But we’ll start with the best showing of the Wilfried Zaha era in Charlotte. In we go:
Charlotte FC had been on, I think, the worst stretch of their MLS existence. They entered Saturday’s contest against the Crew on a five-game losing streak in the league. Not winless, but an out-and-out losing streak, one punctuated by last weekend’s utter capitulation of a 4-1 home loss to the Fire.
Insult was then piled upon injury when they were eliminated from the US Open Cup with a 3-3 draw up at D.C. United that eventually became a PK shootout loss.
Things were bad and getting worse. There weren’t many tactical solutions to be found in the previous few outings and the personnel had not jelled. And then because this is MLS, the Crown got themselves a 3-2 win over the Crew – not an easy win by any stretch of the imagination, but one that was fully deserved – that at least temporarily righted some wrongs.
Along the way, Zaha gave us our Pass of the Week:
That pass was also the first real sign that there’s some budding chemistry between Patrick Agyemang – who got called into the USMNT pre-Gold Cup squad, bagged a brace and finally showed signs of breaking out of what’s been a season-long slump – and Zaha, the new DP who’s been more interesting off the field than on it during his debut MLS season. That assist above was Zaha’s first in MLS, and he later picked up another on Pep Biel’s 75th-minute game-winner.
Part of the chemistry level, I think, came from how Charlotte had a clear tactical vision in this game. They’ve been trying to be more of a ball-dominant side over the past two months, which obviously came with little success. It’s been muddled and I’m not sure the pieces fit.
Against the Crew, who regularly have over 60% possession (they had 63% in this one), there was none of that. Charlotte head coach Dean Smith came to a truce with his attempted tactical evolution, so he deployed a team settling into a mid or sometimes low-block and then playing in behind. It allowed Charlotte to do what they do best, and part of that was leaving Zaha a little higher and more central – closer to Agyemang – while also releasing left back Jahkeele Marshall-Rutty to the Crew’s right wingback.
That made for quicker transitions and a DP less isolated than he had been. Suddenly the connection between playmaker and forward that everybody’s been waiting for was on full display.
“We talked about how Columbus like to commit numbers forward, counterpress and leave players 1v1,” is what Smith said afterward. “If you’ve got Patrick Agyemang 1v1, you have to use it. And [Zaha] used it every time.”
Crew head coach Wilfried Nancy knows he’s taking that exact risk with his tactical approach, and it’s been a good bet for his team over his two-and-a-half years in charge.
“Usually, we are able to control the run in behind. We know that they wanted to play this kind of run behind, but we didn't do well,” Nancy said. “It was a weird game. To be honest with you, it was a weird game. We know Charlotte. The way they play, they want to counter quick.”
Charlotte won with those counters and a set piece. It’s the blueprint for how to beat Columbus and it’s the blueprint for the best current version of Charlotte.
The issue, though, is it hasn’t been a blueprint for silverware in this league and they know it. One-note teams don’t win in MLS unless the one note is possession (each of the past two MLS Cup champions, which includes Nancy’s Crew, are examples). The last pure counterattacking side to hoist the thing? You've got to go all the way back to 2010. The last counterattacking side to win the Supporters’ Shield? File not found.
That’s why Smith had been building more towards becoming a team that can play via possession, if not an outright possession-heavy side. They need that club in the bag, it’s something they will still work on, and it’s something Zaha in particular should help with – he was always dynamic in turning possession into penetration, even in England. So expect Charlotte to keep trying to get on the ball and probably take a few more lumps throughout the season.
But for one weekend, going back to who they were in their best moments over the past couple of years was the right call. And they have the three points to prove it.
First things first: Yeimar Gómez Andrade limped off with what looked like a hamstring injury 16 minutes into what eventually became a 1-0 Seattle win over FC Dallas. Normally I’d just say “Oh well, that happens. Gotta deal.” But the Sounders have the Club World Cup coming up quickly, and boy do they need Yeimar healthy for that. So keep an eye on it.
As for the game itself… another entry to add to the “Jesús Ferreira doesn’t really work as a No. 9 for the Sounders” tome that they’ve collectively been authoring. With both Jordan Morris and Danny Musovski sidelined (both should be back soon, I believe) with injuries, Ferreira got the nod up top. That marked only his second go as a No. 9 since March, and while I think his performance was better than those early struggles, this isn't the time for moral victories. This is a time for goals. Ferreira, thus far, has provided none.
So does Osaze De Rosario, who’s been a man among boys at the MLS NEXT Pro level, and who’s found chances in his brief run for the first team thus far, get the start on Wednesday against San Diego? Or maybe even when Seattle host Minnesota next week for Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire?
I wouldn’t bet against it. Ferreira’s a good player, but he’s clearly more of a playmaker at this point (he’s got seven assists in 1,100 minutes across all competitions, so it’s not like he’s not productive). And the Sounders have a lot of data that says they function better as a whole when a true No. 9 is on the field.
To that point: As soon as De Rosario came on in this one, with eight minutes left in regulation, he pinned both Dallas center backs with his box movement, which allowed Seattle to pour more numbers forward, which meant their crosses were all a bit more dangerous, which meant Dallas had more trouble dealing with them, which led eventually to the game’s only goal when Osaze Urhoghide batted away Albert Rusnák’s service into the box (pretty sure this is the first time two Osazes have been on the field together in an MLS game).
Rusnák stepped up, potted the PK and won the game. He's now got seven goals on the year, by the way.
Dallas were without Lucho Acosta – he was suspended via yellow card accumulation – and did what you’d expect them to do in that situation, loading the midfield up with runners, putting numbers behind the ball, battening down the hatches and bracing for the onslaught.
That onslaught came, but it looked like Los Toros Tejanos would survive with the point anyway. Alas, they are now down to 11th in the Western Conference and have won just once since March.
“They fought, and to lose like that is hard to swallow,” head coach Eric Quill said after the game. “Proud of their fight, and we've got to look at it, and we got to become better for it. Work at the margins that we're losing on right now and that's all we can do, is not accept it. We can't feel sorry for ourselves and blame. We gotta stand up to this and we gotta understand how the margins work in this league, and where the margins lie.”
13. The Red Bulls got kind of a classic Red Bulls win, generating a bad turnover from the D.C. backline to give them Cam Harper’s opener and then winning a second ball in their own attacking third for Mohammed Sofo’s clincher in the 2-0 final.
The result broke a little two-game losing streak for the visitors, while United are now winless in four.
12. I’m endlessly impressed by the work Chucky Lozano is putting in on both sides of the ball every single week. His 95th-minute game-winner (which came after Emiro Garcés registered one of the worst clearances you’ll ever see) in San Diego’s 2-1 win over the Galaxy, is going to get the headlines, but this is everything you want from a DP:
“First and foremost, everybody should take note of this moment in time, it’s a big moment for the club,” head coach Mikey Varas said afterwards, and I’m gonna let him keep the mic a minute here. “These are moments that clubs are built on. These are the moments nobody will forget, that inspire an entire region and make the club real. Guy got the goal in the 95th minute, and it's an amazing goal. Anders [Dreyer] to Hirving. But like you said, my favorite play of the game is Hirving chasing down [Gabriel] Pec. On a yellow card, 70 yards, making a sliding tackle, these are moments that clubs are built on. These are legacies for me in terms of how Hirving shows who he is on the field.”
I can’t really dispute or add to that. Los Niños did it right in this roster build, and so three months into their inaugural season they're second in the West and unbeaten in five.
The Galaxy’s winless streak is 15. The single-season record is 16. The overall record is 18.
11. Duncan McGuire finally got on the board in 2025 as he got onto the end of a brilliant little Eduard Atuesta slipped pass just before halftime to give Orlando City a 1-0 lead over visiting Portland. That turned out to be the game’s only goal as the visitors never really got that close to breaking through.
“I consider Portland a very good team, and a very good team that took [two] shots on our goal. And that means a lot to us,” is what Orlando head coach Oscar Pareja said in the postgame.
The Lions now have a 12-game unbeaten run. Portland have won just once in their past five.
10. We've got resident Canadian Correspondent Calen Carr checking in from CF Montréal’s surprising 2-2 home draw vs. LAFC:
Montréal were coming off a 6-1 home loss in the Canadian Classique and a midweek Canadian Championship first leg loss to Forge of the Canadian Premier League. You couldn’t script a worse past seven days, and the way I saw it, Marco Donadel had two options in preparing to welcome Denis Bouanga and LAFC:
- Defend and wait to suffer.
- Stick with Donadel’s man-marking system, play direct, press high and hope LAFC don’t get in behind.
It was a gamble that came with risk, yet one he had to take. It ended up seeing his team find a two-goal, first-half lead – a surprise for a group that entered the day in historically bad MLS goalscoring company (eight goals entering the weekend; only 2013 D.C. United had scored fewer through 14 matches). LAFC, by the way, scored eight goals just last week.
Unfortunately, Montréal don’t have the roster to maintain Donadel’s system for 90 minutes. Fabian Herbers went down with what looked like a hamstring injury, while George Campbell (who did about as good a job on Bouanga as I’ve seen this season) and Nathan Saliba were subbed off with 30 minutes left and Montréal still in the lead, but needing rest with an eye on their match away at Inter Miami midweek.
The difference in benches may not have been more stark at that point. LAFC brought on Cengiz Ünder and Olivier Giroud to change the game. And while Giroud’s equalizer was a treat for the many France supporters who stayed to take photos with the World Cup winner post-game, Montréal’s hardcore fan base is frustrated at not witnessing a home win since last October.
If they want to have any chance of sniffing the Wild Card game again (yes, we are already at that point in May), they have to have the bodies to be able to compete.
9. Inter Miami woke from the grave to put together a pretty rousing late rally for a 3-3 draw at Philly, a point they earned by virtue of Leo Messi’s brilliance and temporarily forgetting to be awed by Leo Messi’s brilliance.
- For the first part: Messi buried a stunning free kick in the 87th minute, which made it 3-2 Philly.
- For the second part: During the final 15 minutes Miami were so desperate for a result that they finally stopped deferring to Messi and started actually playing soccer again. And when they actually play soccer and don’t just play “Oh god I’ve got to give the ball back to Leo immediately or I might get benched!” they’re really pretty good.
That’s one of the two elephants in the room – the fact Miami’s players often appear to be so intimidated by the GOAT and his friends that they just look to get the ball on his foot no matter what else is happening on the field. It’s not good.
The other elephant in the room is that all four of the Barça boys are now passengers defensively (most of this is just age, but part of it seems to be poorly defined defensive triggers). Javier Mascherano has made a good adjustment in the past two weeks in playing Jordi Alba as an out-and-out winger, which mitigates some of it. It’s still not great, though.
Philly did a good job of exploiting that throughout and probably should’ve won. But even amid this seven-game unbeaten stretch, they keep finding ways to drop points any time they face someone good or good-ish (their five wins over this stretch: Atlanta twice, D.C., Montreal and the Galaxy. Not exactly murderer’s row).
Five of their next six are on the road and several are against quality opponents. They’ll have plenty of chances to show they’re not just flat-track bullies.
8. Nashville went up to Toronto and were more dominant than the 2-1 final score suggests, getting a brace from Sam Surridge and hardly giving the Reds a look until it became kitchen-sink time in the final 15 minutes.
The best news for ‘Yotes fans: Walker Zimmerman returned to action after missing the past six weeks in concussion protocol. He got on the field for those final 15 minutes and showed no ill effects.
7. This was an absolutely ruthless, out-of-nowhere counterattack equalizer for Austin up in the land of the Loons:
And that was it for the scoring, as the 1-1 you see there became the final. It was a very good result for the Verde & Black. They went out in a 5-4-1 shape, determined to mirror Minnesota’s formation and game model.
“For me, the positive today, it's when you come to play against this team, if you feel like you're going to be a fancy team and you're going to play [your] game, you can look at the other teams, their scores that they got when they came here,” Austin head coach Nico Estévez said afterward. “We knew that it was going to be an ugly game, a very ugly game, because that's what Minnesota [does] really well. It makes every team look really bad, you know ... and they don't care about it."
He sounds a little like Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch talking about the Oklahoma City Thunder, doesn’t he?
Anyway, Austin fell into that trap the last time these two teams met, down in Texas last month. That one ended up being 3-0 to Minnesota as fanciness gave way to the Loons’ rugged, linear pragmatism.
Estévez, to his credit, changed the script. And I will say once again Minnesota must learn how to do the same – how to find something beyond fast counters and long throws – if they’re going to end up among the league’s best at the end of the year. They’ll get a chance to show that for Sunday Night Soccer next weekend in Seattle.
6. Sporting KC and the New England Revolution played to a wild, wide-open 3-3 draw at Children’s Mercy Park on Saturday night.
- The Revs got themselves an early 2-0 lead.
- Sporting roared back in the first 20 minutes of the second half to make it 3-2 to the hosts.
- Maxi Urruti scored his first goal in two years for the late New England equalizer.
The Revs have become very adept at getting both wingbacks involved in the attack (one of the points of shifting to the 3-5-2), which is what featured in the first two goals. The other thing they’ve started to do very well is get the forwards combining, which is another big point of that formation. They’re now seven unbeaten since the switch, even though this will probably feel more like two points dropped than a point gained.
I’m giving our Face of the Week to Dániel Sallói, who scored a goal and then honored the memory of former teammate Gadi Kinda:
It was a tough, emotional week for KC by all accounts, and I thought that was that when they were down 2-0 so quickly. Obviously, it wasn’t.
“They didn't want to let the night end that way,” interim head coach Kerry Zavagnin said in the postgame. “You would probably have to ask them individually because this was very much an individual feeling based on the loss of Gadi. We all feel it, some at a different level, but throughout the week all of the club has supported each other. Once again tonight, in a difficult moment of adversity on the field, there was that support again.”
5. Pure center forward’s goal from Darren Yapi here, which was the only tally in Colorado’s weather-delayed, 1-0 win over visiting St. Louis:
Is it the prettiest thing in the world? No. But if you have time to turn and shoot in the box, you turn and shoot. Yapi has, at times, looked a little hesitant or unsure in those moments.
Not in this one, as the Rapids won their second straight and climbed above the Wild Card places in the West.
St. Louis are well below the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs line and have an 11-game winless skid. Olof Mellberg is registering 0.73 ppg through 15 games, which is tied for sixth-worst in league history among full-time managers with 15 or more games in charge.
4. Yohei Takaoka had himself a nightmare first five minutes, and then watched as his teammates spent the next 85 digging them all out of the 2-0 ditch he’d tossed them into. Brian White scored a brace – including his first MLS penalty – before Pedro Vite finally got the 90th-minute decider in a 3-2 win at RSL.
Most of this game was about how Vancouver possess a gear other MLS teams can’t quite reach. The fluid combo play through midfield, the unexpected overlapping runs, the central midfielders releasing early to flood the box… all of it was on display a week before they head down to Mexico City to play Cruz Azul for the Concacaf Champions Cup title.
“I think we've [unfortunately, in a way] had to dig ourselves out of a hole a couple of times this season so we have that confidence, but there comes a point where we have to stop [digging] ourselves holes and come out strong and fast to start the game,” is how White put it afterwards.
"I'm not happy with the way we started, and it should not be a bad habit for us to come out a little sloppy,” is what head coach Jesper Sørensen said.
They’re both correct: the time to stop digging any kind of hole is now. If they do this next weekend, they will finish the night watching Cruz Azul celebrate.
Those first five minutes were fun for the hosts, at least. Eighteen-year-old attacker Zavier Gozo – usually a winger, but playing as a 10 in this game with Diego Luna operating as a playmaking left wing – got the first goal on the end of a nice, inside-out run, while Luna was on hand to pounce after Takaoka gave up a bad rebound just three minutes later.
That was it for the hosts, though. Just one win in eight now and two road games are scheduled for this week.
That’s d-mid Beau Leroux (arguably the biggest surprise package in the league this year) getting all the way to the endline for a pullback to an underlapping wingback because why not, right???
For some real fun, check out the network passing graphic. And remember Leroux (34) and Ian Harkes (6) are dual d-mids:
That’s not where d-mids usually operate!
It’s must-watch on the other end as well, especially with Earl Edwards Jr. in goal (he started in place of the injured Daniel). Edwards has played 341 MLS minutes this year, and he’s faced 14 shots on goal in those 341 minutes.
He’s conceded 10.
By the numbers (it’s the advanced stuff as well as the boxscore stuff), this is the worst start to a season by any goalkeeper in American Soccer Analysis’ database, which goes back to 2013.
Nice job by the Dynamo taking advantage, but I’m not sure anything you get from Quakes games is applicable in any other setting in MLS.
(And to be clear, I love that.)
2. I’m not going to say Brian Gutiérrez’s flying elbow (which has become a habit of his) just past the half-hour mark cost the Chicago Fire all three points on Sunday afternoon in the Bronx. Yes, the Fire were up 1-0 at the time, but the Pigeons were actually playing well – they were throwing numbers forward and getting plenty of looks, including for top goalscorer Alonso Martínez. An equalizer was probably going to come no matter what.
But Guti’s red card meant it was just a matter of time. And as a neutral it was frustrating because it was completely obvious, completely unnecessary, and completely ruined the entertainment value of what had been, to that point, a fun game. He’s gotta stop.
Chicago, to their credit, did a nice job of getting numbers behind the ball and holding on for dear life once they went down to 10. But Mounsef Bakrar found the equalizer just before the hour mark, and Hannes Wolf got the game-winner in the 70th minute to put it away.
Another Fire red card – this one on Dje D’Avilla, and man I can not wait to see Andrew Wiebe’s take on it for Instant Replay (I think it was the wrong call) – late on gave New York City FC a penalty, which Martínez converted for the 3-1 final.
NYCFC are now 4W-1L-1D in their past six. I… think they’re good? I’m certainly leaning in that direction, especially with Keaton Parks back. But I won’t be comfortable with it until they find a second reliable goalscorer, because a second reliable goalscorer will mean fewer dropped points against the likes of Montréal, D.C. and Atlanta.
I think the Fire are good, too. Or at least headed in that direction? Still, though, the story of their first half-season under Gregg Berhalter has been indiscipline (cards and fouls) and self-inflicted wounds (they take a lot of risks and are often punished for them).
It won’t matter how pretty their goals are if they can’t cut that stuff out.
1. And finally, did Atlanta break out of their slump or have they figured out something about how they want to play?
It’s obviously too soon to say anything definitive. What was definitive, though, was that first half in which they took a 2-0 lead over FC Cincinnati, one that could easily have been 3-0 or 4-0 had they finished a flurry of late chances. And what was striking about that half – and what carried over into the second of what finished as a cathartic (but also heart-attacking-inducing because, you know, defense is a thing), 4-2 win for the hosts – was how cross-averse the Five Stripes were.
- As per Opta they launched the fifth-most crosses in the league (on average about 13 per game).
- As per Opta just two of those crosses, on average, were on the ground, which was 28th in the league.
When you combine that cross-happy outlook with an attack that’s been weirdly slow to transition into the final third – and thus is launching those crosses against a set defense much more often than not – you get a team that hasn’t scored many goals.
In the first half against Cincy, they didn’t launch a single cross (again, as per Opta). And in general, I thought they attacked with much more pace. For the game, they crossed the ball from open play just three times, and none of those were against a set Cincy backline. They forced the Garys to scramble and punished them for it, with four different goal-scorers.
For one night, at least, Atlanta’s $50 million attack didn’t settle. And so the 40,000+ fans at Mercedes-Benz Stadium got a taste of what this team might become.
