I want to be very clear about the New England Revolution's 4-1 season-opening loss at Nashville SC: there are zero good solutions for dealing with three of your starting defenders from last year being out for any game let alone the first one of the 2026 season.
The following critique is likely a certain degree of unfair given those circumstances, especially after a spirited chat in the TBM group thread in which I was strongly in the minority about just how easy this coaching thing is and how hard implementing major changes can be.
Like any sport, familiarity and chemistry breeds a certain level of trust, competence, and effectiveness. Changing things all the time can be ruinous to those dynamics...just as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is also its own level of insanity.
I am of the position that soccer teams should be far more fluid in their shape and tactics than they are. The New England Revolution should be at the forefront of this concept with a new coach, two talented strikers that might only have one starting spot, and last week short three frontline starting defenders.
My colleagues pushed back on this, given that they have more coaching experience than I do. I totally get it. Given the amount of travel MLS has to undertake and the fixture congestion on top of that in Europe, implementing a new lineup, formation, and tactic multiple times a week is much closer to impossible than it is to improbable.
I will concede, making game-specific plans multiple times a week might be a bridge too far in Europe, but I think given the roster structure in MLS, there is far more potential for teams to be able to deploy two effective starting lineups with a core group of the senior roster. In the Revs case, they're going to need a two-striker formation to get Leo Campana and Dor Turgeman on the field together rather than their standard 4-2-3-1 look with just one of those two up top.
Somewhere on either end of this discussion is the middle ground of tweaking, necessary personnel changes, injuries, etc., that coaches do week in and week out to improve and/or survive week to week. The end goal is to either shore up your weaknesses, exploit the other guy, or hopefully both. If you end up highlighting your own weakness...then you are going to lose the game before it starts.
There should be a baseline of getting your players in the right spots to succeed and I don't think Coach Mitrovic accomplished that last Saturday.
No good gameplan survives contact with the opponent and certainly a potentially bad plan due to a lack of anything that resembles a good one, will have a tendency to spiral out of control quicker than usual. There are, again, ZERO, good ideas for how to deal with Sam Surridge, Hany Mukhtar, and Cristian Espinoza when you are short three starting defenders. Would I have loved a better performance from the Revs backline on Saturday? Absolutely, but the Revs could have played significantly better than they did and still lost by the same scoreline; that's how good I think Nashville could be this year.
There are however, less bad ideas than what the Revs did...which was a three-fold problem in my opinion.
1 - SHOULD HAVE PLAYED A FIVE MAN BACKLINE
Listen, getting Mamadou Fofana's paperwork squared away now is a great thing and not risking Brayan Ceballos and Peyton Miller early in the year with injuries is what it is.
This was beyond a tough ask for the backline the Revs sent out, and they were not only undermanned because of absences but I think quite literally undermanned.
There should have been one more defender out there with them. Tanner Beason should've started to complete the three-man center back group, and Will Sands and Ilay Feingold should have been the outside backs. The Revs needed as much experience on that backline as possible and you would have had Ethan Kohler as a utility defender to fill a gap if needed instead of asking him on his MLS deubt at a new position to stop Hany F Mukhtar and Cristian F Espinoza.
I do not think it was wise to ask those four players to do the impossible...I would have asked five to try.
Would it have changed the result? Probably not, but it just seems more logical. Might it have also meant starting Alhassan Yusuf so Matt Polster could deputize as an emergency defender for the doomsday scenario that was Sands subbing off in the first half, but at that point the plan has already been shredded and adjusting to a four-man backline might have needed to occur anyway.
Now, the Revs getting burned on a set piece five minutes in, Surridge perhaps knowing very little about a rebound Turner parried into him ten minutes later, and Mukhtar reacting first to a bouncing ball in the box late in the first half are far more a symptom of bad and static defending rather than personnel. I get wanting the continuity of that back four playing together but at the expense of having your two most experienced defenders available from last year's roster starting on the bench... that seems like the worst choice in a group of very bad options.
Perhaps not as bad as this decision though...
2 - LUCA LANGONI SHOULD HAVE STARTED AT WINGER
Because try as he might, Turgeman looked very out of place out wide. This was not an effort problem in any way. Turgeman did what he could defensively but it was very clear that him being isolated near the sideline one-on-one was not a matchup he was going be largely successful in. He did the job to the best of his ability for an hour before getting subbed off, probably should have been at the half through no fault of his own.
Now these are two distinct but similar problems. The Revs should be able to solve them quite easily, hence that argument I made earlier about being able to play multiple formations being relatively feasible.
Since the Revs didn't go with five at the back and opted for their standard 4-2-3-1, deploying Turgeman as a winger should come with a specific role in mind for him over Langoni. The whole point of a wider target person is to provide another, more aerial outlet going forward, someone who can knock the ball down to teammates and to open up space for your main striker and the Revs...were absolutely not doing that.
This might have been the more critical failure of the Revs' formation on Saturday...I had no expectation for the defense to be anything other than passable to maybe excelling at emergency defending at best given the circumstance. Does Langoni change the attack completely over the course of 90 minutes? No, but he was far better suited for the role as the Revs looked to keep the ball on the ground the entire time.
Starting Turgeman over Langoni with the Revs playing that style is coaching malpractice. I don't know any other way to describe it because the last person who did this is no longer employed by the team.
3 - NEW ENGLAND IS NOT A POSSESSION TEAM
This is the lesson I mentioned earlier, the one that as far as I'm concerned, gave Marko Mitrovicbuild-from-the-back the opportunity to be hired for his current position.
Because his predecessor was under the misguided belief that he could morph this team into a build-from-the-back possession powerhouse.
Could it be done? Maybe. Is it playing to the strengths of the team as a whole? Absolutely not.
Making this team a primarily possession-based team is a fool's errand that should be abandoned immediately. It doesn't work. I have said this before, I will say it again, and I will continue to say it until morale improves.
The New England Revolution are a direct and countering team. They are at their best when they are running at your unsettled backline with a former league MVP on the ball. Almost every time the Revs slow the game down and build from the back, they are putting themselves on the backfoot and/or playing into the hands of their opponents more often than not. I do not care for passing and possession numbers that are meaningless and lead to meager offensive output.
The Revs need more of this... and absolutely this...quick, aggressive, and direct types of plays and actions. Yes, the Revs are going to turn the ball over when they are this aggressive, but hopefully those turnovers are happening further up the field and aren't being caused by a gameplan asking a second-string backline to routinely be the key to breaking down an opposing formation on top of covering three all-star level attackers.
Because that game plan absolutely will have a zero point zero chance of success when you have to integrate a 20-year old right back who's been primarily a center back his whole youth career, a backup left back who started six games last year, and two center backs that played less than 400 minutes combined in 2025...the majority of that being Keegan Hughes and his four starts.
I am a big fan of the keep it simple stupid mantra and the idea that these four having played well recently albeit in a preseason setting gave the Revs the best chance to arguably do the impossible. But even if the personnel was not incorrect, the game plan absolutely was since it did not involve anyone trying to go lumping it over the top to a pair of attackers who are allegedly capable of winning a ball in the air.
The starting backline in Nashville did not lose the game for New England. It accelerated what was always likely going to be a bad day five minutes into the year by giving up a seemingly preventable goal...but that backline is outclassed by the attackers they're trying to stop. We can lament why and in particular, how quickly it happened, but it was always probably going to happen.
Why? Because the Revs refuse to play direct for reasons I have been unable to comprehend for several years now. They attempted 17 long balls according to SofaScore the whole game. The number of times they threatened the Nashville goal I can count on one hand and while Campana should've had a brace that only negates half the number of big chances Nashville created inside the Revs six yard box, in the first half. Which again, would not be completely unexpected even if the Revs had their full starting defensive unit.
The biggest question is how do you deploy two strikers, one out of position but who should be a wide target, and then rarely to never go over the top with the ball to stretch the defense? Or take pressure off the backline, you don't want to have the majority of the ball anyway?
In a game in which the Revs knowingly entered with a well below strength and inexperienced backline, they decided to keep their standard style of possession play and the ball significantly closer to their own goal and strand not just your center forward but one of your wingers at the same time.
This is a choice, and a fatal one at that. And I'm not just talking about three points in February.
Mitrovic and the Revs are aligned with much bigger goals than backups keying an upset performance in the first week of the year. I am excited for those goals to come to fruition and see the growth of young players like Raines, Kohler, Jack Panayoutou (eventually), and others over the next several years under the tutelage of someone who has had significant success at the youth international level.
I am not excited to watch for the third straight year a primarily possession-based Revs team struggle to get the ball into the final third and generate chances. Being bad and improving is acceptable. Having growing pains as well as making mistakes and learning from them is not only acceptable but expected on many levels. Repeating the same mistakes I've already seen is not, regardless of whether or not it's a new coach at the helm.
Again, this is one game under very specific and dire circumstances that should serve more as a warning than a harbinger of more bad things to come.
