“I’m on board for the long haul. And we're going to hope to win this year, but we're going to keep trying to win every single year. We want to build a culture of winning, year after year after year, contending for trophies.”
Those were Caleb Porter’s words after his Columbus Crew SC side defeated New England last week to earn their place in MLS Cup 2020. And if it sounded a bit grandiose or presumptuous at the time, you’ve got to concede that he and his players walked the walk on the big stage, putting the defending champions Seattle Sounders to the sword in imperious fashion at MAPFRE Stadium on Saturday to claim their second MLS title.
“From the start, our ambition has been that we want to be consistent contenders. Why can’t we be great? We’ve been ambitious from the start,” Crew president Tim Bezbatchenko told the Columbus Dispatch’s Michael Arace at the start of the postseason. “Was a route [to contention] there in 2019? No. Are we getting there now? Yes.”
Highlights: Columbus beat Seattle to win MLS Cup
Notably, no one in canary and black is acting particularly surprised about making this breakthrough. Going all the way was the plan all along in 2020.
“We knew as the playoffs were going on, the job isn't done, we cannot celebrate,” said captain Jonathan Mensah in Saturday’s aftermath. “And we put that in our heads – we won against Red Bull, we kept it calm, and then we rolled up our sleeves, we kept going. Nashville, New England, we had no celebrations, because we knew what the vision was and what the mission was.”
So what’s next? Can that vision be extended out into the future like the Sounders did with theirs, stoking perennial competitiveness?
Short term
Columbus have built a balanced squad guided by an effective philosophy – what better proof than 19-year-old rookie Aidan Morris excelling in Darlington Nagbe’s place in the final, his postseason debut? – and should be able to keep most of it together, at least by MLS’s standards of turnover, for 2021.
Having won it with Portland five years ago, Porter knows what’s coming down the pipe: Concacaf Champions League participation, wearing a target on your back as the reigning champs, triggering performance incentives in player contracts and other burdens and complications of incumbency. They’ll have to cultivate more depth, manage physical workloads and stoke the collective drive without provoking burnout.
“What I’ve learned is, you win a trophy, sometimes you lose about five percent or so of hunger,” said Porter on Sunday. “It’s important that we’ve got guys to push each other and keep that healthy competition and also be able to rotate. We need an even deeper squad next year.
“For sure, we’re excited about the future,” he added. “We’ve got a great roster, a good core. We feel like we still can get better. We’re going to add some players, we’re not going to rest on our laurels at all because I know once you win a trophy, people are going to want you to do it again.”
They started that process bright and early on Monday, acquiring goalkeeper Evan Bush, a proven MLS starter expected to be Eloy Room’s backup, from Vancouver before announcing their end-of-year contract decisions. Looking at their roster from a higher angle, the Crew are a veteran but not quite grizzled group, with a bulk of regulars in their late 20s/early 30s and a smaller cadre of rising youngsters like Morris and his fellow academy products Sebastian Berhalter (also 19) and Aboubacar Keita (20), and imports Luis Diaz and Milton Valenzuela, both 22.
Crew SC also appear to be a tight-knit, self-aware bunch, and that’s a vital intangible. Long-serving center back Josh Williams was slated to be a backup in 2020 when the club signed Vito Wormgoor last winter, but stepped up impressively when the Dutchman was sidelined by an ankle injury just two games in.
“I think what's so important is to be a good team,” said Williams earlier this month. “When we brought in Vito, obviously I want to play every game, but that guy’s a baller. I knew it right away. So I knew that I would have to play exceptionally just to get time on the field. So I could have either pouted about it and threw a fit because I thought I should be playing, or I could accept the situation and keep working, and keep supporting him and keep supporting teammates, pushing guys at training. That to me is what wins championships.”
The core will remain, but will the overall collective have the legs and lungs to fight on multiple fronts in 2021? Bezbatchenko will be key in evaluating and addressing that, and he’s got a handy set of experiences to call on from his time at Toronto FC.
He was given more money to spend with the Reds, who won everything within their grasp in 2017 and reached the 2016 and 2019 MLS Cup finals, but also struggled to keep key players healthy and fit over the course of full seasons and have recently worked to freshen up their squad with Homegrowns. Which brings us to…
Long range
The so-called small-market club once dubbed “America’s Hardest-Working Team” missed the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs last year and nearly got relocated the year before that, with questions raised at the time about Columbus’ ability to keep pace in the contemporary MLS arms race.
Today the Crew find themselves league champions as they prepare to move into not only a gorgeous new $300 million-plus downtown stadium next summer, but also their new, $30 million OhioHealth Performance Center training facility, currently under construction immediately adjacent to MAPFRE.
The iconic venue’s western parking lots are becoming four fields, two for the Crew academy and two for the first team, along with a cutting-edge 42,000-square-foot building. Meanwhile Columbus have ramped up their academy lately, scouting further afield to bolster their regional player pool with recruits like Morris, who’s originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
These are hefty infrastructure investments on the part of the ownership group which purchased the club to keep them in Columbus at the end of 2018. They underline the commitment of the Haslam and Edwards families – who also wrote a big check to bring in MLS Cup MVP Lucas Zelarayan, an eight-figure investment that’s paying off richly so far. This bears emphasis, because it can only bolster Bezbatchenko’s credibility if and when he pitches them on big-ticket acquisitions in the future.
The importance of Bezbatchenko’s presence cannot be overstated. He’s one of the most respected chief soccer officers in the league and as his freewheeling conversation last week with Sounders president Garth Lagerwey and The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal revealed, he’s both a strategic thinker and a detail-oriented number cruncher. “Bez” and his teams have been as much of a fixture in recent MLS Cups as Seattle, and he’s probably running ahead of schedule with a different but comparable project in Columbus.
The Crew aren’t going to spend like TFC or Seattle or Atlanta, particularly with big bricks-and-mortar projects underway and a pandemic imposing general economic bearishness. But much like Sporting KC, the Timbers and other ambitious mid-tier MLS clubs, they’ve realized that careful injections of elite quality can push a well-built project over the top.
“The data shows that the scales have been tipping heavily in terms of spending,” Bezbatchenko said last month “You can’t be three [Designated Players] behind. But you can spend on one or two parts, and be smart about who you target, and be smart about the composition of your team – and you can be right there. You can.”
“We are not going to be in the top 10 in average spending [on players] every year. I don’t think we need to be. Maybe in marketing and ticket sales, we need to be – but the way to do that is to win.”
There’s no better way to draw fans, hard-core and casual alike, to a new stadium than to christen it as champions. Should COVID-19 vaccines bring the virus under control over the next year or two, the Crew can look forward to a strong home-field advantage and healthy revenue streams downtown.
And we can rest assured that they will carry over the same proud, defiant spirit of the Save the Crew movement when they move in – and that’s massive.
“All these things happened in the past few years like Save The Crew and everything, the club being at risk of not existing anymore – this win is for them,” said midfielder Artur on Saturday. “They work so hard, Doctor Pete [Edwards] and everyone who worked behind [the scenes] and kept the history. This club has a huge history and it's important not to erase it.
“Now we have a bright future ahead, building a new stadium, building a new training facility. Just bigger things ahead and I can't wait – very excited.”
