Wednesday night’s inaugural game against Angel City FC saw several Thorns professional debuts in a decisive 3-0 victory. The Thorns dominated on every stat except possession and played a high-press game, particularly in the second half. Portland ended the night with 14 shots—seven of which were on target—and 13 crosses, all of which were double what Los Angeles was able to produce. Despite being early into preseason with several key players out on injury or limited minutes, the Thorns are looking strong and cohesive, and the numbers reflect that.
I’ve attended all of the Thorns games thus far, this was by far the most fun. Nearly 10,000 people attended a mid-week game, which brought a lively atmosphere into the Park. The purple smoke for domestic violence was sent off and the “YOU KNEW” banner flew, reminding everyone about the horrific actions of the front office. On the field, however, the team seemed as though they were having fun and enjoying themselves and the freedom they are given on the field, which is amplified by the crowd.
Three different players scored on Wednesday—including Yazmeen Ryan, who tallied her first professional goal. And, because I think scoring goals is really fun, I am going to attempt to break down what went well to allow the Thorns their first multiple-goal game of the 2022 Challenge Cup.
In the screen cap above, Sophia Smith is the red circle, and the green arrow is the trajectory of the ball played in by Natalie Beckman. Smith gets on the inside of her defender and has the pace to outrun her. If Beckman plays the ball too far ahead, or too hard, there are two Angel City defenders who are ahead of Smith to reach it first. With the quick movement of her hips and feet, Smith is able to fake out the defender on her shoulder and sit her down. From there, she has a clear path to goal.
When Smith reaches the inside of the penalty box, she is able to put the ball on her preferred right foot and deftly place it in the lower left corner of the net, out of reach of the Angel City goalkeeper. Postgame, Smith talked about how her shooting accuracy has been something she has developed through repetition, largely alongside Morgan Weaver. Seeing the fruits of training pay off in a game is very fulfilling.
Ryan scored the second goal off a rebounded bullet shot by Natalia Kuikka.
Ryan, circled in red, is watching Kuikka set up her shot. Once it goes off, she is able to turn on the inside of her defender and be prepared for the rebound. Her positioning here is what allows her to easily deflect the path of the ball into the back of the net. All of the Thorns were heads up during this play, with Kelli Hubly even with Ryan and ready to receive the ball if the initial shot didn’t make it.
Weaver recorded her first Thorns goal of 2022 in the final 15 minutes of the game.
Madison Pogarch, coming back from injury and earning her first minutes of the year, was playing as a winger (finally one step closer to playing as a forward) and intercepted the ball high up the pitch. She controlled it, and passed it to Weaver at the top of the box. Weaver was able to swing the ball across her body into the open space in the arc. Both the defenders were crashing onto her left side, and by simply changing the direction, she was able to open up the entire goal. She then sent an absolute screamer curling into the side netting. Much like Smith, her goal is one that she has been repeatedly working on in practices and on her own time. As the season progresses, we can only hope that she will be prolific in front of goal.
Challenge Cup group play is halfway over, and the Thorns remain undefeated. As they go against each team in the West once more, the Thorns’ depth will be tested. But, if they keep finding the space in front of goal as they did against Angel City, they should end up with plenty of points from these next three games.
The Thorns look very different than when they stepped off the field in 2021, and two games into a preseason tournament, they are still finding their footing. Without being too critical of the team, there are plenty of bright spots to take away from the inaugural Thorns versus San Diego Wave game.
Debuts!
Saturday night’s game marked the professional Thorns debuts of Abby Smith and Natalie Beckman. Both players appeared in the preseason games and showed new head coach Rhian Wilkinson that they had valuable skills. Although Beckman only played about 10 minutes coming in for Klingenberg, she looked confident on the wing as part of the Thorns’ five-back and should be an exciting prospect in the games to come. Smith has plenty of NWSL experience, most recently for the Kansas City Current, but had yet to make an appearance for the Thorns since signing mid-season in 2021.
In her inaugural game, Smith registered seven saves and a clean sheet, making her the fourth Thorns keeper to record a clean sheet in a Challenge Cup match. The decision to start Smith over Bella Bixby, Thorns No. 1, was a collaborative one between head goalkeeper coach Nadine Angerer, Bixby, and Smith. Head coach Rhian Wilkinson said post-game that it was Bixby’s suggestion to have Smith play so that Smith has the minutes and confidence to fill in when Bixby is unavailable. Smith also spoke highly of the Goalkeeper Union in Portland and how all keepers push one another and inspire greatness. With such a solid culture in goal, any of the Portland keepers should be able to control the backline.
Sophia! Smith!
Saying that Sophia Smith is good at soccer is probably the understatement of the year. Her technical skill and ability to get in behind the backline has already proven to be crucial to the Thorns’s attacking strategies. Sinking three out of three shots on target, Smith is lethal in front of goal. However, in the game against the Wave, Smith showed that she is more than just a pacey striker. In the run up to the Thorns’s lone goal, Smith was able to draw out three San Diego defenders to surround her, leaving both Natalia Kuikka and Christine Sinclair with plenty of space on the wings to send a ball in that Smith hit one-time deftly around Sheridan.
Post-game, Wilkinson had high praise for Smith. She cited that Smith not only has a high ceiling that she delivers on, but that she is able to quickly implement feedback. One thing that Smith and Wilkinson are working on is “when to go in behind defense on transition and when to hold back to create different types of scoring opportunities.” With the combination of skills she possesses, it is a no-brainer that Smith will be a crucial member of the Thorns this year.
Young players!
Sam Coffey, Yazmeen Ryan, and Meaghan Nally all got the start on Saturday. With Becky Sauerbrunn out after undergoing surgery to repair her meniscus, Nally has been able to slide into a starting role on the backline. She didn’t look out of place in the slightest alongside veteran defenders Emily Menges and Kelli Hubly, registering the highest number of touches and completed passes of the three.
Ryan and Coffey, alongside Hina Sugita, are working to rebuild the midfield that the Thorns lost in the offseason. Together, the two young players in their first full season with the Thorns have already impressed. As the holding midfielder No. 6, Coffey had nearly an 80% passing completion rate. She was able to exploit the wide open spaces left by the non-existent Wave midfield, and looked as though she controlled the field. As she gains more experience and confidence on the field, she will be a real force to be reckoned with. Finally, Ryan also worked hard in the midfield, completing several successful dribbles to bring the ball into the final third, playing in Smith. As both Sophia Smith and Ryan get more time together and their partnership solidifies, they should be a lethal duo on the left.
The Thorns go again tonight at home for their inaugural match against Angel City FC as they continue their run to secure their second Challenge Cup championship.
It’s Challenge Cup time again, and the Thorns opened their tournament on Friday with a 1-1 draw to OL Reign. Even with a couple missed chances, it wasn’t a bad start to Portland’s first non-preseason game of 2022—and it left us with a lot of positives for what this team can become.
The Thorns are generally a team that have high expectations for themselves—take just last year, when they set out with the goal to “win everything”—and they’ll want better than a draw. But with a new team and a new head coach and a number of key players out, I don’t think we can read the team’s performance or the game’s outcome as a bad result.
Thorns head coach Rhian Wilkinson put it best in the postgame press conference. “I thought the team put in a performance, in a lot of ways, that we can be proud of,” she said. Although she said that Portland has room to grow, and that they did miss a couple good opportunities, “they gritted out a tie, and winning teams get points on the road. I was really proud of that piece of it.”
Not only did the Thorns pick up a draw, but they did so without the likes of Crystal Dunn, Madison Pogarch, Rocky Rodríguez, and Becky Sauerbrunn.
Those absences—along with the temporary departure of Lindsay Horan and Angela Salem’s retirement—meant Friday night’s Thorns were in a very different position from last year. Instead of leaning on an internationally-experienced midfield that had at least a couple years in Portland’s system under their belt, the Thorns started relatively young midfield that hadn’t really played together before. Hina Sugita and Sam Coffey—while both clearly very talented—are new to the team, and Yazmeen Ryan played less than 400 minutes in the regular season last year.
It’s not surprising that it took the Thorns a second to settle in. In the opening minutes of the match, Portland looked happy to give the Reign time on the ball, sitting back using pressure to force OL to play out of the back.
In Sauerbrunn’s absence, the Thorns also started Meaghan Nally in defense, who had played 19 minutes for Portland in 2022. Despite a dodgy moment early on, she grew into the game and helped hold Portland to one goal against. Wilkinson called her “unflappable” after the match.
“It took us a second to get organized and communicate a little bit better,” Christine Sinclair said after the match, “but I think we figured it out pretty quickly.”
Even though it was fun to watch Portland’s midfield settle in and more effectively contain world class players like Jess Fishlock and Quinn, I’m not sure how much to read into that performance. Rodríguez, Dunn, and, presumably, Horan will be coming back into the fold as the season progresses, and I won’t be surprised if Wilkinson experiments with formations as she and the players get used to working with each other. Still, Coffey, Ryan, and Sugita all put in solid shifts on Friday, and I’m excited to see how they develop as the season progresses.
“We’re definitely up for the challenge,” Sinclair said, “and we’re only going to grow more and more each game.”
And as the Thorns grow into this new iteration of the team, they’ll still have the likes of a number of more experienced players to lean on. Sinclair, Natalia Kuikka, and Sophia Smith showed as much with the goal they worked to create against the Reign.
The Thorns have their first open-door match of 2022 on the books in the form of a 0–0 draw against OL “ol’ Reign” Reign. Rhian Wilkinson’s first game! The Thorns wore green! Let’s talk about it.
With Lindsey Horan gone, the Thorns have no choice but to come up with a completely new system. I’m not sure most fans are really prepared for what losing Horan means, which may be partially my fault and that of my media peers, since I don’t know that we’ve collectively emphasized enough how pivotal she was in the Mark Parsons era. So, to be clear: having Lindsey Horan is like having an extra player on the field. She’s a living cheat code. She was such a presence for the Thorns that she was almost easy to take for granted, like the sun.
It’s not that Portland never got results without her—the clashing NWSL and international schedules meant they had to do that plenty of times when she was on the roster—but I get the sense that the collective awareness of her importance was almost unconscious. Her contribution to the team wasn’t scoring worldies as much as it was that she’d show up and everything on the field would suddenly work better. The discourse when she was available wasn’t “Horan looked good today,” it was, “the Thorns looked good today.”
All this is preamble to the fact that Wilkinson is doing something very, very different with this team. The squad lined up like this:
In a word, the game was unspectacular. Whenever they lost possession, the Thorns would drop straight into a neat block; Morgan Weaver and Hannah Betfort would pester a center back or two to keep things moving, but the counterpress of the Parsons days is long gone. Natalia Kuikka and, to a lesser extent, Meghan Klingenberg, played pretty defensively, spending more time cutting off Reign attacks up the wing than looking to go forward themselves. Sam Coffey sat in a sharply defined No. 6 role, using none of the creativity she displayed at Penn State. Postgame, Rhian Wilkinson had this to say about using Coffey in that role:
Sam, even when I first brought her in, her calmness on the ball—she’s got ice in her veins. She’s been like that since day one, just like, “give me the ball.”… In that way, I really believe in midfield strength and connection. And I like her at the six, I think that she really comes alive, and she connects our team. We have a number of players that can do it. But I wanted to put her in the fire really, and see how she did. And I think she gave you all a glimpse of the talent that she has.
Thorns attacks were sparse, with a handful of chances in the first 15 minutes, then another handful in the last half hour. An early goal by Betfort—a header from close range off a corner by Weaver—was waved off for a foul. Most of the chances came from exploiting the spaces left open by Seattle’s press, with Kelli Hubly and Becky Sauerbrunn both connecting directly with the forwards a few times.
Betfort is listed as a defender, but Wilkinson says she sees her as a striker, and had this to say when comparing her with the other forwards on the roster:
Morgan and Sophia Smith are pure athletes. They’re incredible with their feet, technically, as well. Hannah has also got a lot of speed… the other two have a little bit more quickness, she has pure speed. And she’s very obviously a big strong woman who holds the ball out well for us. And she’s got clean feet for someone who is sort of one of those air quotes “old-school” kind of nines, as holding the ball up, she’s got really tidy feet. And I think she likes to play in a different way, where the others pull the line back, she often comes off the front.
The Thorns haven’t had a good old-fashioned shit-kicking nine in some time, and I enjoyed watching Betfort in that role.
In the midfield, Portland often looked outmatched. They were visibly frustrated with the Reign’s press, and Rocky Rodríguez and Yazmeen Ryan struggled to get past Quinn and Jess Fishlock. They’re both excellent creative players, but with a No. 6 who isn’t tasked with contributing much to the attack, no No. 10, and two forwards who tend to stay forward more than drop back to connect play, they couldn’t build much out of the center of the field.
But what we saw last night is not Portland’s best XI. Hina Sugita got about ten minutes in the No. 8 at the end of the match, about which all I have to say is: everybody new to the NWSL has to get that initiatory “why are they like this” moment out of the way. Smith came on in the 74th minute looking sharp as hell and immediately improved the connection between the midfield and the forward line. Also, Crystal Dunn will not be pregnant forever.
The defense was last night’s strong point. Hubly, Sauerbrunn, and Emily Menges are an outstanding central trio and contained just about everything the Reign threw at them. Whatever hiccups happen with the front five as the season gets rolling, Portland will be able to lean on that defensive foundation for results.
Felipe Mora, Sebastian Blanco, and Yimmi Chará. Photo by Kris Lattimore.
With just days to go until the start of the 2022 MLS season, the Western Conference promises to be as competitive as it’s ever been before.
For the first time, the West is up to 14 teams — adding a quality side in last year’s third-place Eastern Conference finisher, Nashville — as expansion side Charlotte FC take their place in the East. (There is no expansion side in the Western Conference this year.)
Several of the West’s worst teams last season, such as Houston and Dallas, have splashed out club-record transfer fees on new strikers. As the Timbers get set to defend their Western Conference crown, there will likely be few easy games.
1. Seattle Sounders
That’s right. After their humiliating exit from the playoffs last year, the Sounders enjoyed an outstanding offseason.
There’s a sparkling new training facility and a rebrand centered around the club’s 50th anniversary underway. Seattle signed the best player on the team that eliminated them last season in Albert Rusnak. They inked several stars to contract extensions. And they brought several incredibly important depth pieces back.
Brian Schmetzer’s teams have not always been all that good in the regular season, but — given Seattle’s CONCACAF Champions League ambitions and the depth on this roster — this year may well be different.
The front six, which includes five internationals and an ace Brazilian central midfielder, is probably the league’s best unit. The back five isn’t far behind.
If Seattle has had an obvious flaw in recent years, even at full strength, it’s that they could be beat in transition and often played methodically. That necessarily hasn’t changed — but on their day, this team is going to take some beating.
Lineup: Frei, Nouhou, Arreaga, Gomez Andrade, A. Roldan, C. Roldan, J. Paulo, Rusnak, Lodeiro (C), Morris, Ruidiaz
2. Los Angeles FC
LAFC’s regression in the final two years of Bob Bradley’s tenure at the club felt both unnecessary and disappointing. Unnecessary because so many of the club’s personnel moves didn’t make sense, and disappointing because the 2019 team was so tremendous to watch.
Now, the club has turned the page entirely from its hugely successful first era. Bradley is in Toronto; Eduard Atuesta and Diego Rossi are overseas; and new boss, Steve Cherundolo, has a bevy of new recruits to plug in around mainstays like Carlos Vela and Latif Blessing.
Interestingly, many of those new players came from within MLS, a marked departure from LAFC’s player acquisition strategy the last several years. Kellyn Acosta, Ryan Hollingshead, and Maxime Crepeau have played in and won a ton of MLS games. Given the issues LAFC had gutting out wins last season, the team should benefit from their experience.
At no point during the last two years did the underlying numbers ever not like LAFC, and it feels like even a touch more composure and toughness could put them on track to have an excellent year. If Cherundolo can adapt quickly to the league, they’ll be contenders again.
Nashville makes the move from the East back to the West for their third year and first in a new soccer-specific stadium. The travel will be grueling, and the lack of games against their geographic rivals in the South seems like a missed opportunity.
They’ll likely shift back to the East when St. Louis joins next season, but for now Nashville should have the quality to make a serious impression on the West.
This team easily could have advanced to the Eastern Conference Final last year, and they strengthened in key areas in the offseason — adding MLS veterans like Sean Davis and Teal Bunbury to compete for minutes in the spine of the team.
Nashville isn’t exactly thrilling to watch, and they won’t blow many teams away, but they’re very difficult to play against, very good defensively, and in every game have two of the best players on the field with Walker Zimmerman and Hany Mukhatar.
They still may be one or two attackers short when it comes to competing with the league’s very best. But they’re built for consistent regular season success, no matter what conference they’re in.
Last year, on the field anyway, it was the tale of two seasons for the Timbers: very, very poor through mid-August, and very, very good after.
That was almost enough to win the club’s second MLS Cup, and definitely enough to give the its leadership faith that the Larrys Mabiala/Diego Chará/Sebastian Blanco core has another title run in them with just a few reinforcements.
There is good reason to believe. Chará and Blanco, when healthy, remain elite — two of MLS’s most impactful players. There’s plenty of talent around them, too, particularly in the midfield and attacking positions. Giovani Savarese has never missed the playoffs as a manager; there are few better tournament coaches in the league.
But if Blanco gets hurt, or Chará gets old, or the defense looks more like the unit that was shipping goals last summer than the one that locked things down in the fall, the Timbers will fall off in a hurry.
Lineup: Ivacic, Bravo, Zuparic, Mabiala, Van Rankin, D. Chará, Williamson, Y. Chará, Blanco, Asprilla, Mora
5. Sporting Kansas City
In many ways, Sporting is the model of consistency in MLS: Their manager, Peter Vermes, is entering his 14th season at the helm, and his teams are always well drilled. Lately that means they get veteran leadership, value the ball, and try to control games with it.
It works — mostly. Save for the COVID season of 2020, Sporting hasn’t missed the playoffs in ten years. They also haven’t been to the Western Conference Final since 2013, in large part because of a lack of team speed and a tendency to fade in seasons.
This team right now looks no better or worse than any of the last five or six Sporting teams: They’ll have quality players in attacking positions, they’ll play cohesive soccer, and they’ll rack up a bunch of points at home.
But they’ll still likely get run over in transition by faster, more explosive teams, and even on occasion less talented teams like RSL in the playoffs last year. In addition, center forward Alan Pulido is out for the year, leaving a huge question mark.
Unless Vermes has something up his sleeve, this Sporting team will be solid, but limited.
People around MLS waited years for Robin Fraser to get another managerial opportunity, and the Rapids have benefitted handsomely for giving him the controls two years ago.
They’ve also built their roster very well by stockpiling proven MLS players, young American players, and a select few internationals, and inserting them into a clearly defined system. It worked exceptionally well last year, when the Rapids cleared the 60-point mark and topped the West in the regular season.
But there’s little indication that this year’s side is better than last year’s. Kellyn Acosta and Cole Bassett are both gone, and Austin Trusty is headed off to Arsenal in the summer. The key offseason acquisitions, Bryan Acosta and young attacker Max Alves, don’t inspire a ton of excitement.
The glaring issues the Rapids had last season — namely, the lack of a standout center forward or truly elite attacking players — remain the glaring issues right now. This team has a high floor, but very possibly a low ceiling.
Ah, the Galaxy. It’s been quite a few years now since this team was the unquestioned class of MLS in the Bruce Arena/Robbie Keane era, and quite a few years in a short stretch where the team has faded down the stretch and failed to make the postseason.
This year, it looks for all the world like the Galaxy will again be right in the middle of the pack.
The attack, spearheaded by a locked-in Chicharito, should be excellent. Whether or not Douglas Costa produces, the combination of Hernandez, Kevin Cabral, and the inimitable Victor Vazquez pulling the strings will produce plenty of goals.
Defensively, there’s no real indication that this team will be markedly improved from the one that conceded 54 goals last year. They need better individual performances from their backline and more steel in central midfield. Is Mark Delgado the player to give them that? We’ll see.
Greg Vanney has a very good track record, and the Galaxy did improve in his first year, but this will likely remain an entertaining work-in-progress.
This is year six for Adrian Health in St. Paul, and it feels like his team has stagnated somewhat: After fielding a very competitive team in 2019 and nearly making it to MLS Cup in 2020, the Loons regressed last year, struggling to score goals and getting handily dispatched by the Timbers in the first round of the playoffs.
The offseason, following that 3-1 loss, has been rather indifferent. The club re-acquired striker Luis Amarilla and brought in Honduran midfielder Kevin Arreaga, but lost captain Osvaldo Alonso and kept the bulk of last year’s side intact.
There’s certainly quality enough here to ensure that the Loons are professional and competitive each time they take the field, but aside from Argentinian playmaker Emanuel Reynoso, there are very few elite players in the squad.
Will that be enough to make a fourth straight playoff appearance? Possibly. Will it be enough to do serious damage in the playoffs should they get there? Unlikely. This team needs some pop, both up front and at center back, and until they get it, I’m betting on another regression this year.
Dallas appeared adrift at the end of last season when they fired manager Luchi Gonzalez and were on their way to selling Ricardo Pepi for a club-record fee. There were serious questions about the ownership’s commitment to winning.
Those questions, in one offseason, appear to have been answered. Dallas was aggressive from the outset, and ended up singing Alan Velasco from Independiente and committed huge amount of money to a trade for Paul Arriola. They also brought in a new coach, Nico Estevez, who will install a new 4-3-3 formation.
Best of all, perhaps, is the possibility of a full year of Paxton Pomykal in midfield. He has the ability to be a top MLS player if he stays fit, and a could be a creative hub behind what projects to be a lethal front three.
Defensively, there are more questions than answers: How much does Matt Hedges have left in the tank? Who is the starting goalkeeper? Overall, Dallas promises to be more interesting than they have been since the Oscar Pareja era.
Between the pandemic and an MLS investigation into the club for its handling of allegations of misconduct against two former Whitecaps women’s team coaches, it has not been an easy few years for Vancouver supporters.
But, the way the team played at the end of last season under then-interim coach Vanni Sartini was one small bright spot. They went for it in the months following the sacking of Marc Dos Santos, and, improbably, reached their first postseason since 2017.
We’ll see whether they can keep that momentum going this year, and — particularly — whether they can play as aggressively over the course of an entire season and get away with it.
Their standout goalkeeper, Maxime Crepeau, is gone and, while Ryan Gauld is here for the entire campaign, the front office made few reinforcements to a team that, talent-wise, is not among the West’s best.
There was, despite overwhelmingly poor results, plenty to like about Austin’s expansion season: They played cohesive attacking soccer in Josh Wolff’s system, they valued the ball, and they were clearly just a few pieces away from competing for a playoff spot.
Austin tried to get those pieces in the offseason, though the jury is very much out on whether they did enough work on last year’s roster to give themselves a chance to compete all the way into the fall.
Jhojan Valencia has arrived to play defensive midfield, while Ruben Gabrielsen and first round draft selection Kipp Keller will slot in the for the likes of the retiring Matt Besler in central defense. The defensive spine of the team was a major area of need, and Austin addressed it.
The problem is that none of those players have any MLS experience, and none appear to be the kind of proven, show-stopping defender that would improve the unit on day one. This team will score goals and stay in goals more than they did last year, but it doesn’t look like a playoff team on paper.
It was a wild finish to last season in Utah, in which the club saw its manager leave to become an assistant for one of its rivals, get bought by a new ownership group, and then make an improbable run to the Western Conference Final.
RSL got waxed by the Timbers in that game at Providence Park, but they did enough to land Pablo Mastroeni the full-time coaching job and generate a springboard of goodwill to take into 2022.
Now, the hard part. RSL lost its highest profile player in Albert Rusnak to Seattle, the same club their former manager Freddy Juarez joined in the middle of last year, and they haven’t really replaced him.
In fact, this team, which played plucky and brave soccer last year, but rarely very good soccer, hasn’t been improved much at all. Only one player has come in, and while more signings may be in the offing, RSL just isn’t going to scare anybody at the start of the year.
Mastroeni was mostly very aggressive tactically when he got the job last year, but that meant that his team was often wide open defensively. We’ll see if he decides to change tack with more to lose personally this go around.
Lineup: Ochoa, Brody, Glad, Silva, Herrera, E. Luiz, Ruiz, A. Julio, Kreilach, Rubin, Wood
13. San Jose Earthquakes
This looks set to be the final year of the great Matias Almeyda experiment in San Jose, which started with such promise in 2019 and has since fizzled into an acrimonious wait for the end.
Almeyda gave an interview where he ripped the club’s player-acquisition strategy in the offseason, and it’s true that San Jose was lapped in spending ambition by the likes of Dallas and Houston this offseason, not to mention the LAs and Seattles of the conference.
It’s also true that this ‘Quakes team has enough talent to be competitive — though it’s an open question whether Almeyda’s man-marking system, or whatever hybrid of it he uses, in whatever formation, helps or hinders them this season.
In Cade Cowell and Jeremy Ebobisse, there’s some exciting attacking talent. Offseason pickups like Jamiro Monteiro and Jan Gregus are proven in MLS. The roster build looks a lot like Colorado’s from a few seasons ago, even if the overall vision looks less cohesive.
It’s not hard to see San Jose causing some problems for teams this year. But it’s also not hard at all to see the whole project falling apart relatively quickly.
It is very clearly a new era in Houston. The club is under new ownership, and that new ownership appears eager to spend and revitalize a team that has slid so far from relevancy in its city that even its biggest games last season were sparsely attended.
The first order of business was bringing in proven MLS sporting leadership in former goalkeeper Pat Onstad to run the front office and Paulo Nagamura to manage. The next order of business was spending big to acquire Paraguayan forward Sebastian Ferreira for a club-record fee, and there will likely be one or two more big name DP signings to come.
For now, though, this is still largely the team that trudged through last season under Tab Ramos, struggling on both sides of the ball, with effort week in and week out, and with a not inconsiderable talent deficit to boot.
Steve Clark, as Timbers fans can attest, will help in goal. The center back partnership anchored by Tim Parker looks a strength. But until the Dynamo bring in a pair of high-level attacking midfielders and a two-way center mid, the ceiling will be low.
Diego Chará on the ball in MLS Cup. Photo by Matthew Wolfe.
The Portland Timbers are days away from kicking off the 2022 season at home on national television against the New England Revolution.
In ordinary years, this would be cause for great excitement. This year, with the club’s leadership embroiled in controversy over its handling of the Paul Riley coercion and harassment allegations and under investigation over its handling of the Andy Polo abuse allegations, it’s decidedly different.
For many, the joy of attending Timbers matches has been complicated. For some, it’s been, at least for now, erased. The club is set to meet with the leadership of the Timbers Army for the first time since the Riley story broke on March 3, and members of both the local and the national media are pressing for answers on the Polo situation.
It is likely that the start of this, the Timbers’ 12th MLS season, will be overshadowed by events off the field. But the fervent hope of most every supporter is that at some point—preferably some point soon—we can return to talking about soccer.
On the field, the Timbers are in a precarious position. Diego Valeri is gone. Steve Clark is gone. Sebastian Blanco is about to turn 34 and Diego Chará is about to turn 36. Larrys Mabiala will be 35 by playoff time.
Despite the young talent around that trio, the season is shaping up to go one of two directions: a last chance to compete for a championship with the team’s 2017 core minus Valeri, or a transitional year in which that core fades. Here’s a look at where the team is at heading into Opening Day.
GOALKEEPER
The Timbers have enjoyed some very good goalkeeping in their MLS history, but they perhaps never got better than what Clark gave them over the last several seasons: phenomenal shot stopping, very few blunders, and a certain joie de vivre that will be sorely missed this year.
Clark is now in Houston. The Timbers, perhaps because of salary cap issues, did not seem to make a serious play to retain him in free agency., nor did they acquire a clear starting goalkeeper to replace him. That means that, for the foreseeable future, it will be Aljaž Ivačič and David Bingham in goal.
Neither goalkeeper inspires a great deal of confidence. Ivačič, the towering Slovenian, was signed to eventually be the starter back in 2019, but couldn’t beat out Jeff Attinella or Clark over the next three seasons and has looked uneven in his handful of appearances with the first team.
Bingham, meanwhile, the former San Jose and LA Galaxy starter, was out of the league in 2021 and trained with the Timbers before joining the club in the offseason. He hasn’t been an everyday starter since 2019, when he struggled behind a porous Galaxy defense.
The job, considering the club’s investment in him, should be Ivačič’s. He is younger and has more upside than Bingham, though he may not be on a long leash in what seems like a make-or-break year—Giovani Savarese has not shied away from rotating goalkeepers based on form.
Former LA Galaxy II backstop Justin Vom Steeg and homegrown Hunter Sulte are also on the roster.
LEFT BACK
It’s the Claudio Bravo show. The young Argentinian fullback blossomed last season after a difficult beginning to life in MLS, distinguishing himself as a major attacking threat and holding his own defensively down the stretch as well.
Bravo is an excellent player to watch, and at just 24, he has plenty of room left to grow. The Timbers are relying on his durability, because there’s not much behind him on the depth chart—likely just Pablo Bonilla sliding across the backline.
Larrys Mabiala challenges for the ball in MLS Cup. Photo by Matthew Wolfe.
CENTER BACK
The Mabiala/Dario Zuparic tandem dug deep in the fall and winter, just as you would expect from a veteran duo, and delivered the kind of steady, locked-in defensive performances MLS Cup teams always get from their center backs. Both players had standout moments in the playoffs, and Mabiala in particular was tremendous in MLS Cup.
But now both players are hurt to start the season, with identical sports hernia injuries. They’re slated to be back in mid-March, but until then, the Timbers’ depth at this position will be tested.
Bill Tuiloma has stepped into these kinds of positions before, but it’s fair to say that 24-year-old California native Zac McGraw has not. McGraw only started two games last year—games where the Timbers shipped six goals—and it will be a big task for Tuiloma to shepherd the backline in the absence of the two starters. Rookie Justin Rasmussen, signed the day after scoring a banger against Viking FK in preseason, could get minutes as well.
In the bigger picture, there are plenty of reasons for confidence and a few for concern. Mabiala generally goes through periods where he struggles with the pace of play, and neither he nor Zuparic have the kind of speed or agility that clubs increasingly look for in center backs.
This unit has always gotten it done when it’s mattered for the Timbers in recent years, but after conceding 52 goals in 2021 with an excellent goalkeeper behind them, the margins for regular-season error may be thinner this time around. We’ll see how this group holds up.
RIGHT BACK
The Timbers finally, after the beginning of preseason, hammered out a deal to bring last year’s starter, Jose Carlos Van Rankin, back for 2022.
But the structure and length of Van Rankin’s deal—a loan through the summer that the Timbers can extend through the end of the year—is not exactly a vote of confidence. Neither the Timbers nor Van Rankin’s parent club Guadalajara seem sold on the fullback, which is understandable. He was frequently caught out of position and flat-footed defensively last year.
Van Rankin’s precarious position has almost certainly opened the door for Bonilla, who, at 22, has established himself with the first team and is getting looks with the Venezuelan national team. The question for Bonilla is about maturity: in his young MLS career, he’s committed well over a foul per game, averaged a yellow card almost every three games, and was recently sent off in a preseason match. He’s a competitor, which is a good thing, but his performances for the club have been uneven.
Bonilla is six years younger than Van Rankin, considerably cheaper, and still growing as a player. If he wins the job, it’ll make the Timbers’ lives easier. If he doesn’t, Van Rankin’s loan will be extended.
CENTRAL MIDFIELD
Assuming Chará doesn’t fall off a cliff this year, this is a position of real strength for the Timbers.
The captain, who was the best player on the field in MLS Cup two and a half months ago, remains the premier defensive midfielder and one of the most valuable players in the entire league.
Erik Williamson, who was trending in that direction before tearing his ACL in Seattle last summer, figures to slot in next to him once fit in a season that could put him back in contention for a place in Gregg Berhalter’s World Cup squad.
The Timbers have also invested in the highly-rated young Argentinian David Ayala in this spot, who, given their depth at this position, they can afford to integrate slowly and allow to acclimate to MLS without serious pressure, just as Santiago Moreno, another young Designated Player, did last season.
Alongside that trio, Cristhian Paredes significantly raised his stock with the club during the playoff run last year and remains, when he’s locked in, an above-average MLS center mid: skillful on the ball with a good understanding of both attacking and defensive space.
George Fochive may be more of a blunt instrument, but he is now, just as he was during his first spell with the club, a reliable depth piece who can chew up minutes and provide cover for his central midfield partner as a true six.
Savarese can get three of these players into his lineup if he plays a 4-3-3, which, given the strength of the midfield, might make some amount of sense. If it’s the 4-2-3-1, however, competition for the spot next to Chará will be fierce.
Sebastian Blanco. Photo by Matthew Wolfe.
ATTACKERS
Even without a marquee singing to replace the departed Valeri, this should be another position of strength.
With Sebastian Blanco’s return, protracted as it was, the Timbers have four starting-quality attackers: Blanco, Yimmi Chara, Dairon Asprilla, and Santiago Moreno.
None are true playmakers in Valeri’s mold, and all four may be most comfortable on the wing, but their ability to interchange and complement each other gave defenders fits throughout the playoffs and should allow Savarese to throw different looks at different opponents.
Asprilla dramatically elevated his usefulness and fluidity on the ball last year, but his greatest weapon, as always, is his directness and power in the air. He’s physically a handful for defenders, especially fullbacks. Moreno’s speed makes him a handful in a very different way. He was almost unmarkable against Real Salt Lake in the Western Conference Final. Chará is, of course, a workhorse—a positive and a contributor in most every phase of the game.
With all that said: there is no minimizing Blanco’s importance. The Timbers were completely adrift without him last season, averaging 0.9 points per game in games he missed, and absolutely dominant after he returned to the lineup in the summer.
It’s not just Blanco’s attacking threat, which from just about anywhere on the field, in just about any game state, is significant. It’s also that he is very clearly this team’s alpha, a player who reliably changes the feel of games with his presence alone.
There are very few players in MLS who we can say the same of. The Timbers need him healthy, which, given that seemingly every medical team that took a look at his knees this winter raised red flags, is going to make for some very tense moments in the coming months.
Marvin Loría, who played one of the best games of his Timbers career against RSL last time he featured in a competitive match, is back as well, as is Blake Bodily. Savarese will likely find Loría minutes, while Bodily is could be in a do-or-die year if he wants to continue his MLS career.
STRIKER
The Timbers are in an interesting position here: they committed big money to two players, Felipe Mora and Jarosław Niezgoda, who the front office felt could be answers at center forward in a way that Jeremy Ebobisse was apparently not.
Mora will likely miss at least the first month of the season injured, giving Niezgoda, who has made just ten starts over the last two years, his very first run as the clear starting forward. There is no question that the Pole is an instinctual finisher, excellent in the box. It does remain to be seen how active he can be in other phases of play and whether he can affect games and contribute to the attack if he’s not scoring.
Mora, though he ran hot and cold last season, certainly did that. He’s possibly the most complete forward the Timbers have ever had, and even if he doesn’t take over games like Fanendo Adi or Brian Fernandez did, his 18-goals-in-35-starts strike rate speaks for itself.
If they’re healthy, these are valuable, talented players. Whether they justify their combined budget charge and elevate themselves into the league’s top striking tier very much remains to be seen.
Homegrown signing Tega Ikoba figures to make his first team debut during Mora’s absence, and, given the injury history of the two players ahead of him, the Timbers will be hoping he adjusts to life in MLS quickly.
This article originally appeared in FourFourTwo USA. We are republishing it on the occasion of Diego Valeri’s departure from the Portland Timbers.
Nobody in Portland can quite believe they’ve got Diego Valeri.
When the Argentine came here in 2013, it was almost by accident. The Timbers had been eyeing then-U.S. men’s national team midfielder Mix Diskerud, an acquisition that was ultimately undone by the fine print in Diskerud’s potential contract. Valeri was plan B.
What nobody could have foreseen was what Valeri would become. After five years in the Rose City, Valeri is not only a player who defines the Portland Timbers on the field, but he’s a man who inspires more effusive emotion off it. The universal love Valeri’s won in Portland transcends any other athlete’s — or probably, for that matter, any other public figure’s.
That level of admiration goes much deeper than what he does on the field. That’s where it started, of course — Valeri is an elite enganche who orchestrates the Timbers’ attack and also happens to score lots of goals — but what has everyone in awe is he also happens to be an almost impossibly good guy. It seems like a violation of some basic law of the universe for a human being to be both as gifted with a ball and as humble, circumspect and generous as Valeri is.
The outer layer of Portland’s love affair with Valeri — the part that’s observable from outside the city — is his community service. The marquee example is his collaboration with Keith Palau, the Timbers supporter who was named “Community MVP” by the league’s MLS WORKS initiative in 2017.
Palau headed up a renovation of the visitation rooms at two foster care facilities — where foster kids get an hour each week to meet with their birth families — in Washington County, just west of Portland. “They tend to be cold and clinical,” Palau says of the facilities. “You know, it’s in a government building.”
Under the banner of 107ist (short for 107 Independent Supporters Trust, the organized, dues-paying core of the Timbers Army), Palau started raising money to redecorate the drab Hillsboro room in Timbers green and gold.
Sometime during the fundraising and planning stages, Palau unexpectedly heard from Valeri. “I want to help,” he said. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Palau didn’t take it seriously at first. “I thought, ‘that’s nice to say.’ ” But Valeri came back, and he, his wife, Florencia, and their young daughter, Connie, showed up to build furniture and paint.
“You expect them to show up for 30 minutes and pretend to paint a little bit, but no… They were here to work, and they stayed the whole time. They’ve always done more than you’d expect,” says Palau.
A Portland Trend: Everybody Loves Diego
Photo courtesy of Todd Diskin
It’s the same story with the other projects Valeri has gotten involved with. Once a year, the Timbers, Thorns and T2 teams, which all share the same ownership, organize Stand Together Week, during which the teams send players to work on community service projects. That’s how Valeri found out about the Children’s Book Bank, a Portland nonprofit that distributes free books to kids in underserved communities.
“He came and volunteered right after training,” remembers Todd Diskin, partnership manager at the Book Bank. “He was amazed that all this existed,” Diskin says, gesturing at the stacks of donated books that fill the nonprofit’s Northeast Portland space.
Diskin gave Valeri the lowdown on childhood literacy: how kids living in poverty get, on average, 25 hours with books between birth and first grade, compared with 1,000 or more hours in more affluent communities. How that discrepancy affects educational outcomes for those children before they even start school. How working to change it is an anti-poverty measure.
Valeri’s own account of his affinity for the Children’s Book Bank is almost startlingly personal, revealing the genuine empathy with which he approaches the world. “Some kids don’t have an atmosphere around them that’s ideal,” he says. “Books are a world where you can be involved with a reality very different than you are living in.”
The Argentinean playmaker spent the day cleaning donated books, but just as he did with the foster care visitation rooms, he didn’t simply show up for a photo opportunity. “He reached out to me not too long after that wanting to volunteer, to do more,” says Diskin.
He started bringing books Connie had outgrown, and at one point, all three Valeris came back for another book cleaning session, which Diskin opened up to Timbers Army members. Connie, now 8, held a book drive at the family’s apartment building.
A handful of other causes in the Portland area have captured Valeri’s interest. One is Operation Pitch Invasion, which restores and builds soccer fields and futsal courts in underprivileged neighborhoods. Valeri is often seen at OPI court openings, and recently bought a piece at Art Without Pity, an art show benefiting the nonprofit.
He’s also worked with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, which organizes soccer clubs and clinics for the youth it serves. One day, he showed up to a futsal training to meet some of those youth.
Photo courtesy of Julie Roberts
There’s more he doesn’t talk about, not wanting it to look like he’s out for publicity; it’s common knowledge among Timbers Army regulars that much of Valeri’s work in the community isn’t publicized at all.
Ask him about why he’s gotten involved in these causes and Valeri deflects. Much of it, he says, he gets wind of through Florencia, who he says is “behind everything” (he rarely refers to himself at all, instead defaulting to “we,” by which he means himself and his wife). He’s much happier talking about people like Palau and Diskin than about his own involvement, which he plays down as perfectly normal. “It’s the way I want to live,” he says. “I’ve always lived like that… We’re all responsible for the place we live.”
For a pro team’s star player to be this embedded in his community isn’t normal, of course. But the fact that he sees it that way is an important part of why Valeri is so universally beloved here. To really understand the depth of the love affair between Valeri and this city, you have to understand two things: the soccer community in Portland, and where Valeri himself comes from.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the “authenticity” of the gameday atmosphere at Providence Park: the elaborate tifo, the smoke, the ritualized setlist of never-ending chants What’s not as well understood outside Portland is that the whole phenomenon is a legitimately grassroots endeavor — and that it has a reach that goes well beyond the stadium.
There’s history here, dating back to the NASL Timbers of the 1970s. The modern-day Timbers Army started with the resurrected USL team; back then the supporters group was “25 people banging on pickle buckets,” as Diskin puts it (he was there). In the mid-2000s, when the campaign to get the Timbers into MLS started, it wasn’t a corporate ownership group but members of the Army, who often wound up at City Council meetings, lobbying to bring the league to Portland, hashing out bureaucratic details with reluctant council members.
Today, there are two 501(c)(3) organizations affiliated with the Army: OPI and the Gisele Currier Scholarship Fund, which raises money for local kids who otherwise couldn’t afford to play club soccer.
Mirroring Valeri’s attitude, most people take it as a given. “There happened to be a lot of civic-minded people involved, people who cared about the community,” 107ist board member Sherrilynn Rawlson says. “It seemed like a natural development.”
Start asking around, and you quickly realize the Timbers Army is a huge extended family. Talk to Rawlson, who stands in section 116, and she’ll ask if you know Michelle, in section 103. Michelle will ask if you know Darren, the drummer. Darren, naturally, is friends with Frank, who bangs one of the big drums that are the Army’s beating heart.
Everybody says to talk to Frank.
Franklin Oteiza is a Chilean immigrant who fell in love with the Timbers back in 2003, in the club’s USL days. He was Valeri’s first introduction to this strange fiefdom, serving as a spiritual guide when the Argentine arrived in Portland.
To hear Oteiza tell it, Valeri’s arrival in the Rose City was spun by the fates. He knew about Valeri’s exploits at his boyhood club, Atletico Lanus — how, in 2007, the then-20-year-old helped his club win its first-ever Apertura title, the same year the squad had gotten a hard-fought road draw against league giant Boca Juniors. He remembered commentators hailing Valeri as the next big thing when he went to Porto on loan in 2009.
“I knew if this guy signed, he was going to be the greatest Timber ever in the history of the club,” Oteiza says with the certainty of a man who’s lived and breathed this game his whole life. “I’m talking about a completely different level, something that’s just not common in MLS.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
Oteiza felt a kinship with Valeri even when his acquisition by the Timbers was still a rumor. The footballing cultures of Chile and Argentina have a lot of shared DNA, and when Valeri signed with the Timbers, Oteiza couldn’t get over the feeling that he needed to talk to him, to tell him about his adopted home, one South American expat to another.
“It was really important for me to tell this guy we’re for real,” he remembers. “That here we chant and clap and sing for victory for 90-plus minutes… This is it, this is just like Argentina, man. Just like Chile. We sing with all this crazy power, and we’re not going to stop.”
One day shortly after Valeri’s arrival, the drum corps was unloading at the stadium. “As I’m parking, I’m telling my buddy, I need to talk to Diego, I need to talk to Diego,” Oteiza said. As if on cue, Valeri emerged from one of the park’s arched gateways. “Right there in front of me, man.” Valeri, who was still learning English, was relieved to meet somebody who sounded like he came from back home.
“He told me the story about the Timbers, and I was shocked,” says Valeri. “He told me about the history, about the Army, the way they are organized, the way they support the team, they support the city. It was amazing. I didn’t expect that history.”
The grassroots nature of the Army reminded Valeri of the way football works in Argentina, where clubs tend to be supporter-owned. “You don’t find that in different places around the world, in the big clubs,” he says.
Where Valeri and Oteiza come from, intensity and passion often go hand-in-hand with violence and organized crime. “Those were the times, unfortunately, when a lot of crazy stuff was happening in Argentina,” says Oteiza. “People getting killed at the stadiums.”
That’s something Valeri is all too familiar with. “Every team in my country has or [has] had violent experiences,” he says.
By Valeri’s later years at Lanus, Florencia had stopped bringing Connie to matches, fearing for her safety. The family knew they had to get out of Argentina when they were robbed at gunpoint in 2012.
For men living in poverty where Valeri comes from, football “is the only way we have,” Oteiza says, “to release all this incredible frustration and anger and pain.” He recalls being shocked, at his first Timbers game, that people drank beer in the stadium without fights erupting.
Around the same time Valeri arrived in Portland, the Timbers Army, which produces its own line of merchandise, came out with a new t-shirt with a fitting slogan: “Welcome to Paradise.”
It didn’t take long for Valeri to settle in on the pitch. He scored 10 MLS goals in 2013, and it was in that first year that he first kissed the Timbers crest on his shirt after scoring, a gesture that makes Oteiza’s voice shake when he talks about it. In 2015, after spending much of the season recovering from a torn ACL, Valeri took 27 seconds to notch the Timbers’ first goal in the championship match against Columbus—the fastest in MLS Cup history.
By then, Valeri had adopted Portland as his off-the-pitch home in earnest. “When my daughter started to settle down and have a normal life right as a kid,” he says, “there was a moment where I [thought] that Portland is my home.”
Connie, who was four when the Valeris arrived, is a Portland kid through and through. She plays for a youth club at Rose City Futsal and follows the Thorns religiously.
She got her dad into the team, too. Despite growing up with Lanus, Valeri says the Thorns are the first club he’s had the chance to truly support; he rarely attended matches in person as a kid, saying, “our economic situation wasn’t the best.”
It was Connie — who’s more impressed with Tobin Heath’s skills than her dad’s — who got him in the door, but Diego soon became a supporter in his own right. Like his community service work, his support for the Thorns isn’t some occasional token gesture.
“It’s great atmosphere and it’s a great team,” he says. That, too, reminds him of the football culture in Argentina. “You’re waiting for the weekend to be at the stadium to support your team.”
To say Valeri has embraced Portland as his home doesn’t quite capture the intimacy of the relationship he has with this community. The feeling that he belongs to the city is pervasive, and Oteiza isn’t the only Timbers Army regular he’s struck up a friendship with.
Photo courtesy of Thundercats FC
After a match one day in 2016, Valeri spotted a rail banner with the words “Valeri’s Club” written in an arc across the top. Intrigued, the Valeris asked who painted the banner. That’s when the family got to know the Thundercats.
The Thundercats, a co-ed futsal team who play at the same Northeast Portland facility as Connie, started out as an open-invite squad. “If you want to learn how to play,” says Michelle DeFord, “that’s what we can do.”
Just like Diskin and Palau, the Thundercats didn’t quite believe it the first time Valeri said he wanted to play with them. “We were like, ‘We can’t break Diego Valeri,’ ” remembers DeFord, who painted the banner. “He can come when we do open play.”
Valeri showed up and kicked a ball around with the adult team and a gaggle of kids. But he wanted to play. Eventually, a week came around when the team was short on subs, and Valeri came through, along with Shade Pratt, who played for the Thorns at the time. Nobody remembers the score, but the league’s mercy rule, which normally kicks in when one team has a seven-goal lead, went ignored.
“You know in The Sandlot, when Benny’s like, ‘put your glove in the air’?” says Jared Grawrock, asked what it was like to play with Valeri. “That’s exactly what it is. You make a run and the ball will get there… I’m still in awe. None of that shine or coolness has gone away.”
That’s the general feeling around the city. Almost everybody, sooner or later, gets emotional talking about him. He still seems too good to be true.
It’s hard to gauge Valeri’s own awareness of his stature here. He’s glad to spread joy from the field, but he recognizes that what he does for a living, ultimately, is just a game. “After the game is done,” he says, “and after you retire, you’re a simple guy. You’re just one more.”
Asked why he, a guy who has three caps for Argentina and is consistently lauded as one of the best players in MLS, wanted to spend a Wednesday night playing in an adult rec league, he pauses, looking faintly bemused.
“Because I love to play,” he answers, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “And they’re my friends.”
Note: this article contains transphobic and racist social media posts, including a manipulated photo showing a person in blackface, and discusses racist, transphobic, and anti-semitic right-wing rhetoric and violence.
You’ve heard, I’m sure, that the Portland Thorns—the organization currently led by two very nice Canadian women, one of whom said in her introduction to the press that she wanted to create “the most connected, purpose-driven club in the world”—chose a player named Sydny Nasello out of the University of South Florida in this year’s college draft. I imagine you’ve also seen the social media activity fans dug up the instant her name was called. In case you haven’t, here are some screenshots:
I don’t know Nasello. I don’t know, when it comes down to it, exactly why she chose to retweet these things, nor do I know if her views have changed since the most recent one above, from November 7, 2020. But I have spent enough time on the internet to know that retweeting usually serves the purpose of amplifying a message that a user agrees with, and I am aware enough of our current political moment to know that these particular posts suggest a specific worldview. Everything I am about to say is based on that information.
Working with the assumption that retweets mean endorsement, let’s consider the three above one at a time.
The first one indicates that the retweeter denies the reality of trans identity. This is a belief so obviously harmful that it requires no further explanation.
The second one is a little harder to parse, but here I feel that a bare retweet, with no added comment, implies the retweeter has a positive view of the little boy raising money to build a 30-foot wall on our southern border.
The last one, by the former president’s greasy-haired son, no less, alludes to the widespread pro-racial justice, anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, equating anger over centuries of well-documented state-sanctioned violence against Black people with anger over an election that some people believe, without evidence, was stolen. It also alludes to baseless conservative claims that racial justice protesters turned many cities—Portland included—into smoking, lawless ruins ruled by roving antifa gangs.
If our assumption that the retweeter agrees with these things is correct, her views are firmly in line with those of the archetypal Trump voter. Not the reluctant fiscal conservative, not the ordinary rich person who doesn’t want to pay higher taxes; the flag-waving, grievance-driven fanatic.
These tweets reflect a worldview basically reducible to a single principle: no person or group of people has an inherent right to exist, much less the right to be treated with dignity and respect, to express themselves, to participate in the political process, to have complete bodily autonomy, to move freely, or to form associations with others as they choose to do so.
This view denies trans people the legitimacy of their lived and felt reality, denies people uprooted by conflict the right to seek asylum, and denies people living in extreme poverty the right to be treated like human beings at all. To people whose views are in line with these tweets, those rights are only accorded to those with the means to seize them, whether by physical, economic, or political power. To the extent that any person or group of people cannot do so, even (or perhaps especially) if that inability is caused by longstanding institutionalized oppression, this is taken as evidence of inherent inferiority and unworthiness not just of those rights, but ultimately of continuing to live.
Conveniently, there’s a word for this world view: fascism.
Again, it’s impossible to ascribe, with absolute certainty, a set of beliefs to someone you’ve never met, but everything I know about the world leads me to believe that someone who would amplify these messages on their personal social media probably thinks this way, broadly speaking.
A couple hours after she was drafted, Nasello tweeted a Notes app statement containing the kind of non-apology apology we expect from public figures who have been caught expressing views they still wholeheartedly embrace but fear will get them “canceled”:
Nasello can play coy all she wants. She can come up to the teacher’s desk and say “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” with her eyes shyly lowered while she fidgets her hands behind her back. But we all know, and I imagine she knows, that she’s dodging the real issue. The problem is not that she might, at some time, have made some abstract group of people feel “not supported.” The problem is that she has deliberately and repeatedly indicated that she believes some groups of people are inherently less valuable than others. If she does not hold that belief, I don’t know why she would have retweeted Charlie Kirk saying as much. If she’s changed her mind since then, surely she could have said so specifically in her statement.
There are also two Twitter “likes” by Nasello’s account that I want to highlight:
These stand out to me not because they express particularly more extreme or dangerous views than the three retweets I included above, but because of their tone. To me—again, because I have spent a fair amount of time on the internet and can recognize alt-right rhetoric—they add a particular hard edge to the basic outline illustrated by the retweets discussed above.
They are noteworthy because they exemplify what is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the radical right as it currently exists in America: the way that to the extreme right’s adherents, all of this, the casual cruelty and dehumanization and undermining of democratic norms, is a big fucking joke. The modern right was birthed on the internet, by millions of people memeing about things like the Holocaust, trying to outdo one another in edginess, screaming racial slurs on Xbox Live, all for the lulz at first, until at some point the joke became, “let’s stage a torchlight march where we chant ‘Jews will not replace us,'” and the punchline had a body count.
Once again, I do not know Nasello’s intention here, but I think it’s fair to say that the act of clicking what’s called the “like” button usually indicates agreement or appreciation. So: in that light, let’s consider the two tweets above.
I will confess that I’m not sure what the joke is supposed to be in the first one. In part, it seems it’s simply intended to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. One point being made is that anyone (“libs”) who would feel belittled or insulted (“offended” or “triggered”) by blackface is clearly an idiot and therefore that blackface is inherently funny; all the more funny to portray one of the country’s best-known left-wing figures, a woman who presumably understands why blackface is harmful to Black people, wearing it.
There’s some second layer here, too. At the end of 2020, LeBron James’s longtime contract with Coca-Cola ran out, which I assume is the reference being made. I suppose we’re intended to make some connection between Black people (because James is Black, get it?) and Coke, something about how brands have given in to the Woke Mob and will now only endorse people of color. I think? If I’m right about that connection, there’s an added element about James being not just a very rich and famous Black man, but one who is fairly outspoken about racism, which racists do not like.
The joke is nonsensical, as far as I can tell, but in short, it mocks 1) the idea that racism is bad, 2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinking that racism is bad, and 3) corporations wanting to appear not to be racist.
The second tweet isn’t a joke so much as an exemplification of the way the online right expresses approval of its heroes, in slangy terms that gesture toward irony but, as with everything in this world, are anything but. Beating an antifa protester with a stick is termed “based,” while here Trump’s ultranationalist chest-thumping amid a deadly pandemic his administration exacerbated is “hard.” He’s just another memelord, in this view. Calling migrants rapists and criminals is a meme, sexual assault is a meme, racist violence is a meme.
That the views expressed in the posts I’ve included here reflect the outlook of a larger and larger majority of one of the two mainstream political parties in this country is irrelevant to the fact that this outlook is straightforward, by-the-book fascism. This is the single most vile and dangerous ideology that human beings have ever invented, and it’s here right now, and we cannot pretend that we don’t see it.
For the third time, let me reiterate that I don’t know Nasello, so to some degree, all this is conjecture. I think, however, that it’s quite reasonable, as conjecture goes.
And I want to be abundantly clear about the appropriate answer to a person who espouses this kind of extreme right ideology. There is no room for tolerance when it comes to fascism. Fascism is about power, and its proponents do not deal in good-faith dialogue and debate. This set of views is so dangerous not only because it involves wishing harm on certain groups of people; the additional danger is that it seeks to perpetrate that harm through the destruction of the democratic process and anyone who dissents. If we let ourselves be drawn into a facetious discussion about the legitimacy of these views, pretending that somewhere between “we should overthrow the government and install a white nationalist autocracy” and “all human beings are inherently valuable” lies a reasonable middle ground, we’ve already lost.
The Thorns say they didn’t know about all this before drafting Nasello. Fine; I have no reason not to believe them. That’s a serious unforced error, but fortunately it has a simple solution: the Thorns must release Nasello’s rights. An organization cannot seriously claim to respect the rights of women, Black and brown people, and the LGBT+ community while allowing someone with these views onto its payroll. In the Rose City, there is no football for fascists.
Coming off of their strong 2021 season, the Thorns are retaining their core players, and weren’t looking for players in the 2021 NWSL college draft to make an impact right away. With a successful history of developing college players, the Thorns went for players who could add depth to their already deep roster. Here’s a rundown of their selections:
13th pick: Sydny Nasello, Forward, University of South Florida
Nasello has a public history of racism, transphobia, and xenophobia, which doesn’t with the “open” and “inclusive”—as new head coach Rhian Wilkinson described the team yesterday—culture on the Thorns. We’ll get into that more in a separate piece, but for now, her merits as a field player need to be evaluated separately.
A two-year first-team All American, Nasello has many personal accolades to her name. As a No. 11 forward at the University of South Florida, she had a 41% conversion rate, scoring 11 goals in the 2021 season. She is a strong passer and creates plenty of chances off a dribble. USF is consistently battling for the top of the American Athletic Conference (AAC), and Nasello has scored four game-winning goals to help send her team to the top, winning offensive player of the conference two times. USF lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament, which prevented Nasello from exhibiting her talents on the national stage. In order to fit in with the Thorns’ play, she will need to improve her crosses so as to not be wasteful in the final third. She will need to mature quickly to fit in with the Thorns, both on and off the field. Despite her stats, I don’t rate Nasello.
22nd pick: Gabby Provenzano, Defense/Midfield, Rutgers University
Rutgers has proved a successful college for the Thorns to draft from, with Madison Pogarch—along with the now-traded Amirah Ali—attending the school. Rutgers made it to the NCAA College Cup, falling in the semi-final game to eventual champions Florida State. Provenzano played primarily as a center back, a position where she can learn from The Great Becky Sauerbrunn and Emily Menges. An excellent passer, Provenzano boasts an 86% pass completion rate. Provenzano has received numerous individual awards throughout her time at Rutgers, recently earning All-American, Big 10, All Region, and NCAA College Championship first team honors for her role on the back line. Taking her fifth-year of eligibility due to COVID-19, Provenzano captained Rutgers for three seasons. Despite her holding-down of the backline aiding shutouts, she has posted five goals over her 103 career games. With both proven leadership and solid stats, Provenzano could be a great impact player for Portland—and has a high ceiling to grow.
48th pick: Natalie Beckman, Forward, University of Denver
Beckman is an excellent pick late in the draft. She has posted incredible stats throughout her four years at University of Denver and has the potential to grow into an impact player if she gets a contract with Portland. While Beckman has posted 21 career goals, her 47 assists set a college record. Her crosses are always spot on, and her 78% passing completion rate confirms this. In a system with talented strikers like Morgan Weaver and Sophia Smith, Beckman could prove valuable in feeding balls into the attack. An All-American second-teamer, Beckman helped lead Denver to Summit League champions three times. Beckman is also a competent dribbler, able to get into tight spaces and get crosses off at the endline. She is a two-time Summit offensive player of the season and a two-time offensive player of the region. Playing in an elite-level system like the Thorns will help aid Beckman’s development greatly.
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