The 2026 MLS season is here! In a three-part special, we will preview the upcoming Portland Timbers season and give you all of the storylines to follow and knowledge you need to impress your friends with as another great footy crusade begins.
This is Part Three of the season preview. You can read Part One, recapping the offseason, here. And you can check out Part Two, a tactical preview of "Phil Neville & the Dribbly Boys", here.
I'll come right out and say it: 2026 is a big year for the Portland Timbers. Like, maybe the biggest they've faced it some time.
It's not because they are trophy contenders (although that would be an amazing surprise), and it's not because they have a must-watch roster (although Kristoffer Velde will probably do something on a semi-regular basis that makes highlight reels). No, it's for a much more existential reason.
2026 is the year that the Timbers prove if they can still exceptional, or if they are doomed to the doldrums of "just another MLS team". It's the year that Portland puts all the money where their mouth is, the year that jobs are retained or lost, and the year that shows us if this is still a team worthy of being proud of.
So. The Stakes are kind of high. No pressure.
2026: The last ride for an old dog (MLS Spring - Winter)
My colleague Jeremy Peterman wrote a bit about this in his Timbers season preview piece, which you should also check out if you haven't already. He outlined that with the impending MLS calendar flip set to happen in 2027, 2026 is the last "normal" MLS season we will. Probably ever. And with that comes a unique set of expectations and pressure.
Jeremy does a great job of listing out the on-field improvement that the Timbers need to make to remain competitive as MLS turns to a new era. I want to go a step further and say that it's not just competitiveness the Timbers are fighting for – it's also relevance.
One of the rationals of aligning the MLS calendar with the rest of the world is that it will help it become more relevant on the world stage. The league will no longer be the weird American step-child of the soccer world. It will be within and among all of the major leagues of the world. And with that extra attention, extra eyeballs will be searching for which teams to follow.
I would argue that if the calendar change were to happen now, the Timbers are not one of those teams. Yes, they are a recognizable brand with a recognizable coach and an iconic stadium and fanbase. But on the field? Well, as Jeremy said, in their 50th anniversary season "they finished with a negative goal differential at home". If that's not indicative of the ills that Portland faced last season, I'm not sure what is.
Having made the playoffs (not Wild Card) in just one of the past four seasons, Portland is slipping into obscurity. 2026 needs to be the season that they start to rise in the ranks of relevance in the table and get back into the fight for consistent competitiveness, and therefore relevance in the league.
Nobody yet knows how the calendar flip, and 2027 "sprint season", will impact things like roster construction, long-term roster outlook, or the overall state of the league. If the Timbers want to be positioned as well as they can for whatever is next, and be in the relevant conversations that will be had about "the teams to watch", they must use 2026 to become competitively relevant again.
One thing that will make that easier is if they have a technical staff that is the best fit for the club. Which brings us to...
2026: A GM and Coach with it all on the line
I wrote a lot about this a month ago, so I won't go too much longer on it here. But the thrust of it is "Ned Grabavoy probably has his job on the line this year (or at least should)", and "Phil Neville definitely has his job on the line this year"
Sam Svilar
This roster is Ned's now. His fingerprints are all over it, from the MLS veterans to the foreign acquisitions to the young and intriguing prospects. His philosophy is now the Portland Timbers' philosophy, and so it is not a stretch to take how this roster performs in 2026 as a referendum on his chops at building an effective one.
His seat is perhaps not the hottest though due to a variety of unknowns. We don't know how long his contract is. We also don't know how willing the man who signs the checks, Merritt Paulson, is to cut bait and start over. MLS GM's generally get quite a long leash, and while the Timbers haven't reached the heights they've desire, they have tasted some modicum of successes over the past few years.
The hottest seat then is reserved for the gaffer. We do know that 2026 is the last year of Neville's contract (reportedly). And so it is much easier to imagine Portland separating from its head coach at the end of the year – or perhaps sooner.
There's a variety of things that Neville needs to prove in 2026. Namely, the efficacy of his coaching philosophy (which hey I wrote about in Part Two!). It's had two years to embed. It's helped the team take some small steps forward. But this is the year that is has to prove sufficient. The Timbers organization isn't going to wait forever for it to come good. The rubber has to meet the road at some point, and that point is now.
On a bigger level, Neville has maintained that this roster is good enough. He's maintained that he's good enough to get results. His time at Inter Miami was cut short due to his teams being stuck right about where the Timbers are now. Can he finally surpass his history? We're about to find out.
And it's not just jobs on the line. More importantly, it's the hope of the fanbase.
2026: What have you done for us lately?
Not gonna sugarcoat it: Portland Timbers fans have had to endure some rough stuff over the past few years. The Vancouver blowout in 2024. And then the Vancouver blowout in 2025. The San Diego blowout at the end of 2025. Providence Park has taken some lumps recently.
The impact of all of that has made the fanbase weary and wounded. Humiliating defeats suck, and being subjugated to multiple of them over a roughly 12-month period takes a toll. Timbers fans have had to endure watching their team fail to regain the heights they hit in 2021 for almost half a decade, and that might be coming too much to bear.
Soccer fans are some of the most resilient in sport, don't get me wrong. The thing that makes Soccer City the premier fanbase in the U.S. is everyone's ability to witness, well *gestures broadly*, and still come back and jump and clap and sing every week. We're not taking mass-exodus stuff here.
But we are talking apathy. As Portland has sunk, or rather failed to rise, the apathy among the RCTID faithful has waned. They've desperately wanted a moment, a vindication, a memory that they can look back and ignites their green & gold soccer hearts. And with each match and season that they don't get that, it becomes harder and harder to hope or care.
So in 2026, the task for the Timbers is to ignite our hearts again. Lift themselves, and us, up out of apathy into something that's special. Something that makes us proud to chant "PT-FC" from the hallowed halls of Providence Park.
As I close out this section, and the preview series, I am harkened back to the last time I truly felt like Portland hit that high. They got close last year with Gage Guerra scoring in the playoffs, but that moment still comes behind the most dramatic leveler-at-the-death Civic Stadium has ever seen.
Felipe Mora's miraculous strike in 2021 was the loudest I have heard any stadium, ever. Everyone and everything was shaking – literally. It still doesn't feel real.
That's what I want soccer to be. How I want it to feel. That's how I want the Portland Timbers to feel.
2026 will be perhaps the last and best chance the Timbers have to become that for some time. Fail, and they very fell face the prospect of years stuck in the wilderness. But succeed, and... oh man. It could be something special again.
Onward.
