Premium: Cityzen Sean
Goalkeeper Sean Johnson Carries New York City Over the Finish Line for Its First MLS Cup Title
PORTLAND, Ore. — Sean Johnson likes fast cars. The New York City goalkeeper and captain got into motor sports at a young age—he’s a big Formula 1 fan—through one of his uncles, and in 2014 Johnson even won a nationally televised driving contest on an autocross course against other MLS players. The prize: a one-year lease on a Lamborghini.
“Motor sport is definitely one of my biggest passions outside of soccer,” Johnson told me ahead of Saturday’s MLS Cup final against the Portland Timbers. “I’ve enjoyed watching all sorts of racing and just growing up in that culture as well. It’s one of those things when you’re in the moment. Autocross is a one-off. You could have a great lap. You could have a poor lap. It’s very similar to soccer and stepping on the field in a big moment and performing.”
Three days after our conversation, following 120 minutes of soccer and a 1-1 tie, Johnson had just such a moment, staring down the Timbers and a raucous home crowd of 25,000 over penalty kicks in the wind and rain, with the chance to end a quarter-century of New York soccer futility. Not once in Major League Soccer’s first 25 years did a New York team—the MetroStars, Red Bulls or City—win the MLS Cup trophy. For that matter, Saturday’s 26th league final was just the second time that a team from Gotham had gotten there; the Red Bulls lost to Columbus in 2008.
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If one team had the momentum and emotion in its favor heading to spot kicks, it was Portland. The Timbers had appeared cooked and were desperate in stoppage time, down 1-0 in the 94th minute and sending goalkeeper Steve Clark upfield on a corner kick. Moments later, Felipe Mora produced one of the most dramatic moments in MLS Cup history, scoring a 94th-minute equalizer just seconds from the final whistle.
“They’re great to score right there at the end and make it a game,” Johnson said afterward, and that’s when Captain Johnson went to work with his teammates. “I just wanted to make sure that we stayed level. We’d been in that position before. I told the guys we had the experience and not to panic, not to get down on ourselves, because there’s more of an opportunity to go forward and win the game.”
Sure enough, Johnson stoned Portland’s first two penalty-takers, Mora and Diego Valeri, and New York converted four of its five kicks to deliver City the trophy in hostile territory. “The way Sean has stepped up the last two months has been absolutely unbelievable,” said New York coach Ronny Deila. “For me, he’s the big, big winner. He wins us this game in the end.”
The Norwegian Deila, for his part, kept up his end of a bargain: Upon meeting City supporters when he took the job in 2020, he said that if the team won the MLS Cup he would celebrate by stripping down to his underwear—just as he had done in 2009 when his club Strømsgodset had managed to avoid relegation in Norway. So there he was on Saturday, disrobing to the delight of the more than 500 City fans who had crossed the country to follow their team:
Heading into the game, it was hard not to feel a sense of history with both clubs. For New York City, the American outpost of the Abu Dhabi-owned City Football Group, which includes Manchester City, the final represented the chance to return the city of New York to the pinnacle of U.S. men’s club soccer for the first time since the glory days of the NASL’s Cosmos with Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer.
In many respects, Major League Soccer’s strict salary cap and single-entity structure were designed as a corrective to the Cosmos’ free spending and dominance, which caused rival NASL teams to implode while trying to keep up and eventually torpedoed the entire league. But MLS’s master planners never expected or wanted the league’s New York teams to feel as if they had been cursed by the Cosmos’ runaway success.
It took a dramatic change in City’s overall strategy to do it. The early years starting as an expansion team in 2015 were marked by expensive big-name signings (Frank Lampard, Andrea Pirlo, David Villa) but no trophies. City built this year’s outfit a different way, combining the massive data analysis and scouting network of the CFG mothership, a few veteran Americans (led by Johnson) and rising talents produced by the club’s youth academy (none better than 21-year-old midfield stalwart James Sands).
The result has been an attacking corps comprised almost entirely of South Americans who aren’t global superstars but get the job done, whether they’re veterans in their 30s (Argentine Maxi Moralez, Brazilian Héber), emerging stars in their early 20s (Argentine Taty Castellanos, Uruguayan Santi Rodríguez, Paraguayan Jesús Medina) or high-upside teenagers like Brazilian Talles Magno, who scored the late game-winner against Philadelphia that sent City to the final and who converted his penalty in the final shootout.
The 23-year-old Castellanos has been a revelation for City, scoring 19 goals in the regular season to win the MLS Golden Boot—and putting New York ahead 1-0 in the 41st minute on Saturday with a surprisingly free set-piece header. “There are so many talented strikers [in the league], and to set himself apart from the pack and establish himself as the king goal-scorer of the season is a testament to how hard he works on a daily basis,” Johnson told me last week. “The kid is so driven, he’s relentless to get better. In moments where a lot of people take their foot off the gas pedal, he’s looking for the next best thing to improve himself.”
From a historical perspective, the site of Saturday’s final—Portland’s Providence Park, formerly Civic Stadium—was freighted with meaning, even for New York soccer fans. Civic Stadium hosted Pelé’s last competitive game, the 1977 NASL Soccer Bowl, won by the Cosmos over Seattle. But while Portland has been in three MLS Cup finals in the past seven years and various Timbers teams had played more than a thousand games in the stadium going back to ’75, Saturday was the first time that Portland had hosted a final in the old barn (which has been refurbished on a couple occasions)
Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise: Portland has the most intense soccer fan culture of any city in the United States, especially considering it’s spread among not just the Timbers but the NWSL’s Thorns (the world’s best-supported women’s club) and the University of Portland men’s and women’s teams. Braving the cold and rain, fans began lining up Krzyzewskiville-style outside Providence Park on Monday, five days before the final, to have access to the 1,000 wristbands given out Friday morning that would allow them their pick of the best general admission seats on Saturday.
It was only in August that some of those hardcore fans were calling for the job of coach Giovanni Savarese. His injury-depleted Timbers lost 6-2 at home to archrival Seattle and, two games later, 3-1 at lowly Austin.
“We went through a difficult moment, and for really good reasons,” Savarese told me last week. “We had 11 players injured. We had to play the Concachampions. There was a lot of travel back and forth to Mexico. Once players started coming back, we had to reinforce their belief. From that time on, we were able to be a very good team. With [fan] criticism, you hope they criticize you for the right things. It’s normal that a fan wants their team to do well. I’m glad that we showed this team had character, and we picked it up now to be hosting the MLS Cup.”
The Venezuelan Savarese has his own New York connection—he scored 41 goals for the MetroStars from 1996 to ’98 and coached the latter-day second-division New York Cosmos from 2012 to ’17—and he has shown an uncanny knack for success in playoff tournament soccer. He led the Cosmos to four NASL finals (winning three of them), guided Portland to the 2020 MLS Is Back title and has taken the Timbers to two MLS Cup finals in his five seasons with the team.
The ability of Savarese’s teams to turn things up during the playoffs has been even more important in a league where none of the six No. 1 seeds under the current format have reached the final—and only two of 24 No. 1 seeds have done so going back to 2010. (MLS commissioner Don Garber heard those stats this week and told me it might be worth reconsidering the playoff format.)
What’s Savarese’s postseason secret? “Sometimes you can start saying things that you believe are the reasons why,” he told me. “Maybe we have been very pragmatic during these periods. But the reality is that I think it’s just the will to win and do things as a group. I always think the power of a group is bigger than any individual.”
But Savarese did misfire on a lineup choice for the final, going with winger Dairon Asprilla over Santiago Moreno, who had been terrific in the semifinal win over Salt Lake. Maybe Savarese thought Asprilla’s history of playoff success would come into effect again, but he had a horrific performance.
Truth be told, New York probably deserved to win the game in 90 minutes. Yet like their entire season, City made the process more complicated in the end. Consider: As recently as September, New York had a stretch in which it won just one game in 10 matches—and that one victory came against last-place Cincinnati. It seemed as if the team might miss the playoffs entirely.
“That’s a run that could break a lot of teams down and cause a lot of turmoil,” Johnson told me. “But we have guys that have been through five or six seasons with the team. So we just really drew on those experiences and came together as a collective, making it a mission to get through that moment.”
In a league designed for parity, it’s remarkable how many MLS champions over the years have survived brutal stretches, even ones close to the playoffs But the key in this league is simply to get into the postseason tournament. If you can do that, you may well get your big moment to perform—the kind that Johnson loves as a goalkeeper and as a race fan.
In fact, even though Johnson was celebrating New York’s title on Saturday night, he was still planning to get up at 5 a.m. Pacific on Sunday to watch the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which would decide the Formula 1 world champion between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. Three years ago, Johnson attended the Abu Dhabi GP in person, the start of a bucket list goal to see an F1 race at every track on the worldwide circuit.
“It’s win or go home for Lewis and Max,” said Johnson, “so it’s going to be a thrilling end to the season.”
When it comes to thrilling ends to seasons, the man knows whereof he speaks.
Another great post. But where did you eat when in pdx?!?