FC Cincinnati, along with every other team in Major League Soccer (MLS), is currently participating in the mid-season Leagues Cup tournament against teams from Mexico’s Liga MX.

As it does so, with the regular season taking a month off, it might begin to sink in that the club is currently the best team in MLS.

It leads the overall table and, should it continue its from, is on track to claim the Supporters’ Shield which is awarded to the league leaders at the end of the season.

So far in 2023, FC Cincinnati has only dropped two points at home—a meeting with potential top-of-the-table challengers New England Revolution earlier this month resulted in a tie.

The team has travelled around the league in its absorbing orange away kits, and though not as successful on the road as at the TQL Stadium, it still has a better away record than any other team in the Eastern Conference bar Orlando City.

On the face of it, it is not entirely clear what FC Cincinnati does well, but a combination of defensive solidity, a well-rehearsed shape, and players well-suited to their roles and performing well as a result, has created a winning team.

Some MLS sides can be quite extreme with their playing styles. From the high pressing, quick counter-attacking play of teams like the New York Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union, to more possession-based systems of teams such as Atlanta United or Cincinnati’s Ohio rivals, Columbus Crew.

Cincinnati might be closer to the Union, which is no surprise given head coach Pat Noonan was previously an assistant coach at Philadelphia and general manager Chris Albright was a technical director there, but it is able to adapt to the opposition’s style depending on how much of the ball they like to have.

In several games this season Cincinnati’s possession of the ball has come in at around the 60% mark. In others, it has been as low as 35-40%.

It appears Noonan’s side has worked out a way to win both with and without the ball.

Many other MLS teams are only really comfortable on one side of this possession divide, and can struggle if forced by their opponents to do something else.

Noticeable traits Cincinnati does have, are a familiar back three shape and some standout players within it.

One in particular is attacking playmaker Luciano “Lucho” Acosta who is the team’s attacking hub.

He is a creator but can also be a goalscorer, netting ten in the league last season and 12 already this. The 29-year-old captain has only failed to score in three of his last 13 league games.

Only Nashville’s perennial MVP contender Hany Mukhtar has more goals and assists combined (20) than Acosta’s 18 in 2023 and the Argentine is third in the league for expected assists with 6.6, behind Thiago Almada (6.8) and Cristian Espinoza (8.4) according to FotMob.

Alvaro Barreal offers creativity and technique in the left wing-back position, and also from set pieces. No player in the league has made more passes from dead-ball situations than Barreal’s 309 according to FBref.

Obinna Nwobodo powers the engine room with Júnior Moreno alongside him, while center-backs ​​Yerson Mosquera and Matt Miazga have offered an element of defensive reliability in a back three.

The team hopes new signing Aaron Boupendza will give them goalscoring support to Acosta in the latter half of the season, and maybe his presence will help improve the fortunes in front of goal of American striker Brandon Vázquez.

FC Cincinnati is then, at least for now, the best team in MLS, just as it was once the best team in the United Soccer League (USL).

In 2018 it won the USL regular season championship, topping the table with just three losses all season, 11 points ahead of its nearest challengers Louisville City FC and Orange County SC.

When Cincinnati made its USL debut as an expansion team in 2016, the league was considered a de facto third division by U.S. Soccer, with the North American Soccer League (NASL) taking division two status during a relatively short-lived revival.

In 2017 USL was upgraded to a second-tier league, meaning all its clubs moved up a level on the closed-league pyramid. Cincinnati was now a division two team and was already attracting attention from MLS which saw a stable, competitive club with a loyal following.

Rather than being dropped into MLS, FC Cincinnati was built from the ground up (as much as a sports franchise rather than a sports club can be).

It took any soccer scraps left over from defunct clubs such as the Cincinnati Riverhawks and Cincinnati Kings, finding and reviving dormant domestic soccer interest and then some to build something new.

Many American cities have an existing base of soccer from which to draw upon, it just depends on whether the rebrand and the new franchise have enough consideration and enough humility to do so.

This has paid off for Cincinnati, and therefore, seeing as it is a single-entity league, for MLS as a whole.

It helped the club deal with suddenly going from being the best team in USL to the worst team in MLS. An unwanted status it held for three seasons in a row.

2018 was the club’s final year in USL before joining MLS as an expansion side in 2019 and finishing bottom of the Eastern Conference and the overall table each year between 2019 and 2021.

If promotion and relegation existed in MLS, Cincinnati would have gone straight back down. Maybe it would have deserved to but during those three seasons in which the team lost 59 games and won just 14, the fans stuck with the team.

One of the arguments against relegation is that fans will lose interest when their club drops down a division. But Cincinnati’s average attendance has remained steady throughout the various tiers of US soccer, and it broke numerous attendance records in USL while still playing at the Nippert Stadium. It also remained strong during those early MLS struggles.

A franchise constructed in a different manner, parachuted into MLS rather than built from below may not have endured those initial three seasons of difficulty as well, especially as the first was interrupted by the Covid-19 global pandemic.

These types of franchises have also helped USL continue to grow into a strong second-tier league in American soccer.

Off-field factors, not least its fanbase have also contributed to Cincinnati’s weathering of the storm in those first few seasons, and to its stark improvement since.

In its relatively short history, the club has created a soccer culture around itself in the city, building on and activating a domestic soccer interest that can often lie dormant in other areas of the country.

FC Cincinnati also has one of the increasing number of soccer-specific stadiums that is ideal for MLS. Not too big to leave many empty seats, but big enough to create an atmosphere and house its thousands of fans.

This is the background, and the setting, for a club that now has a chance to win its second regular season championship and its first in MLS.

It won’t be easy to maintain this level, but even challenging for the Supporters’ Shield title is something that can be savoured by a club that has gone from the third tier to the first, and now from the bottom of MLS to the top.