Sporting KC looks to return to championship form as it moves west
It’s hard to imagine that only two years ago, Aurélien Collin equalized Real Salt Lake’s late one-goal advantage over Sporting Kansas City in the Major League Soccer Cup final, sending the game to overtime where the French defender later scored the championship-winning penalty kick.
The championship team fielding a starting lineup that day included staunch defensive midfielder Oriol Rosell and once-promising forward C.J. Sapong. All three of those players, along with a slew of others, have now departed Kansas City, with fewer than two years and one disappointing season separating the 2015 version of Sporting and the one that hoisted MLS’s top prize on a frigid December night in Kansas City.
MLS may be the only professional soccer league in the world with a salary cap, which makes it difficult for franchises to field consistently solid teams year after year. For many MLS teams, grabbing a playoff spot the year after winning an MLS Cup wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
By most accounts within the organization, Sporting’s failure last season to defend its MLS title was considered a meek, unacceptable effort. Though the team could be forgiven for its first-round exit from the playoffs — injuries, World Cup action and a difficult travel schedule that wore the roster down — Sporting’s front office didn’t sit around this offseason and hope that things would get better on their own.
Instead, execs weren’t afraid to bid adieu to Collin and Sapong — letting them go to Orlando and Philadelphia, respectively — rather than stick with players who had been instrumental in the club’s 2013 success. (Rosell was acquired by a Portuguese club midseason last year.) They were good moves. Collin had become too erratic on defense, with a penchant for getting caught out of position. Sapong never seemed to regain the scoring touch that made him MLS Rookie of the Year in 2011. (Conversely, striker Dom Dwyer’s emergence last year as one of the league’s top scorers made Sapong expendable.)
Sporting also dumped both of its goalkeepers from last year — Eric Kronberg and Andy Gruenebaum — after neither proved reliable in the season that followed Jimmy Nielsen’s retirement. Sporting went mostly outside the MLS to find replacements for those net defenders, making the position one of the bigger question marks heading into the new season.
The team signed 31-year-old Chilean goalkeeper Luis Marin, who will likely be in the starting lineup for the March 8 season opener against the New York Red Bulls (barring a players strike). Sporting describes Marin as a World Cup veteran; true, he made Chile’s 2010 World Cup squad, but he never played a game.
Joining Marin as a newcomer is European journeyman Krisztián Németh. The 26-year-old Hungarian striker was a solid but unspectacular player in Holland the past three years.
It’s always difficult to tell how international players will adapt to MLS, and Sporting has had mixed results with such players. Claudio Bieler, a big-money sign from South America, was dumped after two unremarkable seasons in Kansas City.
The club returns one known quantity, Roger Espinoza, to an already solid midfield alignment. The Honduran-born Espinoza left Sporting two years ago to join a team in England.
There’s little doubt that Sporting has improved its roster since last season. But will it be enough as the team moves to the Western Conference?
For years, the West has been better by far than the Eastern Conference, which Sporting generally dominated.
Sporting typically has struggled against the Western Conference’s top clubs: the Seattle Sounders and defending MLS champion, the Los Angeles Galaxy. (The Houston Dynamo, for years Sporting’s nemesis in the East, is also moving West in the league’s realignment shuffle.) The playoffs had been a sure thing for Graham Zusi, Matt Besler and company over the last three years, but the club will have to play much better to qualify in its new conference, where even not-quite-elite clubs Real Salt Lake and Dallas FC make for tough competition.
Projected Finish
1. Los Angeles
2. Seattle
3. Dallas
4. Salt Lake
5. Kansas City
6. Portland
7. Vancouver
8. Houston
9. Colorado
10. San Jose
New Players
Bernardo Añor (trade from Columbus)
Jalil Anibaba (trade from Orlando)
Krisztián Németh (free agent)
Luis Marin (free agent)
Tim Melia (free agent)
Roger Espinoza (free agent)
Connor Hallisey (draft)
Saad Abdul-Salaam (draft)
Servando Carrasco (trade from Houston)
Amadou Dia (draft)
James Rogers (draft)
Gone From Last Year
Antonio Dovale
Victor Muñoz
Lawrence Olum
Soony Saad
Christian Duke
Aurélien Collin
C.J. Sapong
Sal Zizzo
Eric Kronberg
Andy Gruenebaum
Claudio Bieler
Igor Julião
Jorge Claros
