The three most important stories from Matchday 1

Plus the inaugural Big Sunday Column of 2025 and some tactics videos

Ok, the three biggest stories of the weekend:

1. Spending Big Pays Dividends: Emmanuel Latte Lath was awesome in his Atlanta debut, showing Mac McClung hops on his first goal and Wondo-like poacher’s instincts on his second. Kévin Denkey scored a goal and was an all-around force for Cincy. Telasco Segovia was a difference-maker for Miami. The San Diego wingers were both very good-to-great.
   
   It all makes me feel like we might be entering a period where parity is finally starting to fray. It won’t all unwind this year, and MLS is never going to resemble the typical league’s haves and have-nots. But a little more stratification over the next few seasons seems very likely.

2. The Internal Transfer Market Rules: This is a point Calen Carr made to me while we were texting Sunday morning. In the past, if a player like Lucho forced his way out, that’d destroy a team for, potentially, years. Now, Cincy are able to turn around and just… buy another MVP 10 from inside the league. No paperwork, no culture shock. Just plug-and-play.
   
   Dallas, meanwhile, sold their young guy for $10m, then turned around and spent half that on an older guy (Lucho), which will make them better on the field. And he should make it easier to develop their next batch of projects, like Bernard Kamungo and Nolan Norris and Patrickson Delgado and the rest. Which should lead to more eight-figure sales.
   
   I love it. This rule has made MLS more fun to follow.

3. San Diego FC Takes a Bow: They were straight-up better than the Galaxy – really compact and well-drilled, and perfectly set up to let their DPs win the game. Teams are going to have to figure out how to crack open that ultra-tight 4-3-3.
   
   I mean, look at this:

There’s no room to play. It reminds me of the old, tight diamond the great RSL sides of 15 years back used to trot out. The Galaxy stared at it for 75 minutes before they were finally like “fuck it, diagonals, wide overloads, release the central midfielders early. Set aggressiveness sliders to ‘maximum ball.’”

And look, after doing that they put San Diego under real pressure, because just like those great old RSL sides, San Diego has decided “if you’re going to hurt is, it’s going to have to come from out wide.” And they also know that the upshot, if the opponents are pushing numbers forward to create overloads and releasing central midfielders to push into the attack off-ball, is that you can get behind them on the break. And guess where Anders Dreyer’s second goal came from?

Credit to Mikey Varas for having this team so, so well prepared. If they really do get de Bruyne this summer… I mean, Jesus.

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Sometimes my Sunday column feels like a breeze. Other times, it feels like a Grade-A slog. And yesterday, folks, was a Grade A motherfucking slog – 14 hours in front of computer trying to tie one word to another, one sentence to another, one paragraph to another, and then to weave it all into something coherent. I’m going to chalk the struggle up to using muscles I haven’t really flexed since October. Anyway, here it is:

• Big Sunday Column, Matchday 1

If you click through to that you’ll see a few tactical analysis videos embedded in there. It turns out making these is pretty manageable – it’s just Preview for Mac, iMovie, and then Handbrake¹ to compress the file enough to fit on BlueSky.

I made three of them this weekend, starting with LAFC’s winner over Minnesota:

Ross on the hellsite asked if there’s a way to tactically invite a pressure trap. The answer, of course, is yes: drop your strong side winger wide and low, and do the same with your strong side central midfielder, then have your center forward check into the half-space. You want to pull numbers to the touchline, and to do that you've got to take the risk of putting your own players out wide like that.

The philosophical way to invite a pressure trap is to do what the Crew do: have your defender put his foot on the ball and stand there until opponents come upfield to press. But there aren’t a lot of coaches (or defenders) who have the stomach for that.

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This was the easiest of the three vids to make, except I forgot to turn the good mic on so it sounds kind of shit:

Also, it apparently has over 1 million views on Twitter (if you believe their analytics, which I never do).

Shouts to Felipe Cardenas of the Athletic, who made a really good point: Messi, in that first pass, over-extends his follow through juuust a bit longer than usual in order to look more casual. You can see Justin Haak react to that casual body language and switch off for a second.

That’s when Messi sprints away. Genius bit of cat-and-mouse from the GOAT, and a great observation from Felipe.

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The third video I made was of the Dynamo, and you can probably tell from my energy level that this was after my second beer:

My alarm rating on the Dymamo’s fortunes this year, on a scale of 1-10, is at about a 4.5. Which means, I guess, that I’m slightly more optimistic of a good outcome² than I am worried about a bad outcome. But only slightly.

My alarm rating on DP center forward Ezequiel Ponce is at about a 5.5 right now, maybe even a 6. The 27-year-old’s movement is just not great, and he’s not really ever on his toes pouncing on rebounds, either. If Wiebe set the dude’s over/under on goals this season at 12.5, I think I’d take the under.

And while that’s fine for an average starting No. 9 in MLS, it’s not fine for a record signing. I need to see more from this guy.

Plus I can never bring myself to trust a No. 9 who wears the No. 10. It’s morally wrong.

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Some work from others I wanted to highlight:

First, Ben Wright’s Nashville coverage at SixOneFiveSoccer is always excellent, and I like that he’s doing the video breakdown thing now, too:

Is this enough to make Nashville tactically interesting? Not yet (in my opinion, anyway). But at least it’s something.

Next, I just can’t say enough about the work Joe Lowery and his gang are doing over at Backheeled. Their new weekly column – “MLS Winners and Losers” – is going to be first on my reading list every Sunday night/Monday morning.

Marc Machado did a great job of breaking down D.C.’s Matchday 1 attempt to add a second club to their tactical bag. I’m not sure it will matter, as the talent gap they’ll be facing on a weekly basis is enormous. But it’s the kind of thing that shows me head coach Troy Lesesne is trying to solve problems.

And look, Cincinnati are going to be a problem for literally every team they come up against, and if you care about the Shield race (you should), you need to keep tabs on them. As such, they are lucky enough to have some great local coverage – multiple dedicated beat writers and podcasts. My favorite read this week was Nate Gilman’s tactical breakdown of what they did in their 1-0 win over the Red Bulls.

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And finally, I took set aside an hour to talk Western Conference Week 1 overreactions on Nos Audietes with my buddy Jeremiah Oshan of Sounder at Heart.

Give it a listen!

1. Huge shouts to Ben Wright and John Muller for guiding me through a bunch of this process.

2. Which would be about 45-48 points – as in, a mild regression from last year.