St. Louis CITY SC (0-0-0) v. Charlotte FC (0-0-0) MLS 2026 league-wide and CITY season opener Saturday, February 21, 2026, 1:30 PM (CT) St. Louis, Energizer Park Apple TV Here is this week's MLS match information link League opener. Season opener. Home opener. First match with the new Apple TV broadcast arrangement. First match with Yoann Damet as head coach. Many new players. Some familiar key faces. A strange and quick reunion with a recent former player. New tactics. Old questions. Last MLS summer season. Many unanswered questions. Many doubts. Some signs of hope. A front office sending conflicting messages about everything from team rebuilding to which fans can feel welcome in the park. An afternoon start. An unseasonably warm week, but a likely very chilly and breezy match day. And so it begins. We just don't know what 'it' is yet. Discuss.
Here we go...a shambles of a back line, missing our best midfielder (?), and no bona fide striker. Ya, this is gonna go well.
PRO's assignments: Center Referee Ismail Elfath, ARs Corey Parker and Kyle Atkins, Fourth Official Fotis Bazakos, VAR Carol Anne Chenard and AVAR Tom Supple. Here are the MLS Game Guides for our match. Disciplinary Summary for our match. St. Louis CITY SC. Suspended: none. Charlotte FC. Suspended: none. (There are some carryover suspensions this matchday, but our match doesn't have any.)
The press conference showed Eduard Lowen not in training and Chris Durkin out sick. Yoann Damet also said that Mbacke Mamadou will arrive next week, so the visa mess must have been resolved (finally). I missed this from earlier this week. Apparently CITY's never-ending practice injury list also claimed Tyson Pearce, to go along with Tomas Ostrak and Fallou Fall.
The info on Lowen really, really concerns me. Our humble, little team needs this guy to be there every week . . . He has been absent too often for the past two years (yes, I know it was for good reason), but a third year of unreliability will be a huge detriment . . .
Broadcast Teams. Apple TV. English language: Jessica Chapman and Ian Joy. Spanish language: Nacho Garcia. (The MLS cut half of the Spanish language broadcasters this season, along with many of the local team reporters.) Local radio. English broadcast, 98.1 FM, Joey Zanaboni and Dale Schilly. Spanish broadcast, 102.9 FM, Santiago Beltran and Hector Vega. Weather. Mid to upper 30s, NW breeze, partly cloudy. At least it shouldn't be wet. Head-to-head record. CITY is 1-0-0 versus Charlotte, 3 points, 3.00 PPG, 3 GF, 1 GA, net +2. CITY at home is 1-0-0 versus Charlotte, 3 points, 3.00 PPG, 3 GF, 1 GA, net +2. CITY has not yet played a regular season match at Charlotte.
Player Availability and Disciplinary Summary reports for our match. St. Louis CITY SC. Suspended: none. Out (injury or illness): Fallou Fall, Tomas Ostrak, Tyson Pearce. Out (other): Eduard Lowen. Questionable: none. Charlotte FC. Suspended: none. Out (injury or illness): Henry Kessler. Out (other): none. Questionable: none.
There are a handful of people on socials complaining about the availability of Lowen and complaining that the club needs to address his absences in some way. I have been very critical of many things St. Louis CITY for a while now; how they have handled the Lowen situation is not one of them. In watching his full interview this week, he was talking about his love for St. Louis, and I dream that Lowen can be someone who plays the rest of his career here, and we can rally around him through unimaginable pain, and have a storybook kind of tale. I know it's professional sports and that is unlikely, but I am very happy the club has treated him with all the compassion he needs and deserves.
Overall I’m encouraged that we might be able to avoid a Wooden Spoon, but today was proof positive we need a legit striker. On that note, I thought Becher led the line well, good hold up play, and a hell of an assist. Hartel is class! Wallem is the same Wallem as last year and showed why we brought him back. I thought Orozco did really well with Zaha except for the goal. Time was good. Polvara was decent. Edelman and Durkin were average at best, Edelman works defensively but limited going forward. Santos is the opposite, good on the attack (except for the last play) and a liability in the defensive third. Sangbin was anonymous. We are Klauss away from being a playoff contender. If we had Klauss we have 3 points instead of 1. I’m hoping there is a way to cancel Cordova and go get Christian Ramirez!
Several thoughts about our opener . . . Last year we opened up against Colorado with a 0:0 draw. I remember walking away from the game thinking to myself, this is an ugly brand of soccer. This year we opened up against Charlotte with the result being a 1:1 tie. This brand of soccer is much better. I went back and watched the highlight video this morning. I was looking at and for legitimate scoring opportunities. By scoring opportunities, I am not talking about shots on goal. Rather, I am looking for plays when a team had a legitimate chance to score and should have scored. By my count (which I am not saying is totally accurate), we had 11 legitimate chances to their five. From out 11 legitimate chances, we produced only one goal. So, House of Cards, based on this datum, I totally support your call for a quality striker. A few other take aways. We will be better than last year. We will not win any trophies (or wooden spoons), but we have a chance of making the playoffs. I am concerned that we may have too many low IQ soccer players. Low IQ players take too long to pass or dribble. The most egregious case yesterday was our centerback Baumgartl. The modern game is all about speed and execution. Players who are receiving the ball and looking around for 5 plus seconds before executing need to find employment elsewhere . . . PS: American Authors. Loved their performance before the game!
The one that stands out to me was at the end of the game when Santos received the ball on the left, and literally froze. I think it was McSorley overlapped, he could have played the overlap, or crossed, instead he stood there, McSorley checked his run not to go offside, then finally Santos played him the ball straight out of bounds. (This sticks out because it happened right in front of me) What I took away from the game is how minimally you need to invest to make the playoffs in MLS, and we haven't made it for 2 years, and we are a bubble team at best this year. If we would just try, we should be in the playoffs every single year.
My biggest take-away is that we have a coach who has actual tactics. The team isn't there yet, but the first half showed buy-in and some growing awareness of what Damet wants. The second half fall-off was bad, and continues to reflect a lack of fitness. Yes, it's the season opener. Yes, we had some players playing under the weather (Durkin). But we hit the wall again at the 57-62' mark just like last year. And the year before. And the first year. We still haven't seen our intended Starting XI in action. I was generally pleased by our defense yesterday. Fallou Fall and Mbacke Mamodou will be defensive forces. My concern/question is whether they can play the ball out of the back as well as what we saw in the first half of this match. We generated better looking scoring chances than anything we saw last season. That's good, On some of those chances, Kahlina made excellent saves. It's soccer, and that happens. But on others, the finishing was cringe. Maybe it's first match rustiness. Maybe it's playing into season shape. Maybe it's getting everyone on the same page. But it looked far too much like watching a rerun of a bad episode. I'm concerned about the largely unannounced training (or preseason match) injury Tyson Pearce apparently had. Those injuries have dogged CITY from the start. Is the new plan to hide them? Fitness and conditioning are critical. Both the early exhaustion in matches and the injuries make me wonder about the training staff. Yes, the style of play affects endurance, but shouldn't the fitness training build endurance to the intended style of play? Some teams announce the beep test scores. I'd love to see the scores our player earned. We will have a much better feel for this team in 2 or 3 more matches. At least yesterday didn't leave all of us deep in emo despair like we were during Olof's nightmare. ("Olof's Nightmare" would be a great band name for a St. Louis area band.)
I think the Mbacke hype is just that, hype. He was playing 4th division in Spain. We were pissed at Lutz for bringing in players from the 2nd division from Germany. Maybe he pans out, but I don't think he is some kind of savior.