2023 Season Previews: New York Red Bulls, Columbus Crew, Colorado Rapids

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2023 Season Previews: New York Red Bulls, Columbus Crew, Colorado Rapids

Since the more than two million dollar signing of coach Gerhard Struber in October 2020, RB Global has continued to spend on the squad after a long fallow period. This off-season is no different with the club record signing of striker Dante Vanzeir. Struber has overseen a dramatic overhaul of the squad, and RBNY improved dramatically in his first season, posting a 10.37 xGD, which was good for fifth in the league (compared to fifth worst in 2020), while the team underperformed overall, gaining only 13th most points with 48 (the 2020 team averaged 1.38 ppg which was close to the 2021 team ppg of 1.41).

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2022 MLS Season Previews: New York Red Bulls, Philadelphia Union, Portland Timbers FC

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2022 MLS Season Previews: New York Red Bulls, Philadelphia Union, Portland Timbers FC

We’ll be publishing three team previews every weekday until the MLS season opens on Saturday, February 26, 2022. You can find all of them here!

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2021 MLS Season Previews: CF Montréal, FC Cincinnati, and New York Red Bulls

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2021 MLS Season Previews: CF Montréal, FC Cincinnati, and New York Red Bulls

We’re publishing three team previews every weekday until MLS First Kick on April 16th. You can find all of them here.

Today we’re looking at three teams that had disappointing 2020 seasons, but each for completely different reasons.

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2020 Season Preview: New York Red Bulls

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2020 Season Preview: New York Red Bulls

Last season was a down year for the New York Red Bulls, and yet they still ended their season with a perfectly respectable first round playoff loss. They enter 2020 with a few franchise faces missing, but primed for a new youth movement.

2019 in Review

What a disappointing season 2019 was for the New York Red Bulls. The Red Bulls are in an interesting place these days as an organization. Having lost the greatest manager in the world (don’t look it up, trust me it’s true I did the math), the Chris Armas era has been, well, completely unremarkable. Whereas in previous seasons the organization drew plaudits for finding so much success despite having a low payroll, focusing mainly on youth and promoting from within, last season they sort of resembled what you’d expect from a team that had a low payroll, and focused on youth and promoting from within.

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Offseason Outlook: New York Red Bulls

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Offseason Outlook: New York Red Bulls

The New York Red Bulls have a strong developmental and tactical system in place, from the first team to the academy, allowing them to maintain a high floor performance-wise, as the losses of several high-profile players have not negatively affected them as much as expected. However, the team’s lack of spending (3rd lowest salary outlay in the league) on high-end talent appeared to catch up with them this season, as their point total plummeted from 71 to 48. More importantly in terms of future performance, its xP dropped from 58.8 to 47.6. Additionally, its xGD dropped from the second highest in the league in 2018—18.6—to right around the equator (3.8). In English, the Red Bulls went from being one of the league’s elite teams to one that was merely average. With major contracts like Bradley Wright-Phillips’ coming off the books this offseason, as well as the potential departure of stalwart and 2018 MLS Defender of the Year Aaron Long, the Red Bulls have the opportunity to retool their roster significantly to complement their steady pipeline of MLS-ready academy players. Either that, or they are looking at a severe personnel crisis that could see them lose ground to more profligate clubs.

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New York Red Bulls: Postseason Preview

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New York Red Bulls: Postseason Preview

At times this season the New York Red Bulls have looked like a very good soccer team, sometimes even harkening back to the 2018 Red Bull team that set (what was then) an MLS record for points in a season. Case in point, nine of New York’s 14 wins this year have come against playoff teams. That included wins over FC Dallas, Atlanta, and Real Salt Lake during a five match unbeaten stretch early in the season and back to back wins over Portland and Philadelphia during a late season run to put them into the playoffs.

There have also been times when the Red Bulls have looked exceptionally mediocre. They’ve looked like a team that not only lost its most important player in Tyler Adams, but also lost a whole lot more of something else as well, despite mostly returning their entire squad from 2018. The flip side of nine wins against playoff teams was picking up only one point from four games against Montreal and Columbus.

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Lost in Transition

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Lost in Transition

Chris Armas is fighting a losing battle; in 2018, Jesse Marsch’s Red Bulls were one of the best teams in MLS. Their expected goal differential (xGD) was the fourth best since 2016, only behind Toronto (2016), Atlanta United (2018), and Los Angeles FC (2019). They were so good that many are sure that had Marsch stayed, they would have won the MLS Cup last year. Anything less than that was seen as a failure, which made a peaceful transition to a new era almost impossible in the critics’ eyes.

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What it takes to win the Champions League

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What it takes to win the Champions League

There's something great about knockout tournaments, especially involving teams that are completely unfamiliar with each other. NCAA March Madness and the World Cup are perfect examples; seeing your favorite team play against a relative unknown like Murray St. or Ghana carries a little extra intrigue than your average game against a conference opponent. For MLS fans, CONCACAF Champions League embodies this opportunity.

Increasingly, CCL has been painted as an MLS vs. Liga MX referendum, one in which MLS teams steadily gain but never overtake Mexico's dominant position in the region. But lost in that narrative is that CCL includes teams from a handful of other countries, too. These MLS-Liga MX matchups will get the majority of publicity (starting with Sporting KC-Toluca in the first knockout round), but seven other MLS/Liga MX teams have to knock off Central American or Caribbean opponents before those glamour matchups are set in stone. If you think these first round matchups are just a formality, just ask an FC Dallas fan how their campaign went last year (spoiler alert: they lost to Panamanian side Tauro before they even got to face a Mexican team).

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You Down with t-SNE?

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You Down with t-SNE?

We all know that some teams play a certain style, Red Bulls play with high pressure and direct attacks, Vancouver crosses the ball, Columbus possesses the ball from the back. Although we know these things intuitively, we can use analytical methods to group teams as well. Doing so seems unnecessary when we have all these descriptors like press-resistance, overload, trequartista-shadow striker hybrid, gegenthrowins, mobile regista, releasing, Colorado Countercounter gambits...etc (we actually don’t know what some of these terms mean and may have made some up, but the real ones are popular so just google them yourself). Those terms are nice, but no qualitative descriptor can tell us how the styles of New York City and Columbus differ from each other. We need to measure, compare, and model two teams’ playing styles and efficiencies. If we are able to do these things we may be in a position to answer what style really is.

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