I’m Dustin “El Jefe” Christmann, and I am an FC Dallas fanatic from Day One of the Dallas Burn. I’m also a hater. I used to yell mean, hateful things from the stands at the Cotton Bowl and Toyota Stadium, but now, I’m sharing my id with you to help guide you, my fellow FCD fans, in your enjoyment of Major Soccer on TV.
Musical accompaniment
Last week
Up to the 40th minute last Saturday night, things were looking pretty good for Our Heroes. They had a 2-0 lead against an LA Galaxy team that is kinda crap ever since Riqui Puig started doing his best Paxton Pomykal impression, but somehow had a CONCACAF Champions Cup game on Wednesday night.
Then FCD had one of their patented 2026 Five Minute Meltdowns and coughed up two goals — most dangerous lead in soccer, amirite? — and a nice 2-0 lead turned into a disappointing 2-2 draw.
Then, on Wednesday night, the absolute worst possible combination of things happened. First, Minnesota United took a lead, and since they’re a team that is very happy to close the shop, park the bus, or whatever metaphor you want to use for a team that is not terribly interested in out-soccering you if they don’t have to, that’s exactly what they did. And FCD predictably had a hard problem breaking me them down.
Second, while attempting to get the goal to level the match, Petar Musa suffered a knock and is quite likely out for this weekend’s game in Seattle.
Great. And at the end of a three-game homestand, FCD walked away with a grand total of two points after blowing leads against St. Louis and the Gals and being strangled to death by Minnesota. Boy, I hope we don’t rue those lost points in three months.
EL SUPERCLÁSICO DEL SIGLO (de la semana)
Inter Miami vs. New England Revolution (Apple TV, 6:30)
I was originally gonna do Nashville-Charlotte in this slot because let’s face it, both teams are pretty good, with Nashville on top of the East and Charlotte in fifth. But you know, Miami is in second, and New England is in third. And let’s face it, I still don’t believe that Charlotte is good. Hell, I have a hard time enough with the notion that Charlotte has a team in Major League Soccer. It feels like a date-filling operation for Bank of America Stadium or like David Tepper’s laundering money.
But you know who doesn’t think that either this game or the Nashville-Charlotte game is worth watching? Major League Soccer.
OK, OK, OK… I get it. One game is being carried on Fox, and the other two games are in sponsored time slots. But you can’t ask your graphic designer to add another game to the graphic? You can’t pay your writer another three bucks to write a paragraph or two about a game — either game — that would involve two out of the top five teams in the Eastern Conference? Whatever.
That’s why you read the Hatewatching Guide, folks, so that you can have ME tell you that you should watch this game.
But let me just say that although New England is in second place in the East, you should view them with a healthy amount of skepticism for one big reason: They are perfect at Gillette Stadium with four wins in four games, which is the sort of home record we’d love for FCD to have. But in their four games on the road? One win and three losses. That sort of home/road split will get you into the playoffs, but not very high and not for very long. Still, it is an improvement over what they did under Caleb Porter, which shouldn’t shock anyone.
Miami, on the other hand, appears to be on a mission to show two things:
- Javier Mascherano wasn’t really doing much in Miami. Sure, they won MLS Cup last year, but let’s have a show of hands of folks who think that they couldn’t have done that under a hundred other managers. And since his departure, they’ve played two road games at altitude in Colorado and Salt Lake and walked away with two victories against two credible teams.
- For those of us who were still unclear about this issue, Lionel Messi is actually running the team. I don’t know why you’d be unclear after the signings — Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suárez, Javier Mascherano, and probably more names that I’ve forgotten. But even if you were unclear, the fact that the interim coach, who is the sporting director at Inter Miami, is Guillermo Hoyos, the guy who brought Lionel Messi to Barcelona, should tell you that. But hey, putting Lionel Messi in charge back in 2023 has worked out fine for them, I guess.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: New England
Little Brother Slapfight of the Week
Austin FC vs. Houston Dynamo (Apple TV, 7:30)
This game is actually on the graphic shown above as “Must-See Match.” It is the WALMART 💥 SATURDAY 💥 SHOWDOWN 💥💥💥, and if I were at Walmart, I’d be calling up Major League Soccer and asking if maybe they couldn’t make an impromptu change to some other game.
Look, I get it. It’s a rivalry game between the two Texas Teams Who Aren’t FC Dallas, but c’mon. If there’s one thing that we and the fans of Little Brother Orange agree on, it’s that nobody asked for Mom and Dad to have another kid. Nobody asked for MLS to put a team in Texas’ most overrated city. Sure, if they had done the sensible thing and put the team in San Antonio, we’d have jokes, some of which have been told by Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA over the years…
…but Little Brother Green is just the latest effort on the part of my family’s ancestral hometown to attract the worst people in the world, like Elon Musk and Alex Jones and Anthony Precourt and Sandra Bullock, and try to convince everyone else that they’re somehow heaven on Earth and that you should wait in line to eat at Franklin’s BBQ.
This game will be witnessed in person by people who were actively rooting for Precourt to move MLS’ First Team, were driving up to Frisco during that saga to watch FCD-Columbus to “get a first look at their future team,” and have generally beclowned themselves on the regular since then. So it has filled me with great satisfaction to see the Crew get a new owner, win an MLS Cup, and get a new stadium while the people in Central Texas slowly find out why the folks of Central Ohio were happy to be rid of Precourt.
But I will be rooting for them for one night for two reasons:
- They will be playing FCD’s most bitter rivals, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- Job security for Nico Estévez, baby. We all know that he ain’t a very good first-team coach. But I’ve never heard anything bad about him personally, and hey, Little Brother Green was nice enough to hire him mere weeks after FCD fired him. Besides, I don’t want anybody down there getting the notion that maybe Óscar Pareja would be an upgrade, even if he definitely is.
But nobody needs to get the idea that they deserve to be anything more than comic relief. They’re just a lower grade of garbage than their opponents in orange.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: Little Brother Green. My apologies to San Antonio and Sandra Bullock for the strays that they caught above.
Sickos Game of the Week
St. Louis City vs. San Jose Earthquakes (Apple TV, 7:30)
While we’re on the subject of Central Texas’ favorite backfiring clown car, let’s give them some flowers: They should feel really proud of their 1-0 halftime lead in San Jose Wednesday night. Might want to work on the things that caused them to cough up five unanswered goals in the second half, however.
But that brings me to one of the participants in this week’s Sickos Game, who are currently on top of the Supporters Shield standings. Now, I read those words at Major League Soccer soccer dot com, and even though I know they would know better than anyone and wouldn’t write those words if they weren’t true, I still felt the need to double-check, and yes, those words are true.
And not that Bruce Arena’s credentials for the National Soccer Hall of Fame were ever going to be in doubt, but the way that the Quakes have transformed with him at the helm might just be the reminder of why they should never be in doubt, because he’s doing something that he never did before in his career.
In DC, he built a competent team and dominated MLS in the first days of MLS when nobody knew what they were doing. With the US national team, he took a national team that finished 32nd out of 32 in 1998 and, with a group that came mostly out of MLS, advanced to the quarterfinals four years later.
In LA, he took an underperforming squad of high-priced talent and got them to bestride the league like a colossus of yore. And now, he’s taking a team that has never been particularly high spenders and, without having to break too many piggy banks, transformed from a perennially bad team to one that was fun to watch, but still outside the playoffs, to one that is straight-up killing opponents. And he’s just in his second season in charge.
Yes, he’s had his stumbles. There was the 2006 World Cup, his time with the Red Bulls, his unsuccessful rescue mission for the USMNT after Jürgen Klinsmann was fired, and whatever it was that happened in New England. But the guy knows what he’s doing, and if you’re willing to give him control over your roster, he’ll get your team playing like they know what they have to do and how they have to do it. And while he’s well-known for bringing “his guys,” like Ian Harkes and Dave Romney, he’s also currently helping young guys like Niko Tsakiris and Beau Leroux make a lot of money when they get their big move.
Honestly, I get why other clubs didn’t hire him after he got canned in New England. First, whatever he did must’ve been terrible to get the hammer dropped on him the way it did. The league usually only craphammers guys that hard when they’re bench players who get busted for gambling. Second, that whole “shaping the roster how he sees fit” thing? Most teams aren’t gonna do that because most head coaches can’t do that, and most teams already have sporting directors and technical directors that they like. But hey, when you’re the San Jose Earthquakes, you take that risk.
It certainly seems like a better idea than whatever it is that St. Louis City has done the last few years, unless their goal was to finish near the bottom of the Western Conference almost every season. In which case, they’re nailing it. And in that case, trading João Klauss to the Galaxy the past offseason made perfect sense.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: San Jose. I don’t usually like rooting for Bruce Arena to have nice things, but I just can’t abide perpetual stupidity.
Good Guys Game of the Week
Seattle Sounders vs. FC Dallas (Apple TV, 9:30)
Amazingly, FCD hasn’t had the most imbalanced schedule so far. That honor belongs to the Vancouver Whitecaps, who have played seven out of their first eight games at BC Place. And like FC Dallas, the Caps are gonna be hitting the road for a long road trip once May rolls around. The reason, of course, is that BC Place will be a World Cup venue and the stadium has to be prepared. Things have to be set up — like the grass field, and the secret lairs for FIFA dignitaries — and all those things have to be taken down afterwards. So after this weekend, the Caps will not return home until the beginning of August.
The big difference between FCD and Caps is how they’ve handled their extended homestands to start the season. Vancouver has won six out of seven at home and is currently second in the West with 21 points. They’re a good team, as evidenced by the fact that they rolled into Portland for their only road game back in March and pounded the Timbers.
FCD, on the other hand, has not exactly racked up the points at Toyota Stadium. They’ve played seven home games, won two, drawn four, and lost one. That is 10 points out of a possible 21. That’s 1.44 points per game. At home. As mentioned above, the capper was the most recent three games at home that provided two of those draws and the loss.
That’s bad. It’s so bad that their road record — one win and one loss — is actually better on a point-per-game basis. Granted, it’s a pretty short record at this point, but going on the road, away from the half-closed, atmosphere-free construction site that is Toyota Stadium, almost feels like a relief.
Sadly, it isn’t because they get to go to their old house of horrors, Lumen Field, this weekend. The last time FCD won there was in 2011. Schellas Hyndman was still FCD head coach. Without checking, I’m sure that a few of the players that will be in the FCD traveling squad had yet to start elementary school. The latest and greatest iPhone was an iPhone 4. (They’re up to the iPhone 17e, in case you don’t keep track of such things.)
It’s been a long time. And while there have been some absolute ass-whippings handed out by the Sounders, most have been the usual 1-0 or 2-1 games that give you hope, but nope, Lucy’s gonna pull that ball away and Charlie Brown is gonna go flying through the air and land on his back.
Anyway, this is normally the part where I write some rah-rah crap, but Lumen Field has just broken me. My expectations at the point are:
- Don’t soil yourselves too badly.
- Don’t get anyone injured.
- Don’t let Jesús Ferreira and Paul Arriola go off.
And if they want to steal a point or three and make those entitled fans hoppin’ mad, that wouldn’t suck.
any idea why abubakar isn’t playing? genuinely confused. he doesn’t look unhappy though