'Quest for cup' drives RSL forward despite bitter finish to 2023 season

SALT LAKE CITY — The offseason has officially begun for Real Salt Lake after bowing out of the MLS Cup playoffs in the first round last week in Houston.

There could be two main schools of thought drawn from two consecutive first-round exits for RSL: The club needs to change something to avoid the same result or it's doing something right in making the playoffs and need to keep pounding the rock, hoping it breaks the team's way for a deeper playoff run.

"I'm gonna look at the glass half full," general manager Elliot Fall said following the season. "This is a roster and this is a group and this is a staff that is absolutely talented enough to win trophies, but sometimes you have to learn how to win. And maybe what we needed in some of those moments were those little failures to learn what it takes next year."

Head coach Pablo Mastroeni added that "you got to break everything down" heading into a new season, but "you don't have to break it down as far (this year) because the majority of players are coming back."

Fall said he believes the outward player movement this offseason will be less than in past years because, as he put it, "this is a long-term project."

And what is the objective of this grand project? "Silverware," according to Fall and Mastroeni.

"The quest for the cup is what drives all of us coaches," Mastroeni said. "And I think how we do that is making sure that we have a good process in place to be able to have checks and balances along the way, but it's essentially winning trophies."

The last time RSL won "silverware," or a trophy, was the MLS Cup in 2009, but the Claret and Cobalt came close in 2023 with a run to the U.S. Open Cup semifinals.

It was the club's first semifinal appearance in a tournament since the 2021 MLS Cup playoffs and its first Open Cup semifinal since 2015. The team reached the final of the MLS Cup and Open Cup in 2013.

Fall and Mastroeni believe the team has the talent to win trophies, and every player who came through for exit interviews this week echoed that sentiment, with Jasper Loffelsend going so far as to say a fully healthy RSL squad is "the best team in MLS."

The club set a new record for its most expensive player signing twice in 2023 with the additions of Andres Gomez and Chicho Arango and witnessed the rapid rise of U.S. national team darling Diego Luna from promising teenager to clutch performer late in the season with goals in four of RSL's final five games.

Despite the apparent exponential growth both on and off the field, Mastroeni warned about the expectation of a constantly rising trajectory.

"I think that is the death of a coach's mindset, to assume that just because you got this far this year, you're gonna go like this (points up) next year," Mastroeni said. "It's not how it works."

To anyone watching RSL season after season, however, that much is clear. The team made the Western Conference final in 2021 and was then eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in 2022 and 2023. If anything, that signals more of a downward — or at the minimum stagnant — trajectory.

On the flip side, Luna said the team was "one (penalty kick) away from all these talks being different" and advancing in this year's playoffs after a penalty shootout in Houston. A win there would have given RSL a home game against Kansas City in the conference semifinals with confidence it could advance to its second conference final in three years.

"These are all things that happen on a razor's edge," Fall said. "Unequivocally, I think this group is talented enough to win trophies but the fact that we didn't doesn't mean that it's a clear failure on another side of it."

Mastroeni compared the tweaks and changes his team needs to a race car driver making small adjustments between races such as fine-tuning the gameplan or "tightening the brakes a little bit."

Will there be some players leaving and others arriving for 2024? Almost certainly, especially given the comments by Danny Musovski this week after the forward stepped away from the team late in the season in search of a contract extension.

But with several foundational pieces set in players like Arango and Luna, those minor tweaks and brake adjustments to Mastroeni's racecar will be fewer as the almost 15-year quest for another MLS Cup continues for RSL.

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