldán is 30, and Stephan Frei is 38, so this season is either a ‘last hurrah’ for the old guard or the beginning of the switch to the new.

There are some young guys to potentially be excited about. Sounder at Heart is high on 23 year old Osaze De Rosario. The Sounders also have 17 year-old Snyder Brunell and 19 year-old Reed Baker-Whiting 5and 22 year-old Georgi Minoungou – two homegrowns and an international – maybe ready to take starting spots.

You just don’t bet against Seattle. Brian Schmetzer is an excellent head coach, and the Sounders will reload midseason like they always do – I think they’ll move some things around and go get a DP. This might not be the year they reclaim the top of the WC from LAFC or San Diego or Vancouver. But they will, like always, be very very good.

San Jose Earthquakes

Finish in 2025: 10th place, 41 points, 11-8-15 (WTL)

Goals For in 2025: 60

Goals Against in 2025: 63

Key Additions: F Timo Werner

Key Subtractions: M Christian Espinoza, F Cristian Arango, F Josef Martinez

Got better? Or got worse?: ⬆️ Maybe Got Better? But not at the right spots.

Espinoza, Arango, and Martinez played 7,112 minutes last year for San Jose. Timo Werner will take over for Arango as the primary attacking force. Other than that, it looks like SJ are looking to a youth movement to provide Werner with support. Winger Ousseni Bouda, a 24-year-old from Burkina Faso had 3 goals in 2025. Midfielder Beau Leroux is a local boy from San Jose – he had 5 goals and 3 assists in 2025. And Nico Tsakiris is just 19. There was talk that last year would be his breakout season - maybe we were a year early on that?

I will say that San Jose’s defense was not good in 2025, and they, uh, didn’t bring in a single defender in the offseason. Overall, unless some last minute moves happen before the deadline on March 26, it seems to me that this team is ‘Timo Werner and whole lot of question marks.’ I can see that being good enough to scuffle along in the Western Conference and snag the 9th and final playoff spot. But that’s about as optimistic as I get. I can also see this defense, which was 27th in MLS last year in Goals Allowed, being slightly worse, and San Jose finishing bottom-three.

I will say that their new tie-died kit is a banger. And really, that’s the most important thing in soccer. Merchandising!

San Diego FC

Finish in 2025: 1st, 63 points, 19-6-9 (WTL); Lost WC Final to Vancouver

Goals For in 2025: 64

Goals Against in 2025: 41

Key Additions: CB Osvald Søe

Key Subtractions: W Chucky Lozano

Got better? Or got worse?: Maybe a little worse ⬇️

I’d never heard of Mikey Varas, San Diego’s head coach, before 2025. I also thought, like all the other basic-bitch pundits, that the safe thing to do was to look at an expansion club, don’t give it too much thought, and say ‘they’ll be bad.’ I learned many lessons.

The thing that people thought about San Diego coming into to 2025 was that they’d need some time to develop a tactical identity and that outside of Hirving ‘Chucky’ Lozano, the team was an unknown quantity. It turned out that they established a tactical identity right from the start - lightning quick attacks, wide spacing, and fast-break, ‘Showtime!’ attacks into the final third. And their best player was not Lozano, but in fact a 26 year-old Right Wing named Anders Dreyer. Dreyer had been acquired by San Diego from Anderlecht in the Belgian League for a $5 million transfer fee.

Dreyer had had a breakout 2023-24 season for Anderlecht, with 19 goals and 9 assists. That was second-most that year to Kévin Denkey of Cercle Brugge; Denkey went the next year to FC Cincinnati, where he scored 15 goals. I’m thinking I could be a successful MLS GM if my simple philosophy was ‘sign a top-five forward in scoring from the Belgian League.’6

The rest of the team built around Dreyer worked, too. Lozano was only good for 1,824 minutes (and missed some of the playoffs) but he had 9 goals and 8 assists. Jeppe Tverskov and Luca De La Torre were fantastic in midfield. The backline, which included Christopher McVey, Luca Bombino, and Paddy McNair, did a great job of ‘bend not break’ on the occasions where the high-flying attack produced a turnover. It worked, and I expect with almost no changes, it’ll work again in 2026.

There is one significant change of course, and that is that at time of writing, San Diego have announced that Chucky Lozano “will not be part of the sporting plans moving forward” according to GM Tyler Heaps. It could be that Chucky thought he was gonna be the star, and when Dreyer emerged as the team’s MVP, Chucky was pissed and wanted out. It’s a bit of a problem for SD that Lozano is definitely not going to play for them, and also that they haven’t successfully moved him to another team. Because having a disgruntled player on the books gives San Diego less leverage for a transfer fee. Plus he’s now identified as a potential clubhouse cancer. And, of course, they’ll miss out on his production. Still, I’m sure they’ll figure it out, and earn a decent transfer fee in the end.

San Diego will be fine. I don’t think they’ll repeat at the top of the Western Conference; maybe more like a second place finish.

Back to the previewin’…

St. Louis City

Finish in 2025: 13th in WC, 32 points, 8-8-18 (WTL)

Goals For in 2025: 44

Goals Against in 2025: 58

Key Additions: M Daniel Edelman, LB Rafael Santos, M Dante Polvara

Key Subtractions: F Joao Klauss, D Henry Kessler, M Akil Watts

Got better? Or got worse?: 📉 Worse.

Forward Joao Klauss had 10 goals for St Louis in 2025, and along with Eduard Löwen and Marcel Hartel formed the attacking core of a team that to be honest was lacking in 2025, again. Well, Klauss was sold to LA Galaxy for $2.4 million. And there’s no clear replacement in attack. Maybe by going out and getting a couple midfielders like Dante Polvara and Daniel Edelman the team wants to shore up the defense and win the battles in the middle of the pitch.

To be honest, I don’t understand what STL are doing. They expanded in 2023 with a good start and a lot of excitement. Then they’ve spent two years struggling, and now they’ve jettisoned one of their better players. It implies that maybe they’re in a ‘rebuild’ mode, and perhaps they’ll give more minutes to young players. MyKhi Joyner, an 18 year old Homegrown, had 15 goals with the MLS Next Pro team, but only earned 370 minutes with St Louis City’s senior team. There’s a few more guys that might have a shot at making a contribution: Jake Girdwood-Reich, and Fallou Fall, and Jaziel Orozco. But I’m reaching here: there’s no evidence that St Louis City will be anywhere above the bottom 3; a playoff spot is positively unthinkable. Not a particularly positive outlook for their new manager, Yoann Damet.

St. Louis really look adrift, and I don’t see this team doing well in 2026. They play the Rapids on May 9 and July 25. So there’s that?

Real Salt Lake

Finish in 2025: 9th, 41 points, 12-5-17 (WTL); Lost in play-in/wildcard round to Portland

Goals For in 2025: 38

Goals Against in 2025: 49

Key Additions: RW Morgan Guilavogui, LB Juan Manuel Sanabria, M Stijn Spierings, F Chance Cowell

Key Subtractions: DM Braian Ojeda, M Wily Agada, GK Zac MacMath

Got better? Or got worse?: ⬆️ Better

In 2025, RSL was Diego Luna, Justin Glad, Goalkeeper Rafael Cabral, and 8 stiffs. That was good enough, though, to slip into the playoffs alongside Pablo Mastroeni’s cautious-but-balanced tactical approach. And a bit of luck – RSL ended in a three-way tie for 9th with San Jose and Colorado, but the first tiebreaker is Total Wins, and RSL had 12 to Colorado and SJ’s 11.

RSL is the only team I previewed here where I can say that they got better in the offseason AND I think it’ll carry them into the playoffs (I think SKC’s upgrades will only be a marginal improvement for now). Morgan Guilavogui comes over from RC Lens in France, the same team that gave the Rapids Hamzat Odejiran. Diego Luna in 2025 was often asked to do it all by himself for Salt Lake, with 9 goals and 3 assists. So if Guilavogui can add a modest offensive threat, it would be a real help to the Real. Really. Dutchman Stijn Spierings has 259 matches played across six different leagues, and helped bring Toulouse back from Ligue 2 to Ligue 1 in 2022. He’ll be critical veteran leadership in midfield for a team that is a bit on the young side.

RSL didn’t make the moves to jump into the rarefied air of the MLS Western Conference top-four. But they’ll be good, and a tough opponent for Colorado. A threepeat of winning the Rocky Mountain Cup looks very much in doubt.7

Part 2 of our Western Conference preview is coming soon…

This past Wednesday, Colorado Rapids Head Coach Matt Wells had what I would call his first real press conference. Yes, yes, he had one last week too, but it was full of the niceties that come with the hi-how-are-ya meeting, including a bevy of softball questions from the press. How is camp? How is Florida? What have you seen? Wednesday, Wells had to field some real tactical questions, and answer them without giving away too much about his plans to opposing coaches. He had to set the tone for his leadership style. And most importantly, he had to answer questions regarding the sale of Cole Bassett to Portland Timbers for $2.65 million [ballooning to $3.7 million if certain incentives are met].

Wells faces some real challenges coming into this 2026 season. He’s taken over leadership of a team that has missed the playoffs 3 of the past 4 seasons - in a league where more than half the teams make the playoffs. The Rapids haven’t won a playoff game in nine years. They made some offseason additions but a lot of folks are unconvinced that these are significant enough moves to really ensure success in 2026. Being a head coach for the Rapids is hard, and I don’t envy him.

Wells is my fifth Rapids manager – as a writer/blogger/podcaster, I’ve interacted with Pablo Mastroeni, Anthony Hudson, Robin Fraser, Chris Armas, and now Wells.1 That level of history – and turmoil – leaves me feeling slightly jaded about glorious promises and optimistic language. ‘Yeah yeah, kid, they all say that. I’ll see it when I believe it.’ I am trying to find that right balance between skepticism and giving the benefit of the doubt. I think we all are. Quite frankly, with our history as a franchise particularly in the Kroenke era, it is more than appropriate to lean into pessimism.

I have pulled a few choice quotes from the post-practice press conference on January 28, 2026 below. The full press conference is embedded at the end of this article if you’d like to see the full context for the quotes. Under each quote is my reaction to what Wells said.

Matt Wells: In terms of us and the squad compilation moving forward, we have to make difficult choices. And this (selling Cole Bassett) was certainly one of them. We have a fantastic midfield group here. It’s probably the, being honest, it’s the unit, I probably shouldn’t say this, but it’s the unit I’ve been most pleased with since I’ve come into the club. And we have a lot of talent there and it’s my job to tap into that and get the best out of them. So it was always going to be a little bit of change here. But in terms of the midfield dynamic i’m very very happy with with what we’ve got in the building.

Wells begins the conference on a question from brilliant, charming, debonaire reporter Matt Pollard by complementing Cole Bassett’s talent and work ethic before sort-of explaining the decision to let him go. He’s starting to explain to the public what he’s looking for; what he’s trying to build; what changes he’s going to make and why he’s making them. And here he tells us all effectively ‘we had redundancy in midfield - a lot of nice players who do too much of the same thing, or not enough of what I specifically need.’ Why Cole was the odd man out will likely remain a mystery. Based on his age and experience, he probably still had sale value? Or maybe the team likes Ted Ku-DiPietro, Connor Ronan, and/or Josh Atencio better.

MW: I watched as many games as you possibly can, and then some more. So I came in here with some good ideas, but until you work with these guys, until you get to know them as people, until you start to see the chemistry on the pitch and how they link with each other within the confines of my game model which is a big change I think until then you see that you can’t make accurate judgment. So I was always saying to the front office that yes Hamzat (Ojediran)2 yes Dante (Sealy) – like massively. I felt they were immediate requirements. And then after that I wanted to hold judgment until I got to assess the guys in person. And now we’re now in that phase where I get to make more accurate judgments. And I can start to really shape this squad in my vision. And I think this is the first small step towards that. But it needs to continue. Now it’s about there’ll be more change in phase two. That could be players going out. But it will most definitely be players coming in.

Some coaches have an incredibly clear system they want to play, and the players must fit that system. Other coaches are less theoretical or doctrinaire about the football they want to play - they have some basic principles, but more or less they let the players they have guide the approach. Mastroeni wanted to defend in mid-low block, and he wanted physical players. Anthony Hudson was Rapids Way 1.0, which was trying to actually go on the offensive sometimes. But it wasn’t a very clear system. Robin Fraser’s system was about ball movement to create openings, increased high pressure over past coaches, and keeping players in positions to defend well even while on offense. It was Rapids Way 2.03 . Chris Armas was also into high press, and there was more urgency in attack than under Fraser, but his defense was a mess. I think the Armas years spelled the death of the Rapids Way – we did not hear that phrase under his tenure, and I suspect we never will again.

So far we know that Well’s new offense will be ‘a big change’ and that he wants to ‘dominate opponents’ [he said that in his opening press conference and repeated it again on Wednesday]. And we also know that Wells understands that his system will require certain players, and it looks like Dante Sealy and Hamzat Ojediran are perfect for that system. We will keep an eye on this, because I don’t yet know what that means.

‘I can really shape the squad in my vision’ is a pretty bold statement, and probably worrying for some, judging from the reactions to Wells’ words on Bluesky. I’m not shocked - every coach has his ideas and the guys he wants to carry out those ideas. It is a little refreshing for a coach to say that out loud. I do think Wells and Pádraig Smith haven’t really telegraphed their intentions to the supporters about incoming acquisitions. And also - I don’t think the Front Office or coaching staff fully get how jarring it is to have an offseason in which two Colorado homegrowns are unloaded for two new unknowns. It’s easier to lose knowing that you’re doing so while you develop young local players who might blossom down the road. Losing with some middle career Nigerian player that just arrived from France is harder to swallow.

MW: The foundations for me are the physical performance and then the mentality, how we see ourselves, how we show up every day, having that identity of being a big team that wants to dominate football matches. So the first two weeks have been about implementing that. Because there’s no sense starting with an unbelievable tactical model and then you get further down the line. And like always in football, you hit a period of adversity and if you have weak foundations then the house is going to crumble. So this has been about strong foundations …

But more important for me is what are we as people? What are we as a team? What’s our identity? How strong is our mentality? And I’m really happy with the point. It’s not perfect. I have to keep pushing and stretching these guys but I’m happy with the level we’re at now. We have to keep pushing on that. Tomorrow will be other examination of that because they’re going to be tired again.

Wells describes elsewhere in this press conference that they guys have been pushed very hard in training, and so clearly he wants a team that can physically out-work other teams. That’s a very Colorado Rapids thing: top-tier talent, speed, or technical ability is more expensive to acquire than stocking a team with dudes that have insane levels of physical fitness. But he wants swagger, too. All this talk of dominating opponents has been intrigued, for sure.

Taking a step back, it also sounds absurd. This team has been an underdog for the entire time I’ve followed it, since 2013. And arguably, the Colorado Rapids, an underfunded team in a midsized market with an owner that prefers shrewd business to a full trophy case, have ALWAYS been an underdog. Creating a club that wants to dominate opponents would be dramatic change in year 30 of Rapids history. I won’t say it’s impossible. But it is certainly improbable.

Pablo Mastroeni ruined the word ‘mentality’ for me. I mean, I get it. You want guys that want to win, and also guys that shake off adversity or stay composed under pressure. As Yogi Berra said, 90% of the game is half mental. But also, this is of questionable value to me. These guys are all top end professionals. The physical and technical ability plus the ability to understand the tactics probably adds up to a great soccer player moreso than a guy with a can-do, competitive attitude who is slower than snot and can’t shoot to save his life.

Also, motivation to perform can be manufactured pretty quickly for a guy if you provide a big enough check.

More below but first…

MW: We have a framework. Again, I won’t share all of it. So there’s different categories of how we dominate and how we review our dominance. And dominate the opponent sort of refers, especially to what we do against the ball. And when they have the ball, how we behave in all moments of the game. and then opponent builds up. But we also have to have the same level of clarity when we move further back down the pitch. And in terms of the high line, how do we hold the high line? When do we drop? When do we hold? When do we squeeze? How do we stand in the line? When the ball goes over ahead, how do we turn? What’s our references? What are the behaviors we care about? And then exactly the same when we’re defending around the box, making sure there’s absolute clarity. Every single player knows their job to the point where they know exactly how they should be stood, what their body shape is, and that’s something I’m very, very passionate about. And it’s that level of clarity that I want across all areas of our dominate framework without sharing the rest of them.

This was my question regarding Wells’ use of the term ‘dominate the opponent’. What does that mean? And in short, he might mean ‘we want to press.’ It could be that in the early watching, us pundits will determine that Matt Wells is Colorado’s version of Jurgen Klopp and the Gegenpresse: a focus on winning the ball back in the opponents final third and then pounding the ball as fast as possible into the box for a chance.I thought we’d see Chris Armas press a lot, but he really chose to press heavily only sometimes, depending on the opponent or whether Colorado was home or on the road. Wells, however, kept saying in this media session that he couldn’t tell us too much. Which is kind of cool in a Don Draper ‘he’s sooooo mysterious’ kind of way.

Last chunk here, off of another Matt Pollard question (about the decision to part ways with Cole Bassett):

I’ve been in a phase since I got here of assessing and identifying the squad. And I was very clear with him in the first meeting that when you’re coming in, like I am, to completely change the trajectory of a team and to create something special and create something sustainable which I’m determined to do. This is no short-term project. This is I want to build something here that really stands the test of time and get the boys to buy into a specific type of football and a specific way of seeing themselves.

I want that to carry through to the organization. I want us to be world-class on and off the pitch. It’s us making difficult decisions. It’s the players now this morning being a little bit uncertain. And we have to live in that space of being uncomfortable.That’s where high performance operates. And it’s no different to when we are holding that high line. I’m not going to feel comfortable right now. It’s very different to them. It’s when we’re building up from Zach Stephan and Nico and the other team’s pressing like crazy.

We’re not going to be comfortable immediately. We have to get used to being uncomfortable. And for me, squad composition falls under that same bracket. There’s going to be difficult decisions that we make, but they’re always going to be for the greater good of the squad. How I see it at the time is that this is something that allows us to shape the squad much, much more in my image by spreading the resources across other areas of the pitch where I feel like we do need depth and we do need challenge.

…

So I’ve no doubt we will reinvest the resources and we’ll spread it across the squad. And at the end of this transfer window, which is when I want us to be judged, and then the product you see on the pitch, I’ve no doubt will be a squad that’s got outstanding players spread across different positions, all competing for the shirt, all fighting each other, no one comfortable, everyone ready to take the other person’s shirt, and that’s how I want the environment.

World class on and off the pitch! I love the enthusiasm. I hope he can maintain it after he takes a walk through LAFC’s BMO Stadium or Columbus Crew’s Lower.com Field and then returns to Commerce City’s low-rent district digs. LAFC’s been around for a hot minute, and their rosters have already included Son Heung-min, Hugo Lloris, Dennis Bouanga, and Carlos Vela.4 We don’t quite rate in comparison.

Also ‘I sold a player and now all the remaining players in the squad are waking up nervous about their jobs’ is certainly an approach. It’s pretty aggressive! It is a wake up call - if you don’t buy my system, you’re gone. It immediately has me worried with a Jurgen Klinsmann ‘do the players want to play for this guy?’ type concern. Let’s give it some time. Maybe he’s just being a boot camp drill sergeant for the start and we’ll see his warm fuzzy side later (?).

His comment about ‘spreading resources across other areas’ was refreshingly honest. ‘We had too many good midfielders and not enough good wingers, strikers, and defenders’ is something I’VE thought in the past, but I’ve NEVER heard a coach or GM say that. I agree. Bully for Matt Wells for telling it like it is a little.

Hot stove season in MLS has been fairly exciting so far. Inside the league:

• Inter Miami acquired Tadeo Allende permanently.

• Tai Baribo went to DC United.

• Walker Zimmerman has joined Toronto FC.

• Nashville picked up former SJ Earthquakes attacker Christian Espinoza.

And then there’s the big transfers-abroad rumors which everyone is eyeing:

• Mateusz Bogusz going from Cruz Azul to Houston.

• Timo Werner, who has 115 career goals in the EPL and Bundesliga, headed for Bruce Arena’s SJ Earthquakes.

• Facundo Torres from Palmeiras to Austin FC.

• Josh Sargent to Toronto FC.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Rapids have been active too, albeit on a smaller scale. There hasn’t really been a ‘this will surely win us the league!’ move that supporters all dream of.

It’s hard to know if Colorado are all done with their moves yet, or if Pádraig Smith still has something pending. But we might as well look at COL’s winter moves now to ponder how things are shaping up in 2026.

Here are all the teams subtractions and additions for December and January (plus one from Summer).1 We’ll take a moment here to ask whether the sum total of these moves makes the Rapids better or worse, at least on paper. And at the end, we shall try and answer another question: is there a chance the Rapids will make any more moves before opening day on February 22?

These moves appear below in ‘the order they appeared on Rabbi’s spreadsheet.’ In other words, no particular order.

Subtraction: Andreas Maxsö. Addition: Rob Holding.

Position: Starting CB.

Minutes to replace: 2,880.

Dumping Maxsö meant the Rapids needed to replace their 2025 leader for minutes played. Andreas wasn’t great, by any measure, and certainly not if we’re considering his performance against his $1.39 million salary. The Achilles heel to his 0.0 G+ in 2024 and -1.20 G+ in 2025 numbers were his not-great Goals Added Passing numbers: -0.61 G+Passing in 2025, third-worst on the team.2 Maxsö was 16th percentile amongst all MLS CBs for Passes Attempted, 74th percentile in passes completed, and 8th percentile in Progressive Passes.3 Yuck.

But before we declare Rob Holding as ‘definitely better because Andreas Maxsö was bad’ consider that he only played 420 minutes for Crystal Palace last year, and 526 for Colorado. It would be unfair to extrapolate out and definitely state anything. But we’re gonna do it anyways.

Holding’s Passes Attempted over the past year were in the 86th percentile; his Pass Percentage is in the 66th percentile; and his Progressive Passes was 88th percentile. We don’t have G+ numbers for the English Championship, but in his time in MLS, Holding had a +0.33 G+. Take all of it together, and I feel pretty good that Rob Holding is going to be an improvement over Maxsö.

Verdict: Upgrade 📈

Subtraction: Calvin Harris. Addition: Dante Sealy

Position: RW/RM

Minutes to replace: 1480.

Calvin Harris had 5 goals on 5.33 xG in 2025. That made him a useful addition to the team in his as a wide attacker, a role that he inherited from the underwhelming and overpriced Kevin Cabrál. But Harris provided just 9 Key Passes all year. Considering that, by comparison, Omir Fernandez provided 8 KP in just 232 minutes, and you see maybe why Colorado decided to move on.

Side note - don’t get confused that the above statement is making the case that selling Omir Fernandez was a mistake. I wasn’t enamored with Fernandez; he was dribbly and an ok passer, but he wasn’t much of a scorer. Then again, the man that took over for him, Ted Ku-DiPietro hasn’t been either. After getting sent to Portland in April for $200,000 in GAM, the Timbers buried Fernandez on the bench, giving him 400 minutes in 2025, so it seems like he’s maybe touched his ceiling in pro ball. Also, Fernandez and Ku-DiPietro play LW while Calvin Harris was primarily an RW. My point was mostly to say ‘a good winger should pass and score well, or pass well, or score well.’

Dante Sealy had 9 goals, 1 assist in 2421 minutes for a pretty bad Montreal team last year. He’s 22 years old. He had 37 Key Passes last year. So he looks like a winger that passes well and scores well. Ding ding ding!

Sealy looks like he might be the solution this team has been seeking for quite some time; the last Rapids winger to score 9 goals in season was Shkelzen Gashi, waaaay back in 2016.4 I’m excited about this. They are too: and I know that because they paid Montreal $1,150,000 in GAM to get him. That’s the most GAM the Rapids have ever paid for a player.5

Verdict: Upgrade 📈

Subtraction: Sam Bassett. Addition(s): Billo Diop, Donavan Phillip

Position: Bench guy

Minutes to replace: 339 (MLS), 462 (MLS, CCL, Leagues Cup)

This one’s kind of an odd category in that the in-out move here isn’t really about finding a like-for-like player who will fill the position Sam had with the club – Sam was a midfielder, Diop and Phillip are strikers. Sam’s role was basically ‘let’s see what the kid’s got’, and Diop and Phillip will be in the same position in 2026.

Bassett was given an opportunity to get some minutes and wow the team, and he gave it a go for a year but ultimately the Rapids have decided to move on. Sam was last seen trialing with Nashville. As an aside, few trialists earn a job with an MLS team anymore – mostly, it’s a way to work out and pick up some eyeballs while your agent speed dials every GM in USL trying to get you $60K and a starting job. Good luck, kid.

Nonetheless, Bassett was good enough in 2025 to not only be on the long end of the bench in the 18-man lineup, but also get into a bunch of games; 15 games, to be exact. And to eat some minutes and give the starters a rest. And that is something every team needs.

R2 player and 1st round Superdraft pick Billo Diop might get those minutes this year. He was a pure scorer for the Cobras6, but if he’s gonna be the 18th man this year, he should be prepared to sub on as a winger, a striker, or even a number 10 / false 9 for garbage time minutes. Same goes for Donavan Phillips, who just won the Mac Hermann Trophy as the NCAA’s best men’s soccer player in 2025. He’s a striker/forward on a team with a bunch of strikers ahead of him.

Here’s a weird thought. The Rapids drafted 3 forwards in the 2025 MLS Superdraft, all of whom (Phillip, Alex Harris, and Sydney Wathuta) are still with the club. The Rapids used their first 3 picks in the 2026 Superdraft to grab more forwards, taking Diop, Mitchell Baker, and Wahabu Musa. This ‘stocking up on forwards’ could be a Pádraig Smith arbitrage idea: paying for strikers is crazy expensive, so draft a dozen of ‘em and if one works out, it’s way cheaper than the transfer fee for a 36-year-old Didier Drogba. Or it could be an imminent signal that the club is going to sell Rafa Navarro and they need to stock the pond with potential backups for Rafa’s heir apparent, Darren Yapi. Or it could mean nothing and the Rapids scouting department just liked those dudes better than some other dudes.

Verdict: Life is like a box of chocolates. 🍫

Sometimes you draft and play Moïse Bombito and sell him to France for $7million. Sometimes you draft and play Sam Raben, he’s a bench guy for the Switchbacks, and he goes on to study for his doctorate in Physical Therapy at Duke.7 You just never know.

Subtraction: Oliver Larraz. Addition: Hamzat Ojediran

Position: DM

Minutes to replace: 2458.

Larraz’ two years on the senior team were full of unfulfilled promise. He had steel in the tackle, but not enough. He couldn’t quite get the hang of making a tough pass under pressure at full speed. There were occasional little errors for turnovers here and there. It all resulted in a -0.69 G+ in 2024, -0.67 G+ in 2025. Maybe there’s a little bit more development there, or maybe the right coach or the right system can unlock Larraz’ potential. If so, it’ll come with his new club, Vancouver Whitecaps. Godspeed, dear ginger ninja.

Meanwhile the Rapids have acquired his replacement, Hamzat Ojediran, from RC Len in the French 1st division. Hamzat had only 416 minutes there, so there’s not much to go on. And there’s no guarantee that he even beats Josh Atencio for the starting spot out of camp. Moreover, Hamzat’s highlight reel on youtube is not particularly illuminating or inspiring. But the Front Office is sure they have their man, and I know this because Ojediran’s transfer fee is reportedly $3 million. If he comes good, it could make the season. If he’s a bust, he’d be the biggest bust in team history: bigger than Nana Boateng and Yannick Boli combined.

Verdict: Unknown. Big gamble 🎰

Subtraction: Michael Edwards. Addition: Lucas Herrington.

Position: CB

Minutes to replace: 27.

Forgive me if I ramble a little bit about the Rapids centerback depth here. TL;DR, it’s bad.

“Big Mike” as Matt liked to call him was a 6’4” centerback. Edwards originally joined the Rapids ahead of the 2021 season – he was a Homegrown with DC United. And in his time with the Rapids, he’s mostly been … not with the Rapids. He spent parts of 2021 and 2022 with the Colorado Switchbacks; 2023 and 2024 with R2; and with Charleston Battery. He had 2 starts with the senior team in 2024 and a total of 328 minutes, including a start in US Open Cup that year. For Charleston, he started most of May and June, then hit the bench.

That’s a lot of effort to say that the Rapids gave this guy a chance to earn a shot in the first division for five years, and it just didn’t happen, and so they’ve moved on. Edwards will likely catch on in USL Championship or USL1 next year.

As 2025 drew to a close, Colorado had Matthew Senanou, Nate Jones, and Edwards on the roster as ‘CBs of the future.’ Jones and Edwards both had their options declined with the senior team, and Senanou’s option was declined for R2. In other words, the Rapids are starting all over at CB. There’s a few guys at R2: Vincent Rinaldi, Charlie Harper, and James Cameron. But really right now, there’s a severe lack of depth at this position for the Rapids. It’s Rob Holding, Noah Cobb, Ian Murphy, and offseason pickup Lucas Herrington.

Herrington is 18 years old and just relocated from the Australian A League. He’s started every match for the Brisbane Roar from October 2025 till literally two weeks ago. The kid has been a part of the Australian U19 and U20 teams. The Rapids liked him enough to sign him to a four year deal with an option for a fifth. The good news for Herrington is that he’ll get some run because there simply aren’t a lot of other options – unless the team makes a signing in the next month and sends Herrington to R2 or on loan. But right now, Lucas has a great opportunity to show his stuff.

I started by saying that the depth at CB is bad. It’s not so much bad as untested. Last year, Maxsö, Holding, Murphy, Cobb, Edwards, and the departed Chidozie Awaziem played 7,205 minutes. Of that, Holding, Cobb, and Murphy played 2,150 minutes. So that’s 5,055 minutes of ‘gee, I hope this works.’

Verdict: Unknown. No downside risk, all upside reward.🍹 But also - what if we need Herrington to play 1,000 minutes?

Subtraction: Rafa Santos**. Addition: None.

Position: LB

Minutes to replace: 417

Rafa Santos was fine, but he wasn’t an improvement over Sam Vines, who posted the best Goals Added of any Rapids Fullback last year with a very modest +0.48. All the rest were in negative numbers. Over the past three seasons, out of 13 fullbacks, only 5 had positive (against an ‘average FB’ set at 0.0) G+ numbers. Only one had positive numbers in two seasons: Sammy Vines. So at this point, the job belongs to Sam. He went 1,440 minutes last season and 2,451 minutes in 2024, so they’ll need him to stay healthy as much as possible. Jackson Travis is here to back him up. And he was fun in 2025 - very dribbly, has potential, only 20 years old. But he was rough in spots too, and has a yucky G+ number (-0.57 in only 748 minutes) to show for it.

**Note: Santos is out of contract and hasn’t landed anywhere new. So it is possible that he ends up back with the Rapids. He made $401,188 in 2025, and I suspect he wants that much or more to stay in MLS. Also, if he came back, I assume he’d either be the backup or have to compete for his job, and maybe he doesn’t want that. Take that all together and it means I think he’s gone.

Verdict: In Sam We Trust. (Mostly because he’s the only real option.)

…

So did the Rapids get better in the offseason, or get worse? Well, they got a little bit better. Sure, I counted Rob Holding as a ‘winter transfer’ even though he came in the Summer window. That’s because he only played in six matches for Colorado in 2025. So he’s like a new player. But the big pickups to focus on are Hamzat Ojediran and Dante Sealy, and they both seem to be good players who will be upgrades over what Colorado had before. Ojediran is a little harder to predict, but that’s the risk/reward part of buying a young player that hasn’t seen a lot of action yet.

Colorado still seem thin at a few positions. Here’s my latest suggested depth chart.

So what didn’t get addressed in the offseason? Well:

• Colorado still needs a true Left Winger/ Left Midfielder.

• There’s not enough depth at CB if someone gets injured.

• And unless Reggie Cannon has a rebound from a sub-par year in 2025, Right Back is perhaps the weakest spot on the starting roster.

• AND if Rava Navarro gets sold to Brazil, then the team will need puts all its trust in Darren Yapi to score 15 goals. Or maybe buy a guy.

So I think the Rapids probably have one more move in store before opening day: either for CB depth, or an LW, or they sell Rafa, or add an FB. We have 30 days to find out.

— — — — — — — —

*: This is a ‘Big Lebowski’ reference. In truth, there were neither a lot of ins nor outs. Rather, there were a few modest moves.

In the beginning, there was… the MLS Superdraft.

When MLS began in 1996, there was barely a youth academy system in America. Sure, youth soccer clubs existed. But good soccer players played BOTH club AND high school soccer, and they generally weren’t identified until they got to college.1 There was no academy soccer that created a path to a pro team, as existed in Germany and England and Italy at that time, because there were no pro teams. A youth soccer player’s greatest hope was to get a scholarship to North Carolina or Duke or UCLA and go to college for free and then get his MBA and become a stockbroker or something.

And at the outset of the inaugural season of Major League soccer, the college draft wasn’t just essential to building your team – it was one of the only ways to do it.2

As the league grew up, the draft continued to be critical to building a winning roster. The Superdraft produced every sort of player.

The Superdraft produced Hall of Famers like Pablo Mastroeni (1998 draft, Round 2, Pick 13 of the Miami Fusion) and Brian Ching (2001 draft, Round 2, pick 16 of the LA Galaxy.

And it also produced guys you’ve never heard of, like Teófilo Cubillas, Jr. and Tim Glowienka.

The Superdraft also produced hundreds of guys that formed the bulk of the rosters, but might not go on to be well remembered by fans – the Andre Akpans and Ned Grabavoys and Ugo Ihemelus and Nathan Sturgises of the league.

Since 2013, when MLS set a standard for its clubs of providing U13, U15, and U17 boys academy soccer at no cost to families, a larger and larger number of the best players began skipping college and turning pro at 18. That meant that a smaller and smaller number of the most impactful players went to college and were later drafted.

Other folks have looked at this overall decline in importance league-wide. Charles Boehm did a nice piece for MLSsoccer.com in 2023. American Soccer Analysis has looked at the results of the Superdraft in a few articles. This one by Scott Knuth has a lovely graphic showing how unbelievably rare Dominique Badji was – an unparalleled diamond in the rough. And this one from Nate Gilman gives you those plot charts that show you that yes, players with higher Goals Added (G+) usually are higher draft picks, and higher picks also play more minutes. No surprises there.

Overall, the Colorado Rapids, an MLS original team, have had their highs and lows of the Superdraft, much like most other MLS teams. And over time, much like most of the rest of the league, the importance of the Superdraft has started to wane as teams produce more and more of their own players out of MLS academies. Below, I break down every draftee in Rapids history since 2010 in an effort to track the degree of importance for the draft.3 I think it would be fair to say that ‘as go the Rapids, so too the rest of the league’: the MLS draft isn’t as critical to Colorado and it probably isn’t as critical to any of the other 30 teams in the league. But at the very least, I think I can say that the draft, while still important, isn’t as crucial to the team’s fortunes and roster building as it once was.

My Big, Beautiful Chart

Here’s the most important result of all my labor: a chart that shows the importance of the draft in terms of minutes contributed by a Rapids player.

The blue line shows you how many minutes a player drafted that year ultimately played for the Colorado Rapids over their entire career, which is probably our most important data point.

The red line shows how many minutes players drafted by the Rapids that year went on to play for any team over their entire careers. That includes any team in the fbref website dataset: so yes to teams in the Tippelaegen and USL; no to teams in Bulgaria and Armenia.

You see from the chart that the Rapids did not draft well in 2010-2012. Colorado didn’t have a first round pick in 2010, and their 2011 and 2012 picks (Eddie Ababio, Colin Givens, and Tony Cascio) just didn’t pan out. There weren’t a lot of players in 2011 drafted after Ababio that went on to significant careers: it was Joao Plata (3rd round, 49th pick) and Joe Willis (3rd round, 50th pick) and fifty guys you’ve never heard of.

But then the chart spikes upward dramatically. That’s the first year the Rapids really hit on – 2013. The team had had two first round picks that year, and both would become wildly successful players, both for the Rapids and beyond.

Deshorn Brown had two 10-goals seasons for Colorado and was sold to Vålårenga in Norway for a $350,000 transfer fee - the largest in club history at the time. And Dillon Powers not only won rookie of the year that year, but played 10,084 minutes all-time for the club from 2013 to 2017. He then played another 8,531 minutes for Orlando City, Dundee United, and Orange County, finally retiring in 2024. No other player drafted by the Rapids has played more career minutes.4

…

The blue line on the Big Beautiful chart above effectively plateaus in 2013, 2014 and 2015 – three years of drafting players in which Colorado derived over 10,000 minutes of production each and every year. These three years were the golden age of MLS Superdraft success for the Colorado Rapids.

In addition to Powers and Brown in 2013, the Rapids Front Office would select Marlon Hairston (6239 minutes for Colorado, 11,989 minutes in pro soccer), Jared Watts (5337 minutes for Colorado), and John Berner (4949 minutes in pro soccer) in 2014. John Berner is still playing soccer today.5

And in 2015 the team had the best draft in club history – picking Axel Sjoberg, Joseph Greenspan, and Dominique Badji. Those three guys put in 14,100 minutes for Colorado and 29,231 career minutes across all their teams. Badji, a 4th round afterthought, is one of the all-time greatest fourth round picks in MLS history, alongside Michael Bradley (2004 draft), Jonathan Bornstein (2006 draft), Luis Robles (2008 draft), Sean Johnson (2010 draft), and Jack Elliott (2017 draft). In many years of MLS history, they don’t even bother to hold the draft past the third round.

So 2015 was the clubs high water mark.

As you can see, both from the line chart and the spreadsheet, the 2016 and 2017 drafts were, uh, not as productive for Colorado. Dennis Castillo and Sam Hamilton both got cups of coffee with the club before moving along to Costa Rica and USL, respectively. Jaime Siaj has had a long and successful career playing in Jordan, Romania, Kuwait, Italy, Lebanon, Ireland, Canada, and the US.

Overall those years were probably thin for Colorado because they didn’t have any picks higher than 15th. In 2017, Jeremy Ebobisse was the 4th overall pick; Lalas Abubakar went 5th, and Julian Gressel went 8th. Nobody of note was taken beyond RSL’s 13th pick of Reagan Dunk. As the draft goes on, there’s just less talent available. Again, Nate Gilman’s article pretty much demonstrates that with charts and graphs: over time, players picked after the first round contribute fewer and fewer minutes at the MLS level.

…

Not much happened in 2018, either. That was I think the weirdest draft I’ve ever watched as a Rapids pundit. The team went out and picked multiple players who were very good, but didn’t go on to sign with the team – instead, going abroad first. Alan Winn was relinquished to Nashville, who at the time were still a USL team. Frantzy Pierrot graduated from Coastal Carolina and signed with Royal Mouscron in Belgium in his rookie season rather than join the Rapids. He’s put together a pretty great soccer career - going to Ligue 2’s Guingamp, then on to Maccabi Haifa, one of the big four clubs in the Israeli Premier League.6 He’s now with AEK Athens.

Brian Iloski signed with a team in Poland, sat on the bench, and ended up in USL for the rest of his career. The Rapids did find some use for Niki Jackson, a big, fast striker who wowed to start his career and then quietly faded from the limelight.

Colorado would have two more big successes in the draft: Andre Shinyashiki in 2019 and Moïse Bombito in 2022. Shinyashiki was the result of knowing your guy and doing what it took to get him. Andre was playing at Denver University, and over the summers he was training with the Rapids U23 team. The coaches and players knew him, and thus when the time came, Pádraig Smith traded up to go get him. The Rapids gave Chicago $100K in GAM to moved up from pick 15 to pick 5. Chicago would eventually punt that pick onto Minnesota, who would select Chase Gasper, who has been mostly a depth piece from 2022 to 2025. Moïse Bombito was obviously the find of the century – a big, strong, fast centerback that wasn’t on anyone’s radar when he joined the University of New Hampshire. Colorado took him with a Generation Adidas contract, and his speed was so head turning that OGC Nice offered $7 million for him in 2024. Big success for Colorado, even if it feels mostly like a stroke of luck, to be honest.

…

The rest of the list – players drafted 2024 to 2026 – are in the ‘too soon to tell’ pile. A pair of Rapids draftees, Palmer Ault, and Efetobo Aror, stayed in college for 2025. After transferring from Butler to Indiana, Ault had 15 goals, 7 assists in 14 games as the Hoosiers went 12-1-6 (WTL) and made the NCAA tournament, getting bumped off in the first round by Saint Louis. Aror, a midfielder, played in 19 games for a total of 1538 minutes and the Portland Pilots went 14-6-2 and advanced to the Elite Eight in the NCAA Soccer Tourney.

Copeland, Harper, Wathuta, Senanou, and Alex Harris all spent serious time with Rapids 2, and might matriculate to the senior team in 2026 or 2027. Kimani Stewart-Baynes was loaned to Lexington SC until he sustained an ankle injury that shut him down for August and September. He had 3 appearances for R2 in MLS Next Pro, so 2025 was something of a lost season for the Generation Adidas pick from the University of Maryland. I think a lot of folks hoped he could become the kind of low-cost develop-at-home winger that Colorado desperately needs to be producing, since the team doesn’t have an interest in spending big across the board, but KSB’s path to the big leagues seems to be temporarily derailed.

Wayne Frederick was drafted out of Duke and played 1152 minutes in 2024 for R2. The Rapids gave him 2 starts and 222 minutes with the senior team in 2025, and it feels like Frederick might find a role as a regular sub in 2026. Kimani Stewart-Baynes will be 21 years old in 2026; while Frederick is just 22, so both players are still in their ‘growth/learning/maturation’ phase.

I’m excited about the potential of Mamadou Billo Diop, a 19-year-old that R2 signed from Florida that just started tearing up MLS Next Pro from the word go: he had 14 goals in 1614 minutes, including two braces and a hat trick. Colorado famously had to spunk their first draft pick on him because he was not under the clubs control. That was weird and annoying, but it does, unfortunately, make sense. A player that isn’t the property of an MLS academy is up-for-grabs to any team. Diop came from a sports-oriented high school in Daytona Beach called DME Academy, and until Colorado brought him over, it was thought that he wasn’t on anyone’s radar. But according to reporting done by Burgundy Wave, an MLS team expressed interest in having him added to the draft, which surprised the Rapids. Anyhow, kid scored a lot of goals and I think there’s a chance he gets 200-300 minutes with the senior team next year, depending on how our new head coach Matt Wells feels about #PlayYourKids.

…

The draft has become less critical to filling out minutes for the Rapids over time, as we’ve demonstrated with all our charts and spreadsheets. But the Superdraft for Colorado will still unearth a gem roughly every four years for the team. It’s unlikely a draft will ever again produce both a Deshorn Brown and a Dillon Powers in 2013. But Colorado still discovered Dominiqie Badji in 2015; Andre Shinyashiki in 2019; and Moïse Bombito in 2023. There are regular MLS players to be had to supplement the guys you get from the academy and via free agency and big transfer fee international signings.

Even though it isn’t quite as rich as it was once upon a time, as long as the Colorado Rapids continue to be one of MLS’ more frugal and scrappy clubs, the MLS Superdraft will continue to be of critical importance to the front office team in Commerce City.

A week ago, on November 13, MLS commissioner Don Garber announced that in 2027, the league will (at long last) flip-flop the calendar. MLS will leave behind the Spring-to-Fall schedule that has been in place since its inception in 1996 and go to ‘the European calendar’, with the season starting in Fall, running through the Winter, and ending in late Spring. This schedule switch has been discussed ad nauseam for at least a decade now.

And I’ve been on record for at least a decade as hating this potential (now actual) move. If you are a follower of the Colorado Rapids and have noticed in-stadium attendance over the years, it starts pretty slow in the cold early months of a Colorado Spring, and often struggles in Fall. Additionally, before the details of exact timing had been revealed, it was my assumption that the calendar would resemble that of Germany, which takes a break for between four and six weeks from mid December through January. That would make for potentially two full months of freezing-cold games on the frozen tundra of Commerce City.

But, when the details were revealed … I didn’t hate this as much as I’d thought I would.

According to Paul Tenorio’s reporting in The Athletic,

A winter break would take place in December and January. Games would likely pause from around the second week in December through the first or third week in February.

That means that weather-wise, this is effectively an addition of perhaps two or three cold home games: one in December, two in February. Colorado has gotten pretty close to that before. MLS Cup 2010 took place on November 21, 2010 in Toronto. The Rapids opened their 2018 and 2025 seasons with Concacaf matches in February. Yeah, those aren’t fun. I was at both the 2018 and 2025 matches, and both rank in the top eight of coldest MLS matches played in history.

However, with the robust winter break MLS has announced, the change will be pretty minor. Mostly, the league is simply reversing the start and end times, and adding a June-to-mid-July break as well: the new calendar is only actually a small increase in cold weather games.

There are three other impacts on the Rapids. One is bad, the other two are good.

The bad news: there’s no world in which MLS will be playing on July 4. That means the Rapids fireworks extravaganza– a tradition that stretches back to the team’s inaugural season – is probably gone. For sure that’s a bummer, but potentially it can be an opportunity for the ‘Pids. July 4 will likely be pre-season for MLS teams, and I can envision a sold-out exhibition match against a team like UNAL Tigres, River Plate, Wrexham United, or another team.1 Still, that midseason July 4 game at DSGP was always a hoot, and if it goes away forever it’d be a shame.

On the upside, Colorado Rapids now can breathe a little easier about competing directly with the NWSL team, Denver Summit FC. The NWSL schedule runs March to November, through the Summer, and so the two leagues beginning and ending at different times should help keep soccer fans interested in both teams year round, rather than disgruntled Rapids fans and local soccer noobs naturally gravitating every Spring to the Summit. That said, the Rapids will still need to work to hold on to their fans attention. In the old days, Rapids-casuals would abandon the team every September as the NFL season got going. Now the Rapids marketing team have to fight for attention against the Broncos every Fall, and then hang on for dear life if the team is in the doldrums in March to keep people from heading to Summit games. Still, I think the schedule flip will be ok for gate receipts.

The other good thing about switching the calendar is that MLS and most European leagues will have the same transfer windows: a midseason window in January, and an offseason one from June to August. That’s good for teams, for GMs, for players, and for football. European players no longer have to depart a team in Germany, Spain, or Denmark at the end of their season and join an MLS team that’s already halfway into their year - which perhaps means their bodies will get a little more time to rest and recuperate. General managers2 will have an easier time reshaping their clubs as the globally available player pool will be expanded and easier to discern.

I guess on the whole what I’m saying is: I’m ok with this move. I didn’t find it necessary, but it isn’t the end of the world, either.

Maybe my feeling is, after all the years of talk, the practical realities are much ado about nothing. I don’t see the big deal of a league that plays 9 months a year and effectively changes which months they AREN’T playing. I don’t actually think the synchronized transfer window matters that much. I am bummed that there might be two or three more cold weather games with lousy attendance in Commerce City, but it’s not like I’m worried about whether poor Josh Kroenke will be missing a meal because of it.

I do think competing against Major League Baseball in the summer for casual fans is easier than competing in Fall and Winter with a crowded sports landscape that includes the NFL, NBA, and NHL. But I also think 30 years on, MLS as a league stands on its own.

It’s probably mostly good for MLS. For the 2026 season, there’s no changes ahead. The mild headache is that in order to flop the schedules, the 2027 ‘season’ will be a ‘sprint season’ of 14 games plus playoffs from February to May. It’s basically the Covid-shortened 2020 season all over again, this time with fans. I hate when sports have to append an asterisk to a stat or a season, and the 2027 MLS Champs are unfortunately going to be the 2027 MLS Champs*.

To be honest, that might be the best opportunity the Colorado Rapids will have this decade to get a trophy.

Roster Moves, Part I - Subtractions

The hokey-pokey of the MLS roster goes:

• Options Declined, Players Waived

• Free Agents declared

• Re-entry draft part 1 and part 2

• MLS SuperDraft; Homegrown signings announced

• Actually interesting news about new signings

Matt and I always starve for news in November and December as the roster gets smaller, then spend January and February freaking out about EVERY. NEW. PLAYER. Even the Kip Colvey and Sidnei Tavares-type signings.

From first glance, Colorado doesn’t have as much roster flexibility as one would want for a team that finished 11th - there are only five players on the 18-man Senior Roster with expiring contracts, and another six on the Supplemental Roster.3

But even though there aren’t a whole lot of open roster spots to bring in new players to insert into the starting lineup, there will be some money to make some moves. My spreadsheet suggests Colorado go into 2026 with $3.5 million in available money to spend on the roster, including Cap space, GAM, and TAM. Plus, there’s an open Designated Player slot, and LOTS of international slots to either occupy or sell off: only Conor Ronan and Daouda Amadou are internationals. That said, the moves won’t happen until later.

But here are my predictions for players contracts and departures to be announced on or before November 26.

Calvin Harris - PREDICTION: Renewed for 2026, Club option for 2027.

Harris had a Goals Added of 0.96 in 2025, third-best on the team. He also had 5 goals, 0 assists, on a salary of just $152,000. He’s a proper winger on a team that doesn’t really have any other proven wingers.4 The only reason he leaves is if someone makes an offer for him that Pádraig Smith can’t refuse.

Andreas Maxsø - PREDICTION: Out of contract, departs for Denmark.

The Rapids already announced at the end-of-year presser that Maxsø was moving on. He wasn’t great, and his $1.4 million salary in 2025 was a hefty chunk of change. Which can now be spent on any number of positions that need upgrades, which is pretty much all of them except perhaps goalkeeper.

Ollie Larraz - PREDICTION: Out of contract, off to Europe.

Ollie was a solid midfielder, maybe a bit underwhelming. His -0.67 Overall G+ could be about him, or it could be about the team around him being kinda meh. It was mentioned that Larraz wants to test the waters in Europe. If he really wants to play abroad, I imagine he might garner interest with a midtable Scottish team or a League One side. Would that, and the sorta meh salary those teams can send, be worth it for a transatlantic move? I wouldn’t do it, but we’ll see how Ollie feels.

Michael Edwards - PREDICTION: Out of contract, signs in USL in 2026.

Mike’s been on my Rapids roster spreadsheets since 2021. You know who else was on the 2021 roster? Will Vint, and Matt Hundley, and Phillip Mayaka, and Jeremy Kelly. None of those guys panned out. The Rapids kept hanging on to Edwards hoping he’d develop and breakthrough. At the age of 24, Edwards was mostly a bench player for USL-C’s Charleston Battery in 2025. I think he’ll make a permanent home in USL going forward.

Ian Murphy - PREDICTION: Club option not picked up.

Murphy played 1164 minutes on the backline for Colorado in 2025 while earning $447,500. You can find a backup CB that can help you miss the playoffs for a lot less than half-a-million.

Jackson Travis - PREDICTION: Option picked up for 2026.

Travis’ defense leaves much to be desired. But he’s 19, he’s fast, he plays a position where there just aren’t a lot domestic players, and he costs just $106,500 a year. You absolutely pick that contract up. Or extend/renegotiate it through 2028.

Darren Yapi - PREDICTION: Signs new contract through 2028, Club Option for 2029.

Homegrown Yapi had 8 goals, 2 assists in 17 starts and 12 appearances coming off the bench. He was paid just $114,833. Yapi is under 22 and is eligible to be a U22 ‘Young Money’ player, which means that his salary cap charge is $200,000. Anything over that is just Kroenke cash that doesn’t affect the clubs ability to sign other players. I expect the Rapids will pay him between $800K and $1.4 mil to keep him around.

Nico Hansen - PREDICTION: Option picked up for 2026.

Backup goalkeeper Nico Hansen was, in my opinion, better than Zack Steffen. There, I said it. I think the Rapids hang onto him till Zack’s deal expires at the end of 2026 and then install him as the new #1. But I say that because that’s what I’d do. The Rapids, as we know, don’t always do what I think they should.

Sam Bassett - PREDICTION: Club Option exercised.

You keep Cole’s brother for the paltry sum of $81,000 because A) he might continue to improve and become a solid starter in MLS and B) you really don’t want to piss off Cole Bassett in order to save the equivalent of the take at the Marco’s Pizza and the Dippin’ Dots stands for the month of April.

Nate Jones - PREDICTION: Club Option not exercised.

Jones started 13 games on loan with the Las Vegas Lights. Their 50 Goals Against was among the worst in USL. Nate’s already 24 years old, so I don’t think the Rapids think he’s worth a roster spot for next year. As my grandmother would say, ‘He should live and be well.’ Which was really code for ‘He should fuck off and I don’t really care what happens to him.’ But it was the nice polite way to say that.

If it all goes the way I see it, and based on the quality of guys on the roster, here is my first draft of a depth chart going into 2026. I’ll be wrong on some of this stuff: some guys will get resigned/retained that I thought were toast; Pádraig will trade two guys I was sure would be here. This roster doesn’t include Rafa Navarro, who pundits think will be sold back to a Brazilian club, or Reggie Cannon, who I think the Rapids should offload at a fire-sale price or cut outright. But both might be back and starting for the 2026 Rapids.5

Eight open spots? Let’s go shopping!

Oh yeah. Also: we need a coach. Someone should get right on that.

…

‘We made the New York Times!’ Yeah, but not in a good way

The paper of record did a hopeful piece focused on Rhode Island FC’s gorgeous new stadium entitled ‘Can Soccer Stadiums Revitalize American Cities?’ Very interesting; all about the real estate and business end of constructing a new stadium.

However, the author, Danielle McLean, cast some shade in the direction of KSE, writing

At least 12 professional soccer-specific stadium projects that have been completed since 2000 have included mixed-use development with housing as part of the proposal. None have been fully realized, but five have been partially completed.

…

None of the 600,000 square feet designated for housing, retail, bars, restaurants and commercial space as part of the Colorado Rapids’ $183 million stadium project in Commerce City, Colorado, for instance, has yet been realized. The stadium opened in 2007.

The Rapids’ ownership group is still exploring mixed-use possibilities with city leaders, while evaluating its operations and the land around the stadium, Mike Neary, the group’s executive vice president of business operations and real estate, said in a statement.

Yeah, right Mike. The Rapids are ‘still exploring mixed-use possibilities’ for Victory Crossing like I’m ‘still considering becoming a prima ballerina’ or like Liberace was ‘still looking for the right girl to settle down with.’ It’s been almost 20 fucking years. Victory Crossing is not ‘zombie’ dead – it’s ‘in an urn on the mantle in ashes’ dead. I’m embarrassed the club is still subjecting the fan base to the charade that we’ll ever get to head to a restaurant before the game, a bar after the game, and then crash at our two-bedroom ‘Victory Crossing’ apartment Saturday night before heading back to the Monday through Friday grind as chief brain surgeon at the Anschutz Medical Campus on Monday. Come to think of it, it’s as likely I’ll become a brain surgeon as Victory Crossing ever gets built.

The Denver suburbs keep growing around Dick’s at an increasing rate - Beeler Park to the east, Northfield to the south, and more new construction out by Peña Blvd - and yet the empty dirt and tumbleweed expanses around the stadium remain the territory of nothing more than prairie dogs and broken dreams. At the rate things are going, DJT will open up the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Refuge to condos, or oil drilling, before Josh and Stan even let a pair of taco trucks park regularly across from 6000 Victory Way in Commerce City as part of a ‘mixed-use commercial space’. What a pity.

Yeah, we pretty much saw this coming.

After a strong run at the beginning of the season, Colorado slumped by mid-year back into a predictable and unremarkable overall season; they ended 2025 with more losses than wins overall, and as a result, they narrowly missed the playoffs. In a league where basically two-thirds of the teams make the playoffs. The Rapids began the year in league play with 16 points in their first 10 games. Over the next 24 games, they pulled in just 25 points, which in any league is just not good enough.

This is pretty much the ethos of the team: several mediocre-to-bad seasons, sprinkled with a good season here and there. Rinse, repeat. For specifics, check this post from earlier this year ‘The Downward Spiral.’

I optimistically thought these Rapids might be able to lash together a playoff spot out of the talented contributions of Rafael Navarro, Djordje Mihailovic, and Cole Bassett. Alas, Djordje asked to be traded, Cole was underwhelming, and the rest of the team wasn’t up to the task. That’s not unsurprising: Colorado’s $13.3 million payroll1 ranked 24th out of 31 teams in MLS. So finishing 22nd in points is to be expected.

I picked the team to finish seventh, but really, that was a placeholder for ‘anywhere from 11th to 5th, but I’m not super optimistic.’ I didn’t miss by much – by comparison I picked Vancouver for 10th and San Diego for 14th. Those are big misses.

But here’s maybe the important thing – the spiritual overview of where we are – which Matt and I have been processing on the podcast for the past few weeks. Colorado continues to spend in the bottom half of the league, and hope that the academy, Pádraig Smith, and magical thinking will produce a miracle. This is becoming tiresome for old school hard core fans like you and me. The Johnny-And-Sally-Come-Latelys to the Rapids will always pop in to a Rapids game and then forget about the team when the NFL season starts. Season ticket holders will quit and the team will somehow convince someone else to invest financially and emotionally in the team. The Colorado Rapids don’t seem to aspire to be anything above mid-table, year after year, and there’s no indication that that will change anytime soon.

The end of the 2025 season signifies 14 straight seasons without any trophies - in a league where there are now five trophies on offer every year.2 Below, I will try to make sense of why, once again, 2025 was a year below expectation.3

The Player Eye Test

First off, I’m going to share my opinion based on the eye test and some of the things I’ve said on the podcast about how certain players performances had positive or negative effect the season – whether they were effective or not. Then I’ll go back and look at what the advanced metrics tell us, particularly Goals Added, which always does a good job of converting what happens into a number.

Here we go, rapid fire:

Mihailovic was great and then he left.

Cole Bassett was his usual hustlin’ aggressive self, but he was moved from attacking midfield to defense midfield to the wing and his production declined.

All the fullbacks were below average at pretty much everything.

Andreas Maxsø is an average defender that gives you little in the attack. And that’s devastating for a DP-level player4 that plays every game.

Ollie Larraz is a good runner, good defender, sloppy passer.

Josh Atencio is a mediocre runner, mediocre runner, sloppy passer.

If you catch Rafa Navarro making a run into the box at the exact right moment, he’s a great striker. But ask him to pass; shoot from distance; cross; head a ball in; dribble his man; or create space and make some magic – and he can’t do it.

OK. Let’s compare that to the numbers.

Rapids Player Performance, By the Numbers

And here’s the numbers. In general, I was right most of the time. Skim this chart below, focusing on the Goals Added number in the final column, and then read my takes below. Of course, take with a grain of salt that G+ is not perfect, but I think it generally describes who was good and who was not.5

Djordje Mihailovic was, indeed, quite good – recording the team’s highest overall G+ of 2.03 mostly on the back of his +1.96 Passing G+ and +0.73 Dribbling G+. He wasn’t really the cause of the Rapids success, though, and his departure didn’t doom the squad. Colorado amassed a 9-6-11 record up till his departure on August 7, and they went 3-2-4 after he left. He indeed was good, and indeed, he left. My take is Djordje being better or worse in 2025 was not the problem.

Cole Bassett’s 2025 overall G+ was a fairly league average +0.28. In 2024 he had the highest G+ on the Rapids, with a +2.06 mark. So Cole wasn’t as good. He had +0.89 Receiving G+ in 2024, and a +0.20 this year. He had a +0.79 Shooting G+ in 2024, and a +0.19 in 2025. He just … wasn’t … as good. Is that because he played several different positions? Is it the guys around him? Unclear. In my humble opinion, Cole Bassett is a really good supporting player in a normal year, but this year he was kinda meh, and that hurt the team.

Reggie Cannon had a -1.79 Overall G+. Keegan Rosenberry had a -0.43 G+. Jackson Travis had a -0.57 in just 748 minutes. Sam Vines had a +0.48 G+. [Rafael Santos’ - 0.16 in only 417 minutes lacks enough data to be conclusive.] So the fullbacks were a net negative of -2.31 G+ for this team. That needs work going forward.

Andreas Maxsø’s -0.61 Passing G+ was third-worst on the team. His interrupting G+ of -0.21 is a bummer for a defender. He was possibly more disappointing that my eye test uncovered. If he’s playing at 4 am this winter playing a Saudi team called ‘Al Something-or-other’, I will not be tuning in.

Ollie Larraz’ +0.10 Interrupting G+ implies he was an ok runner, ok defender. His - 0.20 Passing G+ demonstrates he was also an ok passer. Collectively, he’s ok. I think he’s probably best suited to being a 70th minute D-mid sub than a regular starter, and playing him 2458 minutes, 4th-most on the team, is not great.

Josh Atencio’s + 0.82 Interrupting G+ shows me that I need to get behind him more. He’s not a sloppy passer. I was wrong about him. I will stan Atencio more in 2026. I swear.

Rafa’s fantastic at gathering in a pass and taking a shot. He had the team’s highest G+. I should shut up and just say how great he is and how much worse this team would be without him. He’s also a really great pressing forward. DC’s Christian Benteke and Atlanta’s attacking mid Miguel Almirón aren’t doing that.

So my eyes are pretty good. But I like that math proved me a little wrong in spots.

What about Kevin Cabrál? He sucked. Did that ruin the team?

We will not speak of Kevin Cabrál anymore.

Lousy on the Road

The Rapids had a 8-4-5 (WTL) home record in 2025. Maybe this is a pipe dream, but if that was paired with a totally neutral (and hypothetical) 6-5-6 road record, would have resulted in a total of 51 points, good enough for sixth place in the Western Conference.

Instead, Colorado went a putrid 3-4-10 on the road in 2025, collecting just 13 points out of 51 total up for grabs. That’s 13th out 15 teams in the Western Conference. Only Sporting Kansas City and the LA Galaxy were worse. Road losses to poor teams like the Galaxy and SKC as well as Portland, DC United, Dallas and RSL were strong indicators that tactically and qualitatively, this team didn’t measure up. Maybe the team was too timid. Maybe the players need the additional benefits of altitude to outclass their opponents, but become underwhelming at sea level. I dunno. It’s not my job to fix this problem. Hell, it ain’t even my job to diagnose it. I do this for fun. Yeah, I’m weird. I know.

As Goes Zack Steffen, So Goes the Rapids

The Colorado Rapids went 4-4-3 (WTL) from February 22 through April 26 in MLS League play; which was a fairly decent 1.45 points per game.

From May 3 to August 18, Colorado had a record of 7-4-13, or 1.04 points per game. That’s pretty terrible. So to my mind, the Rapids had two seasons: Spring, and Train Wreck.

Figuring out what was different between those two stretches of the season is one good indicator of what worked and what didn’t in 2025.

In that first stretch of the season - the good stretch - Zack Steffen was the best goalkeeper in MLS according to G-xG, my favorite indicator of GK performance.

That -6.03 G-xG indicates Zack saved 6 extra goals over a normal goalkeeper in the first 9 games he played in the season (Adam Beaudry played one match against Portland, a 3-0 loss on March 22). That’s an unsustainably good rate over a full season – the best season-long G-xGs for a goalkeeper in MLS history since this stat began to be recorded in 2014 were Dorde Petrovic’s -10.75 in 2022; Kristijan Kahlina’s -10.47 in 2024; and Tim Melia’s -10.37 in 2017. Petrovic’s season was so bonkerballs good that New England flipped him to Bournemouth for a $17.5 million fee. Steffen, if he kept that -6.03 pace, would have had about a -15.50 G-xG.

Have I made you feel really great about what an amazing keeper Steffen is? Gee, sorry to get your hopes up kid. It didn’t last.

Here’s a list of MLS keepers G-xG stats from May 3 to October 18.

Yeah. That’s Steffen, now down as the 40th-best GK in MLS out of 61 keepers, with a +0.91 G-xG. Meanwhile Rapids backup Nicolas Hanson had a -4.13 G-xG in 903 minutes; good enough for 3rd in MLS over that stretch.

What I understand out of that is not that Steffen wasn’t very good this year - but rather that the Rapids weren’t as good as their record indicated. Once Steffen started playing like a normal goalkeeper and not a character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the team’s record turned poor.

Good Buildup, Poor Finishing

The Rapids were pretty decent in 2025 at getting into the final third to create a quality shot. Their offense produced 52.1 xG, 13th in MLS. Using the more advance American Soccer Analysis stat Goals Added, Colorado generated 47.32 G+, good enough for 8th in MLS. So they should have a lot goals, right? Um.

Colorado had only 43 goals in 2025 - that was 21st out of 31 teams in MLS. It’s never good in these end of year articles when I have to remind readers how many teams MLS has, because the Rapids are so close in proximity to the bottom.6

Simply put, they got a lot of guys that don’t hit their shots.

• Rafa Navarro underperformed his xG by 4.81 goals.

• Cole Bassett underperformed his xG by 3.15 goals.

• Ted Ku-Dipietro underperformed his xG by 2.11 goals.

• Ollie Larraz underperformed his xG by 1.53 goals.

• Chidozie Awaziem underperformed his xG by 1.84 goals.

• Another seven players underperformed by around 0.3 to 1.9 goals.7

You just can’t have that many ‘Ooooh! So close!’ reactions from the crowd without it corresponding to losses.

On a positive note, two players significantly exceeded their xG: Keegan Rosenberry and Darren Yapi. Yapi put away 8 goals on only 6.29 xG and only 1593 minutes. Maybe he should be starting every game?

We Used to Be Great at Set Piece Goals. And now, we’re not.

Colorado ended the season with just 2 goals from Dead-Ball Passes - meaning corners, free kicks, and throw-ins. That’s second-worst in MLS. (The LA Galaxy had zero goals from Dead-Ball Passes. They might want to take a look at that.) If you go back to 2019, 2020, and 2021, Colorado absolutely dominated on set pieces. Those were, of course, the days when Colorado midfielder Jack Price was in his prime.

Colorado simply doesn’t have that guy anymore - or anyone even remotely like him. LAFC has Son Min Heung. Miami has Leo Messi. Colorado has missed opportunity; specifically, 55 dead-ball restarts this past year considered ‘shot opportunities’, and 53 of those opportunities came to naught. That needs fixing.

…

That’s the post-mortem. It’s a little harsh; a little grim. We give no quarter here at HTHL, and of course, hindsight blah blah blah. There’s lot’s to fix, and about four months to fix it till the 2026 season.

Dear Chris Armas,

Back in 2018, probably sometime around June, I went out to Commerce City to cover the Rapids, who were in the midst of an eight-game losing streak under new manager Anthony Hudson. There were just two of us out at Field 20 that day: me, and Matt Pollard. Matt asked the first question, but prefaced it by saying “I apologize in advance if some of these questions are going to seem a bit tough,” to which Coach Hudson replied “Oh I understand, you guys. You’re only trying to do your jobs.” We proceeded to ask about the losses, and if he’d made some tactical errors or selected incorrect lineups. And Hudson dutifully answered the tough-but-fair questions. And we both wrote tough-but-fair articles as a result.

Hudson, mind you, presided over a disastrous Colorado Rapids team, and neither Matt Pollard nor I sugar-coated what happened on that day or any day afterwards. But Hudson was never rude with us in interviews or post-game conferences. Nor were Pablo Mastroeni or Robin Fraser, the other coaches Matt and I have interviewed.

Flash backwards to 2017, at the moribund end of the 2017 season in which Colorado finished on an abysmal 31 points in 11th out of 12 teams; or flash forward to the 2023 season when a player was suspended for taking cash from Brazilian mobsters in exchange for intentionally picking up yellow cards , and the team set a new low in performance, with just 27 points, or 0.79 per game. Through it all, rain or shine, win or lose, Matt Pollard would cover the press conference. Matt Pollard was at training, reporting and gathering quotes. I specifically remember a post-game where the only people at the post-game presser for Steve Cooke1 were Matt and I. Cooke, who was a class act, thanked us both for being the only writers that bothered to show up.2

And in between the games and the practices, Matt Pollard was also driving to his regular Monday through Friday nine-to-five job. Because almost nobody can actually earn a living as a soccer reporter in America.3 Because we all do it for love of the game, and the team, and not because it makes us rich or famous.

For those of you that missed it, Chris Armas was visibly frustrated, and rude, to Matt at the post-game press conference on Saturday night. After giving a snarky interruption to Matt’s question about the Rapids missing the playoffs – “Matt, we didn’t make the playoffs? Always good, you, uh, reminding me of this…” – Armas trashed Burgundy Wave’s coverage of the Rapids as “always negative” and “always poking holes in the team” and “attacking the coaching.”

I get that Armas is likely frustrated at the end of a long and unsuccessful season, but to turn his ire towards Burgundy Wave - the only outlet in the state of Colorado that has consistently covered the Rapids for the past fifteen years - is wrongheaded and petty. I’m not the only person that thought Chris was off-base here, either. Here’s social posts from Ben Wright, David Gass, Braidon Nourse, and Matt Doyle expressing their support for Matt and disappointment in you, Chris.

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I don’t think Matt or his fellow BW writers have written or said anything this season that most fans would find unreasonable. In the loss to RSL two weeks ago, Matt started his recap by saying “The Colorado Rapids have become predictable, underwhelming, and mid.” In the loss on September 20 to FC Dallas he tweeted “Sigh. That’s a howler from Zack. It’s simple mistakes like that that are probably keeping him off the USMNT roster.” In recapping the Rapids August 30 loss to Sporting KC, BW writer Spencer Baldwin wrote “If you thought the LA loss was bad, it got worse with the Rapids losing to a poor Sporting KC side 4-2.” Those assessments aren’t pleasant, but neither is rooting for a Colorado Rapids side that hasn’t won a trophy since 2010 and has arguably put together just two good seasons in the last ten.

This team wasn’t great, and they lost more games than they won, and they didn’t make the playoffs in a league where most of the teams make the playoffs, and Burgundy Wave and the Holding the High Line podcast effectively stated those facts while trying to explain WHY the team failed to the best of our ability. I don’t think it was unfair for me to say things on our podcast like ‘Cole Bassett should be played in a twin-pivot and not on the wing’ or ‘Paxten Aaronson runs around too much without a final product’ or ‘the backline let the team down, and they lost yet again.’

Fundamentally, the point of a post-game press conference is for the assembled humans in the room to attempt to clarify why the result was the result. And if the coach tells the reporters ‘we tried harder than they did, and we are actually better than the score indicated, but we still lost’ - the reporters have an obligation to challenge the accuracy of that narrative. And if the coach doesn’t like the adjectives that go with the recap: ‘predictable’; ‘underwhelming’; ‘poor’; then the coach needs to generate better results. Period.

Chris, if you don’t like the way we describe the game when the Colorado Rapids lose, then don’t lose so damn much, buddy. If you don’t like being reminded by a reporter that you missed the playoffs in the setup to a question, then … make the damn playoffs.

I can’t believe I’m quoting Anthony Hudson as an example of a coach who actually understood the assignment, but I am. Hudson understood that we’re only just doing our jobs in writing and reporting what we see. I get that you’re frustrated, Chris. But you shouldn’t take your frustration out on the reporters.4 They can’t change the results for you. They can only change the adjectives and adverbs that get utilized in describing the latest win, loss, or draw.

Chris, take a good hard look at the causes of this seasons failure and set your mind to addressing those failures. If you and your team do your best to honestly and objectively solve the problems with the tactics and the personnel that led to this past subpar season, you and your staff can fix what ails the Rapids and deliver a successful 2026 season - which is what we all, collectively, wish for.

But first, send Matt Pollard a giant fruit basket or a bottle of Stranahans as an apology. He deserves nothing less for putting up with your foolishness and disrespect this past Saturday night.

For a wounded fanbase trying to recover after losing Djordje Mihailovic, nothing eases the pain like a good transfer signing. So Colorado supporters are likely feeling a little better now that they’ve learned about incoming winger Alexis Manyoma. But of course, that only really matters is Manyoma is any good.

A good indication of odds of whether Manyoma, the 22-year-old from Colombia, will a hit or or a miss is the recent history of Rapids signings and purchases from abroad. How well have foreign acquisitions gone in the recent past? And so I took a look. The ground rules for players I looked back at for this article are as follows:

1. I looked at players acquired (by loan or transfer) from outside the US.

2. I did not look at US-born players returning from a stint abroad. That excludes a bunch of ‘known quantity’ guys like Cole Bassett, Sam Vines, Reggie Cannon and Djordje Mihailovic.

3. I also did not include foreign players the Rapids scooped up in moves made within MLS. So no Aboubacar Keita or Kevin Cabrál or Gustavo Vallecilla. I also did not review foreign players acquired through MLS draft. No Moïse Bombito or Mohamed Omar here.

You could read this article as a scorecard of how the Rapids Front Office of Pádraig Smith, Fran Taylor, and new scouting director Alex Aldridge have been doing as of late. Or you could just read this as ‘you win some, you lose some’ – and by that I mean that some transfers are going to be amazing and others… less amazing. For the guys no longer with the Rapids, I’ll also do a short ‘where are they now?’ riff. Which, by the way, I love doing that. I can dive down dorky internet rabbit holes all day long – and since I’m on vacation right now, I will gladly do so. We’ll start with recent pickups and work backwards. Here’s 10 guys the Rapids signed from abroad, and how they did.

Ali Fadal

Date Acquired: 2/8/2025

Date of Departure: NA

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Free Transfer from Valencia CF (Spain)

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: Zero minutes

Grade: NG

Fadal was announced as a senior team acquisition, but coming on a free transfer and making the league minimum of $80,622 this year, he’s really more of young ‘stash him and see what happens’ pickup. For Rapids 2 this year in MLS Next Pro, he hasn’t seen much action - just 2 starts and 163 minutes. As evidenced by the lineup in the Rapids final match against Cruz Azul in Leagues Cup, he’s been passed in the depth chart by Sam Bassett and Wayne Fredrick and Sydney Wathuta and Alex Harris. But the kid is only 21 years old, so there’s still time for him to develop.

Lamine Diack

Date Acquired: 2/1/2024

Date of Departure: 6/30/2024

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Six-month loan with an option to buy

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 19 minutes.

Grade: D-

Diack, a native of Senegal, played 1384 for Turkish Superlig team Ankaragükü in 2022-23, and that apparently impressed French first-division team FC Nantes to sign him to a three-year deal. I guess they didn’t think he’d break into the first team so they pawned him off on Colorado, who … couldn’t make use of him either. Diack didn’t even play for R2; I assume there was a contractual problem that precluded him being ‘sent down to the minors.’ So he played a few minutes in garbage time and ran around at training and was shipped back to France in the summer of 2024.

All that could be chalked as an ‘oh well’ situation, except that Diack earned $864,500 in 2024 in guaranteed compensation. Was that a pro-rated-for-six-months amount ($432,250)? I dunno. Does it matter if the Rapids paid $45,500-a-minute or $22,750 a minute? Not really. Diack was a bust. The only reason he’s not an ‘F’ is that he was a loan and there was no transfer fee, so in comparison to other players (cough, cough, Kevin Cabrál) even though he was expensive, the cost was off the books quickly. So a fiasco, but not a clusterfuck or an albatross.1

Post-Rapids, Nantes loaned him again as soon as the Rapids sent him back. And so Diack spent 2024-25 as a defensive midfielder with another Turkish club called Hatayspor. Diack played 1634 minutes, and Hatayspor conceded 74 goals, second-worst in the league, en route to being relegated.2 To start the 2025-2026 Euro season, Diack is with Sion in the Swiss first division – on loan again, as Nantes hold his rights until June of 2026.

Sidnei Tavares

Date Acquired: 8/3/2023

Date of Departure: 2/23/2024

Loan/Transfer and Fee: 11 month loan from FC Porto

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 299 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists

Grade: C-

On August 3, 2023, the Rapids sat 2-10-10 (WTL), putting them firmly in the bottom of the Western Conference with little hope of recovery. The team would make five summer moves, either with hopes of righting the ship or with an eye towards 2024. Colorado would sign Daniel Chacón, Andrew Gutman, Rafa Navarro, Sidnei Tavares, and Luis Diaz. Only Rafa would stick around to start 2024.

Tavares was a 21-year-old native of Portugal who had spent his youth days at the Leicester City academy. In 2022 he was playing for FC Porto B, and they loan him out to Colorado. Oddly, the Rapids gave him the #10 kit number, which, considering he was young, a loanee, and a box-to-box midfielder, made no sense to me. On September 5 the Rapids fired Robin Fraser, and it was inevitable that, unless young Sidnei set the world on fire, whomever the Rapids brought in as their new manager would be remaking the team in his image. Alas, Sidnei did not set the world on fire. I barely remember him touching the ball.

After departing Colorado back to the Porto U23 team for 2023, he was loaned to Moreirense in the Portuguese first division in 2024, where he played 1296 minutes, getting a goal and an assist. That was impressive enough for Blackburn Rovers in the English Championship to pay $2.3 million for Tavares on June 20. Clearly he’s a useful player, but he came to Colorado at the wrong time. Oh well.

Rafael Navarro

Date Acquired: 7/10/2023

Date of Departure: NA

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Loan from 2023 to 2024, Transfer 7/24/2024 for $3.5 million

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 5599 min, 25 goals, 4 assists

Grade: A

Rafa’s been exceptional for the Rapids. He scored just one goal at the end of 2023 as the very bad Colorado Rapids skidded through their worst season in history, a 5-12-17 nightmare (0.79 points per game) that resulted in a pretty dramatic offseason makeover. That next year, though, Rafa bloomed with Djordje Mihailovic and Cole Bassett in support, and the Rapids leadership did what some thought was unthinkable: they whipped out their checkbooks and paid Brazilian club Palmieras a lot of cash to permanently acquire Navarro.

The way this move went down – a loan with an option to buy – has been a very common Pádraig Smith tactic the past few years. And that’s good. Under his predecessor Paul Bravo, the foreign transfer moves that were made weren’t particularly costly, but they were busts. I’m talking about Luis Solignac ($600K transfer fee) and Juan Ramirez ($2 million transfer fee) and Gabriel Torres (unknown - somewhere between $100 and 500k). Had they been loans, maybe we’d think more fondly of the Bravo era. That said, clubs are only willing to entertain ‘loan-with-an-option-to-buy’ moves for a certain caliber of player. Big players are not going to come under those terms.

Anyhow, Rafa’s a win all around. And if his numbers aren’t as good in the next 12 months, I think we will likely point to the quality of the players around him as the culprit, and not the man himself.

Marko Ilić

Date Acquired: 2/17/2023

Date of Departure: 3/8/2024

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Loan till 7/14/2023; Transfer fee of $800K

Minutes Played / G-xG3 / Clean Sheets: 1,170 minutes, +6.20 G-xG, 2 clean sheets

Grade: F

To end the 2022 season in which a mediocre Rapids team finished 10th in the Western Conference, Colorado had William Yarbrough, Abraham Rodriguez, and Clint Irwin in goal. Yarbs had been solid in 2021 but his 2022 wasn’t great, and so the front office was searching for a solution. I guess somebody fell in love with Marko Ilić because they went after him on loan as the replacement for Yarbrough, or at least to challenge him for the job, paying $800K for a transfer and handing him a deal for two and a half years, making $442,850 for his first year, 2023.

Yarbrough mostly held his job for the first part of the year and played well in 2023. Ilić was handed a bunch of games in 2023 - he was being paid like a starting GK, but he was unable to convince the Rapids coaching staff that he was better than Yarbrough. In the 13 games he did play, he was good somedays, bad on others. Overall, his G-xG was second-worst in the league. He allowed 32 goals. His PSxG expected he would allow just 23. In 5 of his 13 games, Ilić allowed in 0.6-2.0 more goals in the game than the PSxG model expected. Oops.4

From a player acquisition standpoint, Ilić was a train wreck. Acquired on loan from KV Kortrijk in the Belgian 1st division, by the time his six-month loan was up, Ilić had only played in 3 US Open Cup games and 3 MLS regular season games. That meant that the Rapids neither had a large enough sample size to evaluate him for a buy. But also – Colorado couldn’t figure out whether Yarbrough was going to hang on to the starting job, either. So the front office just decided to invest the money to lock up a keeper they thought was starting-caliber for the rest of 2023 and 2024. And they didn’t really have a ‘Plan B’, so they paid Kortrijk a transfer fee, and played both goalkeepers for the rest of 2023. Ilić was bad, Yarbrough was meh, and the Rapids needed a full rebuild to end 2023, including at goalkeeper.

Colorado signed Zack Steffen on January 4, 2024, and that made both Yarbrough and Ilić redundant. They sent Yarbs to SJ for a draft pick5, and loaned Ilić to Norwegian side Sarpsborg in March of 2024. In July, 2024, the Rapids sold Ilić to Red Star Belgrade for just $150,000, taking a hefty loss for their speculation and disappointment.

This whole deal was a debacle. The timing, the spending, all of it was a mess. It was all probably avoidable if Colorado could have worked out a 12-month loan, or just decided after six-months that Ilić wasn’t gonna be the guy. They tried to hedge their bet and hold onto the promising goalkeeper to see if he might be the guy. And that meant that they paid too much for a not-good player. He was, in fact, not the guy. Oops.

Ilić didn’t really suffer though. Red Star started him in goal in 2023-2024 on their run to the Serbian League championship, then played him in four Champions League matches to start 2024. He was shellacked by both Monaco and Barcelona for 5 goals each, including conceding a brace to Robert Lewandowski (!) In the winter he was transferred back to Kortrijk on a free, played a few matches, and lost his job. Kortrijk were relegated to end the 24/25 season, and they start 2025 in the Belgian second division. Lord only knows if they’ll chance it to give Ilić the starting job again.

Andres Maxsö

Date Acquired: 1/27/2023

Date of Departure: NA

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $750K, Contract thru 2026, Club Opt for 2027

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 8144 minutes, 3 goals, 1 assist

Grade: B-

Maxsø’s been a solid and dependable centerback for Colorado for three straight years. Knock on whatever, he’s been healthy and dependable. No, he’s not as fast as Moïse Bombito. No, his out-of-the-back distribution isn’t as good as Drew Moor. No, he doesn’t clear or head balls like vintage Lalas Abubakar. Yes, he is a designated player, earning $1,392,500 this season.

I mean, I think a DP centerback is expected to be top-five at his position, and he’s not. He is pretty consistent, and probably above average for MLS centerbacks, and at the time the Rapids signed him in 2023, that was pretty good. In the context of ‘Colorado developed and sold Auston Trusty, and they developed and sold Moïse Bombito, and for a fraction of the cost they got Andreas Maxsø’, this is a good acquisition. If the barometer we’re applying is ‘DPs should win trophies or make all-star teams’, then no, this is not a good acquisition. Yeah, I’d rather have Walker Zimmerman or Aaron Long, especially at that price. But I’m OK with Andreas Maxsø.

Alex Gersbach

Date Acquired: 1/30/2023

Date of Departure: 2/23/2024

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $350K

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 261 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists

Grade: D

At the risk of saying something only six people will understand, Alex Gersbach is the Declan Wynne of Mike DaFontes.6 When Colorado started 2023, they had a left back depth chart of Steven Beitashour, Anthony Markanich, Sebastian Anderson, and Alex Gersbach. All were so bad they went out and got Andrew Gutman to plug the hole.7 It really says something when the entire left back core is bad – and you’re fourth on the LB depth chart. All that for $270,433 in salary.

Gersbach, coming over from Grenoble Foot 38 in the French second division, was signed to a three-year deal, but was disappointing enough that he was waived after just one season in the post-2023/post-Robin Fraser purge. He spent 2024 in Sweden with a team called Kalmar, and then went home to his native Australia to play for Western Sydney Wanderers for 2025.

Conor Ronan

Date Acquired: 1/23/2023

Date of Departure: NA

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $619,000

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 5,283 minutes, 2 goals, 9 assists

Grade: B

It’s unfair that, because he came from Wolverhampton, and because he came after Jack Price, and because he’s a feisty diminutive midfielder, I have always thought of Conor Ronan as ‘Off-brand Jack Price.’ But that’s basically what he is: Jack Price without the amazing crossing and corner kicking. That’s still pretty good.

In 2023, with Price hurt, Ronan alongside Cole Bassett and both Bryan Acosta and Ralph Priso held down the midfield in a fairly disastrous in which the team could not generate goals to save their life. With the arrival of Djordje Mihailovic and the ascendancy of Ollie Larraz, coupled with an injury, Ronan saw less time in 2024. This year, Colorado added Josh Atencio and Ted Ku-Dipietro, further nibbling into Ronan’s time. He’s been good - a good motor and tidy on the ball, and generally good passing, although not as incisive as you might need to beat the best teams in MLS. Ronan was a good addition at a good time.

I imagine the 2023 Rapids without Ronan would have been absolutely putrid. Remember that as bad as things were that year, Colorado were still only the second-worst team in the league that year. Toronto were five points worse.

Should I review Felipe Gutierrez? Who was Felipe Gutierrez again?

Never mind. Let’s not review Felipe Gutierrez. But he did, in fact, exist, and play 840 minutes for the ‘Pids in 2022.

Max Alves

Date Acquired: 1/6/2022

Date of Departure: 1/24/2024

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Transfer fee of $1 million

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 1567 minutes, 1 goal, 1 assist (plus if I remember, another goal in Concacaf Champions League play)

Grade: F- times a million

I have almost no mental energy to re-examine how irrationally mad it makes me that a guy played for the Rapids, sucked, was paid by Brazilian bookies to draw a yellow card, and did so, besmirching the reputation of the game and his teammates in exchange for the puny sum of just $12,000. But I’ll try. To start, I will copypasta what I wrote in 2023.

Fuck this guy with a rusty broken goalpost tube. The absolute unmitigated gaul to come to a team in America from Brazil and then *allegedly* engage in match-fixing for some Brazilian mobsters who only paid you $10,000 to potentially ruin your whole career and make teams avoid you like unshielded enriched plutonium. What was Max even thinking? When he was on the pitch, he was decent; dribbly in a fun way, but not a great passer or finisher. He’s never playing for Colorado again though, and he’s also still taking up a roster slot for the foreseeable future – innocent till proven guilty and all that. No word on if he’s being paid while charges are still pending, but my guess is he is. So again, fuck this guy.

It’s not the front office’s fault they couldn’t tell that a player was both dumb and had low moral character. Matt Pollard, who is a good human being, argued with me at the time that growing up in Brazil, there’s a lot of poverty, and sometimes people kind of have a ‘I gotta do what it takes to get by’ attitude. That’s fair, but also – Max basically ruined any career in MLS he might have ever had with one terrible decision. Also, there are people who would prefer to follow the law and be poor rather than do illegal things to get a few extra bucks.

The gambling scandal broke on May 10, 2023, six starts and 663 minutes into the season for Alves. Max had just one goal, zero assists that year. The thing about Pete Rose betting on baseball is that he was Pete Rose. Max Alves bet on soccer, and he wasn’t Pete Rose.

In 2022, Max *wasn’t yet* a scoundrel for betting on soccer. He was just a disappointment. In my midfielder review of 2022, I wrote:

He was a forward harasser; a midfield connector; a dribbly box-attacker; a midfield line-cutter. The trained eye says he’s an attacking mid that likes to dribble at defenders and shoot his shot. Fbrefs stats are filled with green bars indicating he’s a good passer and great at Clearances. ASA’s numbers say he’s a turnover machine that’s pretty average at everything except defending.

Honestly, what the hell does all of this mean? I have no idea.

But I also concluded my review with this:

It was Max’s first year. He has time to grow and develop. He’s only 21. We have him for four years. It was probably foolish to expect he’d light the world on fire in year one. Maybe all that shuffling around - in the lineup, out of the lineup; left-right-middle; forward/central - hurt his ability to settle in. And if you look at his final four games of the season, he got 230 minutes, he had more touches, and he passed quite well - 40 for 43 and 31 for 34 against FC Dallas and Austin, with a total of 10 Progressive Passes. So he finished strong. All signs point to a better 2023?

Nope. Turns out – this was in hindsight an awful move by the FO.

Whatever became of Max?At the conclusion of the investigation in Brazil,8 many of the other players implicated in the scheme were fined, suspended from playing in Brazil, or even permanently banned. Max was not one of them. I think it was understood that Max was guilty, but that because the Brazilian courts jurisdiction did not extend to the US, it would be problematic to charge or fine him. Plus his banishment from MLS might have been seen as punishment enough. Max returned to him home club, Cuiabá, for 2024, where his club finished last and was relegated from Brazil’s first division. This year he has 1 assist; Cuiabá are in eighth after 21 matches.

Lucas Esteves

Date Acquired: 8/6/2021

Loan/Transfer and Fee: Twelve-month loan with option to buy, loan extended by six months on 7/1/2022

Minutes Played / Goals / Assists: 3,197 minutes, 2 goals, 2 assists

Grade: C

Esteves, as I noted in the season recap for 2022, was the replacement for Sam Vines when the homegrown from Pueblo, Colorado left for Royal Antwerp in Belgium. As a replacement, Esteves was ok. His passing wasn’t quite up to snuff; he had a Passing G+ of -0.97 in 2022. As a loan move with no transfer fee required, and considering he earned $426,092 in 2022, he wasn’t that expensive for Colorado. He held down the left back spot through a not-great 2022 season.

Colorado’s biggest issue in 2022 was probably a below-average midfield that struggled to stay healthy, and so I don’t really think Esteves was the issue. Ultimately, his home club Palmeiras (same club as Rafa Navarro!) asked for $1 million to transfer him, and Colorado balked at the price, and Esteves returned to Brazil at the end of 2022.

In 2023 … Colorado were a fucking mess. And left back was a part of that mess.

The Rapids started either six or seven different players at LB: the aforementioned Gersbach, Anderson, Beitashour, Markanich, and Gutman, PLUS I think Moïse Bombito and Keegan Rosenberry. What if Colorado had paid the measly $1 million for Esteves? They probably still would have been bad: Kellyn Acosta was sold, Jack Price was hurt, Diego Rubio was hurt, and therefore the Rapids were trying to play average-quality football with a replacement-level midfield. But they wouldn’t have been *as* bad. They would have had a solid dependable left back.

Esteves has gone on to a fairly unremarkable career in the Brazilian Série A. He played for Atlético Goianiense, Fortaleza, Vitória, and is now with Grêmio. All are effectively mid-table clubs in Brazil.

…

If we sorted the last ten Rapids foreign acquisitions into four piles titled

• Success!

• So-so!

• Fail!

• Epic Fail!

here’s what you get:

Success! – Navarro, Ronen, Maxsø

So-so! – Fadal, Tavares, Esteves

Fail! – Gersbach

Epic Fail! – Diack, Ilić, Max Alves

The odds of success for Alexis Manyoma, then, are better than a scratcher lottery ticket, but worse than betting on black at the roulette table. That said, considering all the effort I spent screaming about Max Alves, maybe I shouldn’t end this article by talking about taking bets.

Djordje Mihailovic has consistently been the best player for Colorado for the past season and a half. With 11 goals, 10 assists in 2024 and 9 goals, 6 assists in 2025, he’s been incredibly productive in offense. His Goals Added numbers for the past two seasons of 8.54 and 7.75 G+ are exceeded only by Rafa Navarro and Cole Bassett,1 and also demonstrate that he’s been exceptionally good as a player even in situations that the counting stats like goals and assists don’t measure. His ability and his production to date are seemingly irreplaceable.

And – now he’s gone.

He’s taking all that skill at distribution and possession, his wondrous ability with free kicks, his silky smooth ability to wiggle through traffic just above the 18 yard box … and heading to Toronto. Tom Bogert was first to report, and Matt Pollard additionally confirmed that it was Mihailovic who requested to be traded. It’s both hard to understand why he’d want to leave, and of course also, it’s very simple.

The simple part is two-fold. First, a new team means a new contract for Mihailovic, who can move from a team used to paying DPs around $1 million or $2 million a year to a team that has shelled out far more for DPs in their history. This season Toronto was paying Federico Bernadeschi $6.3 million and Lorenzo Insigne an outrageous $15.4 million. Both of those contracts have been terminated. Sebastian Giovinco was paid $5.6 million in 2018. Jozy Altidore was making $4.9 million in 2020. Th entire Rapids roster right now earns just barely $10 mil. TFC have a history of backing up huge truckloads of cash for good soccer players. Mihailovic is only too happy open his pockets and oblige.

Second, Colorado has a well-earned reputation for only being willing to spend the bare minimum to stay relevant rather than splash real cash on players with the intention of winning the league. Hell, this team won’t even spend the money to fix the busted jumbotron, let alone invest in serious upgrades to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park to put it in line with other MLS stadia.2 In the Kroenke era, they’ve never bought a top-flight DP, but rather mollified the fan base with modest purchases here and there. The biggest move ever was to go get a past-his-prime Tim Howard on free from Everton. There’s also the teams more modest moves, like for Albanian International Shkëlzen Gashi, or for Panamanian prospect Gaby Torres, or FC Dallas stalwart Kellyn Acosta. But Colorado has never had moves to announce to the league they were determined to win it all. We’re known as ‘The Moneyball Rapids.’ They call us ‘Distressed Assets FC.’ Nobody has ever written the words ‘the ambitious Rapids have assembled a team that are odds on favorites to win MLS Cup.’ Because the Rapids under Kroenke Sports Entertainment have never been ambitious.

And Mihailovic saw this – he saw Colorado fail to spend big in the Winter before the 2025 season. The Rapids had some intriguing rescue projects: Reggie Cannon and Sam Vines; Chido Awaziem and Ted Ku-Dipietro. But these aren’t bonafide stars. Colorado isn’t making moves on par with ambitious teams like LAFC, who already had one of the best teams in the hemisphere with Dennis Bouanga and Hugo Lloris and Aaron Long, but just added Tottenham superstar Heung-min Son to the mix. This isn’t San Jose, with Christian Espinoza and Chico Arango. There are ambitious teams like Atlanta and Miami and New York. And there are also-rans. And Colorado are an also-ran.

I’m mad at Mihailovic, and disappointed. Yes, he’s an employee in a field where most guys have to retire by the age of 33. He’s only got so many productive years, so he needs to maximize those years while he can – make that paper, as they say. But couldn’t he wait till seasons end to request/force a move? Shouldn’t he first prove that he can take a so-so team and make them a playoff contender by achieving something for the collective rather than just show off some flashing individual stats?

I get that there’s always a tension between a player’s desire to help a team achieve it’s best outcome and a team and owner’s responsibility to compensate a player adequately for their skills. And that when these two are out of sync, a player departs. I guess I didn’t think Djordje was that under-appreciated by his contract, or by this team’s success. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the market dictates all. Maybe a player as good as Mihailovic deserves $3 million or $5 million a year. And maybe he’s supposed to go and get that as soon as he can. It still feels wrong to me.

Mihailovic abrupt departure leaves Colorado high and dry – without a creative midfielder or a rock-solid dribbler to get us into the final third. Mihailovic really tied the team together nicely. And sure, maybe he was going to leave eventually - as all players do. But the timing of this move is unbearably bad and sudden it just makes you want to scream.

The Rapids now look at the final games of the season; (probably just) one in Leagues Cup and nine games in the regular season and think ‘what are we going to do?’ And that’s just one of a dozen other questions that need answering.

Questions like: Who will step in to be the main man in offense? How will the team react to being abandoned by their talisman? Is there any way for head coach Chris Armas to adjust the offense on the fly and get results? How does the Front Office add a player or two at the deadline to stabilize the squad? Can the Rapids rebuild and win in the next six to twelve months? And perhaps most importantly, how will supporters react to being subjected once again to another low-cost rebuild due to Stan and Josh Kroenke’s pathological inability to spend on the Colorado Rapids?3

Colorado is left in a daze - shocked by a move none of us saw coming. But maybe in hindsight, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Kellyn Acosta was frustrated with this team and forced his way out back in 2022. More beloved players like Sam Vines and Cole Bassett have felt the itch to move on and experience life with a more ambitious club. The club knew Moïse Bombito was a high-value asset on a mid-tier team that aspired to greater things, and so they got cash for him while he was a hot prospect in his ascendancy. So I get it - players seem Colorado not as a destination, but as a way-station. A stop on the way to someplace better.

The Rapids have been, for a long while now, ‘a cute little starter club for players before they get serious.’ And also ‘a team that isn’t willing to pay big money for players in an effort to win trophies.’ Mihailovic, I guess, figured this out and wasn’t happy with it. Fans have been witnessing it for a while, and I assure you that they aren’t happy with it. But it’s hard to tell if that matters at all for the powers that be.

If that’s our perpetual identity - the club that never wins trophies because players always wish they were someplace else - then I imagine fans will eventually adopt that attitude too, and move on to find another club when it suits them.

I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of current and active Rapids fans have no recollection of the team’s only trophy: the 2010 MLS Cup. Matt Pollard and I certainly don’t have a firsthand recollection of it; neither of us were Colorado residents in 2010. That hasn’t stopped Matt and I from interviewing players from that era in a desire to document history.

Most current Rapids fans, then, have only since glimpses of success. The 2016 team that made it to the Western Conference finals. The 2021 team that finished first in the Western Conference. That’s about it for success in the past decade.

Other than that, Colorado has been middlin’-to-bad at soccer. In any and every season, good or bad, teams go through down times - losing streaks; winless streaks; general stretches of misery. The Rapids are currently locked in one of those cold spells, as the team’s last 8 games have resulted in a fairly disappointing 2-1-5 record. Yes, the win on Saturday was a hopeful sign. But it’s still just one win amidst a sea of underwhelming results.

A question I have is: how do cold streaks in the past decade correspond to end-of season results for the burgundy boys? How much should we panic? What might we expect for the remaining 11 (non-Leagues Cup) games? Let’s take a look at the last ten seasons to see how strong a correlation there is between one bad stretch of games and that stretch being indicative of (or really, part of the cause of) an entirely bad season.1

[Note: could I have gone back further? Yes. However, 1) ten is a nice round number, 2) I wasn’t around to witness any of the games before 2013, and 3) from 1996 to 1999, there were no ties in MLS; from 2000 to 2006, there were 30, 28, 26, and 30 games played. For consistency’s sake, the last ten seasons seemed more comparable to things now.]

The Edge of the Vortex of Despair .. is Seven Points in Eight Games

The three seasons with the most similar bad runs of form to the Rapids current seven-points-in-eight-games stretch are: 2016 (a 2-3-3 stretch, 9 points); 2022 (a 1-3-4 stretch, 6 points); and 2024 (a 3-0-5 stretch, 9 points).2 Colorado made the playoffs in two out three of those years. In other words, if your worst eight game run in a season results in only 7 points (hint: our current eight game run-of-form), odds are decent that you’ll make the playoffs.

The important thing to note here for our purposes is that this is as bad as you are allowed to be. Anytime in the last decade the Rapids have had an eight game run with six or fewer total points (2015; 2017, 2018, 2019; 2023, 2023) they did not make the playoffs. On some level, that last win over Vancouver might really have made a difference – if that had been an L, the Rapids worst eight game streak of the year would be a 4-pointer. The Rapids can be as bad as this last eight games. They cannot be worse, or they’ll be playing golf in mid-October instead of football.

Your Worst Streak Doesn’t Define You - But it sort-of Does

Looking at losing streaks, this season, Colorado had two mildly panic inducing tailspins: a three-game losing streak in May against DC United, San Jose, and San Diego, and another bad three-game turn from 5/28 to 6/14 against Portland, Austin, and Orlando. That’s also pretty close to the upper boundary of how bad you can be and still make the playoffs. Colorado had a four-game losing streak in 2024 and still made the playoffs. But they did the same thing (losing four in a row) in 2015 and finished dead-last.

I remember 2015 well. It was a bad year. Marcelo Sarvas looked like he was playing in molasses - like he had both lost a step and was a half-second behind the game in terms of reactions. The team rolled out James Riley and Michael Harrington at fullback, and both were beaten by unsympathetic forwards on the regular. Riley was done in MLS after 2025. Harrington hung on for two more years with the Chicago Fire: including a 2017 Chicago Fire team that featured Bastian Schweinsteiger and Dax McCarty aboard, as well as an 18-year-old rookie named Djordje Mihailovic.

This season does bear an uncomfortable resemblance, streak-wise, to the 2022 season, in which Colorado was never truly terrible. They never lost more than two games in a row. The problem was, they lost back-to-back games four times. The ‘Pids finished 4 points shy of the playoffs that year; the last year that only seven teams from each conference made it. A brutal stretch of multiple double game weeks in August resulted in six games, 3 draws, 3 losses for Colorado, and a hot September/October where the team went 3-1-1 wasn’t good enough to get them back into the playoff mix.

This season, nine teams in each conference make the playoffs. The eighth and ninth place teams play a one-game ‘Wild Card’ playoff match, and first round teams get to contend a best-of-three, home/away/home series. This is a format I hate, but I get why they do it. It sells tickets. Because if your team finishes seventh, you don’t have to buy a plane ticket to see them.

Colorado is right on the bubble right now. They have 29 points, but also have a game in-hand (or two) over every team below them. With 11 games to go, avoiding a bad streak might make all the difference.

I don’t really have a fully formed and compelling article on the ‘Pids at this stage of the season. I thought they’d be a mid-table, edge of the playoffs team, and they are. Six wins, four draws, six losses, sitting 8th out of 15 in the table. Nobody wants me to write a thousand words about why I was right. That doesn’t seem to bother Nate Silver, though. Zing!

So here’s a bunch of random thoughts and observations. Enjoy. Or perhaps ‘I’m sorry.’

Where would we be without Djordje?

Mr. Mihailovic has 7 goals and 2 assists; a combined total that far outstrips anyone else on the squad (Rafa Navarro has 6). Game in and game out, he tears through the midfield on the dribble or puts away a critical goal in a tough spot. I give the gif treatment to two of my favorites.

One: Djordje sees there’s nobody lying down behind the wall, so he goes under it (!) to pull out a draw against the always-tough-to-beat Seattle Sounders.

Two: Mihailovic’s awesome solo excursion through the Portland midfield in last week’s 2-1 loss for the ‘Pids only goal. What a romp - from collecting the loose ball from a teammate’s tackle to the back of the net, this was poetry.

Colorado still lost that game. But to date, Djordje has 3 goals from the run of play, that one free kick above, and 2 assists; in addition to 3 PK goals. And it’s not just counting stats: his advanced metrics are phenomenal too. He’s rocking a +1.97 Goals Added, best on the team, meaning he draws opponents on dribbles that free up his teammates, and he’s often the pass before the pass that becomes a goal. Both the eyes and the numbers tell you that on the ball, he’s regularly the team’s most potent force. Without him and those first two incredible months of Zack Steffen, this team is dog poop.

What a weird soccer summer this will be

The USMNT just finished dual losses against Türkye1 and Switzerland. Yes it was our C-team due to injury, but these games weren’t particularly close, nor were Sam’s Boys particularly good. Now the US is playing in the Gold Cup, without Christian Pulisic, who wants a rest. And the only thing at stake seems to be whether we fire Mauricio Pochettino and replace him, again, with Bruce Arena. This is weird. This is weird because we come to count on the summers as ‘international break time’ when we can revel in some semi-meaningful soccer of a different variety. But there’s no Euros, and no World Cup, and no Copa America. There’s just this sorta stupid Gold Cup where the US team’s opening group is Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Saudi Arabia. And to be honest, with the way the US is playing, they might not make it out of the group.

We also have an expanded Club World Cup, which is a weird event, and always has been. The FIFA World Cup has tremendous parity. For all its faults, so does the UEFA Champions League. Even Concacaf Champions Cup, despite some flaws (like the frequent and regular food poisoning of US teams that play in Mexico) is a close-ish competition. The Club World Cup, generally, has always been one giant team laying waste to a bunch of minnows. It also never used to BE a summer tournament. Weird.

The Club World Cup has historically been played in December, and in the past was a competition where Al Hayyat in Morocco and Kashima Antlers of Japan and some team in Kazakhstan played each other at 1 am EST for the chance to lose 10-0 to Real Madrid. Now, they’ve expanded the tournament so that Botafogo and Seattle Sounders … can lose 10-0 to PSG AND Liverpool in a SERIES of matches, and during regular prime time hours, and in summer. Additionally, the matches will take place in the US … but because it’s FIFA, I assume that a ticket will cost me $150 for nosebleed seats. I can’t even raise the energy to submit a press request for a match in Washington DC because … I don’t really care about Al Ain vs Juventus? Or Salzburg and Al Hilal? Or Wydad playing Al Ain2? And if I don’t really care, why would any other soccer fan?

The idea to expand the tournament at all and move it to the US was obviously a massive cash grab, and that’s crass, and that’s a turn off for me. I don’t being used. In addition, a summer soccer tournament is a tough sell for me because so many teams will rest their exhausted players – I’m not even going to see PSG or Manchester City’s best players. And player exhaustion carries separate concerns: the lack of rest for soccer clubs and players globally would be a huge moral issue if it weren’t for the piles and piles of cash the players earn – instead it’s only a modest issue of trying to figure out, as a team, how many minutes a human body can play in 365 days before it breaks.

Will I watch? For sure - if soccer’s on, I will watch it. Last week I tuned in a Mexico-Japan U20 game last week, because, in the words of Edmund Hillary, it was there. But will I care? Probably not. And ‘hey we’re creating more soccer but the games are mostly meaningless’ is a worrisome trend. Because later on this summer we will have …

… Leagues Cup! Unlike the FIFA Club World Cup which is a meaningless tournament that is effectively in its first year, Leagues Cup is a meaningless tournament invented two years ago. A rich history! The format for this year has changed: there’s a league-table round (like UEFA Champions League) and it sort of makes sense?

Leagues Cup might be of interest to Colorado fans because the ‘Pids made such a stunning run through the 2024 Leagues Cup. Because Colorado’s run of form lately hasn’t been great, and because the tournament is arguably harder to win than MLS Cup, and because Colorado hasn’t won any trophies in 15 years, it feels like an exercise in futility for the ‘Pids.

What I’m saying is: there will be a ton of soccer this summer. But mostly, our favorite teams, the USMNT and the Colorado Rapids, won’t really be substantive participants. Maybe I’m wrong! Maybe Potch and the boys will tear things up! Maybe Colorado will make the unlikely run! Maybe the Mamelodi Sundowns3 will upset PSG in the Club World Cup Final on Sunday, July 13! And more importantly, maybe all the big stars will play their hardest in these matches!

As you can tell though, I have reservations, and that makes for a weird summer.

Why did they get Israeli Centerback Stav Lempkin?

It is fascinating to me that the brain trust of Fran Taylor, Brian Crookham, and Pádraig Smith (the Rapids Front Office guys) looked at the problems of this team and said ‘let’s get a centerback.’ It’s not necessarily a bad conclusion - just a surprising one.

In late 2024 Colorado added a fullback (Reggie Cannon) to the club to eventually overtake Keegan Rosenberry on the depth chart. In 2025 they added a centerback (Chidozie Awaziem) to replace Moïse Bombito, and Jackson Travis overtook Sam Vines at starting LB. They also added Josh Atencio and unloaded Omar Fernandez; added Ted Ku-DiPietro and benched Kevin Cábral.

The assumption I suppose they’re making, based on all these moves, is ‘we’re a few pieces away from the right mix. Striker and attacking mid are squared away. We spent the winter fixing the fullbacks and the central midfielders. Zack Steffen is the real deal this year. We just need one fullback, and everything’s coming up roses for me and for you!’4

I’m nervous this is a bad bet. I don’t love Andreas Maxsø. But I don’t think shipping him back to Scandinavia will make us much better, no matter how good Lempkin is.

Because I don’t think the main problem is at centerback. It’s … at fullback and in the midfield.

Here’s the Goals Added numbers on the Rapids for 2025 to date.

Sam Bassett and Ollie Larraz have 1700 minutes and some truly dire Passing G+ stats: -0.42 and -0.46, respectively. Those numbers are not offset by good Dribbling, Interrupting, or Fouling numbers. Jackson Travis and Reggie Cannon also have terrible G+ numbers: totals of -0.51 for Travis and -0.64 for Cannon. Interrupting (tackles, interceptions, and recoveries) is the main culprit again.

Now, there’s a world where you look at this and say ‘these guys will all be better if there’s a good centerback near them to receive and interrupt.’ My conclusion, though, is that Colorado need a good fullback and a good defensive midfielder more than they need a good centerback.

That said, that move may be coming – the Lempkin addition might just be one piece of the puzzle. But IF they did go get a fullback, it’d been a demonstration that the Reggie Cannon less than a year ago was a mistake. And instead the Rapids may still be in the wait-and-see period.

Another possible conclusion based on the G+ data is that since Maxsø has a +0.15 G+ and an Interrupting G+ of +0.37, he’s not the centerback that Stav Lempkin will be replacing. Instead Chris Armas will be benching Chidozie Awaziem, with his -0.11 G+ and -0.51 Passing G+. That ALSO strikes me as weird, because Awaziem has only just been signed to start the winter. So maybe Lemkin replaces Awaziem, and maybe that does improve the Rapids. But then, what do they do with Chidozie?

There’s a third school of thought here, which is that some of this data is premature. That we need a few more months with Jackson Travis and Ted Ku-DiPietro and even Sam Bassett to see what they can really do. I really don’t know.

And here’s a fourth option regarding what the hell the Rapids are planning with this Stav Lempkin signing: on the podcast this week, Matt and I proposed the idea that acquiring Stav Lempkin means Colorado will go to a three-at-the-back formation – either a 5-3-2 or a 3-4-3.5 And there are reasons to believe that a system that frees fullbacks up to be more attacking would be good for this team.

All said, I still worry that the team’s most important areas to address are fullback, midfield, and a wide attacker, and Stav Lempkin ain’t any of those. But maybe another move is coming.

A Parting Rapid(s) Fire Thought

I pulled up the advanced metrics knowing that they illustrate the Rapids have been bad in midfield and at fullback this year. I did not expect those above G+ charts to reveal that Sam Vines and Josh Atencio have been quite good this year.

This makes me curious as to why Vines hasn’t seized the starting left back job from Jackson Travis, or why Chris Armas likes Travis despite some really questionable Interrupting and Fouling G+ numbers.

Atencio makes neat and tidy short passes and he’s very tough to get past - these are things that I had observed up till now, but never watched for. So now, I will. I’m excited by this new soccer-watching development. Four months into the season, and I know what to expect with Josh Atencio, and what I expect is pretty darn good.

That’s a fun part of watching the Rapids from June onward. As a fan at the start of the season and it’s like walking into an abstract expressionist gallery in Berlin: you look at the paintings and go ‘what the ever-living fuck am I seeing here?’ By midsummer, it’s concrete and understandable. And at that point we get to say ‘I know what the artist is doing’. We still have yet to really know, though, if the painting is any good. That’s still to be determined.

A few years ago, when Pablo Mastroeni was Colorado’s head coach, I would shake my head at the end of a 0-0 first half and brace myself for defeat. That’s because, anecdotally speaking, it seemed like the opposing coach would adjust tactics in the second half, while the Rapids would keep doing the same thing. The Mastronaccio, as some fans like to call it, was an effective but simple approach to football: a 4-2-3-1 with a two-way midfielder, a striker up high and alone, and eight other guys defending for their lives. In 2016 it worked, mostly because Colorado got really good at scoring that 70+ minute go-ahead goal. Colorado won 13 games by 1 goal – out of 15 wins. they won eight of those games on a go-ahead goal in the 70th minute or later. That’s 16 points picked up… in the dying moments. Insane.1

In 2015 and 2017, though, the ‘defend for your life, score at the death’ approach didn’t work. Colorado lost 19 games in 2017 and had just 33 points.2 Shkelzen Gashi was hurt a lot. Tim Howard was in decline. Axel Sjoberg, it turned out, could only do one cool trick, and that was clearing the ball. Left backs Mekeil Williams and Mike DaFonte were not up to the task the way Marc Burch had been.3 Mastroeni was fired midseason.

I bring this up not to re-litigate the 2017 season, but because the 2016 and 2017 seasons demonstrate that weird, fluky, late goals can have an outsized impact on your team. In 2016, Colorado counted on late goals and it worked. In 2017, it didn’t.

So far in 2025, the Colorado Rapids are predictably midtable, with 4 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses. They’re winless in their last three matches. But fans have noticed a pattern to Colorado: they tend to collapse at the end of the first half.

If we extend the conversation to ‘ends of halfs’, Colorado also conceded a goal to San Diego in the 89th minute (didn’t matter, they were up 3-1 at the time and won 3-2) and to Houston at 90+6 to give the Dynamo a home draw.

The question is: what could account for a team being consistently vulnerable to end the half? Here’s a list of possible answers.

It’s a focus thing.

The first answer I will give, and reject, I will call the ‘Drive-time Sports Talk Radio Answer.’ That explanation would be that the team lacks focus; they drop their attention like a teenager in the final 5 minutes of a math class before the bell rings.4 That’s a stats and tactics free answer favored by people who want a simple explanation. To be fair, sometimes the simple answer is correct. And it might be the case that Colorado has a mentality problem; that the team for some reason lacks focus or confidence in seeing out matches. The remedy, then, would involve nothing more than some good ol’ motivational speeches before games about being “LOCKED IN” for “NINETY MINUTES”. Additionally, head coach Chris Armas could spend some time at the ends of training, when the team is tired, pretending to defend a lead.

I’m not a huge fan of this theory, mostly because at the MLS level, these guys have been playing competitive football at a high level for a long time. Individually, most of them wouldn’t have made it this far if they had a penchant for dropping their concentration as the game draws to a close. It’s possible, but its also too convenient, if only because anything that can potentially be solved with a locker room speech doesn’t seem like a real solution. It makes me think of folks who listen to motivational tapes in the car to become thinner. I mean, maybe that’ll fix your problems: but I think diet and exercise is probably the sure bet.

It’s a fitness thing.

Related to focus would be fitness: the brain gets fuzzy when it’s tired. Reaction times slow. Speed drops. Maybe Colorado is more fatigued to end the halves than their opponents, and that causes them to make mistakes.

This would make sense if the team was running or training less than other MLS teams. I don’t think thats true, but I can’t know that for sure. I know that it isn’t an age thing: the average age of the eleven Rapids players with the most minutes is 26.5 years old. The average age of their opponents to date is 28.0 years old.

That all said, this theory might have some legs. The fitness staff might want to look at some of the data they receive from those StatSport ‘vests’5 and see if it reveals when players exertion, pace, and heart rates change in training. I’ll add that ‘they just need to run more, and harder!’ might not be the solution. A critique of the Jurgen Klinsmann era of the USMNT was that he would gather a team of in-season trained professionals who had played and trained with their clubs, and then kill them with physically punishing training sessions before international matches. And then the players would look … tired. So ‘they need to run more’ could be the answer. But ‘they need to run less’ could also be the answer. Still, I dislike this theory compared to the next one…

It’s a game management thing.

You can’t expect players to hell bent for leather for 90 minutes straight, no matter what coaches will tell you in the postgame presser.

Slight digression: one of the most irritating soccer experiences I ever had was watching the USMNT-Belgium match in the 2014 World Cup. You remember. The game where Tim Howard earned the monicker ‘Secretary of Defense’ for his 15 save performance. I watched that game down the block from me at Maria Empanada in Wash Park, restaurant packed to gills, and for all of extratime, some idiot kept screaming at the US players to RUN HARDER and WHY AREN’T YOU EVEN TRYING. I am fairly certain this man just did not understand soccer: nobody runs at a sprint for 90 minutes a game, let alone 120 minutes. On some level, soccer is all about gaining the wisdom to know when to jog, and when to sprint. I love me some Ollie Larraz and Cole Bassett, but the fact that they run their asses off all match does not make them better players than Sergio Busquets and Lionel Messi, who, at their advanced ages, sprint when they need to and jog the rest of the time.

Coaches often tell teams when and where to exert their energy. A coach can say ‘we are going to run our asses off for the first 15 minutes to try and get a goal’, or say ‘we’re gonna bunker and defend till 60 and then turn the tables.’ A coach can inform the team to either fast break in transition, or play at a modest pace for possession. A coach can play long ball to the wingers, but that means the wingers will be sprinting a lot. A coach can set a high press, but that means expending energy on defense to win the ball that will have a price in offense, or in the late game. This is what coaches do: they create a strategy, and that strategy is based on two simple ideas in soccer: 1) your players cannot cover the entire pitch at all times, and 2) your players cannot run at full speed all the time.

It is possible that Colorado is pressing and running too much at the start and middle of the half, and the team is fatigued at the end of the half, and that’s why they break in the 45th (or 90th) minute. To determine if this is the case, the coaching staff will need to look at who is pressing and when; what stretches of time they have been emphasizing or not emphasizing; and especially how far and fast players are running from 0-15 minutes, 16-30 minutes, and 31-45 minutes (or particularly 40-45 minutes). For all the complaining we’ve done about Kevin Cabrál’s lack of production offensively, nobody can claim he doesn’t press like a demon early on in the half. But perhaps that means he’s not quite as effective to end the half. This is conjecture, but that level of scrutiny could be applied across the board and regarding Chris Armas’ approach. If Colorado’s early press doesn’t yield measurable results in terms of turnovers and goals, but the team is demonstrably tired to end the first half and is getting punished for it, then Chris Armas needs to change the way he manages the games.6

It’s a defense thing.

To concede a goal to your opponent, three things need to happen.

1. You turn over the ball to your opponent.

2. Your opponent successfully moves the ball from their end of the field to your end of the field – from their defensive third, through the central third, and into the attacking third.

3. In the final third, you allow passes into dangerous positions and fail to defend or block shots in dangerous positions, and your opponent scores.

We’re not gonna dwell on turnovers. They happen. Possession-based soccer is great: you can make it awfully hard on your opponent if you simply deny them time on the ball. But that’s not the jam of the 2025 Rapids, so let’s move on.

So then it’s either #2, or #3, or possibly both. Are the Rapids failing to step up in the central third, or the final third?

• Against DC United, Colorado dropped back into the final third in two blocks of four to defend, letting DC United walk it up into the final third mostly unchallenged. Both goals came because a wide ball came into the box and was finished beautifully. On goal one, Cabrál was late to his man on the entry pass, and Christian Benteke dunked on poor Chidozie Awaziem. On goal two, Aaron Herrera got separation on Djordje Mihailovic and Jackson Travis and bent in a ball to Hosei Kijima for a filthy finish. Reggie Cannon gets absolutely pantsed by Kijima there to get space and separation. Final third defending is the culprit here.

• Against Seattle, Colorado got caught on a quick restart at midfield and the Sounders knifed through the team like a lightsaber through a Obi Wan in Episode IV. No one defender is at fault; there’s like six guys that are a step too slow in defending. But this is a ‘central third’ problem.

• Against Portland, it was a dumb own goal on Josh Atencio. Colorado didn’t get great pressure to the ball and it was definitely mediocre final-third defending that was the culprit.

• Against San Jose it was on an absolute worldie of a goal from Chico Arango off of a set-piece. Doesn’t fit my narrative in that the defense can’t really be blamed for this one. Bangers happen.

• Lastly, against FC Dallas, through the middle third Colorado allowed Dallas to work it in down the wings. In the final third, Dallas made a series of clever passes with movement from the wings, to a cut-back pass, to a goal. Cole Bassett loses his man, or perhaps is anticipating a turnover to switch to transition. Keegan Rosenberry gets a little lost. Ian Murphy gets a lot lost. Reggie Cannon chokes. It’s not great. Colorado were up 2-0 at the time. This game would get goofy in the second half and end 3-3. This end-of-half goal was another moment of not-great final third defending.

So overall, it’s mostly poor final third defending that’s conceding these goals. In three of the five cases (or, 4 of 6 if you consider that COL conceded 2 to DC in the final minute), the team had fallen back into an organized defense with numbers and then got beat. So definitely the back four, or really ‘back eight’, need to have a conversation about their defending late in the half. Rafa and Yapi can sit in lounge chairs or practice PKs while Chris Little and Chris Armas make the others run line drills7 and practice clearances.

It’s a tactical thing. And also a quality thing.

In throwball (ok fine “American football”) there’s a coaching oddity that when teams have a big lead and they need to preserve it, their defensive tactics rely on the ‘prevent defense’ – pull off a defensive end or two, put in an extra corner back, and drop back into zone coverage with five or six guys. I have no idea if this works from a ‘big data’ perspective; throwball’s not my sport of choice. But a popular fan theory/adage is that ‘the prevent defense prevents you from winning.’ The challenge is that a team that doesn’t apply pressure on a pass-russ inevitably allows a Quarterback infinite time to throw, and Wide Receivers infinite time to find space. There’s probably some truth to this, even though I would assume that this defensive scheme is still a good idea in general.

In soccer, our friend Colton Coreschi suggests the same idea exists. He texted me this:

Late-half scoring is part of a tactics vicious cycle. Teams need a tying or go-ahead goal, so the offense pushes more players forward. Defending teams need to compensate, so they add more players to the defense and drop deeper.

But Colton adds that little wrinkle in the second message: “Increased pressure causes weaknesses of bad teams to get exposed and strengths of good ones to be heightened.” In other words, the real Colorado Rapids we see is the one we see in minute 45.

This is ominous and pessimistic, but I don’t think its wrong. As I said on HTHL podcast this week, the Rapids aren’t a great soccer team. I’m starting to think the back four are all sub-par for MLS, particularly Reggie Cannon and Andreas Maxsø. This means that perhaps there’s a personnel decision to be made in July in order to right the ship: to make the playoffs, Colorado needs to find one more defender that can add quality. This is probably a tough sell: Chidozie Awaziem, Reggie Cannon, and Ian Murphy were all added in the past 12 months. Andreas Maxsø is in only his second season, and he’s a DP. Giving up on him is a pretty brutal admission of failure. And its still only 11 games into the season, and the data set is still a little inconclusive.8

The 4-2-2-2 that Chris Armas has switched to seems to have defensive liabilities – although to be fair, three of these games mentioned above with defensive collapses happened when COL was playing a 4-2-3-1. I don’t think the Rapids can be called ‘a bad team’. But I do think we’ve seen over the past several weeks and with some dissapointing dropped results that the Colorado Rapids have a lot of work to do to become ‘a good team.’

In the Eastern Conference, it was pretty widely speculated that the top teams would be Inter Miami and Columbus, followed by Charlotte and Atlanta, then a thousand pounds of horse manure, and then the rest of the conference. And so far, with the exception of Atlanta being a little off, that all tracks. Philadelphia has been surprisingly good, but otherwise, it’s gone according to plan.

The Western Conference, to my mind, is a different story. Over the past couple of seasons it’s been pretty common to just make the blanket statement that MLS West teams play 17 matches at home, 17 matches away, and in the end, LAFC or Seattle win the West. LA Galaxy finally returned to their glory days of the Landon Donovan-Robbie Keane Era last season as Gabriel Pec, Josef Paintsil, and Riqui Puig became the most unstoppable offense force in the league; BETTER than Messi-Suarez-Busquets, in the opinion of this reporter. But through the first seven games of the season, the West has demonstrated that it’s all up for grabs.

There’s my preseason predictions side-by-side* with the results. The big outliers, of course, are

• FC Dallas, who are 6 spots higher than I expected,

• Vancouver, who are 9 spots higher than I expected,

• San Diego, who are 12 spots higher than I expected,

• LAFC, who are 8 spots lower than I expected,

• Seattle, who are 10 spots lower than I expected, and

• LA Galaxy, who are 12 spots lower than I expected.

I do not think we are watching a New World Order1 emerging in the conference.

The two LA teams did not turn into pumpkins overnight. Both are just currently focused on winning Concacaf Champions Cup; as of this writing, Galaxy need an away win tonight against Monterrey’s Tigres while LAFC are up 1-0 on aggregate over Inter Miami.2 The Galaxy will also be missing Riqui Puig all year due to an ACL tear, so it’s reasonable that my picking them 3rd was optimistic. Still, they’re not finishing last. LAFC are also almost certain to reload on DP talent at the season’s midpoint.

Seattle ain’t a pumpkin, either. The Sounders will not be going from 4th in 2024 with 57 points to finish the 2025 season in their current abysmal spot at 12th place; which, in 2024, required 37 points. They subtracted a fading Raul Ruidiaz and added a (so far) underperforming Jesus Ferriera. That’s not a massive qualitative change. Additionally, if you scroll down to a chart I placed in the next section, you’ll see Seattle have just 6 points, but 10.54 xPTs, meaning they haven’t scored timely goals, and they’ve conceded untimely goals.

I think we’re going to see those surprise conference leaders come back to earth midsummer, and the West’s perennial big three start to put together result once they past CCC, which ends June 1. FC Dallas looked incredible on the road at Mercedes Benz Arena against Atlanta, creating danger from Lucho Acosta and getting a devastating roofed goal against Brad Guzan to earn the draw. Vancouver, as mentioned in the footnotes, is probably no joke. And Backheeled/Total Soccer Show’s Joe Lowery has been converted to a San Diego FC believer.

I’m not gonna break down every team in the division and why I think they’re capable of a 48 to 52 point season – at the very least because SKC exists, and I think they’re gonna finish in the high 20s for points.

But the rest of the conference is competitive, and has a deep enough team of quality players, and has the top-line talent to be a problem for their opponents on any given day. I expect the final three weeks in the Western Conference could be the most exciting in a while: where any one of three or even four teams can take top honors, while fully six teams will be fighting for the back end of the playoffs. This could be the best Decision Day in a long while.

Early Weather Report for the Rapids: Fair, but Clouds on the Horizon Look Ominous

Colorado’s early results have been pretty much in line with what I expected. It’s a solid but unspectacular team that didn’t make a big offseason move to realign the stars, and thus, a 3-2-2 record, 11 points, and 7th place.

We’ve discussed it on the HTHL podcast, but there are three players who have been crazy good, and two who leave a lot to be desired.

Djordje Mihailovic was electric in the teams 2-0 win at home to Charlotte FC, scoring a brace and just generally being incredible. He was name MLS Player of the Week, and was quoted as saying “If every game was a day game, I would be Messi.” In the other games this season, he’s been damn good too. Ian Murphy, who I didn’t expect to start, has been excellent both at CB and LB filling in for Sam Vines. But the most surprising performance has been put on by goalkeeper Zack Steffen. Other than a tremendous stretch during Leagues Cup, Steffen was mostly meh in 2024. But he’s been amazing to start 2025. Steffen has conceded 6 goals in league play against an xGa of 10.97. That -4.97 G-xG rate is the best in Major League soccer.

Moreover, if you look at this chart below of teams in the Western Conference, you’ll see the Rapids xGa of 14.18 results in an xGD of -5.06 and an xPts of 6.71. In other words, Colorado hasn’t been that good, and they’ve wildly over-performed expectation. Almost all of that difference is due to Zack Steffen’s goalkeeping. This bonkerballs save on Patrick Agyemang is a good example of the kind of ‘that should have been a goal’ moment that Steffen has been producing every game.

On the other side, there’s Josh Atencio, who is a defensive stalwart in the 98th percentile for Blocks and the 97th percentile of MLS midfielders and Tackles and Interceptions. It’s his passing, though, that kills us. He’s 46th pct in Shot Creating Actions, 36th pct in xAG, and an abysmal 27th pct in Pass Completion. Teamed with Ollie Larraz – 44th in Shot Creating Actions, 49th in xAG, 42nd in Progressive Passes. Put those two together and Colorado doesn’t advance the ball dangerously, and they also turn it over too much in the midfield. I think both players give you something valuable on defense, but I’m not sure the team can make the playoffs with both on the field in terms of what they surrender in passing.

And then there’s *sigh* Kevin Cabrál.

That was regarding the 2-0 loss to Vancouver.

Below is his FBref.com Stats Radar chart. It is NSFW; and you might want to send your children out of the room before you scroll downward.

I mean, 6th pct on Passes Attempted? 14th in Successful Take-Ons? 34th in Assists? He’s not even good at Progressive Passes Received: those long bombs he’s supposed to get on the end of to stretch the field that is, to my mind, his only redeeming quality. He’s in the 51st percentile for that: half the wingers in the league do his one cool trick as well as he does. And he’s worse than 92 percent of the rest of leagues wingers at everything else he does. He does generate a lot of xG – 88th pct is pretty good. It does not, by a long shot, offset all the things he does poorly, which includes passing, receiving passes, dribbling, and defending. Cabrál had just 5 goals in 2024, and 2 in 2023.

I owe Matt Pollard an apology: I’ve been saying ‘yeah, but he stretches the field!’ for the past month, in a nod to the fact that the Rapids attack plan depends on having a long-bomb option like Cabrál in order to allow the central midfielders the space to work. I take it back. I was wrong. Almost any other player you put out there will offer you more in offense. Honestly, it’s possible that the Rapids down to ten men without Cabrál on the pitch might be better than eleven with Cabrál.

The larger problem is a Rapids team with 8 GF, 8 GA, but 9.12 xGF and 14.18 xGA for a total of -5.06 xGD over just 7 games. That’s a -0.723 Expected Goal Differential per game. Zack Steffen has helped them beat the odds through the first fifth of the season, but this rate of defying the odds is unsustainable. If you want to ask how bad things could turn if Zack Steffen becomes merely ‘above average’ instead of ‘insanely good’, look at LA Galaxy’s points total alongside their -5.17 xGD. It’s two. Two points.

Other fans I’ve messaged with have noticed things look a little wonky. The team is disjointed and lacking chemistry. There’s not a good sense of flow. The team has led in overall possession stat only once in 7 league matches. The next four games are vs a dominating San Diego at home, the Dynamo away, a Seattle Sounders team with a lot to prove at Dick’s, and then a trip back east to visit Christian Benteke and DC United.

…

I still think the Rapids will weather this storm and finish seventh. They’re a solid but unspectacular overall team in a conference that is loaded with solid but unspectacular teams. It’s probably mathematically improbable that the whole conference (except SKC) could fall between 41 and 53 points at season’s end. But that’s where I see things heading.

— — — — — — — — —

*- Here are those charts again, larger, in case you are reading this on a phone.

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We spend untold sums of mental energy on certain offseason questions regarding our favorite sports teams. I’ll be in the shower getting ready for work, with an important class to teach or a potentially stressful meeting1 and instead of previewing that event, I’ll start to think:

‘but what if the Rapids tried a 4-4-2 diamond? Would that maximize the available position players?’

These kinds of rumination are more common in January and February, when the roster is in flux and the games are still off in the distance. And then the season starts and our thinking about the Colorado Rapids becomes more fixed on what happened in a game rather than theoretical possibilities. ‘They played this player but they should have played that player.’ ‘They blew this one play; that guy should have been there, not there.’

For Colorado, there’s actually still a surprising amount of flux. And not in a bad way! We’re just still seeing a team and a coach tinkering and adjusting, both the tactics and the starting XI, with a ‘oh THESE are the new look Rapids’ determination still to emerge.

The Rapids have showed (sort of) three looks in the early season. Which isn’t really a ‘but that’s it!’ kind of thing, because through five games thats a lot. But it fits the meme, so we’re going with it.2

Look 1: 4-2-3-1 Classic

The Rapids’ first regular season match, as well as their two games against LAFC, came in a 4-2-3-1 that looks pretty much the same as over the past two seasons. The twin pivots were Ollie Larraz and Josh Atencio, and in front of them was Cole Bassett, Djordje Mihailovic, and Kevin Cabrál. Rafa Navarro sits up top.

It worked just fine. The standard approach to moving the ball up looked like this.

Awaziem starts with the ball and plays it to Larraz, who, facing backwards, pings it back to Ian Murphy. The defense has shifted enough to give Murphy space to play a ball either into space for Atencio, or to a backwards facing Atencio that can ‘open up’ to the ball and start running faced forward. The Rapids would sometimes variate that with Bassett, Mihailovic, or Cabrál dropping deep to be the first ‘ping’. And sometimes it would take a few ‘pings’ to get going forward.

Atencio or Larraz (or sometimes a more forward midfielder) is on ball. He has three options: 1. play the ball left and into space for Cole Bassett to get into the box; 2. play the ball to Navarro, who, facing backwards, can play it to a forward-facing Mihailovic for a dribble or shot; or 3. loft it long and towards the right corner for Reggie Cannon, who can choose to attack from the corner, combine with Kevin Cabrál in close support, or send in a cross to the front of goal.

In defense Colorado tended to defend deep, but they sprang to life in attack quickly when the chances presented themselves. Here’s a look at that with a gif.

Off a recovery, Keegan Rosenberry plays an aggressive pass to Mihailovic, who opens up to face forward and dribbles 30 yards forward with four Rapids players laid out perfectly, flanking him on each side like so:

X X ← Right

X ←

X X ← Left

It’s Bassett (L) and Atencio (R) to his rear, and Navarro (L) and Cabrál (R) ahead. This was a great fast-transition opportunity, and were it not for Djordje’s pass banging off of Rafa’s back foot, it probably could have been a lot more threatening. Colorado still worked it around a little before STL snuffed it out.

The press doesn’t quite work as well in the 4231 because the wings have to come from deeper; usually it’s Navarro doing most of the work. But this setup works because it gives the Rapids good support to the back line with those twin d-mids sitting deep. Can you tell I’m at heart a 4-2-3-1 guy?

Armas has made the offense work in this setup; something neither Pablo Mastroeni nor Anthony Hudson ever achieved. Colorado played in the 4-2-3-1 similarly under Robin Fraser, and with success. But Fraser was more interesting in deliberate, slow buildup through side-to-side passing which opened small gaps in the defense. Armas mostly wants to attack quickly. More front to back, less side to side.

They could probably do this all season, and it would be reasonably effective. As it happens, it seems like Colorado *isn’t* going to be doing this, or at least, they won’t be doing this exclusively.

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Look 2: The All-Star Isolation Attack

I was blessed enough in 2010 to go see Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers take on the Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. As the half drew near a close, Lebron was dribbling at the top of the key, and the four other attackers intentionally cleared off to the sides, leaving Lebron’s defender in a 1v1. I’d never seen that before in basketball. Heck, I wasn’t even aware that ‘yo let me take this dude solo’ was even an option in high level basketball. Lebron pivoted. He spun. He one-hand open-leg dunked on his poor defender (Ronny Turiaf? Devean George? Stephen Jackson?). It was awesome. They call it ‘going iso,’ as in isolation.

Soccer’s generally not a 1v1 sport. There’s 11 players on the pitch: if you get past your man, odds are someone else is gonna pick you up.

But if you send forward just 2 or 3 players on a burst, you could get into a 1v1 or 2v2 situation in the final third, and that might result in an advantageous situation if your players are talented enough. With one of 2024’s leading goalscorers in Rafa Navarro and one of the league’s leading setup men in Djordje Mihailovic, Colorado can put opponents in MVP isolation and do bad things to them. Observe what they did to Dallas on the second goal of the match.3

Mihailovic, receiving a long diagonal from the center of the pitch from Cole Bassett, puts Dallas’ right back (Shaq Moore) in a 1v1 situation. Djordje gets enough separation on the stutter-step to loft in a great front post cross. There in the middle is Rafa Navarro, between two ferns centerbacks. He rises. He delivers. 2-0, Colorado.

In the Jack Price era, Colorado could rely on devastatingly accurate corner kicks and set pieces to score goals. Colorado lead the league in set piece goals in 2021 with 9; in contrast they were 13th that year in goals from open. Colorado hasn’t been deadly on set pieces since then. They don’t have Jack Price any more.

But they do have Djordje. And Rafa.

Look 3: 4-3-3 With a Press in Austin

Colorado came out with a look they hadn’t shown yet against Austin, which was a 4-3-3 with a press – not so much a high press, mind you. Colorado wasn’t trying to pin Austin back in the corners; or rather, perhaps Austin’s fullbacks didn’t choose to receive the ball deep enough to require Colorado to use a high press. Instead, we got this:

1)

Colorado’s three forwards, Djordje Mihailovic, Rafa Navarro, and Kevin Cabrál (top to bottom in burgundy) set up with Austin’s two center backs in possession. Cabrál is actually arriving a little late - he had dropped back and you can see him looking at Chris Armas, who I imagine is yelling at him ‘Non mon ami, nous sommes pressés en ce moment!’ Which google translate informs me is French for ‘Press now!’ I do not know if Armas speaks French.

2)

Cabrál rushes the CB, he passes sideways. Mihailovic rushes the other CB.

Meeanwhile, in the midfield…

With the two orange brackets you have Atencio (left) and Bassett (right). They’re marking space; keeping Austin from advancing dangerously up the middle.

Which is something Austin would total botch a few minutes later when they conceded the only goal of the match to Colorado; a series of up-the-gut passes from Bassett to Larraz to Mihailovic to Navarro that was a master class in three things: risk assessment, operating in tight spaces, and the value of developing chemistry over time.4

Anyhow, here in our still frame about Larraz is cutting off the Austin wing option. Later in the game, Colorado would be a little flat footed to pinch the wings and Austin would advance more effectively in the wide spaces. To some degree, that’s normal: you can’t have everyone running as fast as they can in defense every possession, and the shift from attack to defense is going to lead to some gaps, unless you orient your entire attack to being ‘in a great position to defend when we lose the ball.’ This was a feature of Pablo Mastroeni’s approach to Rapids soccer. I liked it. But in 2017 it didn’t work and he got fired. Pablo has evolved to be a little more complex now that he’s with RSL. Maybe this digression should be a footnote. Oh well.

Austin’s CB could go wide to their RB, but Mihailovic seems to be poised to jump the lane or press and steal, and so Austin…

3)

… bypasses the midfield with the long switch. Colorado wins the aerial, forces a turnover, and the ATX possession is snuffed out.

…

All of this 4-3-3 press stuff was something of a surprise. Colorado played their first four matches of the year (two games against LAFC in the Concacaf Chapions Cup, two MLS games against FC Dallas and St Louis City that ended in a draw) in a 4-2-3-1. The talk preseason was of the Rapids perhaps switching to a 3-4-2-1 with two wingbacks and three Centerbacks. Nobody expected a 4-3-3. But they did it! And they won an away game with it.

Did it work because it’s the best system for the pieces available? Did it work because it was a tactical surprise, custom built for our opponents in Austin? I will be paying close attention to what Colorado does this week against San Jose for clues.