Could you imagine, as MLS pulled FC Dallas from the MLS is Back tournament on July 9 due to 10 positive COVID-19 tests – with two more in Nashville that would become nine before knocking it out of the tournament as well – that 36 days later a hoarse commissioner Don Garber would get up on the microphone to hand out a trophy and say “Difficulty is an excuse that history never accepts?”
Difficulty is something that has beset us all, as the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the world, infecting more than 20 million people and killing more than 745,000 globally. The struggle of health professionals to keep us alive is one, as is the act of keeping on as tragedy mounts and the places we turned to for community become places of danger.
It was the difficulty of hosting a sports tournament that didn’t need to happen in the first place that Garber was boasting about overcoming when he handed the MLS Is Back trophy, an improvised honour, to Diego Valeri of the Portland Timbers Tuesday night. The Timbers beat Orlando City SC 2-1 in an impressive, efficient performance that left one in awe of how they remained effortlessly in control for most of the game, allowing the Lions to get frustrated in possession and then flip the script and execute ruthlessly on attack.
Despite the focus on whether Portland’s Sebastian Blanco or Orlando’s Nani would prove their case as tournament MVP, it was centrebacks who were Timbers heroes. First a Diego Valeri free kick floated with impossible precision to Larrys Mabiala on the far post, to which Orlando soon replied when Mauricio Pereyra caught a laser pass from Nani and somehow had the time to turn while being tackled to fire his own. In the second half, Eryk Williamson dummied a shot, then fired a ball through the area that grazed Jeremy Ebobisse and then found the boot of Dario Zuparic, a defender who scored his first MLS goal since arriving this past offseason.
When the goal went in, there was joy; when the final whistle blew, there was joy; when the players rushed to a giant projection screen to greet the families they had to leave to be there, there was joy.
“The more difficult the fight is, the more beautiful the victory is at the end,” Mabiala said after the match. “We’ve been through many difficult games. … in the quarantine time, we’ve been talking a lot about what we wanted to accomplish and how we wanted to play.”
It was the end of a strange tournament, whose groups were adjusted in progress when teams withdrew, and in which interesting sides tended to do better than famous ones, some missing their best players after opt-outs. Orlando, who hadn’t placed higher than second-last in the east since 2016 (when they were third-last), beat much-hyped expansion team Inter Miami and last year’s No. 1 seed New York City in the group stage before knocking out Supporters Shield winners LAFC in penalties on their route to the final, thanks to the partnership of Nani and Pereyra as well as the contributions of fullbacks Joao Moutinho and Ruan. Cincinnati, which won all of six MLS games last year, won two of three in the group stage, including beating vaunted Atlanta United 1-0. Neither 2019 MLS Cup finalist made it past the first knockout round. Even the Vancouver Whitecaps, who were missing up to 11 players including their two best goalies, leaving 18-year-old Thomas Hasal in net, somehow won a game and made it to penalties in the first knockout round despite being outshot 106-27 in four matches.
In those circumstances, in some ways you can’t watch soccer the same. With players out of form and a pandemic on their mind, how can you judge someone for not placing every pass perfectly? How can you be expected to get results? As a fan, it’s done for your entertainment, but as sports, what is it for? What did anyone prove?
For the winners, the trophy and its place in the CONCACAF Champions League (whenever, you know, that happens), winning is enough.
“I’m very happy, because we made it count,” Blanco told reporters. “I want to thank my family, I want to thank my daughters, it’s been 40 days, it’s been very difficult for them, not only because of the loneliness but everything that is happening now. But like I said, we made it count.”
“The last ten days have been very hard because I had my son calling me every morning crying, asking me when I was going to come back,” said Mabiala, who has three kids, two of them toddlers. “When we had these conversations, we just told ourselves that we need to make it worth it.”
This league is a machine that produces sports, built to make its clubs overcome adversity and keep trying, and which sometimes rewards sacrifices with victory. But is every sacrifice worth it in the name of sports? For players who had to reheat their competitive form and left with an injury instead of a trophy? For Caps goalkeeper Bryan Meredith, who was far from home when his mother died suddenly? For Orange County residents, who faced a turnaround time of six days for COVID tests while MLS got theirs back in 12-24 hours?
Minus two teams, MLS was able to pull off the balance of the tournament without further positive testing after July 14. They wanted to play, and as frustrated as I was with the fact that the tournament should have been called off, I kept watching, up to the end. I got a little bit of joy.
But this is a machine built for one thing, and it hasn’t been turned off. Garber’s boast wasn’t just in defiance of the critics who thought the tournament couldn’t be done (safely), but against the backlash to the league’s return plans revealed last Saturday. Not 24 hours after he handed off the trophy, MLS played its next regular season game in Dallas in front of 2,912 fans at Toyota Stadium, against Nashville. More matches are planned, with fans where local rules permit. A risk assessment tool provided by Georgia Tech estimates that the chances that a group of 1,000 people in Collin County will have at least one person with COVID-19 is over 99 per cent. “If we have issues, we’ll deal with them,” Garber told reporters Saturday, but fans will have to sign a waiver to enter that prevents them from suing if they contract the disease.
The league asked its players to take a risk, and some of them did. But holding mass gatherings of this size, with this amount of danger, is reckless. We miss being in groups, and soccer companies and professionals face the financial penalties of not playing more of it. But this should have ended in Orlando, to wait to see if things are better next year.
After Tuesday’s game, when asked about the risk to fans, Caitlin Murray says Garber responded by citing player safety protocols, and added, “We’ve just got to get started, Taylor. We’ve got to get back and see if it can work.” You actually don’t have to try! The pandemic is not an opponent, and the only winning move is not to play. This is one difficulty that you can actually sit out. Regardless of our longing, the stakes are too high.
Dallas manager Luchi Gonzalez exhibited this sports-brain mentality when he told the AP that results in this match were secondary to a “celebration of getting to play” despite the ordeal in Orlando. “We’re gonna keep learning and we’re going to keep getting back up, and we’re gonna keep playing the game we love.”
Those are words generated by the sports machine. 745,000 deaths, with at least 165,000 in the U.S. Not everyone gets back up, and soccer shouldn’t increase that number by one.