For the life of me I can’t remember a team coming off a club-record season for points, one in which they developed two of the very best young players in the region and compensated for an early injury that could’ve unmade them, and one in which they didn’t officially lose an Audi MLS Cup Playoffs game, feeling this… bad.
It feels bad to think about Real Salt Lake right now. But it shouldn’t! This was a very good year!
Let’s talk a little bit about it:
I’m just gonna list ‘em:
- Andrés Gómez: The Colombian winger was torrid from the jump and parlayed it into a $11 million (plus add-ons) move to Ligue 1 side Stade Rennais.
- Fidel Barajas: Bought the 18-year-old Mexican-American playmaker from USL Championship side Charleston Battery for $250k in the offseason. Sold him to LIGA MX's Chivas for 16 times that amount before summer hit.
- Diego Luna: Turned the 21-year-old playmaker into a core piece of the attack, as he finished second in 22 Under 22 presented by BODYARMOR and won MLS Young Player of the Year.
- Emeka Eneli: He’s 25, so not technically young. But in just his second pro season, he switched positions and became one of the league’s best defensive midfielders. He had a legitimate All-Star shout.
- Gavin Beavers: The 19-year-old ‘keeper was up-and-down with his shot-stopping, but he’s beyond his years in how he commands his box and got more than 1,000 first-team minutes.
It’s pretty clear that this is exactly who RSL want to be: a team that can develop their own guys, but can also bring in high-upside talent on the cheap and sell at a massive profit either to the biggest teams in Mexico (or maybe Brazil) or clubs from the top-five European leagues.
The pipeline is open. To the fanbase, that’s not as good as a trophy. But for the club's long-term health, it was a massive, landmark season.
The very obvious downstream effect of Gómez coming out and looking like prime Franck Ribery was that everybody else in the attack got to look like the best versions of themselves, too. And nobody benefitted more than star center forward Chicho Arango, who had 17g/11a through the season’s first 22 games and was one of the favorites for the Landon Donovan MLS MVP award.
At the same time, Eneli was doing his best Darlington Nagbe impression in central midfield, covering ground and fearlessly getting on the ball in the toughest spots before either somehow wriggling out of it or drawing a foul. He was never going to be a like-for-like replacement for Pablo Ruiz, whose early, season-ending injury caused head coach Pablo Mastroeni to have to rework a game model that had already been reworked significantly last offseason. But he provided a dose of on-ball dynamism that made RSL a unique challenge in the Western Conference.
But Chicho got hurt in Game 23. And then he got suspended. And Gómez was sold. And Eneli ran out of gas. And Luna… well, Luna kept cooking. But as good as he is, he’s not yet at “get on my back and I’ll carry us home” level.
RSL were 12W-3L-7D in those first 22 games. They were just 4W-4L-4D the rest of the way, with blink-and-you-missed-it appearances in both Leagues Cup and the playoffs.
RSL’s underlying numbers, even after they hit that mid-season nosedive, were healthier than last year’s, or the year before. They had a healthier expected goals differential and even more granular stats, like American Soccer Analysis’s goals added metric, liked them more.
They had more of the ball. They hit more short and medium-range passes with more accuracy. They hit fewer long balls, and took fewer shots from distance. They crossed less and looked to actually build high-quality chances more.
Want to know why this team looked like an elite side for two-thirds of the season? Because they were.
- Diego Luna (LW/AM): Took a step forward as a playmaking left winger. Is the next step going to be sliding him inside to be a No. 10? It’s his true spot.
- Chicho Arango (FW): We’ve got enough data on Chicho in MLS to know that his late-season swoon was an outlier.
- Braian Ojeda (CM): The 24-year-old Paraguayan continues to develop into one of the better box-to-box midfielders in the league.
- Emeka Eneli (DM/RB): Honest to god, I could see him developing into an All-Star at either spot.
- Justen Glad (CB): Rock-solid and mistake-free reading the game out there even when things got chaotic around him.
RSL’s shopping is done: They brought in Diogo Gonçalves as a DP and Dominik Marczuk as a U22 signing after selling Gómez and Barajas. In other words, they made their big winter signings in the summer.
It was the right move. I get how frustrating this year must’ve been for Mastroeni – his reward for developing a star player is to have that star player sold and then replaced on a budget smack in the middle of the season – to say nothing of how frustrating it must’ve been for fans. But this is the business.
The business now is to get Gonçalves and Marczuk ready for next year (I am bullish), and to get Luna ready to jump a level once again next year (I am bullish), to get Arango back to his best (I am bullish), maybe to get Brayan Vera some counseling (ehhhh…) and have a plan for reintegrating Ruiz (if he’s back to his best that’ll be like adding a new, borderline DP-caliber game-changer).
It’ll be a quiet winter. The work will be behind the scenes.
We’ll see how successful it’s been come February.
