Backpass: Can you win MLS Cup without a DP?
Colorado are shaping up to have a real shot to win MLS Cup. But they don't really have a star-level DP. Can a very good team win it all in today's MLS - without a multi-million-dollar superstar?
As the Colorado Rapids come steaming towards the end of the regular season and into the playoffs, its about the time to re-ask the question about what we think this team can achieve this year. If you asked Robin Fraser and the players, they would reach into their bag of sports clichés and dust off the old favorite ‘we think we can win it all.’ Which, to be fair, is the attitude and message you want from the players and coaches. If you asked that question of a player and received the reply, ‘There’s talent here, but realistically, our aggregate Goals Added metric indicates we’re significantly overperforming expectation and should be content to get to the Conference semi-finals,’ it’d look really pessimistic from that player. Also, if I player actually gave an answer like that, I’d probably die of a stroke on the spot.
The Colorado Rapids boldly (foolishly? skinflint-ishly?) went into the 2021 season with just one Designated Player on the roster - Younes Namli1. Namli is earning $1.27 million this year and, due to injury, hasn’t produced much: 439 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists, and a -0.53 Goals Added (G+) mark. So effectively, this is a Rapids team that is functioning without a DP.
A question came to me a few weeks back in regards to this: can you win MLS Cup without a DP? Has that ever been done before? So of course, being a spreadsheet dork, I went down the rabbit hole and tried to answer the question2. Here, in three parts, is a chart of every MLS Cup winner since the inception of the Designated Player rule in 2007; their DPs, and the statistical contribution of those players in the regular season.
The early days of the Designated Player era did not significantly change the way to win the league. From 2007 to 2010, the winners of MLS Cup had zero DPs on the roster. I did, however, take the time to look at the best players on those teams, if only out of curiosity, to ask the question ‘if they played today, would they have been DPs?’ For me, some, but not all of the players I marked as ‘key players’, i.e. guys that scored goals or were one of the best players, would have earned DP money if they had been around today.
The 2007 Dynamo team with Dwayne DeRosario, Brian Ching, and a young Stuart Holden just back from Sunderland was fantastic. I can still remember the exact sound of Andy Gray in the EA FIFA game yelling ‘Ching!’ for all the times I played with that team and banged in a headed cross. On the 2008 Columbus team, Guillermo Barros Schelotto (7 goals, 16 assists) was definitely a DP level contributed, but Ale Moreno (9 goals, 2 assists) and Chad Marshall probably were not.
The 2009 and 2010 Cup winners were most definitely ‘not DP’ teams. I remember the 2009 final as the first MLS game I ever watched and thought ‘this is cool. I should watch this league.’3 However, RSL really screwed over the ‘narrative’ going into this match - which was that the LA Galaxy, loaded with talent like Landon Donovan, David Beckham, Omar Gonzalez, Mike Magee, and Edson Buddle were destined for a title. But RSL took the Gals to penalties, and the better goalkeeper (Nick Rimando vs Donovan Ricketts) won. I think Nick Rimando deserved to be a DP, except that GK DPs are almost never a thing. Ditto Kyle Beckerman and defensive midfielder DPs.
The 2010 Colorado Rapids were a thing a beauty in that they played physical, and ugly, and they were able to grind out result after result. Mastroeni was impossible to play through, and Conor Casey banged in crosses and corners for headed goals, and they won ugly, every week. They won *really* ugly in MLS Cup. And that’s fitting, since they are the last team in MLS history to win MLS Cup without any Designated Players. So on some cosmic level, if the 2021 Rapids were to win the whole enchilada this year, it would make sense - the Rapids get it done with all 18 guys and the team is the star. Or at least, they have stars, they just don’t pay them DP money.
MLS historians have sub-categorized the league, somehow4, into three eras - 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. MLS 1.0 is from 1996 to 2007 or perhaps 2009; the birth of the league till Beckham, or the birth of league until the expansion of several important new teams like Toronto (2007) Seattle (2009) Philadelphia (2010) and Portland (2011). MLS 2.0 probably starts in 2009 and goes to just 2015/2016 - the earth-shattering expansions of NYCFC (2015) Atlanta United (2017) and LAFC (2018) . Those three clubs, with either high profile DP signings off the bat (Pirlo and Lampard), sold out massive stadiums (ATL) or both (Vela at LAFC in a sold out soccer specific stadium in Los Angeles located downtown near public transit with an insanely large supporters section) are MLS 3.0, although I think someday it’ll be seen as just the full fruition of MLS 2.0.
Anyhow. An essential element to MLS 2.0 was DPs. There were DPs before 2011 - mostly in 2009 and 2010, but they either didn’t win MLS Cup, as mentioned, or they were essentially busts (Julian De Guzman, Mista, Marcelo Gallardo, Branko Boskovic5, Denilson, Nery Castillo, Rafa Marquez).
From 2010 to 2012, we got Thierry Henry and Robbie Keane, and Beckham and Donovan finally had the pieces around them to be their best, and suddenly this DP thing was clicking.
And you get only the second MLS dynasty team in history, other than the 1996-1999 DC United team (3 MLS Cups and a runner-up), the LA Galaxy. The Galaxy won MLS in 2011, 2012, and 2014 because they had good players, and on top of their good players, they had star players that were DPs. That’s a clunky sentence, but what I mean is: there are good players - essential cogs to winning teams - that aren’t stars, like Drew Moor or Luke Mulholland or Baggio Husidic. And there are star players that aren’t DPs, like Ricardo Pepi now, or Jordan Morris in 2016. And there are DPs like Beckham and Henry that are also stars, but also DPs like Rafa Marquez and Gilberto and Gabriel Torres, who are ‘not stars’ or ‘disappointing’ or ‘an utter disaster.’ The Galaxy had DPs that were stars and good players and they were virtually indestructible for four years.
And then … there’s 2013 Kansas City. This was a team of good cogs that were all having their best year, and also, SKC were the beneficiaries of all of the really good teams choking in the playoffs. Aurelien Colin and Matt Besler were exceptional; Jimmy Nielsen was a top class goalkeeper, Benny Feilhaber and Kei Kamara created things, and Peter Vermes as head coach had perfected his ‘possession to control tempo’ style. Meanwhile, Supporters Shield winners NYRB, with Thierry Henry and Tim Cahill, choked in the second round of the playoffs against Houston. In the West, the very good Darlington Nagbe / Diego Valeri / Diego Chara Timbers lost to a slightly lesser but still good RSL team. And then that good-not-amazing RSL team lost in the final to a very-good SKC team … that had just one DP.
Kansas City’s DP, Claudio Bieler, scored some goals. But ASA’s G+ metric points out that 1) he should have scored more and 2) he was terrible at everything. His Dribbling G+ of -0.33 is ‘not great’, but his Passing G+ of -0.81 and Receiving G+ of -1.81 were among the worst in the league at any position. Essentially, he was a massive final third liability - pass him the ball, and his first touch would let him down way more often than any other comparable striker. Let him dribble, and he’s likely to shank the final pass. He is a pretty rare confluence of ‘expensive player that makes everyone around him worse.’ KC won it all anyhow; and then released him and made Dom Dwyer their striker in 2014. So although the Colorado Rapids are the last team to win MLS Cup without a DP, SKC are the last team in MLS to win an MLS Cup without an effective or productive DP. It can be done, but it takes all the other things to go your way.
The final chunk. This is all recent history, and mostly it’s the central supporting argument to this thesis - which is ‘it may be nigh-well impossible in the modern era to win MLS Cup without a DP - or two or three.’
As you see above, every team since SKC in 2013 to win MLS Cup had three DPs (or, because of midseason transfers, four). And those DPs were productive, overall. In some cases, the level of productivity from the DPs featured above was not significantly higher than the performance you might have gotten from a good non-DP.6 Portland in 2015 were not getting exceptional performance overall out of Liam Ridgewell; Seattle’s experience with Nelson Valdez and new-to-MLS Nico Lodeiro was a wash. But overall, every team after 2013 had three DPs, and at least two were in the range from ‘very good’ to ‘MLS All-Star/League MVP’.
This height of the ‘Stars win hardware’ phase of MLS is certainly 2017 to 2019, when Toronto FC and Atlanta United were in the finals, and star-studded LAFC entered the league and won a Supporters Shield, and every MLS Final was contested by talent-loaded teams (2016 Seattle-Toronto, 2017 Toronto-Seattle, 2018 Atlanta-Portland, 2019 Seattle-Toronto). I mean my God Almiron with an overall G+ of 7.697 and Josef Martinez with a league record 31 goals?
The exception might be 2020, who statistically don’t look amazing, but were still pretty tough to beat. They were good at all eleven positions, and Lucas Zelerayan, like Giovinco before him, was an exceptional player for whom the G+ statistic really doesn’t do him justice. And, due to the shortened Covid-plagued season, the sample size is outta whack, and thus it is harder to use numbers to prove a verifiable point. But the eye test still upholds my original point - Lucas Zelerayan is a fantastic player, and a DP, and he won MLS Cup. Thus, ever since 2013, you need at least one excellent DP to win the highest crown in the league.
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Can the Rapids win it all in 2021? Listen, anything is possible. But the indication from the recent history of this league is that all the teams that make the playoffs these days are good, and a very good team that does not have a DP star, like the Rapids, can go pretty far. But the odds are not good that a team like that can win MLS Cup.
Normally I bold all player names. In this article, I name a gazillion players. So I only bolded Rapids players. I dunno why I bold player names. Habit? Because SBNation’s auto-tagger used to do it anyway? Who knows.
If these images of the spreadsheet are too small for you, here’s a link to access to the original google doc.
It probably wasn’t the first MLS match I ever watched - I’m sure I watched some of Beckham’s debut season in late 2007. But I would say that before 2009, I barely noticed the league existed. Which, considering I lived in DC in 1997-1998, NYC in 1999-2000, and LA from 2001-2006, is not a great endorsement of the leagues efforts to capture twenty-somethings back in the day. They were trying to get little kids with the kitschy logos and all, and everyone knew it. MLS 1.0 marketing was basically Poochie.
MLS is just 26 years old. If I were to subcategorize English football into eras like this, there would be 18 distinct eras from 1857 till today. That’s ridiculous.
Literally, who?
None of them are Claudio-Bieler-level terrible, however.
Third-highest G+ in league-history in seasons in which the metric is available. The two highest are 2019 Carlos Vela (+11.40) and 2019 Zlatan Ibrahimovic (+10.58)