PBP: 2025 MLS Season PBP Thread Week 1 February 21-25 {R}

Suarez will get a “courtesy” knock to sit out a match or 2 once things heat up schedule-wise

 

One thing we should KNOW is that Suarez is not going to be MLS MVP this year after dropping 26 goals and 17 assists. Man, that looks bad for the Brasileiro.

 

Only Messi will be involved in Copa America.

If Messi has to play 90 minutes every match just to get a point he's not going to last.

So far Miami has struggled to put away last year's 11th placed team at home and got a point with a late goal against 10 men at a team that finished 26th.

Maybe, just maybe, MLS is tougher than the media predicted.

 

I get the sense that every change to the matchtrackers makes it harder and harder to find the most basic box score information.

The box scores themselves disappeared long ago. Then you had to look at one page for the lineup and a different page for the substitutions. And this year, the new annoyance is that assists appear only in the feed, not in the summary.

 

To be fair, Delgado didn't commit a foul on his second yellow.

 

He deserved one for how inaccurate the slide tackle was, really.

 

Was the refereeing this weekend really that much worse (genuine question, I only saw the Atlanta game from start to finish and I didn't see anything too egregious or out of the ordinary)? Are we forgetting how bad some of the usual suspects are?

I dunno, I just feel like the longer this goes the more fans will come to accept the replacements refs since there wasn't great vibes with the original ones to begin with. Also a somewhat tangential question, but is Christina Unkel still a part of the 360 show? I didn't watch the entire broadcast, but the hour or so I did watch she never appeared; I understand her husband is striking, but I was under the impression she was employed by Apple/MLS and therefore had to be there if she's still a part of the show.

 

Unkel is not under contract this year. She has other things to do.

The refereeing wasn't great but it wasn't a catastrophy.

 

Some games were fine, others had...problems. The long review in the game you watched was handled very poorly and they actually followed wrong procedure on the sub in that time period). There were significantly more overturns by VAR than we've seen with the regular refs and the AR's in particular struggled.

Unlike the NFL, the fans won't have much, if any, impact on ending this. It will be the coaches and players complaining that will force an end to this. See how Messi talked to the ref post-game last night for example.

And This isn't specific to the lockout but its shown a spotlight on the issue, namely that the average fan saying "the refs suck" don't understand how the refs are supposed to be officiating the LOTG (or even what the LOTG are in man cases). The same refs that "suck" and will easily be replaced are coming from the same pool that FIFA has tapped to work the last two World Cup finals. While there's always a bit of politicking with those assignments, FIFA isn't putting bad refs on the final, they're taking the best of the best. MLS's VAR implementation, in particular, is considered one of if not the best in the world, which is why MLS VAR's have been in the VAR room on both those finals.

 

I'm always amused by the disconnect between the perception of officiating in MLS and the reality. Sure, there is a significant talent gap between the top guys and, say, Marcos DeOliveira, but when your top referees are also working top level international matches, they've got to be doing something right, surely.

As for egregious mistakes, there have been *many* this weekend, but the vast majority have been able to be corrected via video review. That doesn't mean the on-field errors were excusable. Most of them were the sort of error that would get the normal referees the ol Come to Jesus talk. The offside in Dallas. The missed goal in Portland (corrected by review at least). The missed discipline to Busquets on the penalty. All terrible, potentially game-changing decisions at key moments that would be considered *routine* decisions for a qualified, professional referee.

 

I don't know why anyone here should take a poster who can't type or spell correctly (shown for shone?) seriously...

 

One of the patterns I've noticed from soccer fans worldwide over the years is that, as a general rule, they grossly underrate their own country's referees. They all remember a bad call the referee made against their club, which is inevitable in any domestic league. A whole lot of Italians will tell you that Collina was a terrible referee.

 

Autocorrect is evil.

 

JasonMa gets two minutes for tripping (fingers over his keyboard, in this instance)!

 

I've noticed a big increase in how often play is stopped because the ref gets hit with the ball. Maybe I'm imagining it, but it'd make sense for lower level officials to struggle with the pace and angles of a game at a higher level.

 

Although I didn't see play stopped because the ref was hit by the ball (in LAG-MIA the ball hit the ref but Puig kept possession), in every game I watched it seemed like there was an unusually large number of times where the ref interfered with ball movement by being caught in the middle of the play. I kept seeing refs getting in passing lanes, players having to dribble around the ref, etc. I wasn't sure if what I was seeing was just small sample size.

 

You're not imagining it. Avoiding the passing lanes is no easy task, and it's something they get better at with experience plus the hours they spend studying team tactics. The folks usually doing these games *know* these teams, their tactics, and their tendencies. They know how they're coached, which players you can and can't have particular conversations with, how the environment will factor in.

The scabs don't have any of that foreknowledge and it really does show, and if it's apparent to us the viewers, you know the players are doing their best to not lose their minds.

 

Yes. It was significantly worse. Despite people's constant bashing of the refs in MLS, I think it is quite good. You want to see a league with atrocious refs? Go watch the Premier League. Those dudes can't even figure out how to communicate that a goal has been scored on review. But what I saw this weekend in MLS was ugly.

 

It isn't that I thought this weekend was fine, it's that I expected it to be even worse so I came out of it relieved and pleased in equal parts.

 

I think a lot ended up being "fine" thanks to video review, but they weren't exactly perfect with that, either. There's no way the Miami handball had a proper check, for example. Without an AVAR helping, it's quite likely no one told the referee to delay. Based on the amount of time other incidents were looked at, I can't believe he was given a check complete.

 

The VAR check that led to the (failed) PK for the Crew versus Atlanta on Saturday took forever to happen. It's hard to know what really occurred, but it looked as though the field officials just weren't seeing the reason for a penalty, but eventually the VAR official got the ref to look at the video evidence. I mean, in the end, it was the right call. But it was a slow and clunky process getting to that point. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if these refs met for the first time in the locker room before the game.

 

Well, the first meeting would have been in Dallas midweek, and some of them *might* know one another from working together in the past, but in all likelihood there were many, many of these scabs meeting and working together for the first time, and unfamiliarity leads to inefficiency. Plus, as I said before, the VARs are working without actual assistants (at least they were in week 1...). There's even one additional factor which is the change from Hawkeye (Atlanta) to Sportec (Arlington). Presumably, or at least barring anyone making the jump to a new employer, they are working with all brand new replay operators on top of everything else. They're the ones actually operating the equipment so if they're green, it will again slow everything down.