May, as you’ve just experienced if you’re an avid MLS watcher, is a grind. Traditionally, it’s when the three-game regular-season weeks start and when the Concacaf Champions Cup ends. It’s when teams really commit (or don’t) to the US Open Cup/Canadian Championship. And if you’re LAFC, it’s when you get a chance to play in the Most Expensive Game in North American Soccer History™.
It’s the busiest month on the calendar, stuff like “nine games in 29 days” and such. In theory, that should make it a “let’s separate the men from the boys” exercise, but it almost never works out that way. What tends to happen instead is the top of the table comes back to the pack a little bit, while at the same time, desperation kicks in for the stragglers, who suddenly start collecting results.
Everything tightens up because you can’t fake desperate. Desperate wins games. Even in Carson.
In we go.
The second-hottest team in the league – the one that’s done the best not just surviving, but actually thriving across all competitions over this past month, with an unbeaten run that’s now hit 10 games and an upcoming date in the Open Cup quarterfinals – is Nashville SC.
That’s not unusual. The ‘Yotes, under previous head coach Gary Smith, regularly dominated in the slice of the year when:
- Rugged, uncomplicated defense still wins the day because teams aren’t quite 100% polished with the ball yet, and…
- Hany Mukhtar, a notoriously slow starter, comes alive.
That’s a winning combo. Go back over the past four years and you’ll see, season after season, how Nashville are one of the league’s best in mid-to-late spring.
The difference this year is B.J. Callaghan’s team is more dimensional with the ball than Smith’s ever was, and so the upturn in results (even after Saturday’s ultimately disappointing 2-2 home draw with New York City FC) is about more than just Hany finding his finishing boots. Callaghan had a vision for changing the way this team plays, and the players have been happily executing it.
This group, whose core is mostly the same Smith worked with for the past half-decade, is now more of a ball-playing side, one that still operates off some of Smith’s principles (get Mukhtar and Sam Surridge running together), but also comes further up the pitch as a collective. So they hit more short and medium-range passes, play side-to-side a little bit more to open up the half-spaces, and settle for open-play crosses much, much less often.
They are, in other words, one of the teams honing the knife via possession as the season goes on. The result is sequences like these two happening with greater frequency and lethality:
In some ways it looks like bad defense on NYCFC’s part – we all know there are defensive issues on every single goal that’s ever been scored; go ahead and pick at ‘em if you want – but it’s more about Nashville’s shape in building out. Callaghan has empowered his center backs to be braver on the ball, drawing more pressure before slipping passes through to the central midfielders (in this case it’s 19-year-old Matthew Corcoran, who had something of a coming-out party with a pair of secondary assists). Those central midfielders, in turn, are empowered to find space, receive on the half-turn and try to combine in short bursts to eliminate any closing pressure. They’ll even sometimes drift all the way to the touchline, which is what you’re seeing in the second clip.
It’s dangerous. Lose the ball in those spots and your rest defense is at least partially compromised, leaving the center backs with lots of space to worry about in behind. That’s a massive philosophical shift. The risk has been worth the reward, though, as Jack Maher has (finally) taken a big step and Colombian veteran Jeisson Palacios has been a godsend.
Those guys are why Nashville were able to go almost two months without Walker Zimmerman, which in years past was a death sentence. He was back in the XI this weekend, and while some of the rust showed, there were more than just a few reminders that Zimmerman, too, can play with the ball a little bit.
That said, they saw a 2-0 lead dissolve over the game’s final 35 minutes to become a 2-2 draw (not without some controversy; make sure you watch Instant Replay this week).
These ended up being points dropped and a costly reminder that the blade still needs sharpening.
“It’s important that we reflect back on what the month looked like. That was our ninth game in the month,” Callaghan said. “[I’m] proud of the group, the way they competed. Proud of the way they were able to grind out results, not only in MLS play but in the US Open Cup. I’m really proud of the contributions across the board by a lot of players.”
NYCFC, meanwhile, had an up-and-down month, which concluded with a schizophrenic week: a commanding 3-1 win over Chicago followed by a humiliating 3-0 home loss to Houston followed by this impressive rally for one point in Tennessee. None of it really makes sense until you remember this is MLS, at which point it all does.
The big takeaway through all of it: When the Pigeons have Keaton Parks on the field, they can beat anybody. When they don’t, they’re pigeons.
The big news of the week – or some of the big news of the week, anyway – was St. Louis parting ways with new manager Olof Mellberg. Turns out that, despite the confidence with which he was presented, the big Swede was not the right fit for a team looking to push back into Audi MLS Cup Playoffs contention after a year on the outside.
“The decision to part ways with Olof goes beyond just results,” is how sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel put it in the press release announcing Mellberg’s departure. “We’ve analyzed the team’s performance across a number of factors, including the need to execute against a style of play that led to the team’s initial success and has been part of our DNA for four years.”
Those words sound right and the decision to cut bait with Mellberg now rather than letting him grind the entire season into dust was the correct one.
The problem is I’m still not exactly certain what the style of play referred to in Pfannenstiel’s quote is supposed to be. There just hasn’t been a consistent one across the first two-and-a-half years of St. Louis’s existence:
- Bradley Carnell, he of the Red Bull roots, was hired first and brought Energy Drink Soccer with him (and has subsequently brought it to Philly, where things are going very well).
- John Hackworth was then named interim coach when Carnell was dismissed, and while CITY SC remained a transition-heavy team, there was less high pressing and direct running, and more mid-block traps with an emphasis on Marcel Hartel’s ability to crack opposing backlines open from the left half-space.
- Mellberg tossed all that in the trash for a low-block 5-4-1 (I can’t bring myself to call it a 3-4-2-1) that was just about absorbing pressure for 90 minutes and trying to hit on the occasional set piece or counter. It was dog water.
Which brings us to new interim head coach David Critchley, the fourth man to walk the sidelines in 28 months. On Saturday he steered the team to a late, dramatic, 2-1 win over a heavily rotated San Jose Earthquakes side.
This was no masterpiece – both St. Louis goals came when they capitalized on mistakes from a rookie center back and a backup goalkeeper, and in between they found a way (as has been their wont this season, no matter how many center backs are crammed into the lineup) to cough up a late goal. In the 90th minute this one looked destined to finish 1-1, another disappointment in a season full of them.
But the difference was they spent the whole game trying to play on the front foot. There was a timidity, or maybe even an outright fear, to how Mellberg wanted his team to operate. On Saturday that was not on display, which is a big part of how and why Simon Becher won the deciding penalty in second-half stoppage time.
That was baked into the game plan. You can see the more aggressive positioning in the network passing graphic:
Yeah, that’s a pretty standard 4-2-3-1, but Eduard Löwen (No. 10) pushed forward early and often from the double pivot, and both fullbacks were given orders to get forward on the overlap.
This was not something that happened under Mellberg. Almost ever.
Now, the final ball wasn’t great from anyone in red (boy does Critchley need to help Hartel and Cedric Teuchert rediscover their 2024 form) but at least the structure gave them a chance to… get chances. More balls into the final third, more balls into the box, more runners in the box when those balls get there, etc. It eventually showed up on the scoreboard; all of it showed up in the advanced data after the game as well.
“I believed in the team and I knew everything we talked about. We accepted nothing today but three points as a team. So, the mentality was super, super important for us,” Critchley said in the postgame presser. “Yes, they equalized, gave us a little bit of adversity. It's okay.
“We're changing things around here. We don't sit back in those moments. We go and try and win a football game, and that's what we’ve done and that's what was deserving of the three points today."
The loss ended San Jose’s eight-game unbeaten run across all comps, one that stretched back to early May. Like Nashville, they’ve played their way into an Open Cup quarterfinal next month and might’ve paid for the energy they expended with some dead legs at the end of this one.
“The team has played very well during the month of May. They’ve battled real hard,” head coach Bruce Arena said afterward, in a press conference long on brevity. “They’ve done a real good job.”
Like I said, May’s a busy month. The Quakes were mostly great and are well set up to climb in the season’s second half.
11. The Red Bulls, another of those Open Cup quarterfinalists, finished the month with a nine-point week, which was capped by Saturday’s relatively ho-hum 2-0 win over Atlanta.
Cameron Harper accepted a third-minute gift to make it 1-0, then delivered one to Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting 26 minutes later for the final:
I’m giving Alex Hack our Pass of the Week for dropping that ball right into Harper’s run. Great job of avoiding that Atlanta pressure, carrying the ball upfield a bit and then playing the runner through.
10. Charlotte were on the wrong end of a bad one midweek at RBNY, but went up to Toronto and took out their frustrations via a goal from Pep Biel and a late insurance goal from Pat Agyemang for the 2-0 final on Saturday.
Agyemang continues to dig himself out of the slump he’s spent most of the season in, and his goal was classic Big Pat: with the opponents pushing up in search of an equalizer he got loose on the break, buried one defender, cut another, and finished nicely. He’s devastating in those open-field moments.
Where he still needs to improve is in finding one-touch finishes from sequences of possession. So while his boxscore numbers from the half-season are ok (6g/1a in about 1,250 minutes won’t get you benched), his underlying numbers are worrying: just 22nd percentile, as per FBRef, in non-penalty xG, and just 44th percentile overall in shots.
Agyemang is great at scoring the types of goals that few other players can score. He’s got to get better at scoring the types of goals that have Tai Baribo atop this year’s Golden Boot presented by Audi race and won Christian Benteke last year’s award.
9. Hugo Cuypers got one of those goals to make it 2-0 Fire, then almost immediately scored an Agyemang-type goal to make it 3-0 in what eventually became a big, 3-1 Fire win down in Orlando against the suddenly struggling Lions.
The Belgian DP is having a season typical of No. 9s under Gregg Berhalter, whose scheme generates a ton of looks in the box if your movement is good:
This is just classic Berhalter Ball. Kei Kamara, Ola Kamara, Gyasi Zardes… they all feasted on sequences like this. Cuypers now has 10 goals on about 12 xG, so even as he’s underperforming a little bit, he’s well in the Golden Boot race.
“There were a couple things that we focused on that I thought we did a really good job in and a lot of it had to do with our midfield and our wingers,” Berhalter said in the post-match presser. “Part of the game plan was to open up space and get their back line out of position, and I think we did that well.”
The Fire are another Open Cup quarterfinalist and lost just once in May across all competitions.
Orlando City, meanwhile, have now followed up a 12-game unbeaten run by losing three of four (all competitions), conceding three goals in each of those losses.
I think it’s a blip – I think this team is good, and I don’t think Pedro Gallese will wave at many more shots like he did on Philip Zinckernagel’s opener, which set the tone – but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
8. New England pushed their league unbeaten run to nine games, absolutely burying CF Montréal by a 3-0 scoreline after Giacomo Vrioni’s 36th-minute red card reduced the hosts to 10 men.
The Revs then did the right thing in releasing their wingbacks higher and enveloping a Montréal side that had been on the front foot for the first half-hour. Armchair Analyst special correspondent Calen Carr was on the 1s and 2s:
Twenty-year-old wingback Ilay Feingold built off his first-ever MLS goal midweek by scoring two and assisting another in Montréal. In the process, Feingold picked out his fellow wingback, 17-year-old Peyton Miller, for his first MLS goal to boot.
Miller is one of the top young prospects in MLS (recently called up for the US U20s) and has had moments where he’s shown his ability to drive forward inside on the ball or stretch in behind off the ball, and then find the right pass (he had a nice assist to Feingold and also had one to forward Ignatius Ganago that was called offside). Miller seemed soft-spoken (reminder: he is 17) and said all of the right things about the team after, but plays with a poise and some personality beyond his years (I can’t say for sure, but there was a moment before his goal where I thought he asked Montréal and former USYNT player Dante Sealy if he wanted his shirt after being pulled down by it – which I loved).
Either way, the best versions of the Revs, whether under Bruce Arena (with DeJuan Jones and Brandon Bye) or this younger version (with Miller and Feingold) under Caleb Porter, weaponized the wingbacks to allow Carles Gil time, space and cutting runners coming from deep areas out wide.
Their home-heavy schedule this summer won’t be enough on its own to take this project to the next level – they’ll need Leo Campana healthy and scoring goals for that – but in the meantime, these wingback-to-wingback goals are fun to watch.
7. Also fun to watch: Leo Messi. The GOAT put together a 2g/3a masterclass as, in their final outing before the FIFA Club World Cup, Inter Miami ripped a massively (heh) depleted Columbus Crew side to shreds, to the tune of a 5-1 final.
The first goal? Columbus fell asleep and Messi took a quick free kick to play Tadeo Allende over the top.
The second goal? Crew backup ‘keeper Nicholas Hagen flubbed a pass right to Messi at the top of the box trying to build out.
The third goal? Mohamed Farsi was late stepping up and Messi beat the offside trap to run in behind.
You get the idea. Just a lot of ruthless opportunism from the Herons, who’ve got some spring back in their step over the past week, which started with their late rally for a point in Philadelphia last Saturday.
This was easily the best Miami performance of the year, which makes it the best of the Javier Mascherano era.
"We managed not only to score three goals but also to dominate the game and make Columbus run, which is not easy because normally they are a team that overwhelms you,” Mascherano said. “With their style of play, you can beat them, but usually you suffer a lot, like we did in the match in Columbus."
It’s the Crew who are now suffering, as they’re winless in six and have lost two of three. Their Supporters’ Shield hopes aren’t exactly dead, but they took what looks like a mortal blow this month.
Columbus look like a team that badly needs two weeks off to get their legs back.
6. Also suffering are their neighbors, FC Cincinnati, whose winless skid hit four after a brutal 2-1 home loss to D.C. United, which followed Wednesday’s equally brutal 3-3 home draw to FC Dallas, which itself came on the heels of the 4-2 clubbing they took in Atlanta last weekend.
These were three games you’d have expected Cincy to win. These were three games they’ve made a habit of winning since Pat Noonan arrived, grinding out 1-0s and 2-1s even when they haven’t been playing well (as has been the case all season until this week).
"We don’t concern ourselves with where teams are positioned in the table. Our focus is on us and trying to be a good team and improve,” Noonan said to the press after the game. “All of those teams, despite their record, showed that they can go and beat good teams.
“Well, right now I think that there’s a lot that you could look at our group and say ‘How good are we?’”
They’re second in the East – third in points per game (1.76) – but the underlying numbers say “not very!” And while both D.C. goals came via set pieces, most of the work Noonan needs to do is on build-out patterns, because Cincy had no answers for ball progression once United blanketed Pavel Bucha.
D.C. ended up taking four points this week, and I’m gonna go back to Wednesday night’s Gabriel Pirani banger for our Face of the Week:
He, uh, had a message he wanted head coach Troy Lesesne to hear.
I don’t think this represents any kind of turnaround for D.C., but they’re well clear of the Wooden Spoon race at least, and find themselves crafting something of a Cinderella story in the Open Cup.
It really has been a good couple of weeks for the Black-and-Red.
5. Dallas held on for dear life at home against Philadelphia, getting a scoreless draw despite Lalas Abubakar’s 39th-minute red card. The Union generated 23 shots; just one of them was on goal. Dallas got numbers behind the ball and stayed disciplined.
A disappointing result for Philly, who nonetheless stayed atop the East on two points per game and pushed their unbeaten streak to 11 across all competitions – they had a very, very good May. That includes a couple of Open Cup wins, which means they’ll be hosting the Red Bulls in the quarterfinals.
Dallas finished the month 0W-3L-3D in league play.
“We gotta have a long reflection of these last four or five, six games we've been in,” is how head coach Eric Quill put it in the postgame.
4. Dejan Joveljić’s goals on either side of halftime gave Sporting KC a 2-1 lead at Houston, at which point the visitors battened down the hatches amidst a second-half onslaught. It turned out to be enough, but to be safe they got a late one against the run of play from Santiago Muñoz for the 3-1 final.
Sporting are now 4W-3L-3D since Kerry Zavagnin replaced Peter Vermes. Vibes are some of that, as it’s clear the guys in the locker room needed to hear a new voice. Joveljić’s brilliance is maybe even a bigger piece, as he’s got 7g/1a in those 10 games, and has scored a brace in two of the wins.
Joveljić became a father on Thursday, so it was a pretty, pretty big week for him.
“Probably the best week ever,” he said afterward. “One day before my wife delivered – actually a few hours before my wife delivered – we played against New England and I scored and we took one point, which is great after [going] 2-0 down.
“This game on the road in a very tough place to play – I hate this place, to be honest – so it’s a huge three points. Now we go to LA and then we play three games at home. It's going to be hard, but we need to get points to be in the race for a playoff spot.”
Sporting are just four points back from ninth-place Houston, and good vibes + a hot striker = a great way to collect results. Structural issues remain, however, as they haven’t won the xG battle since Zavagnin’s second game in charge, and the even more granular advanced stuff is flashing a huge warning sign.
The biggest is that it’s still just waaaaay too easy to complete meaningful passes against them, as so:
There are multiple instances there where some organized pressure can at least turn the whole Dynamo movement backwards, or maybe even cause a turnover. Instead, Sporting are so passive it opens an entire half of the field for Jack McGlynn to dime up Lawrence Ennali in a spot where he’s born to do damage.
The loss snapped Houston’s four-game unbeaten run in the league, but Ennali’s return – this was his first game back after last year’s ACL tear – means they don’t have to look hard to find a silver lining.
I’m buying Dynamo stock for the second half of the season.
3. I’m already loaded up on San Diego FC stock. They barely allowed Austin a sniff in a comprehensive 2-0 win on Saturday, which they needed after a frustrating 1-0 midweek loss at Seattle.
That graphic, courtesy of MLS Analytics on BlueSky, is what positional dominance via possession looks like. What makes San Diego special is the myriad ways they have to turn that positional dominance into attacking penetration. Sometimes it’s via direct, off-ball running from the wingers, and sometimes it’s off of combo play with the No. 9 (who’s almost always a false 9 these days), and sometimes it’s more traditional overlapping from the fullbacks.
In this one, it was releasing one of the 8s in Mikey Varas’s 4-3-3 into the attack with well-timed box arrival – happening more and more of late with this team. That’s how Luca de la Torre made it 1-0 on the hour mark, while some late combo play opened up the Verde & Black backline for Milan Iloski to add the coup de grace.
Los Niños went 5W-1L-1D in May with a +10 goal differential. They’re second in the West and it’s not an accident. They play beautiful, winning soccer.
Austin don’t. They’re winless in league play since mid-April and sinking like a stone, though they did manage to punch their ticket to the Open Cup quarterfinals.
2. Minnesota United were looking for a signature Western Conference win and absolutely found one, taking points in Seattle for the first time in their history with a 3-2 win at Lumen Field. Praise Kier!
I’m sure it’s going to shock you to learn they were dangerous on set pieces and devastating on the counter. They were also mostly very, very comfortable defending in their 18-yard box, which they did for most of the game.
In short, it all went to Eric Ramsay’s plan. If you’re a regular reader you know I have my doubts about the long-term efficacy of that plan – teams that play so completely against the ball tend not to win things in MLS – but the Loons are third in the West and into the Open Cup quarterfinals. So this might be the year.
Seattle’s little, two-game winning streak came to an end, and while the injuries to the center backs have taken a toll, they were at least able to welcome Jackson Ragen back to the XI after a prolonged absence.
The other silver lining here was the play of Georgi Minoungou in the second half. He constantly found space and beat his man out wide, and damn near got his team a point doing so.
Still, this was neither the performance nor the result they wanted. Obviously.
1. And finally… finally. Finally. It finally happened. Finally. At last. Finally.
The Galaxy had been playing better over the past four or five games. Not great, mind you – not even good, really – but good enough to eventually pick off a win if they got a couple of lucky breaks and an opponent lacking focus or manpower or both.
That’s exactly what the schedule gods served up with RSL in town on Saturday night. The 2-0 win for the hosts, with both goals coming in semi-transition against a raggedy backline, snapped LA’s record 16-game winless streak to start the season.
I’m gonna let Galaxy coach Greg Vanney take the mic and sing us out:
“The last five games, we’ve been more healthy. We’ve had the majority of our group together. We’ve seen some younger guys come along," Vanney said in the postgame.
“I don’t see why we can’t get on a run. For us, as a group, it’s about learning how to win and getting across the finish line. So hopefully tonight will be a lesson."
