2020 Season Preview: FC Cincinnati

2020 Season Preview: FC Cincinnati

“Dumpster fire” has several meanings, most of them fairly parallel, but it’s rarely used to describe something dull enough to feel like it’s taking weeks, maybe even months off your life. “Life-sucking” sums up FC Cincinnati’s 2019 season tidily as anything. You never knew quite what would happen when the whistle blew, but you understood it would hurt and that you wouldn’t enjoy it. Even down the stretch when they dialed back the defensive incompetence, they rarely won. All in all, it was…unpleasant.

2020 can’t be that bad, surely. I don’t know that, obviously, but I literally cannot think of a way that Cincinnati could be worse on all sides of the ball than in 2019. But let’s see if we can’t find some ways.

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Offseason Outlook: FC Cincinatti

FC Cincinnati’s life in MLS started in 2019 with a roster build that received a near-universal side-eye. The year ended with the team grasping for scraps of dignity (rough translation: losing every hand in a game of strip poker on a very, very cold day). The 2019 season would see Cincy take disturbingly credible runs at the league records so awful that they looked like they’d haunt the teas that set them for year to come, maybe decades – e.g., DC United’s 2013 record for single-season losses (24) or Orlando City SC’s 2018 record for goals allowed (74).

Cincinnati took only one of those records – the new high-low bar for goals allowed is 75! – but, sweet baby Jesus, did their season die a brutal death and with abundant co-morbidities. Long scoring droughts ruthlessly paired with defensive meltdowns throughout the 2019 season (e.g., a 1-5 road loss to Orlando, a home loss by the same score to Toronto FC, or the 1-7 mid-season loss at Minnesota, aka, The Game that Stabbed Hope Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over and Over).

So, what the hell happened? What went wrong, I mean besides “so many things, more than the hairs on your back”?

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