Minnesota United is a rarity: A swooning team moving on in the MLS playoffs

Minnesota United may be playing in the conference semifinals Monday night in San Diego, but despite advancing past Seattle in the first round of the MLS playoffs, the Loons are in the midst of what might be their worst stretch of their entire year.

Count their shootout victories against the Sounders as draws, and the Loons are mired in a four-game winless streak, with just one win in their last eight games across all competitions. This swoon comes at the end of a year in which Minnesota had only one regular-season winless streak that stretched as far as three games.

It’s the opposite of 2024, when Minnesota transformed itself after the summer transfer window into one of the league’s top teams. This season, the Loons have gone the opposite direction. But in that span, they do have one top-notch result to point to, one that will come into play Monday night: a 3-1 victory in San Diego in mid-September.

At least until the middle of the second half in Southern California, it wasn’t a pretty game for the Loons. San Diego attempted seven shots before the Loons even got one, and that one was off-target. SDFC ended up taking 22 of the game’s first 23 shots, and Minnesota keeper Dayne St. Clair had to make nine saves before San Diego’s CJ dos Santos was called into action.

“I don’t think we showed ourselves particularly well in the first 15 or 20 minutes there,” Loons coach Eric Ramsay said. “But we, as we have a habit of doing, can keep the games very competitive. We can stay in games for long periods of time, and we know that even if it doesn’t feel like we’re at our fluid best, we are an instant around the corner away from getting ahead or getting level.”

That’s exactly what happened in San Diego. A Joaquín Pereyra free kick squirmed out of dos Santos’ arms, leading to a corner kick, and — as he has done so often this season — Anthony Markanich popped up to score for Minnesota from the set piece. It so shocked San Diego that they seemed to switch off entirely, which led to Carlos Harvey nabbing a second goal almost immediately. Minnesota later got a third, in stoppage time, when Nectarios Triantis chipped dos Santos from the halfway line of the field.

It was three points for the Loons out of nowhere, the very definition of a “smash and grab” road victory.

The Loons made early technical mistakes in both games, but when they end up in the back of the net, those mistakes tend to get spotlighted. Midfielder Wil Trapp said that the key might be just focusing on managing early risk.

“Just kind of let the chaos of the first ten minutes kind of ebb away until everyone is a little bit more solidified and comfortable in the rhythm of the game,” he said.

That said, there are simply no easy answers to starting on the right foot.

“Across every sport, every coach wants their team to start well,” Ramsay said. “There is no magic button you can push. I’ve been in hundreds of dressing rooms, pregame, where everybody is shouting about starting the game well, and make sure we do this and make sure we do that. But the reality of it is, sometimes it falls away. So I think we have been racking our brains as to the concrete messages that we can give the players that aren’t just the generic [ones].”

One of the keys for Minnesota will be managing things in the midfield, where the Loons were overrun for the first 20 or 30 minutes against San Diego, before switching to play three central midfielders instead of two. Minnesota’s entire defensive identity is based on preventing play in the center and pushing the game to the edges of the field — not an easy task against top-seeded San Diego, whose own game model is designed to keep the ball in the middle.

The message from the coaching staff, ultimately, is not that the Loons need changes, but that they need to do well the things that they’ve always done well.

“I think there’s a real level of confidence in the group that if we hit a certain point when it comes to our performance, then we’ll win the game,” said Ramsay.

9:00 p.m. Monday, Snapdragon Stadium

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