2024 has gotten off to as bad a start as is possible for NYCFC, as the team sits at rock-bottom of the Eastern Conference with a -3 goal differential after two games played.
Those two games were two road losses featuring zero goals scored and just four combined shots on target, with very few signs of improvement shown over the struggle that was the 2023 MLS season.
It's easy to walk away from the 2-0 defeat to St. Louis CITY SC at CITYPARK with strong feelings about the trajectory New York City now finds itself on.
On one hand, it's Matchday 2 of a long campaign, with a young, revamped New York City roster still coming together as newly-signed players trickle in from overseas.
Jovan Mijatović and Agustín Ojeda are likely to be building blocks for New York City's attack, yet they had almost no involvement in preseason and have been thrust right into action with their new teammates.
Thus far, it's been without any goals to show for it, be it for the newcomers or for anyone else wearing that 24/7 Kit.
As Nick Cushing said repeatedly after the match, St. Louis, like Charlotte, is a difficult place to go play and go win. The club's first-ever trip to the Gateway to the West followed on the heels of that raucous first 2024 match at Bank of America Stadium played in front of almost 63,000 well-coordinated fans.
It's not an easy way to start a season, so two losses can't be called a surprising outcome, and better days at Yankee Soccer Stadium and Citi Field are still to come: That would qualify as the positive outlook on things, a glass-half-full view of New York City FC's current state.
The negative outlook on things comes back to the fact that the flat, tentative, losing performance in St. Louis is also the 20th road defeat NYCFC have suffered in 36 away matches played in all competitions since Nick Cushing became head coach.
In those 36 away matches under Cushing's leadership, NYCFC have picked up six wins, and five of them came way back in the far-off times of 2022 when the shine of that 2021 MLS Cup victory hadn't come close to wearing off.
Being a bad road team in MLS isn't a death sentence, but when you add the almost constant road letdowns onto the team's seemingly venue-neutral lack of attacking cohesion and success, you come to the glass-half-empty side of things.
The question hovering over NYCFC as it heads into its home opener, a fixture the club has never lost in its previous nine installments: How full is your proverbial 2024 glass, now that the first two matches of the season are firmly in the "loss" column?
Watching the team play in Charlotte and St. Louis, it's very hard to line up in the glass-half-full camp, especially given how even NYCFC's previously-impeccable home form took a dip during the 2023 season.
The collective 180 minutes of play haven't inspired much confidence, the new personnel has yet to announce itself in MLS, and the team already looks slightly adrift and bereft of effective ideas—and it's only the beginning of March.
The length of the season and the number of playoff spots MLS gives out means it's no time to outright panic or pour your glass out and entirely give up on 2024.
It feels as though it will take a very different performance against the Portland Timbers at Yankee Soccer Stadium to make fans confidently line up in the glass-half-full camp, a camp that's likely seen its numbers drop due to NYCFC's flatline of a start to the 2024 season.
