Picking MLS award front-runners! Plus, Cavan Sullivan goes off! | MLS Update

Taylor Rockwell (0:21)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Total Soccer Show live on YouTube. My name is Taylor Rockwell. I'm excited to be here with you with two fine fellows who you can see but you haven't heard from. Let's see how long I can make this go before I actually do the introduction. I bet it can go for a while.

As I said, I'm Taylor Rockwell, and I'm excited to be here today to talk about some MLS awards we're going to be giving out, MVP, Newcomer of the Year, Young Player, Goalkeeper, Defender, Coach of the Year, all of those and much, much more still to come. For now, enough from me. Over to Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe.

Joseph Lowery (0:54)

Hey, Taylor, how are you? I'm doing very well.

Taylor Rockwell (0:57)

You're throwing it right back to me to ask how I'm doing?

Joseph Lowery (0:59)

Hot potato, baby. Hot potato. I mean, if you hold the hot potato for too long, you will burn yourself. That is just a fact of life.

Taylor Rockwell (1:04)

This is very true. This is very true. And that's why you should keep it moving. That's why it's called a hot potato. Joe, we have awards that we've already talked about. We have the Landon Donovan MVP Award. What of these awards would you say needs like a player attached to it? Like my thought was like should it be the Andre Blake Goalkeeper of the Year? Who else deserves some mentions when it comes to handing out silverware?

Joseph Lowery (1:25)

That's a great question. I think we all agree that we should unfortunately rip the MVP Award away from Landon Donovan, all-time great American soccer player, no doubt about it. It just feels like to me when Messi wins the Landon Donovan MVP Award, you have some reconsideration that needs to happen about the state of your league and what's changed maybe since before.

I will say, I think we should rename the U-22 Player of the Year, the Alfonso Davies U-22 Player of the Year. Maybe it's a little soon, but surely the best young player that's ever coming to MLS unless maybe not anymore, but we'll talk about that later.

Taylor Rockwell (1:56)

I think for the young player, they should really honor the young player aspect of it by just having it be named after the player who won it the preceding year and then just cross that out every single year. Jeff.

Joseph Lowery (2:05)

The Cleveland Browns quarterback jersey, Colt McCoy scratch, go through the way.

Taylor Rockwell (2:09)

It's so long. That jersey is so long at this point of starting quarterbacks for the Cleveland Browns. I think we're up to 57 quarterbacks and they have not been around in their modern incarnation in quite some time. Let's not talk about them and dysfunctional organizations. Let's talk about a functional Jeff Rooter. Hello, Jeff.

Hi. Yeah, that Browns jersey is like a maxi skirt at this point. It's great.

That works with half our audience, right? And it just gets booed the whole world over. Jeff, what about you? Are there any individuals you think deserve to have their names attached to awards? I know you've got strong thoughts about Defenders of the Year. I think newcomer of the year should be Didier Drogba. Because when I just think of someone comes in and immediately the whole club just changes over. It's happened one time, and I think that we should remember that well. I think that the Montreal Impact, the best part of it is you have to call them the Impact because he was an Impact player. And so then as they're continuing with this Montreal Foot Club charade that they've been on for a few years, we at least have to honor our history. Flip flip charade. Well said.

I do think we should honor the weirdness of this league. Maybe we need a discovery rights claim of the year, we need like usage of GAM of the year. But that maybe is for allocation disorder whenever it returns. For now, we're going to go through some of these categories. First, a little bit of housekeeping. We do have TSS plus over on the Patreon where we are doing extra editions of Weekend Review. We're talking about news as it breaks. We're doing some quizzing. There's some videos from Graham as he bemoans the state of Scottish football, specifically his Scottish football club and much, much more over on the Patreon. And if you're the kind of sports fan that wants to dig into the story behind the stats, you can join the Athletic Live on YouTube to cover all the sports stories you can't stop talking about on game days. They watch the biggest matchups alongside the Athletic's most tapped in reporters. You can become a part of the show in the interactive chat. The Athletic Live is presented by Google Gemini. Check it out starting September 8th and subscribe now on YouTube. And with that said, Jeff, why don't you get us started with your leading contender for the Landon Donovan-Leonel Messi MVP Award? And why is it Leonel Messi? Yeah, it's one of the two namesakes. I'll let you guess which.