In Major League Soccer, there are three categories of teams.
There are the global brands that the league will routinely bend roster and salary cap rules to accommodate. Think Lionel Messi to Real Miami or David Beckham to LA Galaxy.
Then there are the teams that are routinely solid to above average despite receiving no special accommodation from the league. These make up a large portion of the league and are where the Portland Timbers used to reside.
The final category is teams that are lost in the wilderness. Every time they develop a good player, they promptly see them swiped by a better team in MLS or a foreign league.
This is where the Timbers exist today, and they only have themselves to blame.
Two years ago, the Timbers brought in Evander, a bright young Brazillian star who had been making waves in the Danish Superliga. The hope was that Evander would be the next big face of the franchise. For their $10 million investment, the Timbers got one so-so season in a lost 2023 campaign for the franchise and then a brilliant 2024 season in which Evander was a legitimate MVP candidate. Despite a second-half surge, the Timbers failed to build around several brilliant attacking acquisitions in Evander, Anthony, and Jonathon Rodriguez and crashed out of the playoffs with a first-round 5-0 loss to Vancouver.
It’s hard to identify when exactly things with Evander and the franchise started to go wrong. Still, they culminated with him unloading on the team’s front office in the locker room and on social media following the loss, laying blame for the disastrous end to the season at the feet of general manager Ned Grabavoy. Instead of trying to patch things up behind the scenes, Grabavoy responded by calling out Evander, burning the team’s relationship with their star and any leverage they had to move him to the ground.
When a midtier MLS team finds a star, sometimes moving heaven and earth is not enough to keep them. Bigger fish will come knocking, and those offers can be tough to turn down. Before and during the 2024 season, the Timbers turned away all offers for Evander. In the wreckage that followed the temper tantrums from their star and front office, they were left to take whatever they could get or try to hold things together with Evander long enough to improve their leverage. In the end, they chose the first track. The best offer that they could get didn’t come from Europe. It didn’t come from South America … it came from the Midwest.
It would be understandable if the team got bullied into accepting an offer from a different top-flight league overseas. Instead, on Tuesday, news broke that the Timbers were selling Evander to FC Cincinnati. Cincinnati isn’t even in the first tier of MLS clubs. It’s a city that has made a reputation for making horrible chili and being terrible at professional sports. Yet here the Timbers are, acting like they belong in the league’s poorhouse in making a $12 million deal. Someone here is likely making a huge mistake, and the Timbers can only hope and pray that it’s not them.
In making this deal, the Timbers have made it clear where they exist in the MLS hierarchy- and it’s not near the top. The team has been backsliding for years. They are the property of an owner in exile, run by a general manager who pitches a fit when a player steps out of line, and playing in a stadium that was once considered to be a unique crown jewel in MLS but now has a gameday experience that you would expect to find at any corporate cookie cutter arena in any of the major sports leagues.
To the team’s credit, they did act decisively once they decided they wanted to run Evander out of town. They didn’t have to search for a replacement for long, as the news of his move to Cincinnati was immediately followed by news of the signing of Portuguese attacking midfielder David da Costa from French club RC Lens to be a new Designated Player acquisition for the club.
By all accounts, da Costa is a fine player. Like Evander when he was acquired two years ago, he is still young and raw but incredibly talented. His acquisition does set up yet another transition year for the Timbers. If da Costa follows the recent trend of Timbers designated player acquisitions, he’ll take at least a year to find his way in MLS. Then, it should be clear if he is ready to blossom or bust.
If da Costa breaks out and becomes the talent that the team hopes he will, Timbers fans should hope that the front office has learned from the self-inflicted wounds of the Evander debacle so that he can help the team return to its proper place in the pantheon of MLS.
