The new kids in town, San Diego FC, take their first-ever trip to San Jose this weekend, making their Bay Area bows against the San Jose Earthquakes for our Matchday 29 Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire clash at PayPal Park (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).
San Diego have figured things out as quickly as any expansion team in MLS history, and currently lead the Western Conference with 49 points. They’ve exhibited a level of tactical clarity that's remarkable in any side, let alone an expansion team.
The hosts are looking for the same. Bruce Arena has done good work trying to reboot the Quakes during his first year in charge, but they are still a chaos engine at times.
And that makes them fun! Fun is good.
San Jose Earthquakes
- Is Cristian Espinoza the most underrated attacker in the league? He’s my pick. The Argentine All-Star has put together another outstanding season with 4g/12a.
- The recipient of a lot of those assists has been forward Chicho Arango, who has cooled off considerably after a scorching hot start. When he’s good, he’s a Landon Donovan MLS MVP-caliber striker. And San Jose need that version of him down the stretch as they fight for an Audi MLS Cup Playoffs spot.
- Beau Leroux has come out of nowhere to become one of the best central midfielders in MLS, both shielding the backline and getting into the attack. He adds value everywhere.
San Diego FC
- More of the game has run through DP right winger Anders Dreyer than expected at the start of the year. And the Dane has risen to the occasion – he’s been one of the best players in MLS all season, leading the league with 29 goal contributions (12g/17a).
- Luca de la Torre is one of my favorite players in the league to watch. He’s so smooth on the ball and effortlessly puts his teammates into good spots. If he adds more cutting edge, we’re talking about maybe the very best No. 8 in the league.
- And the guy behind him has been one of the best No. 6s in the league. You probably won’t notice Jeppe Tverskov out there, but to MLS sickos, he looks like a Kyle Beckerman regen (complimentary) in so many ways.
Points. That’s the whole thing now for the Quakes, who are desperately trying to claw their way back into the playoffs after last year’s Wooden Spoon disappointment.
They are much-improved over last year, of course, but that won’t matter much to them if they don’t get across the finish line in the final whistle blows on Decision Day two months from now. And it’d be nice, to boot, if they managed to climb into eighth place – because that would mean they host the Wild Card game, and that would be the first-ever postseason game at PayPal.
Which was built a decade ago! The Quakes need a break, man.
The greatest expansion teams in MLS history:
- 2018 LAFC: 57 points and set the tone for what would become a Supporters’ Shield-winning juggernaut the next season.
- 2009 Seattle Sounders: 47 points, which was one point off the top spot in the West, and won the US Open Cup.
- 1998 Chicago Fire: 56 points (in 32 games, so a higher PPG than LAFC), and won both the US Open Cup and MLS Cup.
Only two expansion sides have ever won a trophy. No expansion team has ever won the Shield in their debut season.
San Diego are playing to make history.
San Jose: Beware Preston Judd off the bench!
The 26-year-old Cali boy has some Goonie genes, with five goals in 690 minutes this year.
Two of the last three goals have come at a “90+X” time for the Quakes, getting San Jose a win against Vancouver last weekend and a point against the Timbers in Portland.
Judd is not a particularly complicated forward, but he’s a dangerous one because of how single-minded he is about being in goal-scoring positions and putting maximum pressure on opposing backlines with his movement and effort. If the Quakes need a goal in the second half, you can bet Judd will be sent on to sniff one out.
San Diego: How much will they miss Milan Iloski?
Listen, any real criticism of the expansion boys is nitpicking… HOWEVER, nitpicking is par for the course when you’re a true Supporters’ Shield contender (the favorite, according to my MLS Season Pass colleague Dax McCarty).
I have but one personnel concern (probably too big a word) with San Diego: center forward.
Against Sporting KC, Onni Valakari played up top – on the lineup sheet at least, as he frequently drops deeper as a creative fulcrum in midfield to let Dreyer and Chucky Lozano find space in wide areas and challenge the depth behind opposing backlines – but, as technically brilliant as he is, the Finland international has just four goals in 26 MLS matches. Tomás Ángel battles his you-know-what off, but the box-score production (3g/2a) hasn’t been there. Marcus Ingvartsen hasn’t played since June because of injury.
Which brings us back to Iloski, who was a human microwave for head coach Mikey Varas: 10 goals in 471 minutes before his loan was terminated and he signed permanently with the Philadelphia Union, for whom he scored in a Union US Open Cup win on Wednesday.
Iloski scored in six games for San Diego. They won five of those games, 15 critical points in the race for the Shield and playoff seeding. Far fewer points will decide the Shield. What happens when the vast majority of the goalscoring load is on Lozano and Dreyer’s backs? Will San Diego have a third goal threat that flips a couple of results their way down the stretch?
We’re going to find out.
San Jose Earthquakes
The Quakes, as mentioned, are a chaos engine. Arena has – much to my surprise – had them playing primarily out of a 3-4-2-1 this season, with flying wingbacks and a weirdly empty midfield.
That doesn’t lend itself to much pitch control, but it has lent itself to a high-powered attack. High-powered as in 49 goals to this point, which is fourth in the league (and one goal off of first place).
A lot of them have looked something like this:
Espinoza plays as a sort of inside-right playmaker rather than a true winger, which means he spends more time in and around the box, combining with the likes of Arango and Josef Martínez. Josef, of course, is much more of a poacher than a playmaker, but that doesn’t mean he can’t set the other guys up: he can, and does.
The interesting part comes with the positioning of the wingbacks. Usually, they play high upfield, as you can see from this network passing graphic I picked from a random game this summer:
Of late, though, they’ve been a little bit lower, probably as a result of how fragile they’ve looked defensively.
When that happens, the 3-4-2-1 can end up looking a lot like a 5-4-1, and the Quakes are less of a chaos engine at that point than a sit-and-counter proposition.
San Diego FC
They play the most compact soccer in the league, and have been committed to that no matter the game state. You can crack them open, but you have to be brave and precise:
That’s their plan when they don’t have the ball: compress the field and make you string together several special plays in order to get them into rotation. I’ve written before how they remind me of nothing so much as the great Real Salt Lake teams of 15 years back (we’ll count this as my second Beckerman reference of the column).
But that’s me burying the lede. What makes San Diego remarkable is how committed they are to getting on the ball and using it to control everything about the game. They’re at or near the top of the league in possession, passes per possession, passes into and within the attacking third, field tilt and all the rest. Varas told us in preseason that this is how they’d play, and he’s been good to his word.
Here’s a paragraph from John Muller’s recent feature on San Diego’s approach that ran in the Guardian:
True to his promise, Varas’s goalkeepers have refused to play it safe this season, launching just 8.6 percent of their open-play passes more than 40 yards. According to the stats site FBref, that’s not just an MLS record – it’s lower than Barcelona, Man City or any other team in Europe’s top five leagues going back at least as far as 2017-18.
The whole goal is to get the ball onto the foot of Dreyer or the other DP winger, Chucky Lozano, entering the final third at speed. And they have hit on that goal basically all season long.
Last week was their first win in forever, so there's no chance Bruce will change the XI. That means it’ll be the typical 3-4-2-1.
Varas is still juggling an injury-plagued backline and midfield, and he’s got a potential new No. 9 with the arrival of Corey Baird. I’m expecting changes from last week, but your guess is as good as mine – though we know it’ll be their usual 4-3-3.
