NYCFC 2020 Season Review, Pt. 1: Spring Interrupted

February to June

By John Muller

A.D. 2020 went way off the rails almost immediately. It was Maxime Chanot’s fault. Two minutes and seven seconds into NYCFC’s MLS campaign, the veteran center back got fooled by a nice ball over the top from Columbus’s keeper, clipped Lucas Zelarayán’s heel while trying to recover, drew a red card, and was punished with a suspension from league play for the next five months.

Okay, it was just the usual one-game timeout. But it really did last five months. And that’s the story of how the season started: there we were, all excited to see if NYCFC could improve on its best-ever season, curious to see what this Ronny Deila guy was all about, and suddenly it was all just … suspended.

The glimpses we got before the world stopped looked more or less like Dome Torrent’s team, which made sense considering Deila hadn’t even had time to watch Torrent’s team, let alone reinvent it. In the moments before Chanot’s red card you could see NYCFC defending in a 4-3-3 that worked like a 3-4-3, with Alex Ring alongside Maxi in midfield and James Sands between the center backs. The line was high, Héber was pressing all the way to the keeper, and over on the weak side Alexandru Mitriţǎ was barely pretending to defend. Ah, the comforts of the familiar.

We stole this Second Spectrum animation from a Matt Doyle column

Basically the only thing that seemed to have changed since 2019 was that Jesús Medina was now in the lineup. And not just the opening day lineup. All of the lineups. It wasn’t clear why. Deila seemed to want to play a 4-3-3, but he admitted Medina wasn’t really a winger. NYCFC’s Young DP was still the same player he’d always been: skillful in space, disciplined in defense, good at arriving in the box, but also slow, prone to disappearing, and liable to be bullied off the ball by a light breeze of subatomic neutrinos. As Torrent summed up the situation in his secret goodbye interview with The Outfield: “I prefer Mitriță and Ismael. Ismael usually score 14, 15 goals. One-v-one. Fast player. Strong player. Medina has quality. And, quality. And, quality. But is a fighter? No. Fast player? No. One-v-one? No.”

Ronny’s faith in Jesús seemed like a sign something was changing, but it was hard to say what. Two Concacaf Champions League games against the hopelessly outmatched AD San Carlos didn’t give us many clues, though the season-opening goalfest in Costa Rica got everyone’s hopes up that Deila really meant that quote about how he’d rather win 5-4 than 1-0. (He did not.) Two MLS games in which NYCFC was forced to play down a man in one and down a Maxi Moralez in the other didn’t seem like a useful sample, either. Even the loss to Tigres in the first leg of the CCL quarterfinals had kind of a Rorschach quality: you could spin a story out of the fact that NYCFC played on the counter with just 35% possession, or you could point out that they went blow for blow with equal chances against one of the better sides in Liga MX. 

What did it all mean? Did it mean anything? It was too soon to say.

The only thing we knew for sure was that the squad hadn’t changed. This was both good and bad. Good because these were the players who’d won the East last year. Bad because, well, these were the players who’d won the East last year. David Lee took over as sporting director in November and by all appearances spent his first offseason diligently leveling up on Candy Crush. NYCFC didn’t sign a backup for Maxi Moralez, the club’s most important player and only attacking midfielder, who’d just turned 33. They didn’t seem interested in replacing Medina or Mitriţǎ, two DPs who probably didn’t deserve the tag. Picking up an Icelandic pop star to back up the injury prone Rónald Matarrita at left back seemed fine, but other than that the offseason’s most exciting acquisition was all the new web traffic The Outfield was getting from people googling “What happened to Gedion Zelalem?”

In short, there were only two ways this team was going to top last year: either everyone stayed healthy and played to their full potential, or Ronny Deila worked a miracle.

Cross off “stayed healthy.” On March 12, MLS suspended the season indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. A week later NYCFC confirmed its first case. “We were shocked with the news because if it was someone from the club it was a person I saw on a daily basis,” Moralez told an Argentine paper. “We don’t know who got the Covid-19—we only got notified via email.”

That pattern of behavior would continue. In June, after MLS strongarmed players into continuing the season despite their safety concerns, The Athletic reported that NYCFC had received “multiple positive tests among players and team staff” without disclosing them, even as the club barraged fans with messages to “Stay Healthy. Stay Home.” In October, after NYCFC played not one but two matches in less than two weeks against teams that had confirmed a COVID-19 case in their squad just hours before the game, The Outfield repeatedly reached out to NYCFC and MLS with questions about the league’s safety protocol. They went unanswered.

So we waited in the dark as New York City shut down for a long, grim spring. We didn’t know if we’d get to see NYCFC play as well as they had last year. We didn’t know if we’d see them play at all. For the moment, we were waiting on bigger miracles. ❧ 

Image: Thomas Cole, Clouds