Look, the rest of this column will be about personnel, tactics and all the fun stuff that happened on the field in 2024 for New York City FC. But more than anything else, I will remember this as the year they finally pushed the deal for a home of their own across the line (and hopefully, soon, as the year in which they broke ground on Etihad Park).
Getting anything built in the five boroughs is a landmark achievement. I can’t wait til I can see this place in 2027.
Ok, now let’s talk about 2024:
Any fan of the Pigeons would tell you the simple truth: this team was generally quite good at home (all three of the stadia that they variously called home), and generally quite awful on the road. This is not an unusual discrepancy in MLS – it’s been well-documented that home-field advantage in this league is more pronounced than in any other significant, top-flight league – but this group pushed it to an extreme.
And I don’t know why. Lots of folks like to chalk it up to the smaller field dimensions at Yankee Stadium. But that doesn’t pass the smell test, since NYCFC were absolutely dominant when they crossed a couple of rivers and called Red Bull Arena, with its relatively large field, home.
Some might want to say inexperience could have something to do with it. But James Sands, Keaton Parks, Maxi Moralez and Santi Rodríguez were all holdovers from the 2021 MLS Cup-winning team (who, by the way, won that trophy on the road).
Some might say it’s because they were more comfortable switching play when they were using the ball and controlling the game with it. But they were 28th in switches of play at home, and 27th in switches of play on the road.
Mentality, I guess? I hate chalking things up to the unquantifiable like that, but here we are.
The Alonso Martínez story feels like a throwback to OG MLS, back when this league was driven, in large part, by the development of Concacaf guys. Mauricio Cienfuegos became a star here, as did Stern John, Carlos Ruiz and Damani Ralph. Some of the best, most important players of the region’s past three decades got their start – or at least, got their first major platform – in MLS.
As the league’s budget has gotten bigger and the recruiting reach has gotten longer, MLS teams have become more and more comfortable shopping in Europe or South America. There have been fewer Concacaf breakthroughs, and I miss that.
Enter Martínez. The Costa Rican had arrived late in 2023 as a winger who’d mostly failed at his one stop in Belgium (Lommel SK), and was a fringe national team guy at best.
In 2024 he won the starting No. 9 job outright for his club with 18g/4a in slightly under 2,100 minutes across all competitions, and looks to be on the verge of doing the same for his country. As a guy who was a winger by trade, he takes up unusual starting points for his off-ball runs, and I’ll go so far as to say it’s Taty Castellanos-esque at times. He was brilliant, and a look at his underlying numbers says the productivity is unlikely to be a one-off. This wasn’t a simple hot streak; this guy knows where the goal is.
Alas, even for the best strikers, knowing where the goal is and unloading shot after shot upon it doesn’t always work (just think Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez vs. Brad Guzan, or Mateusz Bogusz and Denis Bouanga vs. Stefan Frei). And Martínez saved his highest variance finishing performance – bad variance, not good – for his team’s biggest game of the year:
A lot of that was Carlos Coronel, but a lot of it was Martínez.
Still, he’ll be back. And chances are he'll be, at the least, very, very good.
Head coach Nick Cushing has done a wonderful job of developing young homegrowns like Tayvon Gray and Justin Haak, and coaxing improvement out of guys in their respective primes like Martínez and Rodríguez. He was also playing all the right notes with Malachi Jones before a season-ending leg injury in early summer.
But… man:
Add in the relatively unhappy departures of Talles Magno and Thiago Andrade over the past 18 months, and we’re over $30 million worth of transfer spend on guys who, for whatever reason (it’s not lack of talent), have not moved the needle.
If Cushing’s back next year – I think he will be – he’s got to sit down with the front office and figure this out. Because, I mean, tip of the cap for being willing to play guys like Martínez and Jones over the higher-priced arrivals. But there were multiple big games this year – in addition to the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs loss vs. the Red Bulls, the Leagues Cup quarterfinal loss to Columbus also comes to mind – where the Pigeons sure looked like a team that could use a $7 million winger to go out and snatch all three points.
- Alonso Martínez (FW): It’s his job now.
- Santi Rodríguez (AM/W): At home in either spot, though I thought he was at his best as a No. 10 when Jones was really cooking off-ball.
- Keaton Parks (CM): Still a one-man field-tilt machine, who offers NYCFC a level of pitch control against virtually everyone.
- James Sands (DM): Still hardly ever puts a foot wrong, but needs to develop another gear now with his passing in possession.
- Matt Freese (GK): Was the second-best goalkeeper in the league this year, and should be in the next USMNT camp.
I love this roster, and think most of those guys in the third section above can be very, very good MLS players (we’ve already seen that from Birk Risa, who was beaten out for the starting job by Haak fair and square). I think Julián Fernández, in particular, can be an excellent MLS player.
Which is to say that most of them should be back. So should Hannes Wolf and the ageless Maxi Moralez, who remains a joy to watch even as he hits his late-30s. Both fullback slots are areas of strength in quality and depth (though they’ll need a new back-up left back if Christian McFarlane is sold to the mothership in Manchester this winter, as is expected).
They don’t need another shopping spree. They need Cushing to do for Fernández, Agustín Ojeda et al what he’s done for Martínez and Rodríguez.
Figure that out and the mentality piece – the “can’t win on the road” part – takes care of itself. And then it’ll be time to talk silverware.
