Here’s a twist: Sporting KC might want to follow Minnesota United’s lead this time

Minnesota United doesn’t have a natural rival in MLS. Sporting Kansas City, which hosts Minnesota United on Saturday night, has traditionally been the choice — almost by default.

SKC fans, for their part, much prefer their own rivalry with St. Louis City. But thanks to (relative) geographical proximity, plus a history of U.S. Open Cup matchups dating back to Minnesota’s days in the second division, there have been spots of bad blood between Minnesota and Sporting KC through the years.

And so it’s unlikely you’ll find a lot of Loons fans who are bemoaning the current state of affairs: Sporting Kansas City is awful.

Way back on Sept. 21 of last season, Minnesota beat SKC 2-0, the team’s first-ever road win in Kansas in the regular season. The win started a seven-game undefeated run for the Loons, one that carried them to the second round of the playoffs.

Down in Kansas, it touched off a losing streak that still hasn’t stopped. Sporting KC lost its final five games of 2024, including the U.S. Open Cup Final, and has started 2025 with five more losses — three in the league, and two in the CONCACAF Champions Cup.

In 2009, Peter Vermes — then the team’s technical director — was named as the interim coach after a midseason firing. Vermes never left; he’s the longest-tenured coach in the league by almost seven years.

Between 2011 and 2021, SKC was the small-market class of the league. Vermes won an MLS Cup in 2013, plus three U.S. Open Cups. SKC finished first in the Western Conference four times and only missed the playoffs once.

The team also opened its new stadium in 2011, one that won awards and served as a model for other MLS stadiums, and executed a rebrand that — even if it came with the culturally-nonsensical name “Sporting KC” — at least rid the team of the very-1990s “Wizards” nickname.

Over the past few years, though, SKC has gone downhill. Ownership hasn’t been willing to spend on new players, and the ones that it has brought in haven’t worked out. Vermes, who was both head coach and sporting director for years, stepped down as sporting director last summer to focus on coaching — a move seemingly designed to make sure he kept at least one of the jobs, instead of being fired from both.

So this is a franchise that hasn’t invested in the squad, run by a new sporting director whose predecessor is still in the building … and still coaching the team, even though he’s made the playoffs only once in three years.

From a Loons perspective, it’s almost the cautionary tale of what might have been, had the franchise not chosen to reboot itself. At the end of 2023, Minnesota management was faced with a struggling team, coached by a longtime coach in Adrian Heath that had assumed final say on all personnel decisions — a familiar refrain, for Sporting KC fans.

Minnesota opted for a clean break, firing Heath and moving on to a more modern setup, with up-and-coming CSO Khaled El-Ahmad tasked with acquiring the players, and up-and-coming coach Eric Ramsay tasked with organizing them on Saturday evening. The two jobs are different enough, and often enough at odds with each other, that it’s a wonder that anyone ever tries to do both.

Despite fan unrest, it wouldn’t have been all that shocking for Minnesota to have stayed the course and brought Heath back for 2024, where the few “Heath Out” signs and banners seen at Allianz Field might have gotten more regular use. After all, Heath had made the playoffs the previous four years — to say nothing of the type of success that Vermes had once had.

During his time in Minnesota, Heath often noted his regard for Vermes and what he’d built in Kansas City, and everything he’d accomplished with a limited budget in the Midwest.

Sporting Kansas City ownership, and their fans, have to be wondering if it’s time for SKC to follow Minnesota’s lead this time and make a clean break with the past, rather than hoping for a turnaround that seems further and further off.

7:15 p.m. Saturday at Children’s Mercy Park

TV; radio: FS1, Apple TV+, MLS Season Pass; 1500 AM

Minnesota (2-1-0) would like to add to the losing streak for Sporting KC (0-3-0), which is now four games short of the league record of 14, set by FC Cincinnati in 2021 and 2022. Following the game, Minnesota will lose five players to international duty: Robin Lod (Finland), Michael Boxall (New Zealand), Carlos Harvey (Panama), and Tani Oluwaseyi and Dayne St. Clair (Canada). Joseph Rosales, who is still injured, was not called up by Honduras.