Sep 27, 2020; Los Angeles, CA, USA; San Jose Earthquakes midfielder Jackson Yueill (14) is mobbed by his team as they celebrate his goal in stoppage time defeating the Los Angeles FC at Banc of California Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
I wrote parts one and two of this three-part preview in December, and kept…on…waiting through the preseason to see if San Jose was done making moves. Well, with a few days left before San Jose faces Houston…it looks like they are done making moves. These are the San Jose Earthquakes, more or less.
It became a fun little trope with each of San Jose’s last several signings: these are Matías Almeyda’s guys. This is Matías Almeyda’s team. Every single new professional signing of the past two years is a former Almeyda player, save for Benji Kikanovic. While fans are still trying to figure out what, exactly, the “project” that Almeyda, Jesse Fioranelli, and Chris Wondolowski refer to — one thing is clear: the Earthquakes are full-bore on it.
Wondolowski, the eternal captain, is a key cog of this project even as he says he’s going into his last year, again. When he was asked why he came back for one more season, he spoke glowingly about this project. And it’s worth spelling out what this means. Chris Wondolowski is more wrapped up with one team than anyone else in MLS, and even MLS history. The project, as it were, is developing a post-Wondo identity for San Jose. The man himself isn’t so much anointing his successor at center forward, he is creating a system that can survive him.
Almeyda’s guys, all seven of them by my count, are also parts of this. Not all of them are expected to be huge contributors, and I think there are major issues if players like Lucho Abecasis, Daniel Vega, or even Oswaldo Alanis are starting a majority of matches this season. What they are expected to do is set an example and form an institutional core for the academy players, draft picks, and other impressionable newcomers.
That’s not only off-the-field stuff. So much of soccer is repeated actions based off of key movements. Having individuals who have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them allows their teammates to riff off of them. The team started clicking when Carlos Fierro and Andy Rios made it into the lineup last year, not because they are particularly gifted MLS contributors but because they provided a foundation for guys like Marcos Lopez to grow. They are crucial to developing this new San Jose identity.
OK, so what is it?
A Digression: The Devil and the Angel
The best thing I read about soccer this offseason came from my colleague Jamon Moore, who dropped me a link to Jamie Hamilton’s “Project Cyberball.” It’s more bonkers than it sounds. It’s a six-part story, and soccer doesn’t come in until Part Four. Bear with.
Perugia, Italy, May 2017. Bielsa is speaking at the Encuentro conference. ‘If two teams face each other and neither takes risks, there is no football match’ Bielsa explains ‘But if two teams face each other and both take risks there is a football match. Sometimes I say to myself the following: I prefer to get no points (to lose) but having played to win all three points than to get one point without playing for all three…I do this as a tribute to the spectator’.
So here we have it, spelled out for us in as simple terms as possible: Bielsa does not recognise the authority of the twin pillars of scoring and not-conceding in search of point maximisation….Bielsa frees himself and all those connected to his footballing project from slavery to the score, from servitude to abstracted numerical quantity, and in doing so he liberates us from a simulated reality where we have been conditioned to believe that which is of most ‘value’ is a strictly non-human entity.
The true profundity of Bielsa’s project now begins to reveal itself. By rejecting the zero-sum nature of football, Bielsa rejects the abstracted model. He rejects the conceptualisation that ‘point maximisation’ is a goal in itself. He showed this when he commanded his Leeds Utd team to concede a goal in an effort to restore the human concept of fairness to the game. The cybernetics of football data analysis do not allow for this interpretation, they cannot, it is not logical for the system to concede a goal on purpose.
Lots of big words, but for me it boils down to this: is it more important to win a soccer game or to enjoy it? I don’t think Bielsa or Almeyda would look at it in such dichotomistic terms — in fact, I think their entire argument is that it isn’t a dichotomy — the best soccer is victory through enjoyment.
Hamilton talks about cybernetics, the study of control and communication, a lot. He states that Bielsa “applies cybernetics not to obtain some particular finite quantity or meaningless digit but, rather, he uses it in the service of generating an emotional connection between his football and the people who play, experience and watch it.”
Bielsa is often compared with Jose Mourinho, the technocrat wizard who wins championships wherever — okay, most places — he goes. In Oliver Kay’s recent Athletic piece, he quotes Mourinho’s derision of “poets.”
There are lots of poets in football. But poets, they don’t win many titles.
…
The poets are the ones that win every match. They win every match. I think I’m going to try to have one of these jobs in a few years, because you win every match. And I never managed in my career to win every match. I always lose matches. Some guys win every time. I don’t. I don’t. But in a bad season, in a season where sometimes I felt my team was the worst team in the world, where I felt sometimes that I was the worst manager in the world, we managed to win three trophies.”
Weird Trump-ian self-referential apologia besides, it’s amazing to see how much Mourinho misses what it means to “win every match.” Coaches like Bielsa don’t win every match by taking three points from each of them. They win every match by making every match worth watching.
Going back to Hamilton, he sees in Bielsa someone who is trying to make soccer more than soccer:
Bielsa has sought to unite people through football. He has, thus far, avoided tenure with any true ‘superclub’ (perhaps he is deemed too avant-garde for the mainstream?) and one suspects the task of keeping the celebrities happy isn’t exactly up his street. Bielsa’s football is a football which demands his players to sacrifice themselves to a higher power, to melt away their egos and go in search of some extended version of themselves that is yet to emerge.
Whether Bielsa is truly the anti-capitalist crusader that Hamilton makes him out to be, boy, I don’t know. But I see where his argument is taking him. In a global sport, there is more to it than winning and losing. If there wasn’t, we would all just be Bayern Munich fans, have tattoos of Benjamin “demi-vollee” Pavard, and brag about how our LA Galaxy have won five MLS cups. Clearly that’s not the case.
Folks like Mourinho, high-school coaches who do that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” and bosses who squeeze for workplace efficiency gains think that they’re in competition with the Bielsas of the world. But they’re not, they’re just in competition with other smaller versions of themselves. The Bielsas aren’t competing for wins, they’re competing for hearts.
Blue Collar Poetry
The biggest lesson that Almeyda has taken from Bielsa is simple: our team is the protagonists. The way they do this was covered in the first two parts of this series — they hold possession, win duels, and spread the field. They make the opponent uncomfortable and reactive. You can counter and set-piece the Quakes, for sure. But you can’t out-Quake them.
This is, I think, the core of this San Jose identity. They don’t man-mark, throw fullbacks to the endline, and slash long diagonals because they think it will win every game. They do it because it’s a whole lot of fun to watch. It also speaks to the soul of Almeyda’s project and why he chose San Jose, perhaps: in a league without relegation, for a team whose globally-recognized home belies a working-class ethos, and a fanbase who have made a whole thing out of never saying die, they can become truly more than a club and instead an entire way of doing things.
The line on the Earthquakes in MLS is that they’re one of the most entertaining teams in the league. Their form has…fluctuated, to be sure. And though they have switched out moving parts to try and become a more cohesive whole, they just keep on hammering at their opponents until the season is over, no matter how the season ends. In a league with a real thick midtable of teams that come out in white jerseys, a 4-4-2, and a coach who talks about the fundamentals — San Jose is out doing its own weird thing.
There is an open question of what will happen post-Almeyda, whenever post-Almeyda happens. The idea of the project, in my mind and perhaps in the Earthquakes’ as well, is to form an identity as the poet-team of MLS. They don’t have to win all the time, winning can be hella boring anyway. They just have to pull out stoppage-time victories after the East Coast games are complete and after 90 minutes of exhausting soccer in its own right. They just have to be a big chunk more fun than the boring teams playing for the tie.
It is only fun if it works, I suppose. But this drags the Bielsa paradox back up: what does it mean to work? For the Earthquakes, for a lot of us, I suppose, it means to try hard and have fun doing it. In my day job (which is hardly blue collar, I should note), I’m never going to be crowned champion in my profession. It just doesn’t work that way, and it definitely shouldn’t. Why should it be any different in soccer?
There are precious few times for most of us to be protagonists in our own lives. For those of us with a lot of external responsibilities, watching soccer for two hours is a little time to mark for ourselves. For the vast majority of the US (or especially like, Western Hemisphere) labor market, our lives are spent in service to bosses, management, and clients. Life in the best of situations is a complex web of social relations, and in the worst of circumstances it is constant service to individuals and roles you wouldn’t go near otherwise.
Almeyda’s Earthquakes swashbuckle through that, if “swashbuckle” is a verb. They make sports into a TV show, where you’re rooting for the good guys to come through in the end. It’s not good television if the good guys win every time, it’s not like Mourinho who would go watch grass grow in high-definition and get out of his chair to cheer for the lawnmower. Almeyda’s identity, which he’s imbuing the Quakes with, is to go out every match with a clear identity and a clear approach, and to fight like hell to win and entertain.
It’s not impossible to link this to championships. The most interesting test case here is Caleb Porter, who took a high-octane approach at Akron University into MLS, where he had to tweak it to win. His Cup-winning side in Portland was cynical to say the least. In Columbus, he’s been a bit more open in his approach so far. And it’s also worth noting that in 2019, his team was the first to really throw a wrench in Almeyda’s red-hot Earthquakes when his Crew earned a tie by dropping their line of confrontation on defense and doing a weird tika-taka anti-man-marking counter-press-but-with-possession on attack that I still haven’t figured out how to describe. If you can’t tell.
I’m not sure if Almeyda will stick around to win silverware with San Jose, but if he can name a successor to skip the boring parts of Porter’s approach and go right to Zelarayan dropping dimes in MLS Cup, I mean, that’s a working model for San Jose.
What is Success in San Jose?
This identity when done right feels somewhat heroic, as the Earthquakes stake their claim to playing the game the decent way and winning hearts as they do it. When done cynically, its cover for never winning anything worthwhile because you’re sticking to the principles of not going out and buying a defense-destroying striker.
I think it can work here in part because of the foundation laid by Wondolowski, Shea Salinas, and guys like Jimmy Conrad and Ramiro Corrales to boot. It is also in part because San Jose is, in many ways, the United States’ largest blank slate.
San Jose is famously the largest American city where more people leave for their commutes than come in. It’s bigger than San Francisco or Oakland, a fact that always astounds my non-Californian friends and family. I’m not from here myself, and whenever I tell folks where I live I get glazed-over eyes and a tight-lipped smile.
This is a bigger thing than the Earthquakes, for sure. And there’s a lot of cool stuff here, whether it’s Cesar Chavez’s home, the best pho in the country, and an ineffable rust belt-meets-silicon valley vibe. It’s a lot more Latinx and hard-working a city than it gets credit for, as well as being a huge international hub generally with a food scene to match.
What this brings me to, in another big reach for this little article, is one of my favorite Wikipedia lists: The UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List. It’s this survey of priceless and sometimes wonderfully bizarre cultural practices that make our societies unique and human. Things like yoga, Neapolitan pizza, as well as “Mongolian knuckle-bone shooting” and the Nicaraguan drama El Gueguense. It’s a list of things that attach people to place, and people to each other.
A good example might be Argentine fileteado, the art of fine gothic line painting that decorates storefronts and buses in Buenos Aires. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to support a multi-billion-dollar industry, there’s nobody out there trying to make “Uber for fileteado.” It’s just a small thing, repeated, that makes life a little bit better for those that appreciate it.
I don’t know if “proactive soccer” is going to make that list. PayPal Park is a fun place to watch a game, but I don’t think it has any intention of being the San Siro or Bernabeu. I also don’t think that’s the point. The project, the San Jose identity, is to make protagonists out of the team and the people who enjoy watching them. It’s to be on the front foot and to work towards that stance, affecting the people around you and the world around them for the better.
It is really easy to be cynical about the corporate world and particularly soccer’s relationship to it. There is a lot to be cynical about, especially with a World Cup coming up in Qatar and a European landscape full of debt-ridden directors and shadow armies of on-loan young players.
The Earthquakes are adjacent to that to be sure, but it doesn’t overwhelm the experience of watching their games or following the selection. The project is to produce enjoyable soccer, and to produce enjoyment through soccer. There’s money to be made in that, and I am aware that the money is to be made off of me. But let’s be real. I don’t have the kind of money to buy championships. A PayPal Park full of folks like me doesn’t fund a squad that can go toe-to-toe with the European giants. But I can buy 90 minutes of entertainment at a time, and choose to share those matches with people who want to enjoy what they watch, and players who enjoy how they play. That’s really the core social interaction of soccer, or spectator sports as a whole. If the project here in San Jose is to get back to that, it’s a project I think we all can support.
