In 2012, Tim Cahill played in 12 regular season matches for the New York Red Bulls, racked up 1,080 minutes on the field and scored one goal. By most accounts, his initial transfer-shortened MLS season was underwhelming. He often struggled to get involved and entered the 2012-2013 offseason with uncertainty clipping at his heels. Would NYRB’s latest DP be another mild disappointment? The following season was a mystery.

In 2013, Clint Dempsey played in nine regular season matches for the Seattle Sounders, put in a grand total of 651 minutes in an MLS uniform and scored one goal. By most objective measures, Dempsey’s initial blast of MLS air was a bit stale. Unlike Cahill, his form hadn’t suffered in the EPL on the eve of his transfer, and monstrous expectation had been heaped on his shoulders after his historic and somewhat controversial transfer.

Now, Dempsey is mired in an offseason much like the one Cahill had last year. Big player, grand expectations and a sudden and immediate need to meet them.

The similarities between Dempsey and Cahill are not merely incidental, I don’t think. They are instructive, and based on Cahill’s ascension, that portends well for Dempsey’s future in MLS. Cahill found the going tough in his first few months on the job after arriving from Everton in July 2012. But after an adjustment period, Cahill turned into one of the league’s top players in 2013, and few would argue that his first full season in MLS looked little like his first truncated one.

And so we have Dempsey on the same precipice Cahill occupied last year. A quietly disappointing yet short debut season, an offseason of questions, a crack at a March-to-November full calendar season (barring of course the mid-season World Cup for Dempsey). And if Dempsey follows Cahill’s pattern, which I think is not only possible but entirely likely, Sounders fans will be incredibly happy with Dempsey’s form in 2014. A reason this works as it does is because Dempsey and Cahill’s roles aren’t entirely dissimilar. They are both midfield rovers, they both run in from deep and both of them need a certain amount of tactical infrastructure in which to operate. It’s extremely difficult to suss all that out in a few months. Given an offseason, though? Big things.

We begin in New York in the summer of 2012. One of Cahill’s obvious early adjustments was simply finding his place in a side Hans Backe had enormous trouble settling in any coherent pattern. Cahill bafflingly played next to Rafa Marquez in a game against Columbus in mid-September with Dax McCarty on the right wing just a few weeks into his tenure with NYRB. With Marquez doing and going where he wanted, that left Cahill more or less by himself in the middle of the field. This was the equivalent of starting an accounting job in a new country and being asked to figure out the foreign tax law on your own.

Two weeks later, the selection headaches continued. Against TFC, Backe rightly moved McCarty to his spot deep in the midfield, and Cahill was dropped in next to him. This is where Cahill began to assert some of the command, shaky as it was, that dovetailed out from the team sheet as it must. He began pushing forward more, and with support at his back and players pushing with him, he was stranded less often. This allowed him to find Henry, however occasional those times were, and even make some runs into the box on headers in the run of play. Still, these times were far too few.

A common emergent thread from Cahill’s precarious first few months in the league was his difficulty adjusting to the peculiarities of an MLS midfield. His wobbly form toward the end of his Everton career did him few favors on this front. One of the most difficult transitions from players in other leagues to MLS involves the midfield, where there are more staunch pylons and fewer fluid players.

Even forward playmakers in MLS tend to have more graft than guile, which makes tracking back to find possession a doubly difficult task. Asking a midfielder to stay pegged high in MLS is more of a gamble, because fewer lack the touch to do so, and skill sets more often than not require coaches to open up the throttle to allow them to run unimpeded through both boxes. The vast majority of MLS’ midfielders are two-way players (this is true in most leagues, but this reality is as stark in MLS as it is anywhere), just as comfortable cruising back as they are going forward, if not more so. The league’s most recent midfield draft crop echoes that sentiment in spades.

So here was Cahill, historically a midfielder who liked to make plunging runs into the box through the midfield, suddenly contending with a NYRB setup that offered him little shade and burly midfields used to closing down on both ends. What this usually does is force midfielders deeper into the intestinal tract of the build-up to find spots where they can inject themselves into the blood stream. As you can see here in a game against Chicago in early October 2012, Cahill was content to prod attacks from the brain stem. With McCarty unsure of spacing and relational passing networks where Cahill was concerned, there was little he could do but drift back and support. It goes without saying what kind of effect this had on team’s general forward playmaking ability.

This wasn’t all Cahill did in 2012, but it represented far more of his attacking oeuvre than it should’ve. Sometimes there weren’t clearly defined excuses or reasons for his unsettled play. He just wasn’t that cohesive. He went large periods of games without touching the ball, made incomplete runs, struggled to hook into Thierry Henry’s attacking harness. It’s not that he was terrible, but the growing pains were severe enough that a few wondered if his residual downslide at Everton would continue unimpeded. After the 2012 season, he offered this quote to the Wall Street Journal about the league’s level of play based on the looming playoff system at the end of the rainbow: “People will ask why the game is sometimes slow,” he said. “Maybe it’s because one team doesn’t want to win.” Telling in its own way.

Cahill is different now. He was an MLS All-Star in 2013 after scoring five goals and assisting on three more through NYRB’s first 17 games. He was an integral piece of the team’s run to its first Supporter’s Shield, and he was named the team MVP at season’s end with 11 tallies and five assists. He was far more comfortable within the run of play, and Mike Petke tailored the attack better around Cahill’s skill set. And suddenly he was no longer marooned, was able to link play and found that dangerous trademark header with more regularity. In every sense of the word, Cahill looked vastly more comfortable.

Which brings us back to Dempsey, whose 2013 was eerily similar to Cahill’s 2012. In his early days in the lineup, there were the appropriate selection headaches. In Dempsey’s first full 90 against Houston in August, Dempsey was deployed next to Lamar Neagle up top as a two-striker tandem in what looked a little like a flat, misshapen 4-4-2 diamond. With Shalrie Joseph at the top (?!). With Joseph often in no-man’s land and Dempsey attempting to play off Neagle’s shoulder, that left cavernous spaces that opposing teams exploited with atomic success over the last few months of the season.

Here’s a moment from the Houston game that illustrates the point.

This is Giles Barnes surrounded by six Sounders players in a semicircle of defensive sadness moments before he unleashed a blast that doubled the Dynamo’s lead in Dempsey’s debut. What created this moment? A long ball that Neagle tried to trap as Dempsey (who is off-screen) tore off high up the field. Neagle, who does not have the touch to drop back into the midfield regularly, turned it over, and Barnes scored with a howitzer. Dempsey should have been there instead. Which, without knowing Neagle or the men hoofing from the back, is a devilishly hard thing to simply intuit. A learning process.

Unsurprisingly, Dempsey’s best game of the season was probably his last in the regular season. His only goal of the season came in a 1-1 draw with the Galaxy on Oct. 27, a game I was in Seattle to see. It was obvious that Dempsey had settled into a more comfortable rhythm off the ball as he dropped deeper behind Eddie Johnson, who operated as a lone striker instead of nominally putting Dempsey up next to him. Allowing Dempsey this freedom of movement seemed to unchain him a bit and allow him to create and run from deeper.

This, right here, is where Seattle wanted Dempsey and where he so rarely found himself until very late in the season (and even then…). It was fascinating to watch Dempsey off ball, off the camera, because it was obvious that he still wasn’t quite himself. Better than he was in August, but he still looked a lot like Cahill did in 2012. Halting in possession and daring in places where he needed to be safe and vice versa. There was a progression from the summer, but it was blindingly obvious he was still adjusting. He progressed far enough to render optimism but not quite far enough to settle every offseason nerve.

Of course there are nuances here that make both situations unique. At least tactically, Seattle’s initial task was finding a way to get Dempsey deeper without making him defensive. NYRB wanted Cahill higher. After some wobbly moments, Cahill found his niche and gradually grasped hold of the attacking impetus. Seattle’s hope is that Dempsey settles similarly in 2014. And to be sure, this is no safe bet.

The main difference between Cahill and Dempsey in their transition years is at the top of the managerial tree. Cahill benefitted from the fresh air Petke swept into the organization, bringing new tactical ideas and a clean, even start. Seattle of course opted to bring back the embattled Sigi Schmid, who was 4-4-1 in 2013 with Dempsey, arguably the most dangerous player in the league, in the lineup. He has an offseason to figure out how to better integrate Dempsey with a flagging defense that offered him little aid in 2013. As it was in Cahill’s case, some of this will be out of Dempsey’s hands. The deployment of the players around him will cast a shadow on how free he can make his movement. Still, Dempsey has a ladder to climb to regain his form from his EPL days. The precedent Cahill set is there for him to follow.

And lucky us. Dempsey’s second tactical assignment of 2014? Finding a way around Michael Bradley.