Atlas have spent a lot of their existence being dogmeat, but they were great two years ago. Then they were dogmeat again after selling everyone from their Bicampeon side.
Now they’re… pretty good, I think? They’ve got eight points from four games to start the season – which is a huge relief after they were 17th in the Clausura. They’ve just looked better in basically every conceivable way, with center forward Eduardo “El Mudo” Aguirre the key man so far.
They’ll play a bog-standard 4-2-3-1, and they’ll likely be pretty good. But I have a hard time imagining this group winning five straight knockout round games.
Welcome to the Tijuana home for wayward MLS boys, featuring Joe Corona, Efraín Álvarez and the star of the show, Emanuel Reynoso. You remember him from last year’s tournament, right?
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Seven points from four games so far, and since their manager is Juan Carlos Osorio they’ve played three different formations in those four games.
They’ll probably be pretty good. Reynoso could win them a couple of games all by himself. But they’re not winning five straight in the knockout rounds.
Remember former NYCFC manager Dome Torrent? Somehow he’s the man in charge of Atleti, a very new club born in the maelstrom of bankruptcies and shifting ownership groups that defined LIGA MX in the middle of the 2010s.
They are officially half-owned by Spanish giants Atlético Madrid, and at some point, there’s supposed to be some level of player development pipeline that funnels directly from one team to the other. But that hasn’t really happened so far, save for the presence of left back Juan Manuel Sanabria.
What has happened is they’ve put together a pretty decent start to the season, including an opening-day win over Club América. And under Torrent you know they will be structured and methodical in how they approach literally every single game.
That – and a boatload of veterans – will make them tough to beat.
Things had gotten pretty bleak by the time ownership cut the cord with previous manager Nico Estévez and installed Peter Luccin, who’s done well enough to now be considered the favorite to win the job outright. The big change under the new manager is that Dallas are playing more quickly, with a stronger emphasis on attack and less on pure pitch control. That’s made for some pretty open games, but open games can be fun – especially when you’ve spent a club record on a No. 9 who’s delivering.
How that No. 9, Petar Musa, fits in with Jesús Ferreira and Alan Velasco remains to be seen. I think we could see a 4-2-3-1 with Ferreira as a No. 10 underneath and Velasco playmaking as a left winger, but it’s all theoretical at this point.
Tier 4: I’m Working on Bettering Myself at the Moment
Look, it’s not you. It’s them.
Necaxa juuuust missed out on the Liguilla last season (they lost 2-1 to Pachuca in the play-in) and responded by… not really doing much except doubling and tripling down on their youth movement, I guess? They are pretty easily the youngest Liga MX side at the tournament, and are one of the youngest sides overall.
So far that youthful energy has been their calling card in the Apertura: they ran Puebla off the field in Week 2. They’ve also been pretty comfortably outclassed by both Tigres and Monterrey, which gives us a feel for how they’ll stack up against the favorites in this thing.
The Union clearly expected to be competing for titles like this, which is why they brought back 98% of last year’s minutes this season. Instead, they’ve fallen apart with an embarrassing Concacaf Champions Cup exit followed by a prolonged regular-season winless skid that mostly came down to proven, high-level veterans making catastrophic errors on a weekly basis. They’ve looked nothing like the team that’s come so close to so many titles over the past half-decade, and nothing like a team that could finally break through and win one this summer.
Still, they come in on a little bit of a roll after de-pantsing Nashville and New England last week. So it’s not all bad.
TFC got off to a hot start thanks to some fantastic play from both Lorenzo Insigne and Sean Johnson, but it was never sustainable. And club president Bill Manning – who bears most of the responsibility for this Frankenstein’s monster of a roster – eventually paid with his job.
Everyone else left over is probably fighting for their own, with only Federico Bernardeschi distinguishing himself. The Italian veteran hasn’t just been the most productive attacker on the team, but he’s also shown a willingness to work and suffer as a two-way player, logging most of his minutes as an inverted wingback.
The Five Stripes are very much a team in flux, having parted ways with longtime head coach Gonzalo Pineda in June, followed by the sale of two stars – DP No. 9 Giorgos Giakoumakis (now banging in goals for Cruz Azul) and No. 10 Thiago Almada – along with homegrown left back Caleb Wiley. In total, Atlanta will reportedly receive something between $40 to $50 million, which is the kind of money you need when embarking upon what’s clearly going to be a complete, multi-window teardown and rebuild.
The first part of that rebuild: find a playmaker. And they’ve done it, reportedly agreeing to a $13 million deal for Atalanta’s Russian No. 10 Aleksey Miranchuk.
Watching this roster come together is probably going to be the most interesting part of Atlanta’s summer.
Minnesota were always destined to have a weird 2024 – their first season without long-time manager Adrian Heath steering the ship.
But really, it’s been extra weird, as they got off to a hot start despite injuries to Teemu Pukki and the eventual departure of Emanuel Reynoso, and the late arrival of new head coach Eric Ramsay, and the evolution into a 5-4-1 shape where the center backs step into central midfield, and the wingbacks play deeper than most, and former winger/false 9/No. 8 Robin Lod has turned into an All-Star caliber No. 10. And and and and.
It’s been a journey, one in which they’re still finding themselves. Recently, that’s meant significant struggles as they’ve not coped without center forward Tani Oluwaseyi and goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair, who missed significant time on international duty with Canada at Copa América.
With those two guys back, they’re a much better team. But probably not good enough to get very far.
They’re stumblin’ out the gates, with just one point, one goal and a -5 goal differential through their first four games of the Apertura. They clearly miss d-mid Alan Cervantes – sold to Club América this month – while new guys Choco Lozano and Fran Villalba have been…. Woof. Not great. And JJ Macías is still hurt, of course.
They were fourth from bottom in the Clausura, and it’s been a while since they were good.
La Franja were real, real bad in the Clausura with just one win and five points, and they’ve only been moderately bad to start the Apertura – though still not particularly good, either, given their soft schedule.
They are traditionally a low-spending club, and are still exactly that. Old friend Lucas Cavallini leads the line after arriving on a free from Tijuana, and he has been by far their best player to start the season.
They’ve won one trophy in the past 33 years. It would be a shock if they added another this summer.
The 2023 Concacaf Champions League winners are a shadow of what they were, having seen many of that group leave – some for money, some for free (including maybe their best-ever player, Ángel Mena).
And so it’s a rebuilding process for this pretty historic club, which is not one of the grandes, but who have been around forever and whose eight Liga MX titles put them just one behind Cruz Azul, and one ahead of Pumas. Four weeks into the Apertura and they’ve yet to win a game.
Former Nashville DP Jhonder Cádiz leads the line while Mexican legend Andrés Guardado wears the armband and runs the midfield.
After two years of success under Wilfried Nancy, Montréal hired a coach with a completely different game model in Hernán Losada last year. When that didn’t work they went back to the well and hired Laurent Courtois, Nancy’s disciple, in the hopes that he’d bring a return to the free-flowing, attractive (and winning!) play that won hearts in 2021 and 2022.
It hasn’t quite taken root yet – by every reasonable metric Montréal have been a low-possession, low-block, counter-attacking team this year – but the hope is they’ll continue to evolve.
As for what that looks like in this tournament, “prohibitive underdogs” is a fair descriptor.
Francisco Calvo!!!
Yes, the Costa Rican center back – a Minnesota United MLS original – is now making his home just south of the border for los Bravos. So too are former MLSers Jairo Torres and Bofo Saucedo.
And, well, things aren’t going great. After finishing 12th in the Clausura they’ve somehow looked worse to start the Apertura, with just one point through four games (against, to be fair, a very tough schedule).
Avilés Hurtado! Remember him? The Monterrey legend is now Juarez’s starting right winger. How’s that for a trip down memory lane?
After months of treading water above the playoff line, Austin began to sink in late May. Since then, it’s been one setback after another as they desperately waited for the window to open and reinforcements to arrive. With the addition of three new presumed starters in Osman Bukari, Mikkel Desler and Oleksandr Svatok, the hope is they’ll find some balance and a bit of the magic that defined their 2022 season.
Note that star No. 10 Sebastián Driussi’s MLS goal totals have dropped from 22 in 2022, to 11 last year, to just five entering Leagues Cup play. To make any kind of noise, Austin need Driussi to wear his goalscoring boots.
Last year’s beaten finalists have been struggling massively ever since, and it eventually cost long-time head coach Gary Smith his job. Rumba Munthali took over on an interim basis, and while the results got better for a minute, they still weren’t great. And then they got much, much worse as the ‘Yotes enter Leagues Cup on a six-game losing streak, by far the longest in club history.
And so in comes former Philly and US men’s national team assistant B.J. Callaghan just in time for this tournament. His toughest test will be getting a team whose lack of any midfield ball progression has been glaring – man, do they miss Dax McCarty – to actually create danger with the ball. Given that need, a repeat of last year’s excellent showing would be a shock.
After a promising start, D.C.’s regular season entered a nosedive around mid-April. By late May it was officially a nosedive, and come summer it’s sure looking like a death spiral.
Christian Benteke has been excellent, and a few other veterans – Mateusz Klich, Aaron Herrera, Jared Stroud – have been good. But overall, this is a team that’s short on match-winning quality and chance creation.
They try hard and still look bought in on Troy Lesesne’s vision, but with four wins in four months, it’s fair to question how long they’ll be able to stick around this summer.
The Fire are in their customary spot outside of the playoffs despite getting solid play all season long from record-signing Hugo Cuypers, as well as from guys like Brian Gutiérrez, Maren Haile-Selassie and Chris Brady. The problem is the rest of the team has been poor, with high-priced players (none more obvious than Xherdan Shaqiri) who contribute little and other pieces who don’t really fit.
They have missed the playoffs for six years running, and the way things look right now, seven seems a pretty good bet. It’s hard to imagine them flipping a switch for this tournament.
It’s been a season from hell for the Revs, who’ve battled injuries and underperformance from Day One under new manager Caleb Porter. They won just two of their first 13 games. Then they won five of six. But then injuries struck – most importantly to Carles Gil – and they were back to their losing ways in the run-up to Leagues Cup. Because of all of the above, there’s been no consistency and little player development.
Still, if Gil’s back healthy, and with Giacomo Vrioni having a good season, and Aljaž Ivačič having been one of the best goalkeepers in the league since his arrival… I could see this team winning a few games. They definitely have talent.
There was a lot of hope for Sporting this year. They’d spent the final two-thirds of last season playing at a 60-point pace, then ripped St. Louis apart in the playoffs, and they were returning basically their whole squad.
But, man, have things gone wrong. Virtually everyone except for Willy Agada has underperformed, which, when mixed in with some injuries, has made this feel like a lost season. Manager Peter Vermes and ownership have both said they’re now embarking upon a three-window rebuild, which tells you all you need to know about what they think of their chances this summer.
St. Louis used up all their luck by this time last year. The 2023 Leagues Cup is when the cracks in the armor started appearing, which then continued down the stretch and into the playoffs as the cracks turned into chasms. Now, with 2024 two-thirds over, those chasms have become an abyss.
It cost Bradley Carnell his job, and things haven’t gotten better under interim John Hackworth. Three new arrivals will hopefully boost the overall talent level, but “overall talent level” is where the concern really is, as St. Louis are punching up basically every single game. Some unsustainable finishing across the board and superhero-level goalkeeping from Roman Bürki masked that in 2023, but it was never going to last.
And now it feels like this team is redefining itself on the fly, as new players arrive and the game model seems to be undergoing a significant change as well.
It’s a lot to piece together in one summer.
The newest team in LIGA MX, Mazatlán were established in 2020 after the relocation of Monarcas Morelia. Their manager is Víctor Manuel Vucetich, who won a trio of CCL titles with Monterrey about 12-15 years ago.
They have one point through four games. They have never won a trophy. They should maybe be in the tier below this one, but that would ruin the bit.
Tier 5: The Quakes & Queretaro
Bad year for the letter Q.
Ooof. Ok, poor San Jose.
- Daniel was their best player last year; they lost him to a long-term hamstring injury before the season was four weeks old.
- JT Marcinkowski would’ve then been the starter, but he had already done his knee. So goalkeeper has been an open wound all year long.
- The backline has largely been poor.
- The midfield’s been anonymous.
- Jeremy Ebobisse’s been snake-bitten in front of goal.
Hernán López and Cristian Espinoza are fun, but overall, there’s a reason this team’s in last place. And it hasn’t gotten better with interim manager Ian Russell in charge.
Aké Loba! Rubio Rubín!! Ronaldo Cisneros!!!
Zero points through four games, including ghastly home losses to Tijuana and Chivas.
Remember Pablo Barrera? God, he absolutely tormented the USMNT during the 2011 Gold Cup. He’s still playing!
Matthew Doyle –
