ORLANDO – Back in June during his club's visit to Cincinnati for the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, Minnesota United FC head coach Adrian Heath offered Alan Koch some unsolicited advice via the local media.

This week in Orlando, Heath offered more advice, but he had a chance to deliver the message to FC Cincinnati's head coach in-person.

As Heath recalled to The Enquirer, the two managers exchanged pleasantries during the Major League Soccer Combine activities at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando. But when the conversation really got rolling, Heath gave a brutally honest, first-hand assessment of what it meant to lead a rampant and wildly successful United Soccer League side into Major League Soccer as an expansion team – an experience Heath and Koch now share.

"You've had incredible success in Cincinnati," Heath recalled of his words to Koch. "What you're going to have to get used to now is losing some games."

It wasn't a threat, nor was the spirit of Heath's sentiments altogether negative. On the contrary, Heath was offering support and camaraderie to Koch because he's been there before.

Heath's Orlando City FC was FC Cincinnati before FC Cincinnati had even been conceived.

More:Breaking down FC Cincinnati's 2019 MLS schedule

More:FC Cincinnati's Alan Koch: Attacking play not a concern but 'if the season started today, I wouldn't be happy'

More:MLS Combine Notebook: Jeff Berding talks FC Cincinnati draft strategy

From 2011 to 2014, Heath's Orlando sides dominated the USL action on the field, in the stands, and in the media. The club got results and had raucous support.

Sound familiar?

What's come since in Orlando hasn't been as pleasant. MLS has seen Orlando endure only losing and coaching changes in its four years in the top division.

Due in part to expectations that carried over from Orlando's lower-league successes, among other factors, Heath was axed from his job about halfway through his second season leading the club in MLS.

A caretaker manager and two other head coaches have since followed.

Like Orlando before it, FC Cincinnati finally has MLS.

FC Cincinnati won't necessarily be condemned to the same struggles as Orlando, but Heath's point was that there could be periods of suffering before FC Cincinnati starts to enjoy its stay in the top division and that all parties involved need to brace for that.

"That expectation level has to be tempered a wee bit," Heath said. "Not everyone is spending big money like Atlanta did when entering the league. The rest of us, it's a process. It's a plan. The one thing that I think that people underestimate is how difficult that first year is in the MLS."

For its part, FC Cincinnati seems open to the possibility that Year One could be a grind. It received another reminder of that Monday with the reveal of its 2019 regular-season schedule.

The schedule opens with a gauntlet stretch of nine out of 10 matches against teams that qualified for the MLS Cup playoffs last season.

FC Cincinnati has every intention of on-field success as an expansion team, and the club's turned heads with some of its savvy offseason dealings (see: expansion draft day).

Cincinnati's brain trust is also realistic.

"Rome was not built in a day," said Koch, who indicated the club's long-term plan will continue to unfurl over the course of several FIFA transfer windows through 2020. "We've done some very good pieces of business so far to get the pieces we have in place, but we still have work to do in the remainder of this window. We'll have work to do in the summer window, and we'll have more work to do next year.

"We're not going to come out of the gates blazing. It takes time. It takes time to gel a team. You can even see that from our own experiences. Look at last year in the USL. It wasn't MLS but we're playing the same game and we were building a team in the same manner. We struggled for the first few games, and then we went undefeated all summer."

FC Cincinnati is a winning organization. The closest thing it had to a down year was the 2017 season – and it still made the USL Cup playoffs and captured international attention for a Cinderella run the Open Cup.

The aim of the organization will always be to win. But this year, the hope is supporters will embrace any early-season struggles that result from the jump from USL to MLS.

"We will go fight. We have belief in ourselves and we're excited to go fight for three points in every game we play," Koch said. "But, I think as a club, we need to be realistic that we had immense amounts of success in the USL. Now, we're in MLS. Let's learn from our predecessors like Orlando. They had huge success as we did, but you don't go into a bigger league and expect the same results. So, how do we as a club handle that adversity? How do we deal with that together with our fan base?

"The goal is to win every game. That will never change, but we're now going into a tough league where nobody wins every game."

Right now, every week seems to produce a new milestone for FC Cincinnati: New signings, draft picks, media attention.

Soon, the club's supporters will lay eyes on the team's inaugural MLS kits. Preseason matches will make it all the more real.

Before long, it will be time for kickoff on March 2 at CenturyLink Field. Koch's starting 11 will be across the field from Seattle Sounders FC.

Everything is all good at the moment. Excitement abounds.

But as Koch alluded to, a big question facing the entire FC Cincinnati community is this: How will it handle the difficult moments?

"That's one of the things the (Cincinnati) ownership group need to be realistic with," Heath said. "Yeah, we all want to be incredibly successful from the first day. We know that. But for me, one of the things I would say to the people of Cincinnati is just be careful about what the expectations are because when you're winning, it's never that high. When you lose, it's never down so low. It's somewhere in between, and managing that expectation is something, at times, that's difficult."