Here's what we learned about FC Cincinnati during Leagues Cup
It turns out 2023 FC Cincinnati is mortal after all. At times Cincinnati can look all-conquering, but the club bleeds and loses tournaments like everyone else.
FC Cincinnati, Major League Soccer’s leading team, lost to Nashville SC in the first knockout round of the expanded Leagues Cup, falling in a penalty-kick shootout after playing to a 1-1 draw on Friday before 19,911 at TQL Stadium.
FCC remains one of the more ambitious teams in North America this year as evidenced by its strident pursuit of trophies in multiple competitions. Those pursuits have allowed soccer fans in Cincinnati to dream bigger than ever before, and there's real value in that, but Friday marked the first time in 2023 the club was altogether ruled out from winning one of those trophies.
FC Cincinnati First iteration of Leagues Cup successful despite FC Cincinnati early exit
FC Cincinnati FC Cincinnati falls in Leagues Cup PK shootout to Nashville SC | Replay
That was a harsh reality for a team that up until Friday’s match had basically taken everything it wanted in the current campaign.
"It's frustrating. I know we have the team to win everything and like I said, if we played better tonight I think we could have beaten any team we faced the rest of the tournament," Cincinnati's Brandon Vazquez said. "I think this gives us a wake-up call and we have to put our full attention to Open Cup and winning the Supporters Shield now."
With the first-of-its-kind Leagues Cup in the rearview mirror, we reflect on the Cincinnati’s stay in the competition and the high-stakes stretch run to come.
What to make of the Friday’s performance
In a word, you might describe FC Cincinnati’s showing versus Nashville as: “Meh.”
FCC showed once again that it could fight back late from a deficit. Vazquez earned and converted a penalty kick in the 84th minute. That cancelled out Anibal Godoy’s 64th-minute opener, which was scored when FC Cincinnati couldn’t cope with or clear Hany Mukhtar’s corner kick.
You could argue Cincinnati ran out of time in the game. When the full-time whistle sounded, FCC looked the stronger of the teams. It was credibly seeking out a potential game-winning goal. But running out of time isn't an excuse. FC Cincinnati knew the Leagues Cup format, which sees matches go straight to a penalty-kick shootout when tied after 90 minutes.
Teams aren't afforded the 30-minute extra period in Leagues Cup like they are in the MLS Cup playoffs and Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup.
FC Cincinnati conjured up precious little with the time it had in the first half, too. Captain Luciano Acosta asserted after the game that Nashville “didn’t come to play” – a swipe that inferred a cynical, defend-first mentality from the visitors intended to stifle the match.
Whether or not that was true can remain an open discussion. What’s indisputable is that FC Cincinnati, which is now 19-2-9 across all competitions, still failed to break down an eight-loss Nashville team that allowed four goals in its final Leagues Cup group stage game.
(Nashville also has the best defensive record in the MLS regular season with just 22 goals allowed, so maybe “not coming to play” is just who they are, and what FC Cincinnati should have prepared better for).
Once the match goes to a penalty-kick shootout, all bets are off. The game becomes one of chance – a lottery for all intents and purposes. And FC Cincinnati had been lucky in those lotteries prior to Friday. FCC center back Matt Miazga, who proved an effective penalty-taker multiple times this summer, had his attempt saved and that proved decisive.
Two prior shootouts this season went FC Cincinnati's way thanks to a combination of heroics from goalkeeper Alec Kann and flawless penalty taking. On Friday, Kann came up empty-handed and Miazga misstepped. End of tournament.
In an instant, one of a possible four trophies available to FC Cincinnati crashed off the table. You can lose it that quickly, and maybe the memory of that feeling will be the true value of Leagues Cup to this club. Loss on that scale of finality could propel FCC to avoid another instance of it.
What to make of Leagues Cup
FC Cincinnati used its time in the competition to mixed results. It gained valuable experience in penalty-kick scenarios. You can never have too much of that.
FCC already had plenty of experience in knockout, win-or-go-home situations via the U.S. Open Cup. The loss to Nashville was FCC's first in a knockout match this year. That's worth scrutinizing if you're inside the locker room.
Performance-wise, FC Cincinnati dominated a good (not great) Chivas Guadalajara. That was the team's high-water mark in the competition. But that performance was all but required after Cincinnati allowed itself to get jumped by Sporting Kansas City, falling behind 2-0 within 12 minutes in the July 23 contest. They'd go on to take an extra point in the group standings by winning a shootout after a wild, 3-3 draw.
Some other key takeaways:
Boupendza goalless in Leagues Cup: One of the objectives for Leagues Cup was to keep newly-acquired striker Aaron Boupendza firing after he scored in his mid-July league debut against Nashville. That wasn't accomplished. "Boup" went scoreless in 204 minutes of Leagues Cup action. Maybe you can write that off as part of the onboarding process and him needing time to get acclimated. However you want to try to reduce it, it's the beginning of a shaky trend. And does 15 days between now and the next match help or hurt his lack of end product?
Vazquez got hot: On the other hand, the club did get Vazquez firing. He scored five of the team's seven goals in Leagues Cup and, after a slow start to the year, Vazquez suddenly has 11 very useful goals across all competitions (15 goals including those he scored for the USMNT, too). With more than two weeks until FCC's next competitive action, Leagues Cup couldn't be ending at a worse time for Vazquez after he clearly carried over his scoring touch from the Gold Cup back to FC Cincinnati.
A leaky tournament defensively: FC Cincinnati burned itself on its set-piece defending in all three Leagues Cup matches: Free-kick versus SKC, throw-in versus Chivas, corner kick versus Nashville. And it was all very sloppy and very preventable. In sum, FCC allowed five goals over the three games. That breaks down to 1.7 goals per game compared to 1.1 during the regular season.
That's the team-specific overview, but what did we make of the Leagues Cup as a concept? And how was it executed?
The idea of mixing MLS and Liga MX clubs together in the same competition was interesting in theory. In practice, it was much less interesting. That was reflected in Friday’s attendance number of 19,911, which sounded generous compared against the actual sight of the assembled patrons.
Friday's attendance was also down from FC Cincinnati’s group-stage matches at TQL Stadium (24,524 vs. Sporting Kansas City and 25,000-plus vs. Chivas Guadalajara).
Drawing almost 20,000 tickets for a match that wasn’t scheduled or guaranteed eight days earlier was a feat, make no mistake. But a truly compelling match would have sold-out. FC Cincinnati and Nashville SC had just played a regular-season game July 15 at TQL Stadium. No one needed to run it back, and MLS vs. MLS in Leagues Cup quickly became tired.
Just five of Mexico’s 18 top-flight clubs survived to reach the Round of 16. In the East bracket, one Mexican club remained. There were none left in the South bracket. That’s basically the U.S. Open Cup with an invited international guest for half of what remains of the entire tournament.
Obviously, there are 11 more MLS clubs than Liga MX has but again, domestic fans probably don't need or want to see more MLS-versus-MLS. They want a taste of something exotic and there weren't enough top-shelf Mexican teams to go around. FCC can count itself as lucky that it had Chivas, one of Mexico's "big four" clubs, in its group.
As for the local combatants, FC Cincinnati head coach Pat Noonan had this to say of his club’s three-match Leagues Cup sojourn: "I think we enjoyed our experience in this competition. We've seen some really good opponents that we're unfamiliar with, and however this progresses, you start to see some teams that maybe you're more familiar with a year or two from now. And I think there's been some really exciting games. I like the conclusion of them where, you know, players aren't asked to grind out another 30 minutes.
“I think it's for the entertainment value that the penalties at the end are a good conclusion. And you know, it helps probably with now what will be a quicker turnaround for the teams remaining to stay fresh. And so I think that works out OK for the players’ sake and the well-being of them. And now, you know, we'll observe and see what it looks like as the tournament closes out if the games continue to be competitive, which I think they have been, but like I said, now that we're finished with this, we'll just turn our focus to our group and the league play resuming. We have a couple more weeks to dissect how we all feel about it and how the conclusion looks."
What’s next: A break
One of the quirks to Leagues Cup all along was the possibility of weeks without competitive matches for clubs that exited the tournament at earlier stages. FC Cincinnati finds itself as part of that group of teams, but they seem to see a silver lining in that.
FCC’s next competitive match is Aug. 20 against Columbus Crew at Lower.com Field. Three days later, the circus that is international superstar Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami CF comes to TQL Stadium for the U.S. Open Cup semifinal.
That back-to-back stretch represents one of the more monumental periods in the franchise’s history. And taking the Messi game in isolation, it’s a huge opportunity to showcase FC Cincinnati and TQL Stadium. There will likely be more eyeballs on FC Cincinnati on Aug. 23 than at any other time this year − and that probably even includes late-round MLS Cup playoff games should FCC achieve that.
FC Cincinnati doesn’t seem to mind the layoff between Friday’s PK defeat and Aug. 20. They’re tired. The Nashville game was already the 30th of 2023 and there are at least 12 more games to come across all competitions.
Once FCC clinches its playoff berth in late August or early September, the number of guaranteed matches swells to 14 across all competitions. Beat Miami and advance to the Open Cup championship match, it's at least 15 more games.
If FCC does well in the MLS Cup playoffs, it could play close to 20 more games this year, potentially making it 50 or more competitive games in one season. That’s an extreme workload.
Given all that, some downtime in August doesn’t seem so unreasonable, does it? It might even supercharge FC Cincinnati for the stretch run.
For now, FC Cincinnati is off until Wednesday. Fans have more than two weeks to gird for the next installment of the "Hell is Real" derby, and Messi after that.
Hopefully there are better uses of the FCC's community's time than speculating about Alvaro Barreal's future.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Here's what we learned about FC Cincinnati during Leagues Cup
