FRISCO, Texas - Years ago a Dutch player had a great match immediately following a long injury layoff. I asked him after the game about it and he completely dismissed his performance. First game back doesn’t matter, he told me.
Nobody expects much on that initial return, he explained, so that one is a breeze; the real test comes next – when you and everyone around you expect it.
Now let’s expand the scope of that premise; Let’s look at FC Dallas and how expectations can be tricky, and sometimes even a heavy thing.
A year ago Nico Estévez took over an FCD bunch that he had found a little dispirited. Things hadn’t gone well the previous year (2021) and he needed a slightly softer approach, a methodology that would prepare the team while also strengthening spirits and confidence. Which he did, pretty clearly. Because FC Dallas surprised plenty of us with a breakout campaign, a 20-point jump from 2021, FCD’s best year-over-year improvement in 26 seasons.
It even surprised Estévez, who suspected he needed two campaigns to push the club into better real estate in the standings but happily saw the project sprinting ahead of pace.
Now, though, we’re in the second cycle - the one where folks might expect something similar. Members of the chattering class (the ones brave enough to make predictions in a notoriously unpredictable league) pegged FC Dallas to finish somewhere between 2nd and 7th in the West, most on the higher end of that range. Which is great! Except that it does come with some burden of expectation.
A day before last week’s season opener, Estévez talked to me and my FCD radio partners about it - about the “consequences,” so to speak, of turning heads with last year’s forward progress.
“The expectation now is that we do the same this year or better,” Estévez said “And that is not the reality of MLS. In MLS, everything can change. This is what I’m telling them. The only thing I expect is that we give everything, that we compete, that we perform as best we can, and that this can lead us to wins. Besides that, we don’t have to think about anything else.”
Except that in Game 1, the season opening loss to Minnesota, I wondered if perhaps that message may need more time to sink in? I saw a team that did some things right against a tightly organized defense. But I also spotted instances where FCD players made incursions into the final third, but sometimes seemed hesitant to go for it from there. The final third of the field is the time to get dynamic, to be brave and not be afraid of failure. As we used to say about one of America’s top soccer heroes (And a Texan!) Clint Dempsey, he was never afraid to “try stuff.”
See, if you’re the scrappy underdog and you get into areas where a shot or a high-reward cross is possible, you take the darn shot or cross. Why not? What could go wrong? For competitive souls, when people don’t think much of you, you exhale, set your jaw, and lean into that determination to prove those fools wrong.
The entire construct gets turned on its head when expectations run high. Because at the root of expectations lies the desire for perfection. And in that critical moment, when you’re not 100 percent certain you can deliver perfection, deferring to something safer becomes the comfortable off ramp.
Against Minnesota, Alan Velasco had a late first-half opportunity to find Jesús Ferreira at the far post in transition. He didn’t make the pass.
In another moment, Ferreira received a ball in a nice pocket between Minnesota’s lines, just outside the penalty area. They weren’t finding many of those choice spots because, again, the visitors had come to defend, to make things difficult on FCD attackers and then maybe nick a goal and get out of Texas with an early season smash-and-grab. Which is exactly what they did.
Ferreira could have engaged a defender or looked for a quick combination. Rather, he laid off a ball along the right. It wasn’t necessarily a bad decision, but it was the safer decision. And I wonder if a talented player like Ferreira might have made a different choice last year?
Elsewhere, maybe an outside back doesn’t make the extra run. Or a midfielder might pass laterally rather than driving further upfield. When margins are so small – and they certainly are in MLS – these little moments all around the field add up.
Don’t look for this to be a season-long problem. Estevez and his staff will sort it out. The team has talent and a familiar, fruitful structure, elements that generally forge success over a lengthy season. But carrying a heavier load of magnified expectations may require a little getting used to.
