But expansion teams don't have to be terrible.
Yes, only Seattle flew out of the gates and was immediately successful but I'd still rate Portland as reasonably successful. Philly and San Jose fall into the next tier: out of the playoff race early but not unequivocally the worst team in the league. Chivas, RSL, Toronto, and Vancouver are the teams that failed completely and fought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to stay off bottom more or less all season. So, from one perspective, half of all the modern expansion teams are terrible. Looking at the data a little closer though reveals that post-Toronto most expansion teams are typically bad but not terrible:
2008 - San Jose: 14th out of 14 (but ahead of LA on GD if not head-to-head); 1.10 PPG
2009 - Seattle: 4th out of 15; 1.57 PPG2010 - Philly: 14th out of 16; 1.16 PPG
2011 - Portland: 12th out of 18; 1.23 PPG
2011 - Vancouver 18th out of 18; 0.82 PPG
Chivas, RSL, and TFC’s terrible launches make sense when you think about it. When Chivas and RSL joined the league in 2005 they were the first “true” expansion teams in MLS history. Nine of the other teams they were competing against had 9 seasons, 7 in the case of Chicago, to prepare for those teams’ arrival. MLS was a small league and most of the recognized available talent, particularly domestic talent that formed the bulk of rosters, was relatively concentrated. Into that atmosphere TWO new clubs and brand new soccer organizations had to build rosters from the discarded players from the other teams along with what other foreign talent they could attract on a mid-2000s, pre-DP rule, MLS salary budget. Chivas went the reinventing-the-wheel approach as part of their initial brand identity and failed so spectacularly that they ended up on their fourth coach and did a complete about face by the start of their second year. Real Salt Lake only did marginally better. TFC joined the league only two years later and had to deal with the further restriction of MLS’s then quite tight domestic player quotas as they specifically applied to the league’s new, first ever, foreign based team. TFC were essentially forced to reinvent-the-wheel in one way or another yet, for all that team’s record setting failings, still did better in the slightly expanded MLS, on a PPG basis, then Chivas or RSL had. Heck, they almost finished ahead of then third year RSL that year! Just possibly, being an MLS expansion team had gotten a little bit easier.
However, since Toronto things having been getting a lot less predictable. Seattle is still the massive exception but, other than Vancouver, every MLS expansion team has at least been somewhat competitive if not quite respectable. In every other case they’ve finished tied or ahead of at least one established original MLS franchise in their inaugural year. San Jose finished tied on points with the LA Galaxy, ahead on goal difference, and only behind them in the standings based on head-to-head results; their 1.10 PPG would have been enough to match their 2011 finish of 14th (out of 18) in this year’s MLS. Philly, though not great, finished ahead of a historically terrible DC United and, by that point, established Chivas team. Obviously Portland finished ahead of a number of established MLS teams as they nearly made the (expanded) MLS playoffs in 2011.
Considered in terms of PPG Vancouver is in many ways just as much of an outlier as Seattle. The data set is small but biggest cluster of post-Toronto expansion teams have a PPG between 1.00 and 1.25. In the larger MLS of 2011/12 that’s still not good enough to make the playoffs but is very likely to be far better than the pace set by the league’s absolute worst teams and will keep you around the playoffs at least into the final months of the season. So, like I keep repeating, most newer MLS expansion teams aren’t very good but they’re not typically terrible either.
What does this mean for Montreal? Well, I would suggest that it gives them the realistic expectation, if they follow the established model for an expansion team, that they don’t have to be terrible in 2012. I must admit: so far Jesse Marsch has been following the established playbook better than average from my perspective. Many people were underwhelmed when his appointment was announced because it seemed like a safe and boring MLS oriented choice. Clearly his nearly complete lack of experience will be a concern and until Marsch is battle tested as a head coach we still have a lot to learn about him. That said, they’ve still got the SuperDraft to go and a lot of roster to fill out but it’s clear that Marsch is being pragmatic and not trying to innovate. That, more than anything else, should give Montreal supporters confidence and be a cause for concern amongst TFC supporters. It’s exactly the sort of approach I’ve long favoured for TFC and, for a lot of reasons I’ll one day explore in another post, one that TFC have generally resisted. Interestingly, from an exclusively Canadian perspective Montreal is being innovative: they’re just doing as good a job as possible to be a typical American MLS franchise! Neither Toronto or Vancouver tried that!
Of course, now that I’ve written all of this they’ll just end up being terrible to spite me, right? Not that I’d be complaining much of course.
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