Timbers Preview: A Season of Questions

The Portland Timbers won their first playoff game in four years last fall, but the 2025 season was otherwise largely a disappointment. 

After a relatively strong start, the Timbers won just two of their final 14 games—limping to a middling eighth place finish in the Western Conference and doing little to arrest the notion that the club has regressed both on and off the field. 

This year, the Timbers are mainly running it back: Ned Grabavoy and Phil Neville are returning as general manager and head coach, and, with a few exceptions, the roster remains largely unchanged from where it sat last November. 

If the Timbers are to engineer a revival in fortunes this season, much of the improvement will have to come from within. Here are the five major questions facing the club as it prepares for its sixteenth MLS season.  

1) Where will the goals come from?

In Neville’s first season in Portland two years ago, the three-headed monster of Evander, Jonathan Rodriguez, and Felipe Mora powered the Timbers attack by scoring 45 of the club’s 65 regular season goals. 

But the attacking issues may not simply be about personnel: as Matthew Doyle has suggested, the Timbers’ attacking play last year was frequently disjointed and patternless—a stark contrast to the fluid final third actions of both the Timbers’ northwest rivals in Vancouver and Seattle. 

Whether the Timbers’ attack experiences a revival in fortunes this year is partially up to the likes of Da Costa, Velde, Mora, and the collection of players around them. But it’s also a question of whether Neville and his staff are able to build a system that turns the attack into more than a collection of parts—which brings us to question number two.

2) How much more time will Phil Neville get to prove himself?

Neville has managed much or all of five seasons in MLS between his stints in Miami and Portland. His teams have never advanced past the first round of the playoffs, have never finished higher than sixth place in their conference, and have finished with a positive goal difference only once. 

Not only have his teams produced consistently average to below average results, but they’ve rarely established an ambitious or even a clear tactical identity—and that’s a problem in Portland right now, because while Neville has often gotten the Timbers to play hard for him, this team does not appear to have the talent required to compete for trophies with superior effort alone. 

This is a team that needs an elite manager, and there is simply no reason to believe—there has never been any reason to believe—that Neville is that. In fairness to him, most managers in the league aren’t. 

But the question heading into this season is how much more mediocrity and barking about mentality the club can stand before it decides to move on. Neville’s contract is up at the end of the year, and though he has received firm backing from Grabavoy, Grabavoy himself may be in jeopardy given the club’s struggles over the last three years. 

Neville is affable and well-connected, but this surely is his final chance to prove himself as an MLS manager. We’ll see how long he gets. 

3) What will the central midfield balance be like?

One area in which the Timbers will look markedly different in 2026 is in central midfield, where David Ayala—gone to Miami—has effectively been replaced with 24-year-old Colorado native Cole Bassett.

The departure of Ayala, who the club suggested would not have re-signed in Portland following the expiration of his contract, was a blow. But Bassett looks like an astute pickup: an energetic young player on a favorable contract with plenty of MLS experience and previous stops with Dutch giants Feyenoord and the U.S. national team. 

He’s also a more attacking player than Ayala, which should give the Timbers some added punch in the final third. If he produces at anywhere near the rate he did for Colorado after his return from the Netherlands, he’ll be on the team’s most valuable players. 

How his arrival changes the rest of the central midfield dynamic is less clear. Ayala excelled, particularly in the first half of last year, by doggedly compressing space all over the field and comfortably led the team in both interceptions and tackles won. Ayala offered plenty with his passing range too, but the Timbers leaned on his defensive workrate. 

If Bassett can’t approximate that this year, more of the defensive burden will fall to Diego Chará and Joao Ortiz—a potential issue considering Chará’s age (he turns 40 in April) and the fact that Ortiz, at least last year, looked nowhere near good enough to start in MLS. The Timbers will likely add another defensive midfielder as well, but it’s not clear when that player might arrive. 

The other complicating factor is Da Costa, who at times last year was deployed deeper in midfield and occupied some of the same spaces Bassett did during his time in Colorado. The Timbers might be happy to get Da Costa higher up the field this year, but it remains to be seen if the two players can comfortably coexist. 

4) Can the Timbers continue to improve defensively?

The Timbers took a step forward defensively last year thanks in large part to the efforts of New Zealand international Finn Surman, whose presence significantly upgraded the team’s central defense.

It’d be no shock if a European club made a sizable offer for Surman following the World Cup, but the New Zealander is still in Portland for now—and to build on defensive improvement he helped engineer, the Timbers returned to the same part of the world from which they signed Surman to ink 23-year-old Alex Bonetig from the A-League’s Western Sydney Wanderers.

Bonetig is expected to displace Kamal Miller from the lineup, and there may also be a change at right back, where the veteran Brandon Bye, who spent the last eight years in New England, has been brought in to compete with Juan Mosquera. Maxime Crépeau’s departure, meanwhile, means James Pantemis is the clear number one goalkeeper for the first time.  

But the potential upgrades in personnel along the backline are not the end of the story. The departure of Ayala and Cristhian Paredes are significant losses for the defense, and any defensive regression in central midfield is likely to show up most clearly in the team’s defensive numbers.

Then there’s the question of how the Timbers will defend: Neville mainly deployed a back four last year, but also dabbled with a back five and ended the season by having the Timbers man mark San Diego to mostly disastrous effect in the playoffs. If the central midfield is less defensively sound, getting the system right will matter even more for the defense this year.  

5) How ambitious are the Timbers in 2026?

Over their first 11 years in MLS, the Timbers reached the Western Conference championship four times and MLS Cup three times. They were a regular presence on national television, sold out every home game for nine consecutive seasons, and employed multiple club-defining players.

But MLS has changed considerably since the Timbers’ debuted in 2011, and the pace of change has only accelerated since the Timbers’ last trip to MLS Cup in 2021. 

There are more clubs spending more money than ever before, and given the fact that Portland won’t ever attract the kinds of star players Los Angeles and Miami can, the Timbers have to be exceptional and ambitious wherever else they can to win big—their academy, player development, scouting, financial outlay, and their presence in the city. 

Owner Merritt Paulson has always been a competitive, engaged owner—and still appears to be, despite his resignation as the club’s CEO amid scandal more than three years ago. The question now, however, is whether Paulson and the entirety of the organization have the resources, drive, and intelligence to compete at the highest level.

That question, about the long-term prospects of an organization that at one not-too-distant point was among the league’s most successful, is looming over all the others as the 2026 season begins.

The Portland Timbers face Columbus Crew in the 2026 season opener, Sat Feb 21, 7:30 pm, Providence Park, tickets here.