I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About
Kevin Wallace
Ever since we started The Post back in 2020 we wanted to positively contribute to the experience of being an FC Cincinnati fan. Everyone who has been a part of The Post or adjacent projects has been a fan first of FC Cincinnati. Not a journalist, not someone with aspirations of working for the league or the team. They want FC Cincinnati to win. They want to see FC Cincinnati do well. They do not like it when The FC loses. Essentially, we here at The Post took the team and the league seriously, at face value.
FC Cincinnati was founded in 2015 and first kicked a ball in 2016. On a global scale it is brand new. On a Major League Soccer scale it is still very new. However, myself and virtually everybody who has ever contributed to this website or again, adjacent projects, is older than MLS. We are sports fans, we are soccer fans, we are fans of other teams in the city, we are fans of college teams in the area. We are used to taking our sports seriously, and we are used to earnestly rooting for our local teams.
I say all of that to say this: There is a weird uncanny-valley-esque coverage when it comes to Major League Soccer. The first and most obvious example of this that I can remember, was the Men in Blazers having a joke segment about MLS matches on their podcast. The league was presented as a complete and total sideshow, and absolute goofy thing that happens after the real thing. Jokes about Kyle Beckerman wonder goals and the general un-seriousness of the coverage was entertaining at first, but clearly undercut the league itself. This was back around 2014, still before Cincinnati had a professional team. And while I was a casual fan of MLS, as much as a broke guy could be living hours away from my nearest team, I could still recognize it as mocking MLS.
The Men in Blazers example is an extremely obvious example, and one that many people have grown tired of over the years since then, especially MLS fans. The problem is, I can still feel that sense of un-seriousness when it comes to the coverage of MLS from national outlets. And I don't just mean ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports, or the other traditional outlets. But even outlets that were designed from the ground up to take it seriously, like The Athletic, or better yet for Major League Soccer's own media productions.
For example, the best and easiest example I can point to is in almost every national Major League Soccer writers and reporters you will eventually hear them give some version of “the middle of the season as a slog and the games don't mean as much so they are difficult to watch”. To me, that completely and totally erases the local fans experience of cheering for their team. Of rooting for their favorite players. Of wanting to see their (hopefully) favorite sport played representing their local community. That the game and the sport itself is not enough to justify its own value in rooting for, and therefore watching. Or any more capitalistic sense, consuming the product. There is not a single Major League Baseball writer that would dare suggest the same thing of a baseball game played between two average teams in the middle of May. We don't look down at every single college football conference outside of whatever the power ones are at the moment and say “none of these games matter”. And yet that same attitude is applied to Major League Soccer teams, and games by the very people who are there to cover and report on and informed fans of MLS.
Among fans, especially ones online, there is a general insecurity about their league that is expressed in either extreme deference to European soccer or extreme defensiveness when anybody were to suggest slight changes or alterations to Major League Soccer to make it better. I’ll say in general, I find myself in the second camp more often than not. A good example of this is recently Opta Data released a ranking of the The Strongest Leagues in the World where MLS appeared in the top 10. So many MLS fans were quick to say that they disagreed with the rankings, some went further to say that MLS in no way should be considered that high up as a league. When every single one of them have seen players come over from European leagues and struggle on or against their teams. They have seen the top coaches from Belgium and the Netherlands come over to the United States and struggle to be good managers. They have seen their own MLS alumni go on to become valuable members of good teams in Europe. And yet it's insane to suggest that MLS might be a better soccer league top to bottom than Turkey, Switzerland, or The Championship? Also, don’t you want that to be the case generally?
The horror
There is a general goofiness of Major League Soccer as well that is accepted and in many places encouraged. MLS after dark is a mostly harmless version of this, but is the most prominent example I can point to quickly that weird things happened late at night in MLS, that players you've never heard of do well or that defense looks awful late at night. Never mind the fact that these are perfectly normal local times for those local fans to be rooting for actual teams that actually mattered to them. But every time you tell a fan in Vancouver or Portland or Minnesota that their team is a goofy sideshow to the real thing, certainly at a certain point they have to be asking themselves does my team actually matter? Are we actually a part of this thing?
Nothing against Pablo, I love his work, but this was the top tweet on my feed when I was writing this.
And I admit, this is something that I struggle to put into words, and I have struggled to articulate for a very long time because it is very, very difficult to nail down exactly this feeling that I have with regards to Major League Soccer. But something that we've talked about on the Cincy PostCast multiple times is how MLS is covered versus how the NFL would be covered with similar stories. Within the past year, we have seen the best American soccer coach of all time suspended for reasons that have still not been made public. And as far as I can tell, there isn't a single member of the national media who is it all curious about that. Could you imagine if Bill Belichick had the New England Patriots well on their way to competing for a Super Bowl and was suspended with no cause given, unceremoniously fired, blackballed from the league, and there would still not be a report out there as to what he did? Is that even something that can happen in the NFL? I don't even think a Quarterbacks Coach of a good team could have that done to them without it being in the news for weeks. Recently a star wide receiver for the Detroit Lions was suspended for two weeks and it has been nonstop coverage on NFL channels, whereas earlier this year, a legitimate MVP candidate in Major League Soccer was suspended and again we have no idea what he is done, and nobody seems at all interested as to what happened.
So when I think about those two examples in particular, I have to ask myself does “Major League Soccer matter?” And if it does matter, does it matter to the people who have chosen to cover this league? Does it matter to fans of the league? Or rather fans of the teams within the league? Because if it doesn't matter, then these stories don't matter, and were are all right to ignore them. Anything that might be bad PR or anything that might hurt so-called business metrics is right to be ignored. But if it matters, if you're a soccer fan in Boston, that actually cares about the New England Revolution, don't you care about what happened to Bruce Arena? if you live in Utah and you're a huge fan of RSL, don't you wanna know what happened with Chicho Arrango? Isn't it weird that nobody else cares? And if nobody else cares, and in particular the people who are supposed to care don't care, why should you care? And once the fans stop caring, none of this matters. This is Football Manager 2025. We are just watching somebody play EAFC. Which, don't get me wrong, can be fun sure. But I doubt it ruins the next day at work for you when your favorite streamer loses a championship game. And you’re probably not dropping hundreds if not thousands of dollars every year on that streamer.
So this is my best attempt to put these vague feelings that, I don't feel extremely strong about, but certainly nag at me. They nag at me especially when I’m recording twice weekly podcasts and occasionally writing a blog post.
FC Cincinnati matters because it represents my city, represents my community. It's a team playing my favorite sport. There are fantastic storylines throughout the year. And it is allowing my local community to write its story in a grand world narrative that goes back to the founding of the sport of soccer. It matters because with FC Cincinnati, the players that have played here and the players that will play here tie Cincinnati with communities and team teams all over the world. No other sport can truly offer that, at least not on that scale. So maybe I'm a dweeb for taking any of this seriously. Scratch that, I am a dweeb for taking any of this seriously. But that's just sports. I think. But it would just be nice to have Major League Soccer fans, teams, the league, reporters, and commentators to take it seriously as well.
Way ahead of you