2020 Season Preview: NYCFC
/Point-above-replacement values are explained here. Non-penalty expected goals + expected assists are explained here, and you can see all players’ xG+xA in our interactive expected goals tables. Touch percent is the percentage of total team touches by that player while he is on the field, which can be found in our interactive expected passing tables.
Look, if we do this whole preview in serious pundit voice there’s going to be nothing to say about New York City Football Club. They're the exact same team as last season! Which was pretty much the same team as the season before that! They’ve been good for years, and if you’re crazy enough to bet on MLS you’d have to be even crazier not to bet on them being good again this year. Like some jerk wrote, boringly, on this website a couple of months ago, there’s no reason NYCFC shouldn’t be a playoff team in 2020.
But screw that, right? There’s a reason nobody likes Nate Silver. You know who everyone likes, deep down, whether they want to work through this uncomfortable personal truth with their therapist or not, is very loud men who go on TV to yell their loud sports takes loudly. And if those men gave even one tiny airborne molecule of a crap about American club soccer, boy would they have some news for you: NYCFC is not going to make the playoffs this season. Not even close! In fact, you’re an idiot for ever thinking they might.
Here’s every reason why this is not a playoff team:
First of all, you only thought they were good last year. I mean they were good, but not good good. Sixty-four points might have been enough for second on the table but second place doesn’t get you a trophy, and even if you won that trophy it’s some dorky fan-made shield thing that hasn’t gotten twerked on by an Atlanta stripper. Aim higher.
According to expected goals, which is totally a thing loud TV men understand and care about, 2019 NYCFC wasn’t even in the top 20 strongest teams of the last nine years. Hell, 2018 NYCFC had a better xGD, and everyone knows 2018 NYCFC was a train wreck because Dome Torrent is a bad soccer coa—sorry, we’re getting a 404 when we try to pull up those old columns but just trust us, that team was a train wreck, okay. Anyway, you know who had a better xGD than NYCFC in 2019? The Chicago Fire, who missed the playoffs so hard they had to fire their coach, take a flamethrower to the only parts of their roster you might have recognized, hand over their best player to the L.A. Galaxy for free, and go into witness protection as the Vancouver Whitecaps if the Vancouver Whitecaps’ crest was scribbled by a four-year-old with Happy Meal crayons.
Delia has threatened to “give everything from myself to the Club.”
You know why else NYCFC won’t make the playoffs? These jabronies only had one thing on their to-do list this offseason—hire a coach—and they screwed the pooch. First they made distracted boyfriend face at Gio van Bronckhorst for so much of 2019 that Torrent got pissed and walked away, then instead of conducting an actual candidate search they spent the next couple months doodling little hearts around GvB's yearbook pic. Alas, this club is incapable of signing anyone named Gio. When van Bronckhorst decided he'd rather get rich in China than trust that Man City planned to hire Pep Guardiola's successor from its Double-A team, NYCFC said eh, it's just our head coach job, let's throw darts at a Rolodex.
What they wound up with a few days before preseason was Ronny Deila, manager of the tenth best team in the Norwegian Eliteserien, who caught NYCFC's eye because he … signed a player on loan from CFG years ago? Honestly, nobody knows. It wasn't because he'd won fans at his most recent club, where they popped bottles when they heard some Americans were planning to relieve them of their coach. And it wasn't because he'd been some superstar at Celtic, the one notable entry in his bio, where he only got hired by accident. The season after Ronny left Glasgow, Celtic shot from 86 to 106 points while improving their goal differential from +62 to +81. His next stop, Vålerenga, went from averaging 43 points and a +5.3 GD in the three seasons before Deila to 38 points and -2.7 GD in three years under him. Getting hand-picked for promotion on the strength of that CV is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of failing up.
Because he's young and way too enthusiastic, Deila has been branded the Norwegian Klopp, a comparison that might make more sense after he gets around to reading up on the German Klopp. His current tactical ambition is to fix a defense that isn't broken, which worked out super well for Frank de Boer last year. Oh, and he's going to do it in a 4-2-3-1 that also has two strikers, or something? K. Like his roster, Deila's staff appears to have been picked for him (including an assistant who's better qualified than he is). The guy’s a caretaker manager of a club that should have been able to pull top talent if only losing the last coach and sporting director two weeks apart hadn't been a flashing red warning sign to stay away.
Let's talk about that roster. Is it pretty good? Sure. Is it better than last year? Nobody's even pretending. They replaced Ebenezer Ofori and Ben Sweat with Icelandic pop singer and occasional international friendly player Guðmundur Þórarinsson, who's apparently supposed to fill both holes in the depth chart, and … that's it. Gedion Zelalem? Great for preseason retweet numbers until everyone remembers why he washed out of MLS last year. Tayvon Gray? Stud prospect but there’s still no USL team so have fun splitting time between the U19s and the bench. So far the winter roster moves haven't brought serious competition to any position in the starting eleven, which seems like it ought to cost NYCFC whenever Grant Wahl does those dumb ambition rankings.
| Moralez Rank Among NYCFC Players | '17 | '18 | '19 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expected Goals | 4 | 2 | 1* |
| Expected Assists | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Expected Buildup | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Progressive Passes | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Attacking-Half Defensive Actions | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Attacking-Half Recoveries | 2 | 2 | 2 |
But the real problem with this squad is the Designated Players, all three of them major question marks. For Maxi Moralez, the question's whether he can stay young. The one-man engine behind NYCFC will turn 33 before opening day, and the list of 2019 MLS attacking mids age 33 and up isn’t exactly auspicious: Diego Valeri, Benny Feilhaber, Sasha Kljestan, Federico Higuaín. Only Valeri played more than 2,000 minutes. For an NYCFC team that looks about as appealing as a three-day-old dollar slice any time Maxi steps off the field, that’s nightmare fuel, and the scariest part is they knew this all winter and didn’t even bother to sign a backup.
For Alexandru Mitriță, the question isn't whether he's lived up to his bloated transfer fee (nah) but if he's a DP in this league at all. He didn’t look like it for the first half of last season. He didn't look like it in the playoffs, when he was outplayed by non-DP Ismael Tajouri-Shradi. He didn't look like it at last month’s preseason Florida Cup, when he was outplayed by Andres Jasson, an 18-year-old academy winger who hasn't even inked an MLS deal. Remember that player Chicago gifted the Galaxy? Check out last year’s bar chart for that guy, Aleksandar Katai, a healthy 28-year-old winger who, again, just had his TAM-range option declined by a team that didn’t make the playoffs. Then compare it to NYCFC’s club-record $9 million signing.
And then there’s Medina. Jesus. Why is this guy still here? There’s an alternate reality where NYCFC did the right thing and shipped him out the minute the summer transfer window opened on July 9, 2019, to give the kid a much-needed change of scenery and bring in an elite DP who would actually, you know, improve the team. That’s a timeline where NYCFC caught up to a flagging LAFC in the Supporters’ Shield race, steamrolled their way through an MLS Cup run, and returned a triumphant Torrent and Claudio Reyna to push for a treble this year. Then there’s the reality we’re living in, where absolutely none of that stuff happened and NYCFC continued to waste a DP slot on a player who contributed 392 blah minutes the whole second half of the season and couldn’t even make the bench (!!) in the playoffs (!!!!) and, get this, THE CLUB BROUGHT HIM BACK IN 2020.
Fellas! You can cut a deadweight DP! FC Cincinnati, the worst roster builders in MLS history, did it! The freaking Colorado Rapids did it! You’re telling me an ownership group that spends more on Man City transfers every time Pep sneezes than all of Major League Soccer has in its entire existence can’t cut bait on a bad $4 million investment? That cost is sunker than the Titanic and you’re doing no one any favors by refusing to climb on the damn door.
As things stand, NYCFC will be returning 92% of its 2019 minutes in 2020, which means the squad features roughly as many upgrades as a new edition of FIFA. In a league that’s growing by leaps and bounds, that’s not great. Since announcing their 2015 arrival with a David Villa billboard in Times Square, NYCFC has slashed payroll by 54% while the MLS median has climbed 65% to overtake them. That's five seasons in freefall from the second-highest wage bill in the league, neck and neck with Toronto, to below Cincinnati, the garbage-chili-on-spaghetti of soccer teams. Like Dome yodeled as he rode off into the sunset, this club acts like it’s FC Barcelona but spends like it’s Espanyol.
Which brings us to the real reason NYCFC won’t make the playoffs in 2020: Nobody cares. City Football Group doesn’t care, or they wouldn’t treat this club like a Financial Fair Play haven with annoyingly high overhead. The front office doesn’t care, or they might bother telling fans why their sporting department quit on them or what’s going on with the stadium search. Fans don’t care, or they wouldn’t be bailing on their season tickets in droves and missing all those scenic 7 train trips to Citi Field. Why should the players care? Why should you?
2020 Expectations
Lol jk NYCFC will make the playoffs and everything will be fine.
Won’t it?