It’s a weird one tonight. Real Salt Lake lost 2-0 to Seattle Sounders. I’m happy for Seattle, in all honesty. I’m kind of happy for RSL, too, if it gets us closer to actual, demonstrable change in our front office and coaching setups. I fear it won’t, but at this point, seven losses in eight games isn’t something you can explain without pointing any number of fingers.

It’s a weird one tonight, too, because a good friend of mine in Seattle is in the hospital. He’s one of the desperately unlucky few to have contracted ALS, a condition for which there is no cure. It’s a disease that progresses incredibly quickly. It’s a disease that’s impacted the RSL family acutely.

My friend, for whom we named our firstborn, is a fan of Seattle Sounders, having moved there some 20-some-odd years ago. When I first explored my interest in soccer, he was somebody I talked with all the time about the game. We watched the 2006 World Cup together; when we were in high school together, I watched his games (and left early with him after a red card; we ate at Wendy’s.) My relationship with soccer has been intertwined with our friendship. Today, with my friend struggling more than usual — and struggling significantly — it’s hard to get truly mad about this game, but it’s plenty easy to be sad about this historically bad run of form for Real Salt Lake.

I’m not going to make today’s post just about my friend, but I can’t separate this game from our friendship. If you know anything about ALS, you know how devastating it inevitably it is. If you have the means, consider a donation to the ALS Association. You might remember John Genna, who was Real Salt Lake’s VP of communications and public relations, and the fundraising efforts to which readers of this site contributed in 2022.

Today, Real Salt Lake feels like the least important thing we could be discussing, but I’m going to let it distract me. We’re going to talk about the game. But I thought it was important to recognize that soccer is more than just a game of wins and losses, and it’s likely we’ve all made friendships around the beautiful game. I hope you all feel the joy of that at times, even when Real Salt Lake is at their very, very worst.

You know what? We’re just going to bullet points today.

• There are people that are going to talk about the injury crisis, about international absences. To my mind, those excuses died about — I don’t know — 8 games ago? 13 games without a win is tremendously poor form (hi, Seattle Sounders) and it’s been the case through any number of injuries. The only consistent injury is Justen Glad, and while I think his absence has had a significant impact, it wasn’t a surprise going in to the World Cup. Excusing the team’s performance for that should have us questioning other parts of the organization.

• Signing a young center back with World Cup experience is fine and good, but finalizing that signing at the very, very end of a long transfer window has meant that any delay has been particularly problematic. We can blame external factors there, but we’re not the only club dealing with these conditions. We should know by now that obtaining a work visa is extremely chaotic at the best of times in 2026.

• The last time RSL won an away match is March 7. The last time before that is July 16, 2025.

• If we look at the statistical positions of players, this played out as a 4-2-2-2, with Sam Junqua playing as a left back, DeAndre Yedlin at right back, and Philip Quinton and Kobi Henry at center back, more or less. That was a forced move after Alex Katranis was forced out of the lineup with an injury during warm-ups. I don’t want to get conspiratorial about this time and injuries, but there sure to seem to be a lot of them right now, and they’re not just freak accident sort of things. I dunno.

• “I think the guys executed the game plan to a T.” Pablo Mastroeni, everyone. “It’s tough. Going from our last game, did we compete the right way? Every one of our guys said yes. Did you work extremely hard for the guy next to you? Absolutely. Tactically, between the boxes, did we execute the game plan? Yes. It just leaves the boxes again.”

• Pablo continues by talking about players playing out of position, and you know what? I’m exhausted by this. He talks about Sam Junqua having to play in a new position, but by the looks of it, he just played at left back. Is Pablo Mastroeni mistaken about what he played? Is he lying? It’s one of the two, because it’s honestly very clear cut to my eyes. But I guess if I’m being generous to Mastroeni, I could see the argument that maybe Junqua didn’t play the role the way he would have hoped. I guess I’d buy that. The team does still regress to a back five out of position. But I’d ask a bigger question: Why are you playing a style that demands players play out of position? Why are you putting Sam Junqua, who has significant minutes for this team at left back, in a position where he’s trying to play some extremely misguided formational approach?

• And I guess I should be more generous to Pablo, because rewatching does show Sam Junqua playing very high at times in the first half. But why? Why in the world are we persisting with a 3-5-2 with all these players out? Why is he playing Luca Moisa as one of two “10s”? Why persist with the chaos-reigns approach that worked wonders with Diego Luna at his best and Zavier Gozo making incredible runs?

• Dominik Marczuk remains absolutely dire. That we couldn’t execute a loan for him during the offseason is perhaps a benefit to us, because I don’t know who plays there, but hey wait! I’ve got an idea — what if DeAndre played right back instead? What if we played a classic 4-4-2, ditched the nonsense, and just went back to basics? Because we now have Pablo Mastroeni after the match talking about how Sam Junqua is going to be playing left wing back in the next match, and I’m just asking: Can you be normal for once? If we can’t try a 4-4-2 during an injury crisis, if we can’t simplify what we’re doing? What’s the point? I don’t know how we got here from complaining about Marczuk, but what did he bring to proceedings?

• If Real Salt Lake wants to be a development team, they have to be able to sell players and not have that immediately lead to a complete collapse. We saw it with Andres Gomez (though there are some clear mitigating factors that we won’t discuss today), we saw it with Zavier Gozo. In this case, I wonder further if we can’t have a coach that adjusts a system when a vital player in that system leaves. Seems nice, right? But this system exists without regard for the players, and Gozo isn’t coming back. This isn’t 2011 Real Salt Lake, when Javier Morales went down with a nasty ankle injury, but they persisted with the diamond all the same. He came back. Zavier Gozo isn’t.

• It sometimes feels like Real Salt Lake thinks they’re the smartest team in the room, at least from a coaching perspective. They’re not. The chip on the shoulder isn’t justified; it’s a lie the coaching staff must be telling themselves.

• Sergi Solans is great, and I’m glad we’ve got him, but he’s not a natural finisher in one-on-one situations. He creates so many of them, but he so rarely scores with them. That said — our approach cannot simply be “Solans scores with all his shots,” because that just not realistic.

• Danny Musovski’s goal. What in the world is this team doing trying to build so poorly? Morgan Guilavogui puts just about the worst possible touch he could on play, then doesn’t track back. (You’ve got to track back when you make a mistake like that.) If you free the frame right before Musovski’s shot, you’ll see that Kobi Henry is close — but he has to shift over because there’s just no organizational sense about this team.

• Albert Rusnak’s goal. We saw it so many times. He’s good from those positions. He finds space well.

• I think Philip Quinton was fine. Not great. Not awful. He’s getting stick again, and yes, he had a poor moment playing out of the back, but you know what? This team should stop playing out of the back under pressure. It so, so rarely leads to the desired outcome, where the team takes advantages of players pressing high to create a numerical advantage further up the field. Instead, When the team plays out of the back well, it leads to them most often recycling play to the back once the opposition has moved back defensively. I even think he wasn’t at fault for the Rusnak goal, which was preceded by the team giving up possession far, far too easily. Yes, he’s not an organizing defender (I don’t think Justen Glad is, either), but if you pause at Rusnak’s shot, you can see Jordan Morris could easily have received a pass there and been onside. He would almost certainly have scored it. There’s another pass open to his left. He took the shot, but none of the options were defended particularly well.

• So I guess what I’m trying to say is that Philip Quinton isn’t a singular problem, but he’s part of a host of defensive problems. Start with playing out of the back in ways that don’t actually benefit play, progress to a generally poor midfield setup, and finally get to attacking players having a wealth of options because honestly, nobody knows how to coach this team. It feels pretty evident watching them defend.

• If I don’t see another shot from distance taken so inaccurately, it’ll be too soon.

• A deep, prolonged sigh.