Opinion: Happy to be Here

Matt Broo

This is supposed to be fun

Cincinnati, OH has an MLS team.

Repeat this to yourself again in case you've forgotten it:

Cincinnati, OH has an MLS team.

Us. Cincinnati, Ohio. The town that never seems to get out of it's own way for anything. The city Mark Twain once thought would ignore the Apocalypse for 20 or so years. The place that STILL cares where you went to high school.

That Cincinnati, Ohio -- the one still fighting about streetcars-- has an MLS team.

I want you to go back in time to the distant past of June, 2014. What would you have said if someone were to have told you "Hey, we're gonna have an MLS team in this city in five years." You'd have laughed. You'd have accused that person of being high, drunk or both. That sort of thing doesn't happen in Cincinnati.

But, it did. And here we are.

And when we got "here," we found out: we suck at being an MLS team.

However, at the risk of sounding like a club shill, allow me to suggest that it really shouldn't matter to anyone that we suck right now.

This season is a celebration of everything this club and this city have accomplished. We have established Cincinnati as one of the premier soccer cities in the United States. The city shut down a street in OTR so that a bunch of people could watch the Champion's League finale this past weekend. This coming weekend, they're bringing the USMNT's travelling revenue-generation circus to town -- something that seemed unfathomable only a few years ago. And, every week, we get to watch FC Cincinnati compete in the highest division of American soccer against the best American soccer clubs.

Our fans get to travel to the best away environments in the country, like in Seattle or Los Angeles. Our fans get to travel to some of the best destination cities in the country, like Denver or New York. In a few weeks, we'll be hosting in the LA Galaxy (and possibly lowercase-g god himself, Mr. Zlatan).

You want to trade that for whatever island they had the Harrisburg baseball stadium on?

Sure, the results on the field suck. The play can be frustrating to watch. The front office shakeups don't exactly project confidence. The Flo FC thing -- well, we'll save that for another blog. But we're here. We're in a spot we were never supposed to be. And, did I mention that we suck?

There are any number of reactions you can have to all of this: bitterness, apathy, anger, etc. The one I'd suggest is: joy. Soccer is fun (even bad soccer). The drinks pour just as smoothly at TopCats (or even Mecks, if you're reading this from another SG) before wins as they do before losses. The songs ring just as loudly around Nippert from the bottom of the table as they do from the top. And, any sports fan will tell you this truth: winning feels so much sweeter when you've experienced the "lows" as a supporter.

Does this mean you shouldn't be complaining? Absolutely not. Vent away to the person sitting next to you whenever we play a long ball to no one, or on twitter when we fail to push numbers into the box. But, when you've gotten it off your chest, remember this is Cincinnati. And we're in MLS. We jumped the line, including the Kinkos Crew in Nashville, to get here right now. We signed up for the ass kicking so that we could be done with the cosplayers in Louisville and the empty stadium matches in Richmond. And, compared to where we could be, I'm gonna choose to love ever second (at an apropriate BAC to facilitate said love).

So, let's enjoy the ride for 2019. It's probably gonna be bad, and I'm certainly open to revisiting my "eh, let's drink and have a party" take if the bad extends into 2020 and beyond. But, for right now, FC Cincinnati is bringing me MLS soccer and an excuse to drink with friends on a weekly basis. That's way more than I ever expected when I signed up for season tickets five years ago.

And I'm good with that right now.