There are ways to keep track of the league's growth. Attendance has been a big one pretty much since Day 1, and the steady upward trend is heartening for those of us who remember long, lonely days in mostly empty venues like Giants Stadium or the Rose Bowl.
Then there's TV ratings, online and social media reach, and so on. Number of soccer-specific stadiums? That's a good one, too.
Tracking the on-field growth is a tougher ask, partly because soccer is a pretty subjective game until/unless you roll the ball out for two teams to go toe-to-toe. Signing guys like Sebastian Giovinco, Laurent Ciman or Obafemi Martins in their soccer prime is a better indicator of an individual club's ambition than it is a sign of overall league strength, but it's still a pretty good sign of overall league strength.
Even better, though, is Harry Shipp doing THIS, or Jose Villarreal and Gyasi Zardes combining for THIS, or Diego Fagundez doing THIS and Kevin Ellis doing THIS.
Homegrown Players have started to take lead roles for some of the best teams in MLS (here, have your weekly dose of Bill Hamid). There is no better growth indicator than that.
Onto the games …
1. Green Light
Seattle will once again be atop the Power Rankings, just as they are once again atop the standings. Sunday's 2-1 win over the visiting Red Bulls wasn't necessarily the most beautiful game the Sounders have played, but it was predictive of good/better/best things to come because of the flexibility the Rave Greeners showed.
New York have given 4-4-2 teams trouble all season thanks to their swarming midfield and high press, which can cut off not only service from the back, but service to the front. They strangle attacks in their crib.
So Seattle, whether by happenstance or design, compensated. Clint Dempsey dropped off the front line for the majority of the game to prevent RBNY from having too much of the ball, breaking up the visitors' rhythm while creating danger as, more or less, a true No. 10:
All the data in that chart is provided by Opta. The thickness of the lines connecting the players is representative of how many passes they played to each other, while the position of each player is an aggregate of where, on the pitch, each of their Opta events took place.
Dempsey, as you can see, was very much in the center of it all.
"At halftime, we talked a little bit about going more direct … we felt we could get behind them on the flanks," said Sounders coach Sigi Schmid afterward. "We moved them side to side, but once we moved them side-to-side we didn't go forward at the right moment, and just trying to find the right moments."
Harrying Dax McCarty and simply keeping Seattle's attack moving – Dempsey's main jobs on the day – allowed Marco Pappa to play a more attacking role himself, going down the left-hand side to find daylight time and again, including on the first Seattle goal.
The other thing it allowed for was the type of delayed, back post run that provided for the game-winning goal. We've gotten so used to watching Dempsey combine as a pure forward with Obafemi Martins that it's easy to forget that central midfield is where he made his living in this league a decade ago. That was the Deuce of old on Sunday, a version of him we haven't really seen in a long, long time.
That means the defending Supporters' Shield champions have a new wrinkle to throw at teams that try to play them out of the center of the park.
2. Box Cutter
Obviously the growth of the Homegrown program is my favorite thing to talk about, and I also have a soapbox I like to stand upon when talking about the importance of the SuperDraft. Good teams get good minutes out of guys like Amadou Dia and Connor Hallisey, who were both first-round picks this past winter and starters this past Friday in a 4-0 Sporting KC win over FC Dallas.
While those draft picks played key roles, it's the reclamation projects who've been the difference-makers for Sporting this year. I've written before about Benny Feilhaber, who's right there with Dempsey and Jermaine Jones in the "Best American of the Last 18 Months" race, and I've dropped a few paragraphs here and there about newly arrived D-mid Soni Mustivar. Feilhaber was once the star of the US U-20s and a US hero in the Gold Cup, Confederations Cup and World Cup, while Mustivar is a former France U-20 guy that, for some reason, couldn't quite catch on with Bastia.
Both have found a home and hit new heights in Kansas, where they're running the midfield these days.
But the guy I really want to focus on is striker Krisztian Nemeth, who was (along with Giovinco) the best player in MLS this week. This is filthy:
Nemeth is one of the best in the league at doing his work early, when his back is to the goal. By that I mean he makes his first move before the ball even arrives, as you see above; or he switches up the foot he receives the pass with; or he uses the defender's momentum against him; or he'll lower his center of gravity early, which makes it so much harder to push him off the ball.
Receiving the ball isn't an act of brute force with Nemeth. It's not just his strength and touch vs. the defender's strength and timing; it's a dance, one where he knows the steps better than the guy trying to take him off the ball.
That dance kept Matt Hedges guessing for the entire game and led to the first two Sporting goals. You can't come at Nemeth the same way twice, and folks have noticed:
That is first-round pick Ignacio Maganto to Homegrown attacker Jose Villarreal to fellow Homegrown attacker Gyasi Zardes, by the way. Maganto also had a goal of his own.
On the other side of the ball, Homegrowns Scott Caldwell and Juan Agudelo (RBNY Homegrown, but still) each had an assist, while Fagundez had that goal I linked.
Friendly reminder that these two teams made MLS Cup last year. #PlayYourKids
6. I wrote a bit about Vancouver's struggles, which more or less continueddespite a 2-1 win over RSL on Saturday. As pointed out in the comments section of that column, Carl Robinson has been juggling lineups on a game-by-game basis, which could be the root cause behind the teamwide disconnect.
5. Shipp's goal (linked above) was the best moment of Chicago's not-as-close-as-it-even-looks 3-0 win over Montreal on Saturday. Bakare Soumare got our Face of the Week in that one:
Frank Klopas has come in for some scrutiny for Montreal's away record over the last 16 months, which is now almost unbelievably bad: no wins, 15 losses and six draws from 21 games, good for six out of a possible 63 points on offer.
4. Orlando City's fight-back for a point in Saturday's 2-2 draw against Columbus will be featured prominently, I'm sure, on this week's Instant Replay. Congrats are in order for Kei Kamara, who's the fastest in the league to 10 goals and has now hit double-digits for the third time in his career.
3. Orlando's equalizer coming off the foot of former Union man Pedro Ribeiro will be hard to watch for Philly fans. They saw their team's winning streak come crashing to a halt thanks to late goals at the end of each half by D.C. United for the 2-1 final and could badly use the type of clever movement and hold-up play Ribeiro brings to the table.
2. It took a pair of late misses (one extremely well-saved) by Jeb Brovsky for NYCFC's winless skid to continue.They drew 1-1 in the Bronx against visiting Houston and are now 1-7-5 on the season.
Of note: NYCFC played close to a "true" diamond for most of this one, with Mix Diskerud in the No. 10 role. He needs to get on the ball in the final third and be goal-dangerous for that formation to work, however.
1. Something close to a diamond is also being played in Toronto, where the Reds have gone all-in on a 4-3-1-2 with Michael Bradley as the free roaming "1" in that lineup. They steamrolled San Jose by 3-1 on Saturday, with Giovinco particularly impressive.
While Bradley and Giovinco, and to a lesser extent Benoit Cheyrou are grabbing the headlines, it's also important to note how well TFC's fullbacks are playing. Justin Morrow – who's long been one of the league's best fullbacks – headed home the first goal, and after 18 months in the wilderness, Homegrown left back Ashtone Morgan is showing the confidence and vision to make passes like this:
MLS, of course, still has a lot of growing to do. But the fact that Morgan doesn't look out of place next to the likes of Giovinco and Bradley, or that Villarreal has done such an incredible job (when healthy) of replacing Landon Donovan's production, or that Justen Glad can come in and put in a serviceable shift at right back in his first MLS minutes, means the growth we've all been waiting for is here.
Play your kids, folks. It's the only way to keep up.
