Welcome to Allocation Disorder. I am Sam Staskell, joined by Paul Tenorio. MLS is back. Still, it's still

back, Paul. And the group stage as of about an hour ago is over. Portland and L.A.F.C.

closed this thing out. It was weird. It was wacky. It was wild. It was not great in terms of quality of play, all kind of things that we expected.

However, quite a few things that we did not expect.

Cincinnati, Vancouver, Orlando, Montreal, all advancing to the round of 16, Atlanta, New York Red Bulls, L.A. Galaxy,

all getting smacked around and heading home, NYCFC barely making it through by the skin of their teeth.

It's going to be an interesting round of 16 and an interesting overall knockout stage.

But let's just dive right into it since it's so late here.

And this will be what the majority of the episode is about before we get into some

listener questions.

But let's just dive right in, Paul.

What did you make of this whole, what did you make of the whole group stage? Yeah, I mean, I thought like MLS's back was really

very, very much MLS is back. And I, and I think, you know, I think it is exactly what I hoped

it would be. It's the MLS upside down, right? Like, I mean, anyone who's covered the league's

preseason knows that there are these, like, kind of wacky results that happen that get

fan bases super excited about their teams and then the reality of a regular season kicks in

at some point. And those results kind of get thrown out the window.

And that's, I mean, that's what this tournament is, right?

It's a preseason tournament.

And so you had to understand that there were going to be some weird results and there

were going to be some crazy things that happened.

And, I mean, I half jokingly said that I thought, and I hoped Orlando City won at all because it would be like the MLS is back upside down.

...