Heading into the 2021 season expectations were high for Minnesota United. There was a general consensus, as mls.com wrote in their season preview, that “the Loons figure to be challenging around the top of the Western Conference again in 2021.” Internally the feeling was the same. The club has been, as Adrian Heath recently said, working for “incremental change,” getting a little better every year. “Can we get better? I think we have,” he argued, adding that “this is a better group of players than we had two years ago.”
That claim, measuring improvement by the quality of individual players, points to the club’s developmental philosophy, established in 2019 when Ozzie Alonso, Vito Mannone, and Ike Opara were brought in to stabilize an historically bad defense.