2021 MLS Season Previews: Colorado Rapids, Philadelphia Union, and Vancouver Whitecaps
/We’re publishing three team previews every weekday until MLS First Kick on April 16th. You can find all of them here.
Today we’re looking at three teams that have reason for optimism ahead of the 2021 season.
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Colorado: A Steady Current
By Mark Goodman
The Colorado Rapids were full of surprises in 2020. They had the most games cancelled due to Covid, and also took early exits from both of the league’s tournaments, the ‘MLS is Back’ bubble competition and the MLS playoffs. They also had their first winning season and first playoff appearance since 2016. With that in mind, it seems like 2021 is a tipping point year for the young Rapids - they’ll either continue to make progress and become one of the better teams in the Western Conference or they’ll demonstrate that they made the most of a shortened schedule in 2020 and regress backwards.
If it ain’t broke
The start of the MLS season (really, any sports season) requires that fans adjust and rewire their brains. There’s a lot of ‘oh yeah, he left in January for Europe’ or ‘who’s that guy? (cue frantic google searching). Even for folks that cover the league closely, it still takes time to download the new names and excise the old.
I’ve got good news for you: that won’t be a problem for a person that watches the Rapids. They lost three players you won’t remember and added six names you may not need to learn at all. The starting XI will have between zero and two new players in it to start the season.
The question for the ASA-level nerds out there is what might we deduce about a team and roster stability from year to year? So here’s a chart:
| Transfers | Loans | | | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1st | 1st | ||||
| 1 | 1 | 1st | 2nd | ||||
| 2 | 1 | 3 | 3rd | 8th | |||
| 4 | 4 | 4th | 22nd | ||||
| 3 | 1 | 4 | 4th | 16th | |||
| 4 | 4 | 4th | 6th | ||||
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 7th | 11th | |
| 5 | 5 | 7th | 14th | ||||
| 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 7th | 7th | ||
| 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 7th | 21st | |
| 5 | 1 | 6 | 10th | 26th | |||
| 1 | 1 | 4 | 6 | 10th | 10th | ||
| 5 | 1 | 6 | 10th | 9th | |||
| 3 | 3 | 6 | 10th | 3rd | |||
| 3 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 10th | 17th | ||
| 6 | 1 | 7 | 15th | 12th | |||
| 7 | 1 | 8 | 16th | 4th | |||
| 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 8 | 16th | 24th | |
| 6 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 16th | 5th | ||
| 8 | 1 | 9 | 19th | 25th | |||
| 8 | 1 | 9 | 19th | 15th | |||
| 7 | 3 | 10 | 21st | 20th | |||
| 4 | 5 | 1 | 10 | 21st | 13th | ||
| 7 | 1 | 3 | 11 | 23rd | 19th | ||
| 8 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 24th | 23rd | ||
| 8 | 2 | 4 | 14 | 25th | 18th | ||
| 24 | 2 | 26 | 26th | NA |
I ranked MLS teams on their number of incoming roster moves (transfers, draft picks, and homegrown signings) and placed that against their overall table finish. There’s no need for a complex statistical regression here or creating a fancy WAR-type number normalized to 100 here. This chart is simply looking at the degree to which a team’s changes are related to their 2020 performance.
There are teams with correlation between roster moves and final position (in bold). The LA Galaxy, for instance, finished 20th overall; they rank 21st overall in offseason in-bound signings. That makes sense: ‘we were bad, we need to change things up’ is a logical sentiment. Some top teams like Philadelphia, Seattle, and Toronto fit this description, too. The Rapids are in this category - I’ll come back to them.
There’s some middlin’ teams with a looser connection between finishing position and transfer moves.
Then there are the other guys (in italics)…
The ‘oh no baby what is you doin’?’ teams in the league: Chicago (finished 22nd, made just four transfers), RSL (21st, five transfers), and Cincinnati (26th, six transfers). None of these teams have done much, and it’s bizarre. Does anybody really think that the worst teams in the league can tinker at a few spots and suddenly be relevant? Eek.
The Rapids decided that it wasn’t broke and they ain’t fixing it. This makes a lot of sense: the team is young probably getting better year over year just on growth and experience. Sam Vines couldn’t buy alcohol till this year and Cole Bassett is still a teenager, and the expectation is that each year will be more productive for those two lads - assuming the team doesn’t sell them off to Europe mid-summer. Rapids DP Younes Namli starts just his second year in MLS, and the team hopes he’ll settle in a bit more.
Although Colorado made six total roster signings, only one of them will really be of any consequence. They signed four Homegrowns who are unlikely to see more than a few hundred minutes combined. Only Michael Barrios, brought over from FC Dallas on a trade involving an international slot and draft picks, looks to either start or see significant minutes.
Only two teams in MLS had a comparably quiet offseason with just one in-bound transfer: Philadelphia, which won the 2020 Supporters Shield, and Toronto, the Shield runners-up. This demonstrates Rapids coach Robin Fraser really likes the guys he has. Yet one might conclude that there’s bit of hubris here, too, in a Rapids team that made the exact same number of transfer moves as two of the best teams in the league. Clearly, there’s a lot of confidence in Commerce City to start year two of Fraser’s tenure. He’s got his system; he’s got his guys; and he clearly thinks that it’s enough to succeed.
Midfield Questions
The Rapids rolled out a 4-3-3 under Fraser, using what I called a fluid attacking and possession style that was… balanced. It wasn’t defensive or offensive or long-ball-y or tiki-taka or cross-oriented or low block or pressing. It was … ‘fluid’. (Matt Doyle had some thoughts about this on our latest Holding the High Line podcast) Eliot’s dataviz at the end of the 2020 season shows that, too.
Other than playing the ball centrally a little more than average and to the wings a little less-than-average, the Rapids generally do nothing distinctive. They do a little of everything well, and they’re hard to define. Jack of all trades, masters of none.
The midfield engine room will be most critical. The likely starting three will be a four-man rotation of Cole Bassett, Younes Namli, Kellyn Acosta, and Jack Price. Price is a set-piece wizard and a good offensive asset as a ‘six’, but he’s something of a defensive liability as a d-mid. Acosta had been mostly unimpressive in his first two seasons in Colorado, finishing with a -1.16 Overall g+ in 2018 and a second-to-worst amongst all MLS midfielders -2.29 in 2019. He disappeared for long stretches where you’d wonder “is Acosta even on the field? I don’t remember the last time he touched the ball.” At the start of 2020, I said “either this is the year Kellyn Acosta becomes a reliable two-way midfielder in MLS, or the year we officially stop talking about Kellyn Acosta.”
Well, smack me in the tuchus and call me Sally, because in 2020, Acosta became a reliable number eight for the Rapids. His passing and defense really tied the midfield together, and he looked more confident and effective in combining with the other team playmakers like Jonathan Lewis, Sam Vines and Younes Namli. Whether this was Acosta getting a chance to shine in a system made for him or the ancillary benefits of having a better caliber of teammate alongside him, we’ll never know.
Cole Bassett and Younes Namli are the attacking parts of the midfield. Namli is one of the slickest dribblers in MLS - he reminds you of Darlington Nagbe in that you just can’t take the ball off him. But with just two goals, three assists on the year, his production is lacking. A DP whose main attribute is ‘doesn’t turn over the ball’ is pretty uninspiring, so that needs work. Bassett is spectacular on the dribble and with timing a late arriving run into the box to get a goal. He has to grow his game as well in all the other ways.
Can they succeed without an elite striker?
Colorado finished 2020 with a solid, unspectacular 32 goals scored. Bizarrely, they got it done without anyone topping five goals. And as I mentioned, they did not acquire a proven goalscorer in the offseason. Of the guys on the roster and likely to lead the line, Diego Rubio once put up double-digit goals for Colorado in 2019, working off of Kei Kamara. Michael Barrios had nine goals for Dallas in their double-trophy 2016 season. Andre Shinyashiki led the NCAA in goals in 2018 with 28 goals. So there are possibilities, but nobody you can pencil in as a ‘sure-thing’ scorer like other teams have - no Vela, no Josef Martinez.
Can they succeed with goalscoring by committee’? In theory, sure, though you have to go back to 2013 with Sporting Kansas City to find an MLS Cup winner that lacked a top-10 scorer on the squad. Winning a cup without a dominant striker is a big ask for a team that was league-average in 2020, and expects to do better this year.
2021 Prognosis
The Rapids are good. Fraser has them believing; they’re young and talented; and the defense is very, very good. They are a playoff-caliber team. Whether they can manage more than a 5th-through-7th place finish and an early playoff departure will depend entirely on getting above-expectation production at half a dozen spots.
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Philadelphia: Where Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness
By Jared Young
The Philadelphia Union didn’t make a big splash this offseason despite selling two young players for more than $10 million. Fans have bemoaned the reserved spending, but the Union strategy is one that makes sense when you consider the numbers.
Fans of soccer outside the US know that winning follows the money. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, in the book Soccernomics, showed that from 2007 to 2016 team wages in the English Premier League described 90 percent of the variance in the table. A similar query on the pre-pandemic 2016-2018 EPL seasons reveals a similarly strong relationship of 71 percent between wages and goal difference. Throughout most of the soccer universe, wins are for sale.
In Major League Soccer, no such correlation exists.
A salary budget, lower quality of play compared to the bigger leagues, and a generous playoff system all ensure that there is plenty of randomness when it comes to winning.
While the correlation math in the chart above is near zero, there does appear to be some improved odds for spending. However, the lift in spending required to improve a team’s odds of getting into the playoffs is significant.
| Probability of GD>=0 | |
|---|---|
| 51% | |
| 51% | |
| 65% | |
| 83% |
The table to the right shows that spending can increase certainty around achieving a goal difference of zero or greater, (which results in a playoff appearance 91 percent of the time). The problem is that the cost doesn’t outweigh the benefit.
If an average spending team in 2019 wanted to go from a 51 percent chance of getting zero goal difference to 83 percent, they would need to spend an additional $6 million in salaries to do so. That increase in probability of 32 percent would mean that a playoff appearance needs to be worth roughly $18 million to break even financially. Even generously imagining potential playoff revenues doesn’t land one anywhere close to that number. Money just can’t buy enough winning in MLS to make it worthwhile.
Unless your favorite MLS team has aspirations beyond breakeven math, they’ll likely choose to operate just as the Philadelphia Union have in their 11 years in the league. Limited spending has certainly been a point of contention for Union fans in their big market city, but it’s hard to argue with the logic.
The Union’s strategy has recently focused on smart signings from smaller leagues, like left back Kai Wagner from 2. Bundesliga, and less flashy investing in a strong Academy pipeline that will give them financial advantages over their mild spending counterparts.
The system is starting to work. Here how’s the Union place on the chart with an estimate for their spending situation in 2020.
They’ve never spent over 80 percent of the league average, yet they have a greater than zero goal difference in five of the last eight seasons – that’s ahead of the other teams given that level of spending. They also just had their most successful season yet, with a +24 goal difference and a Supporter’s Shield.
The success of that team was a function of a few factors – very low player turnover, aforementioned smart signings like Wagner and Jamiro Monteiro, and a youth pipeline headlined by Mark McKenzie and Brendan Aaronson that provided quality minutes and brought the Union over $10 million in transfer fees.
The Union did replace crucial center back McKenzie with Scotland International Stuart Findlay. They also landed a young midfield prospect Leon Flach (also from the 2. Bundesliga). But the shoes of attacking midfielder Brendan Aaronson are going to be filled by another Academy product Anthony Fontana. Fontana has more of a goal scoring knack than Aaronson, tallying eight goals in 30 appearances, but it remains to be seen if he can help create the fluidity the Union enjoyed in the final third last season.
Fontana will be surrounded by a cast that knows each other well - led by Monteiro, Alejandro Bedoya, Kacper Przybylko and Sergio Santos. That group, and a solid defense anchored by their gritty six Javier Martinez, should keep the Union as playoff contenders.
The Union are playing the long game. The Academy pipeline and Ernst Tanner’s knack for identifying obscure talent is the combination that appears to be keeping the team above the playoff line. Spending on players doesn’t need to be the answer, they just need to do some things a little bit better than the others.
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Vancouver: They Hope Money Buys Happiness
By Kieran Doyle-Davis
The Vancouver Whitecaps are genuinely one of the weirdest franchises in Major League Soccer. They had easily the highest profile young player in league history, Alphonso Davies, who was sold for a rather large (but in hindsight maybe too small) fee and has gone on to become one of the world’s best attacking left backs. They turned that gigantic pile of money into a bunch of transfer gambles that almost comically haven’t worked out.
Fredy Montero arrived on a free in 2019, and Lucas Venuto, Jasser Khmiri, Jon Erice, and Hwang In-Beom all joined on not insignificant transfer fees in MLS. Montero is now in Seattle, Venuto and Erice left on free transfers within a year, Khmiri is on loan in USL, and In-Beom was sold for a small, but tidy, profit to Russia.
Round two of the Davies gold card spending went bigger and bolder: $5M for Lucas Cavallini, and multiple $1M+ transfers in Janio Bikel, Ali Adnan, Erik Godoy, and Leonard Owusu. In this time, they also drafted Ryan Raposo (the 2nd worst player in the entire league by g+ for players with over 400 minutes last season) ahead of Daryl Dike, which has aged like milk in the Granville Island sun. None of those folks have left the club yet, and some had fairly useful seasons last year, so it definitely an improvement on 2019’s transfer business.
The well is dry. (Via Transfermarkt)
Round three this offseason was interesting: the ‘Caps announced a new head of recruitment in Nikos Overheul, formerly of StatsBomb, Brentford, and the Danish team nobody can spell. In comes center midfielder Caio Alexandre at $4M according to Transfermarkt, winger Deiber Caicedo at $2.5M, they made Ranko Veselinovic’s loan permanent for $650k, Bruno Gaspar arrived on loan, and David Milinkovic’s loan was made permanent for $110k (he was then immediately released, make of that what you will). If you are following along at home, that’s some grand total of about $15M in net transfer spending in the post Alphonso Davies era. The fee is gone. Maybe there are some incentives kicking around the Whitecaps bank account, but anything spent now is new money. Did the Whitecaps use the Davies money effectively? Almost certainly not.
A quick look back
In 2020 the Whitecaps improved, mostly trivially. Ali Adnan is a good and fun left back who does useful passing things for Vancouver. Erik Godoy profiles pretty much exactly the way you want a centerback to in the g+ model; he dribbles a little bit, he can pass the ball forward, and he does enough quality defensive work that those things aren’t for nought. Michael Baldisimo looks like he is 13 but passes like he’s 33 and can break things up sorta kinda maybe (g+ thinks so anyways). There is starting to form the skeleton of a team that can be good. All the pieces weren’t there, but were starting to get there. -0.63 xGD per game was good for… dead last, but at even game states this team was about as bad as Atlanta (-0.22 xGD per game at even game states). Given they were stuck playing a fairly good Toronto team 421 times in the first half of the season and their region locked second half of the season was a fairly strong Pacific Northwest, there may be some weird schedule effects going on there too.
A left back isn’t really a part of The spine, but Adnan gives Vancouver enough going forward that there’s something to lean on there.
Is this the year they’re finally good?
Vancouver retained their good pieces, they upgraded at right back with Bruno Gaspar and Caio Alexandre seems like somebody they’re super high on. He isn’t a flashy Brazilian 10 or rugged ball winner, but a WyScout deep dive and some YouTube compilations set to Danza Kuduro make him look like somebody who can really knit things together. I couldn’t tell you which of Owusu or Bikel were supposed to be that guy last year, but the reality is that it was neither of them. Caio could be that guy.
All receptions valued at higher than 0.02 g+. That’s a man who gets into good spots.
With two real center backs in Godoy and whichever of Cornelius and Veselinovic is feeling frisky, two real fullbacks and some okay depth, and three MLS calibre goalkeepers, this team is slowly but surely turning into something. Lucas Cavallini is the highest receiving g+ starting striker in the league, at +0.13 g+ p96 compared to his positional average. His xG was real solid at 0.53 xG p96, even if the goals lagged a little, that’s a really solid profile to work with. If literally any of the wingers come good, this team has a lot of the raw materials to be competitive. There are legitimate question marks over some of their acquisitions this off-season, but with the change in their recruitment department fans have a reason to be hopeful that this round of spending is a little bit smarter.
Oddities to look out For
The Whitecaps were full of statistical oddities last year. Will they ever draw a game again? Your guess is as good as mine. Will they find another strange goalkeeper from the Canadian interior who is the second coming of Lev Yashin? Hasal actually had a positive G-xG last year in the post shot goalkeeper model, but he captured our imagination so shut up with your fancy math. Will Cavallini come out the other side of a hilariously bad finishing slump? These are the questions we must ask ourselves. The ‘Caps were one of the teams who saw the biggest jump in this year’s analytics rankings, keep your eyes peeled if they start doing more smart stuff.