Poor old Sven-Göran Eriksson. I liked him a lot. In an age of Proper Football Men, Eriksson always seemed to me to be a proper football man. His passing, while not unexpected given the candidness with which he’s handled the later stages of his illness, was incredibly sad.
Like you, I will no doubt spend some of this week absorbing the tributes and obituaries. I haven’t had a chance yet, so none is linked below. There almost certainly will be some included next week.
Elsewhere, what a strange weekend.
Odd little patterns often emerge in football. Sometimes there will be a spate of handballs or a rash of red cards for elbowing. This weekend we had three – three! – instances of celebrating away supporters toppling digital perimeter boards (the things we used to call advertising hoardings).
It happened at Hillsborough, where Leeds United supporters went through a board on Friday night with no harm done.
It happened at Selhurst Park, where West Ham United’s players reacted quickly to protect a ball boy on Saturday.
And it happened on Sunday at the Swansea.com Stadium, where Cardiff City’s gorgeous equalising goal led to Ollie Tanner, one of its architects, suffering a nasty cut.
Cardiff have called Swansea’s security into question, which isn’t surprising; here, unlike the other two, somebody got hurt and there was some distance between the stand and the board.
The supporters in all three cases bear some collective responsibility. To be clear, that’s not a criticism of Leeds, West Ham and Cardiff specifically. They just scored goals and enjoyed them and they’re hardly alone in that.
I do think it’s fair to expect a more considered celebration. There are people on the other side of those boards as well as people at the front who might not fancy falling over them.
But three times in as many days? That’s not just a matter of supporter behaviour. That’s a problem with the environment.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
Can Major League Soccer’s DC United be fixed?
The manner of their Major League Soccer defeat against FC Dallas seemed to break something in the collective psyche of DC United.
United, coached by Troy Lesesne, returned from the summer break for the Leagues Cup and shipped four goals in thirty-five shambolic first-half minutes on their own turf.
That they ended up with three of their own despite a red card merely reinforces the fairly obvious fact that United – who, at the time of writing, have the league's joint top scorer in their ranks – are a little on the leaky side. That's a symptom. The cause, and road to recovery, must be found elsewhere.
It's been a long decline that would have resulted in the ignominy of relegation in most other places. In MLS, it led somewhere worse. It was the path to the purgatory of absolute mediocrity.
It's a miserable drop when you start at the top. DC United are a founder member of Major League Soccer and its inaugural winners. When the weird and wonderful world of professional football in North America rumbled and spluttered back to life, United were the top dogs.
In 1996, they won MLS Cup to become league champions and claimed the US Open Cup. In 1997, they finished first in the overall standings and then retained the title in the post-season. In 1998, they did an unusual double of the CONCACAF Champions League and Copa Interamericana. In 1999, they won MLS again.
No MLS team can match that period of success, though many have made it their business to try. Inter Miami are the latest, an indicator not only of how MLS has changed in the last three decades but also of its ability, at last, to gain some sort of foothold beyond its own continent.
Those early United successes were achieved by some of the true Major League Soccer greats. Those trophies made legends of Jaime Moreno and Marco Etcheverry, of Ben Olsen and Eddie Pope, of Roy Lassiter and Raúl Díaz Arce.
Even today, United supporters of sufficient age talk about these players, the Bolivian duo in particular, with the sort of reverence that builds monuments.
That, perhaps, explains some of the rawness with which the team’s current situation is felt. Simmering frustration with slow deterioration has given way to something more visceral, more immediate, because the likes of Moreno, Etcheverry and Pope feel like ancient history. In MLS terms, these are glories that date back to the beginning of time. It’s not hope that kills you. It’s hopelessness.
2024 marks twenty years since United’s last title. That’s just football. Nobody has a right to win any competition because the opponents are trying to win it too.
In American sports, there’s an additional twist. Relegation is off the table but the dividing line between failure and barely acceptable performance is qualification for the post-season. The playoffs are the minimum and missing out consistently won’t be tolerated for long before existential questions are asked.
United haven’t been eliminated from playoff contention yet in 2024 but they will be soon. They’re dead last in the Eastern Conference and this will be the fifth consecutive year they’ve missed out. That’s unheard of in DC; their previous worst run was four barren years between 2008 and 2011. Throw in 2013 and 2017, and that’s eleven years without playoffs out of the last seventeen.
Olsen was the team’s head coach for a lot of those years. His decade in charge spanned all the way back to the end of that previous dismal run, which his team finally ended by making it over the line in 2012.
Since Olsen departed in 2020, United’s three coaches have been equally unproven. Hernán Losada’s only previous job was in Belgium at Beerschot, where he’d been a respected player. Wayne Rooney followed after his topsy-turvy time in charge of Derby County. Lesesne, while a well regarded coach, only has a few months at New York Red Bulls and a spell in the USL Championship to show for his career in the professional game.
Lesesne probably isn’t the solution but he isn’t the problem either. Indeed, prior to the break and the Dallas debacle, his team had been showing signs of life. So where have DC United gone wrong and how on earth can they get back on the trophy trail?
Their captain and talisman is Christian Benteke, the former Aston Villa striker who will turn 34 after this season. He has seventeen goals, level with Real Salt Lake’s brilliant Colombian Chicho Arango.
Benteke is one of two designated players (signings enabled by the Beckham Rule), the other being ex-Leeds United man Mateusz Klich. Finland’s Matti Peltola was signed in February under the Young Designated Player rule.
Klich shows up well statistically. Benteke is, well, a freak. There’s an awe-inspired running joke among MLS commentators about the Belgian’s head having the league’s most potent gravitational pull. If that seems a little extreme, try this on for size: Benteke has won 244 aerial duels in the league this season. The next best tally, which also belongs to a DC United player, has won 87.
But every silver lining has a cloud. Benteke’s only won three-quarters of his aerial duels, which suggests there’s some hoofing afoot. United’s regular starting goalkeeper has kicked the ball further this season than anyone else in the league.
United rank poorly for progressive carries and progressive passes, and they have the worst pass completion rate in MLS. Benteke aside, they’re not really taking their chances.
Yet it’s not scoring goals that’s Lesesne’s biggest problem. The trouble’s at the other end, where the worst save percentage in MLS is contributing to more than two goals against per game. Playing so many minutes with ten men isn’t helping much either.
But this is just 2024. It’s just some stuff that’s happening. Some other stuff happened last year, and for the three years before that, and for a bunch of the ten years before that. Lesesne isn’t the architect of DC United’s seemingly permanent drift into the quagmire of the bottom half of the table. They aren’t broken on the pitch. They’re broken off it.
The squad is poor, just as other squads were for Losada and Rooney and, at times, Olsen. Benteke and Klich are decent enough designated players who are both more than pulling their weight, yet Benteke is outside the league’s ten highest earners and Klich isn’t even in the top thirty.
There’s no inherent problem in that other than the simple reality that United, if they’re to compete at all, will have to compete somehow with the clubs who are paying top ten money to their DP acquisitions. Nothing about Jason Levien and United’s longstanding ownership group suggests that’s likely.
In that sense, it’s valid to consider the impact of Audi Field. United’s ownership made good on its promise to move the team out of the crumbling RFK Stadium and into a soccer-specific facility, which they opened in 2018. Bricks-and-mortar stability can come at a cost to the playing side even when the city does the heavy lifting but, six years on, stagnation won’t be tolerated for much longer.
DC United can be turned around. Of course they can. Washington, D.C. and the surrounding areas remain fertile football ground at a time when there’s an incumbent World Cup-winning captain and globally adored eight-time Ballon d’Or winner playing down the coast. Better still, the club has a weirdly beautiful new stadium at Buzzard Point to capitalise on any future successes.
But they need a strategy and they need it now. It has to come from front office leadership that’s focused on football above all else. The club needs a framework that shapes the recruitment not only of a new head coach but of a coaching set-up – new or evolved – in line with the strategy.
And, yes, they need to sensibly invest more in the playing staff in order to lift DC United back into the playoffs and, eventually, into conference finals and MLS Cup. The only strategic output that makes United make sense is a team that’s good enough to fill the stadium. Jumping between green coaches and tiptoeing around designated player signings won’t be enough.
United’s strategy should put long-term thinking ahead of seasonal tinkering and, in my view, it should be constructed around younger players whose presence can offer stability as well as benefit from it. A robust understanding of how to exploit the DP rule is a must.
The possibility of a revival is there. Whether the appetite is there to plot and above one is another question entirely. Ask a United supporter how Levien and D.C. United Holdings can turn their team around and there’s a better than even chance the reply will be some variation of “Sell the team!”
Recapturing the old DC United for the modern day might require just that. Not necessarily. The important shift isn’t in the identity of the owners and decision makers at the club but in the overall direction of travel.
United need to build and to be stable. Levien would rightly point out that a lot of work towards that goal is in fact already happening away from the spotlight but he would, one hopes, also accept that supporters need something on the field they can get behind. Find that sweet spot, and there might just be a road out of purgatory after all.
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Salty beef extracts
Notts County’s most vital 90 minutes of the week take place far from the pitch (i)
‘It’s a disease’: The football fans who are trying to get VAR scrapped (i)
In the shadows, at the other end of White Hart Lane (Unexpected Delirium)
High ticket prices are not the answer to PSR (The FSA)
The changing face of the Bundesliga (The Sound of Football)
Non-FIFA football: New hope for the Unrepresented (The Full International)
Mental Health in Football: The Pressure on Young Footballers in the Limelight (Callum McFadden)
Why Is Soccer’s Most Famous Scoopster Doing PR Work For Mason Greenwood? (Defector)
'I thought Derby County change was a travesty but money talks' (Derby Telegraph)
NWSL, players sign historic CBA (Sounder At Heart)
“I just want to apologise to everyone that I might have offended. It is just a human mistake, an accident. It wasn't meant to be out on my socials like that. I'm sure Wolverhampton is a nice town and I'm sorry.”
It’s easy to say after a hat-trick, Noni Madueke.
Dessert
Nurse! He’s talking about Mizuno again!
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Have a week.