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 month
The games this weekend are taking place on August 24 and 25. The last league games that we covered were on July 20. In between, there was the All-Star Game, which… whatever. Complaining about the All-Star Game after it’s been played every season for 29 seasons is like complaining about all the blood in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
But Leagues Cup? C’mon man. Who are we fooling here? The only people who like it are drawing paychecks from Major League Soccer and Apple. The fans don’t care and if you feel like they do, just look at some of the attendances in this year’s Leagues Cup. I’m sure that people have visions of full houses to see their local team play Chivas or América, and no one thinks about Juárez or Necaxa. And this year, they didn’t get to paper over that with Lionel Messi.
And to fit this multiple-week competition into the schedule, the league has to start their season earlier and end later and have more weeks in the schedule with midweek games, so FCD ended up playing damn near every weekend and Wednesday during July. The very best thing about the 2024 Leagues Cup for FC Dallas is that their early exit meant three weeks of much-needed R&R.
EL SUPERCLÁSICO DEL SIGLO (de la semana)
Leagues Cup Final: Columbus Crew vs. Los Angeles FC (MLS Season Pass and Univision, Sunday at 6:15)
But having said all that about the uselessness of Leagues Cup, this is still a really great matchup. It’s a rematch of the 2023 MLS Cup Final, and it’s a matchup between two teams that are having themselves a pretty good 2024.
This will be the third cup final that Columbus has been in in the last year, after the aforementioned MLS Cup Final and the CONCACAF Champions Cup Final against Pachuca in June. That’s pretty impressive and a real feather in head coach Wilfried Nancy’s cap. If you ever wonder if the Hunts are the worst owners in Major League Soccer, just remember that Joey Saputo let Nancy walk from CF Montréal after he led them to a second-place finish in the East in 2022. And that wasn’t too far out of the norm for the general level of incompetence with which Saputo has run his organization over its time in the league.
And let me take a moment to address a sentiment that’s been expressed by FCD fans for, well, years with a tone of resignation that FCD will never win anything: “Oh, we can’t compete with New York/LA/Atlanta/Miami/whomever.” Bullshit. A team in Columbus Freaking Ohio has won three MLS Cups, three Supporters Shields, and an Open Cup, and four of those trophies came with ownership that might look a little familiar. So miss me with any sort of notions that our team in the nation’s fifth-largest media market can’t do it.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: Columbus, who seem not to be so committed to making it 2010 by hook or by crook the way that LAFC is. But good luck to Olivier Giroud, I guess.
Little Brother Game of the Week
Nashville SC vs. Austin FC (Apple TV+ free game, 7:30)
Anyone remember when Nashville SC was good? You should. It wasn’t that long ago. Gary Smith had put together a team with a terrific defense anchored by our old friend Walker Zimmerman. And even if the attack wasn’t prolific, it was at least deadly, with Hany Mukhtar pulling the strings and winning a league MVP award in 2022.
But times change. The goals and assists from Mukhtar dried up, Nashville’s scoring dried up — from 52 goals in 2022 to 39 goals in 2023 to 26 goals through 26 games in 2024 — and they went tumbling down the standings. This cost Gary Smith his job because people hate losing 1-0 every week more than they hate losing 3-2 every week. (Say, this sounds familiar.)
They’re hosting another team that peaked in 2022 from another nouveau-riche city in Little Brother Green. And like Nashville, Little Brother Green has been having issues with scoring. And both teams decided to do callbacks to departed country music icons in their uniforms — Nashville with the Man in Black uniforms and Little Brother Green with their white uniforms with green sleeves that were allegedly inspired by the Armadillo World Headquarters. (I don’t know how those unis were inspired by the Armadillo, which was torn down 40 years ago, but that’s the official story.)
The difference between the two clubs is of course that Josh Wolff has managed to keep his job. I gotta give Little Brother Green’s technical staff credit. They have been remarkably patient with a coach who managed to lose the only trophy that ever mattered to them, Copa Tejas.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: Nashvegas, mostly because they hired B.J. Callahan, whom we last saw as the beefy USMNT interim manager between the two Gregg Berhalter stints.
“Let’s Pretend to Care About the Eastern Conference” Game of the Week
Inter Miami vs. FC Cincinnati (Apple TV+ free game, 6:30)
Back in June, when Lionel Messi got injured during the Copa América final, there were a lot of dummies out there that figured that Inter Miami was toast while he was out. One of those dummies was me. Hey, I figured that when you lose one of the league’s leading scorers and most influential players, you’re gonna suffer. Call me crazy.
But here we are, and Inter Miami is in first place, five points ahead of FC Cincinnati. Did Cincy tune-up Miami 6-1 last month at home? Yes. Did it matter? No. It turns out that when you follow up that 6-1 win with losses to Charlotte, Chicago, and the Red Bulls before Leagues Cup, that kind of renders that big win pretty irrelevant, especially when Miami follows up that loss with two straight wins over Toronto and Chicago.
So Cincy gets another chance to reel in Miami. Both teams are well-rested, with both teams going out of Leagues Cup in the Round of 16. Messi will still be out, but hey, we’re learning that that may not matter too much.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: Cincy.
Sickos Game of the Week
CF Montréal vs. New England Revolution (Apple TV+ free game, 6:30)
Since I mentioned CF Montréal earlier, let’s check in on them:
Well, that’s always a good sign when you’re in 11th place in the East and your coach had a beef with a star player that needed resolving. I gotta say that when Montreal came to Frisco in March and pounded FCD into a smooth paste, it looked like they’d finally figured things out. Well, no. The calendar now reads August and while FCD is likewise in 11th place, they at least have more points. “Regression to the mean” is a real thing, y’all.
But it’s not a real thing in Foxborough. At least not yet. This is not how anyone thought things would go. They were a pretty salty team that Bruce Arena built and when Arena left because of [REDACTED], they hired a guy who’s won two MLS Cups in Portland and Columbus. But hey, after 23 games, you are what your record says you are. And they stink.
It’s a good thing that this game’s on at the same time as the FCD game.
Jefe the Hater’s rooting pick: Montreal. I don’t know if God smiles when Caleb Porter suffers, but I do.
Good Guys Game of the Week
DC United vs. FC Dallas (Apple TV+ free game, 6:30)
Quick trivia question: When was the last time that FC Dallas visited DC United?
Answer: October 13, 2018, a 1-0 loss
That’s a little ridiculous. That was near the end of Óscar Pareja’s time in Frisco and FCD has had two permanent coaches and two interim coaches since then. This is not to say that MLS needs to schedule FCD to visit DC more often, but that maybe FCD needs to do a little bit better at hiring coaches so that they’re not firing them in the middle of their third seasons. So congratulations, Peter Luccin. You get to do something that neither Luchi Gonzalez nor Nico Estévez got to do.
But aside from that little bit of trivia, this game is keeping with the recurring theme of this week’s column: Teams that are run worse than FC Dallas. As a fan of this team and this league since the mid ’90s, I so enjoy hating on DC United for the simple reason that they had so much in the league’s early years and their fans would relish in telling you about it.
So when they spend season after season falling on their face, missing the playoffs, trading away and selling off their best players, hiring and firing dopes like Ben Olsen, and Hernan Lozada, and Wayne Rooney, it’s like a drip of dopamine. Stuff isn’t always great at FC Dallas and our beloved club does a fabulous job outrunning excellence and trophies, but when you’re a hater, you at least get the schadenfreude of seeing the suffering of at least a few clubs.
So suck it, DC United. When you’re out at Audi Field on Saturday, watching Petar Musa and Jesús Ferreira and Alan Velasco and Paul Arriola and Sebastian Lletget kick your shit in, enjoy your nostalgia for Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno and Roy Lassiter. And then suck it some more.