Which Former Austin FC Player Had the Worst Time in 2021?

Last week’s announcement that Freddy Kleemann and Will Pulisic were heading out on loan made all of us at The False 9 feel a little nostalgic for those players who suited up for Austin FC in its inaugural season but who, for one reason or another, will not factor into this season’s plans. While we’re sad to see some of them go and ambivalent about the rest, everyone at this website sincerely hopes that these one-and-done players had a decent time in Austin last year.

But what if there is a way to quantify what kind of experience these former players had while playing for (or at least getting paid by) Austin FC in 2021? Not necessarily how their individual seasons measured up stats-wise, but rather how they would rate their enjoyment of playing in Austin on a scale of “meh, the results on the field weren’t what we wanted but all in all I had a pretty alright time” to “it was a ceaseless torrent of frustration and pain and I never want to speak of it again.” After fiddling around with a couple of spreadsheets and the football reference page for Austin FC, I have devised a metric to do just that. And so without further ado, I present THE BUMMER INDEX.

What Is The Bummer Index?

As its name implies, it’s a statistical rating of how big of a bummer the 2021 season was for Austin FC’s former players. I’m only focusing on those who have left the club because, while last year was a disappointment for everyone, at least the players who returned in 2022 have an immediate shot at greater on-field success. For the departed, they may never again have the chance to wash away the bitter taste of consistent defeat. To them, their time at Austin FC may forever remain one giant bummer.

How Is The Bummer Index Calculated?

The Bummer Index considers individual playing time, game states, and match results to arrive at a single rating. The higher the rating, the bigger the bummer. For games where the player made an on-field appearance, points are awarded as follows:

• The player was on the field while Austin was trailing: 1 point per minute
• The player was on the field while Austin was leading: -1 point per minute
• The player appeared in a loss for Austin: 50 points
• The player appeared in a win for Austin: -50 points
• The player appeared in a draw for Austin: 0 points

Additional scoring: if the player did not make the matchday squad, he was awarded zero points, as I cannot tell how big of a bummer his matchday experience was. For instance, Player A may have spent the day undergoing rigorous physical therapy to rehabilitate an injury, while Player B may have enjoyed a scheduled day off gallivanting around The Domain. Such distinctions are unknowable and therefore unquantifiable. Also, for any match where a player made the bench but did not receive any playing time, he was awarded 25 bummer points. While this may seem harsh, there are few things in the world more disheartening than getting dressed, going to work, and feeling that your time was wasted. Let’s call it the “this meeting could have been an email” penalty.

I then added all of these points up and ranked them from smallest to biggest bummer. In the interest of clarity, I’ve grouped them into four tiers. Now let’s go to the numbers!

Tier One: The Non-Bummers

Aaron Schoenfeld, Ulises Segura, Brady Scott (tie): 0 points

None of Schoenfeld, Segura, or Scott made a single gameday roster in 2021, and thus their Bummer Index scores are exactly zero. As a result, their time in Austin was deemed the most pleasant of any of our thirteen former players. While this may seem counterintuitive, one must remember that they did not have to endure a two-month road trip, spates of humiliating defeats, or passive-aggressive comments about their performances in post-game press conferences. Instead, Schoenfeld and Segura had experiences roughly equivalent to that of a project manager at a failed tech startup: they were paid six-figure salaries to live in Austin for a year and in the end they produced absolutely nothing. Half the dudes on Rainey Street right now could tell you that this isn’t a bad way to live. As for Brady Scott, he was loaned to Memphis which is a dangerously fun place to be if you’re a twenty-one-year-old with a little bit of money. I see no bummers here.

Tier Two: The Bummer Rises

Ben Sweat: 9 points

Sweat only appeared in two matches before a torn ACL ruled him out for the rest of the season. While any serious injury is a major bummer, the blow was certainly lessened by the fact that he appears to have returned to full health and signed with Sporting Kansas City in the offseason. In his brief time with the club, he was never on the field while Austin FC had the lead.

McKinze Gaines: 80 points

Gaines was one of the few modest success stories of 2021, as he parlayed his stint as an unsigned trialist into a first-team contract and regular minutes at the end of the season. His form was impressive enough that Charlotte FC selected him in this year’s expansion draft, though early results suggest that his new club will provide him with heretofore-unknown levels of bummer. Still, during his time in Austin he lost more than he won, and played from behind more often than he did with a lead.

Will Pulisic: 150 points

Our third-string keeper never saw a minute of playing time, but still made six gameday rosters behind Brad Stuver and Andrew Tarbell. It’s assumed that he got plenty of fresh air and exercise during pregame warmups, which honestly sounds pretty nice, but afterwards he had to sit on the bench and pretend to be invested in a match that would almost certainly not need his services. Not a catastrophic season, but a bummer of a season nonetheless.

Tier Three: Dangerous Levels of Bummer

Matt Besler: 408 points

One could argue that, regardless of numbers, no one had a bigger bummer of a season than Besler. The thirty-four-year-old veteran was forced into retirement after suffering the latest of several concussions over the course of his lifetime. However, it is important to distinguish between bummers and potential tragedies, and the end of Besler’s career certainly falls into the latter category. We here at The False 9 wish him decades of continued good health, and hope that he now spends his days away from soccer doing whatever the hell he wants. As for 2021, he went the full 90 in a losing effort many times, but he was the only former Austin FC player who spent more minutes on the pitch with his team in the lead than he did with his team trailing.

Manny Perez: 476 points

A case can be made that Perez was the most accursed player of 2021. Over the entire season, he never once played in a game where Austin FC emerged victorious. His 2021 record for appearances? 0 wins, 4 draws, 5 losses. He was able to enjoy a lead for only twelve minutes all year, in a game where Austin ended up allowing a late equalizer. On the two occasions where he made the bench but did not play, Austin won both games and he was left to sit there in his spotlessly clean jersey like a schmuck. I’m sorry, Manny. At least the USL is treating you better.

Tomas Pochettino: 646 points

Here is where I answer the question you may have been asking for a while now: why doesn’t The Bummer Index take into account individual accomplishments like goals or assists? The answer is simple: we at The False 9 are firm believers that there is no “i” in “team” (and indeed, the very reason we did not choose the more grammatically-appropriate moniker “The False Nine” is because we didn’t want an “i” in our name). If one player scores a goal, then the joy is shared between everyone on the pitch, and the index is designed to reflect this. As such, I am ultimately agnostic about Pochettino’s two goals and one assist in 2021, bummer-wise. Setting aside those tallies, we have a player who spent over six hundred minutes on the field while in a losing position, who appeared in all but two of Austin FC’s losses, and who generally gave off the vibe of a man who would rather be anywhere else than playing for Josh Wolff. Dangerous levels of bummer indeed.

Freddy Kleemann: 658 points

If there was a poster child for being all dressed up (in a soccer kit) with nowhere to go (anywhere near the pitch), it was Kleemann. Recalled early from a loan because of a rash of early-season injuries, our “break glass in case of emergency” center back ended up riding the pine a team-high 23 times in 2021. On those rare occurrences when he was called on for mop-up duty, he scattered 49 minutes over three matches and enjoyed playing with a lead in exactly 1 of those minutes. Other players had bigger bummers last year, but no one was used so infrequently to so little effect as our boy Frederik.

Tier Four: The Bummer-pocalypse

Sebastian Berhalter: 754 points

Lil’ Sebastian really took one for the team in 2021, which is doubly depressing because Austin FC wasn’t even technically his team. On loan from Columbus, Berhalter was pushed into duty early and often last season, as the injuries soared and the losses piled up. Forced onto a lousy squad at a young age, roughly half of his minutes on the pitch were played while Austin was trailing. He had a significant role in only one win (against Houston on August 4), and then was promptly demoted to the bench once “Big” Sebastian Driussi, Moussa Djitte, and Gaines arrived. He finished out the year with a series of non-appearances, save for the final match against Portland where he saw Austin fall behind early and earned a yellow card for his troubles. I’m sure it’s fun to be a teenage professional athlete, but the novelty can’t make up for being cannon fodder when your team is losing and a benchwarmer when they are (slightly more frequently) winning.

Aedan Stanley: 802 points

Stanley made the gameday roster 21 times last year, which was a calamity for player and team alike. He had no business being anywhere near the MLS in 2021, but it was an expansion season and the team needed end-of-the-bench guys who could eat up a couple hundred minutes while not embarrassing themselves too badly in the process.  Stanley appeared in a game where Austin had the lead exactly once, and even then he was on the field for less than the running time of “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version).” Other than that, he was simply grist for the mill of defeat. He played 233 total minutes and Austin trailed in 160 of them. In his two starts against Minnesota and Frisco, Austin never scored and fell behind after 10 and 50 minutes respectively. He almost never had a respite from the bummer-ness of playing in a losing position. And for his troubles, his contract wasn’t renewed and he shuffled off to be a backup on the second-best team in Miami-Dade County. I’m not gonna lie, I’m bumming myself out just thinking about it. At least he has a fairly robust Wikipedia page for a player of his stature.

Kekuta Manneh: 852 points

And here we have finally arrived at the summit of Bummer Mountain. Kekuta Manneh, minor fan favorite thanks to his history with Austin Aztex, would probably just as soon forget that Travis County exists at this point. Early in the season, he was first off the bench in our run of road losses, racking up 50-point bummer scores with each passing week. And then it somehow got even worse. On July 1 he had his last season highlight, playing 17 minutes in Austin’s 4-1 thrashing of Portland. After that, he never took the field in victory again. In the final 22 games of 2021, he racked up 632 bummer points, or slightly fewer than Freddy “White Flag” Kleemann had for the entire year. For four solid months Manneh never once played when his team had the lead. His final start in an Austin uniform was when the team lost to a bunch of literal children. Apart from that, his matchday logs are a string of DNPs and mop-up appearances in ugly defeats. He survived 27 substitute minutes in the final match against Portland while Austin trailed 3-0, and then his year was over. In a season largely defined by soccer futility, Manneh became its avatar. I really wish that he gets a bit of a run with San Antonio FC this year, because he could really use some good luck against weaker competition. But in the meantime, all I can do is offer my heartfelt condolences to our erstwhile Prince of Bummers. I hope that Claudio and Josh sent him an Edible Arrangement or something in the offseason.