FC Dallas just went to Minnesota United and lost a fairly crucial game 4-1. They are now winless in their last 10, having taken four of the last 30 points on offer. Their last win was July 22 at Montreal, and they've been outscored 23-8 since then.
They were in first place in the West when this streak started. They're now in eighth place, and while their upcoming schedule is relatively friendly, this Dallas team has gone out of its way to show that they're capable of dropping points any time, anywhere, to anyone. This does not feel like a club about to make an autumn charge into the playoffs.
This is unprecedented – I've never seen anything like it in my 21 years of watching MLS. Other "good teams" or "talented teams" have missed the playoffs, or had bad seasons. Other teams have folded up shop mid-season.
But FC Dallas weren't just any old "good team." They entered the season justifiably considered among the league favorites coming off of a 2016 in which they won the Supporters' Shield/US Open Cup double, and returned all their relevant players and added multiple pieces in the offseason that were supposed to push them over the hump into "all-time MLS elite" category.
Then they went out and juuuuust about proved all of the above talk was correct by playing Pachuca to a standstill over 180 minutes in the CONCACAF Champions League semifinals despite missing their best player, Mauro Diaz. And they went unbeaten in their first nine league games, then did enough to stay in the hunt until mid-July.
I literally have no idea what's happened since then, but there've been a lot of goals like this scored against Los Toros Tejanos:
When there are that many breakdowns – Maxi Urruti's turnover is soft; Carlos Gruezo and Victor Ulloa do not react at all as MNUFC enter transition; Walker Zimmerman gets his footwork all wrong – it's tough to point at just one thing. And when there are that many good players playing bad soccer, it's hard not to assume the problem is just one thing.
I don't know where Dallas go from here, but it feels like the answer is "down." This team's playing like its season is already over, and given where they were supposed to be, and where they have the talent to be... like I said at the top, this type of collapse is unprecedented.
