In MLSsoccer.com's countdown of the decade's best clubs, Sporting Kansas City was tabbed fourth on Tuesday. Visit the league website on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to see which three clubs topped their list.
It was a slow start to the 2010s for Kansas City. They started the decade playing in a baseball stadium as... the Wizards (yes, the Kansas City Wizards still existed at the start of the decade; how 'bout that as a reference point for how much has changed over the last 10 years). The first quarter of 2011 wasn't much better, either, as they began the season 1-6-3.
Then, in June, Children's Mercy Park opened. And everything changed.
Sporting marched toward the top of the conference and kept it going for eight years. They made the playoffs every season from 2011-2018 and won four major trophies along the way, including the 2013 MLS Cup. They didn't win a Supporters' Shield, but they finished atop their conference in the regular season three times. In all, Sporting won a trophy or finished first in their conference in six different years in the decade.
8 playoff appearances |
1 MLS Cup appearance |
1 MLS Cup (2013) |
3 US Open Cups (2012, 2015, 2017) |
Through the process, coach Peter Vermes both started a new trend and also pivoted away from it. It's been a 4-3-3 the entire time, but one used in different ways. Sporting spent the first half of the 2010s as a high pressing team — the first truly "pressing" team in MLS history, as Matt Doyle will tell you. It wasn't just a singular tactic, it was an identity. Every time you played Sporting, you knew you were in for a storm. Vermes made pressing cool (or at least palatable) in MLS.
Then, in 2017, the team started to evolve. For the last few years of the decade, they weren't a pressing powerhouse; they were a possession juggernaut. They have consistently ranked near the top of the league in passes completed per game and possession percentage. Their win over Toluca in the 2019 ConcacafChampions League, in which they flew down to Mexico and passed so gracefully that the home fans Ole'd the home team, was one of the best scenes of the decade.
Sporting have also gone about roster-building in their own way. Every other team on this list — every other team in the league, really — has made a signing that was meant to define the team. Sebastian Giovinco, Diego Valeri, David Ferreira, Nico Lodeiro, etc. Sporting haven't had that guy.
Yet they have still had seven different players make an MLS Best XI team, the third-most of any club in the decade. Of those, only Benny Feilhaber joined Sporting as a national team player. Matt Besler, Graham Zusi, Roger Espinoza, Tim Melia, and Ike Opara all arrived to Sporting as kids or reclamation projects. Whereas other clubs used star players to push into the next tier, it seems safer to say that Sporting worked the other way — the team elevated the players.
