By Dummy Run (@thedummyrun)

Here's the weird thing about New York City Football Club in the Year of Our Lord 2019: after all the autumnal sturm und drang, the late-season slide, the second-round playoff bounce, and Domènec Torrent's desastre of a postseason presser, the club had a whole offseason to clean house and bring in Torrent's team and they just kind of ... didn't. What you'll see on opening day is more or less the same lineup you know and love (or used to love last summer but now hate with a burning passion because they lost some soccer games). Even my boy Ben Sweat's still out there, which can be a beautiful thing as long as a foul pole’s obstructing your view of the defensive third.

So, uh, what gives? Allow me to resubmit to you the possibility that Dome’s team was maybe actually not that bad at soccer last season. That in fact their +0.55 expected goal differential per game was the second best in MLS during Torrent’s tenure, a marked improvement from under Patrick Vieira. And that their best run of games came without David Villa or Yangel Herrera, this offseason’s two major departures. Maybe Claudio Reyna wasn’t crazy to think all this team needed was a few new pieces for things to fall into place.

2018 in Review

Ugh, do we have to do this again? Okay fine.

Here’s the season the way you probably remember it: NYCFC bolted out of the gate with an away win against a strong Sporting Kansas City team and for two months they never looked back. The first loss didn't come till late April, but when the second one hit on May 5, wheewww boy: a 4-0 shellacking at Red Bull Arena sent Vieira into panic mode, and he scrapped his high-pressing 4-3-3 for a few weeks of janky back-three ball until Herrera’s long term ankle injury forced yet another switch to a 4-2-3-1. But the double pivot worked! In Vieira’s last game NYCFC spanked Atlanta up and down the baseball diamond and was unlucky to only earn a draw.

Then Vieira bailed midseason to coach a club he definitely hadn’t been talking to and in came Torrent, who wasn’t shy about reminding everybody that he’s besties with Pep Guardiola. Was this an upgrade? For a while it sure looked that way, as NYCFC took off on another 5-0-1 tear while playing a 4-2-3-1 so aggressive that it shaded into a 4-2-4. With Villa injured, the team hurled bodies into the box from all angles and came away with points. But when their star striker returned, the chances mysteriously dried up. See that big ol’ dip in the blue expected-goals-for line in the chart at the top of this article? The plunge was so sudden you could schedule your #DomeOut tweets by it.