Disappointing Season In Prospective

Sporting Kansas City's title defense season came to an end on Thursday night in the knockout round of the MLS playoffs. I think many fans, players, coaches and staff in the front office will call this season a disappointment. For people to consider this season a disappointment is a huge accomplishment for this franchise.

Attendance at Sporting Park was not hurt by Sporting KC's season. They broke their average attendance record for a season at Sporting Park averaging 19,714 (+5 from 2013) in a stadium that has a seating capacity of 18,467. Every game was a sellout and the team now stands at 53 straight sellouts for MLS games.

After the 2004 season in which Kansas City made the MLS Cup and lost to DC United in the handball game, the Hunt family, the owners at the time announced that they were selling the team. Luckily for Kansas City fans the team was sold to local owners, but from 2005 until the team moved in to Sporting Park in 2011 the team only made the playoffs twice and even missed making the US Cup tournament twice. During that stretch making the playoffs was a bid deal. 

Since moving in to Sporting Park in 2001 Sporting has won the Eastern Conference twice, won the US Open Cup, won the MLS Cup, qualified for the MLS playoffs every year and qualified for the CONCACAF Champions League twice. 

Sporting Kansas City has 2 of the 11 regular starters for the US Men's National Team. That is 18% of the starting team playing in Kansas City. Some teams in the MLS do not even have one player on their team that is a regular player called in to the US camps. This is a good and bad thing for Sporting as that mean 18% of the starts are gone when the US plays. Sporting also has other players that have played for their national teams this past year.

This season was also full of injuries including three players suffering season ending injuries, all defensive players. Also at one point Sporting's top two goal keepers were also injured at the same time. I can count on one had the number of players this season that did not suffer an injury that required them to miss playing time. The team had more players play in an MLS game this past year than in any of the recent years and also used more different line-ups this season than they did in the past two seasons combined. 

With this exception of a few other MLS clubs I think most would be happy to take Sporting's disappointing season. For me calling this season a disappointment is a huge success for this organization. The bar has been raised so high that if the team does not win a trophy it is disappointing. Sporting Kansas City fans are lucky to have a team with such high aspirations.