Pablo Mastroeni kept his options open. The 2021 season had just ended, and his unfancied Real Salt Lake team had made the playoffs and pulled off an upset at higher-seeded Seattle despite not taking a single shot across 120 minutes of play. The squad bowed out in the conference final, but had surprised plenty along the way.

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Defending was that RSL team’s calling card, much like that of his former team in Colorado, but Mastroeni didn’t want to be pigeonholed. He was just an interim coach in 2021, and RSL’s run had garnered interest from other MLS teams. In job interviews, Matroeni made presentations based on his attacking style; how his team would progress the ball up the field, and how they’d finish plays.

“I think every year as a coach, no different than any year as a player, you evolve,” Mastroeni told The Athletic.

Mastroeni ended up staying with RSL permanently, and the club has evolved alongside him. After Mastroeni signed, new billionaire owners David Blitzer and Ryan Smith have brought RSL into a new era. And on Monday, Mastroeni’s team will face a do-or-die first-round playoff test against the Houston Dynamo – this year’s U.S. Open Cup winners who are in great form.

If RSL is to win, it will need to be nimble, confident, and resilient. Recent history, of Mastroeni and the club as a whole, will have given them plenty of practice.

“I think my greatest strength is the ability to adapt and to be competitive in every match,” Mastroeni said. “If I want to be known as something, it would be the mentality and the fight that the guys have every single game.”

Even after that run to the 2021 Western Conference final, it was clear to RSL general manager Elliot Fall, Mastroeni and the entire sporting department that the roster needed some upgrades. In the 18 months before Blitzer and Smith came onboard, RSL had been run on a shoestring by MLS itself after the ouster of former owner Dell Loy Hansen. The team’s marquee acquisition in that period, Anderson Julio, was brought in from Atlético San Luis on a loan-with-purchase deal.

With the benefit of hindsight, Fall now sees that period as vital – a chance to reset the club culture and focus on re-establishing RSL’s ground rules before major investment landed.

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“You can’t have success by just dumping money on the problem,” Fall said of MLS roster-building. “You have to find ways to efficiently use every roster spot and every acquisition method, so it’s been important that we not lose track of that. Just because we have some more resources, (it’s important) that we continue to turn over every stone and find every player — go through our process the same way.”

A lifelong resident of Salt Lake City, Fall first joined RSL in 2007 as an intern with the public relations department. He gradually rose the ranks, shifting to the sporting department during Garth Lagerwey’s time as GM. Like Mastroeni, Fall needed to stay adaptable in order to get to his place in the organizational hierarchy.

As a result, he’s one of a few remaining throughlines from the current iteration of RSL to the club’s halcyon days in 2009. That group rallied around a mantra that “the team was the star,” focusing on the collective in the first years of the league’s designated player (DP) era. The club’s one MLS Cup was won that year against an LA Galaxy side featuring Landon Donovan and David Beckham.

“You can have seismic shifts from year to year in MLS,” Fall said. “I’m not saying that you’re never going to have success doing it, but it’s a much harder pathway to success than having your identity and sticking with what makes you who you are and makes you successful.”

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Eventually, though, the investment came. In 2023, the once-spendthrift club dropped $16 million on player acquisitions, with Cristian “Chicho” Arango the headline newcomer. The Colombian striker first arrived in MLS with Los Angeles FC, scored plenty en route to an MLS Cup title in 2022, then left for CF Pachuca in LigaMX after LAFC wouldn’t offer him a designated player deal. Inconsistent playing time left him again exploring his options over the summer, ultimately becoming RSL’s record signing in July.

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The rest of RSL’s investment was concentrated on players under the age of 24. Andrés Gómez, 21, joined from Millonarios, Colombia international Nelson Palacio, 22, from Atlético Nacional and Braian Ojeda, 23, from Nottingham Forest after spending 2022 on loan.

“Every one of them was a guy where we said: this guy can come in and help us now, he can develop, and he can grow into an even more integral part of what we do in this club,” Fall said. “They’re also players that we believe have the potential to move on, if that’s what ends up happening, and be successful in other places. It was important to us that even in investing, that we maintain that developmental approach.”

Diego Luna also exemplifies that ideal. Signed from USL side El Paso Locomotive in 2022 as an 18-year-old, the attacking midfielder has worked his way into Mastroeni’s rotation despite only turning 20 in September, notching eight goal contributions across 1,201 minutes this season.

“When Diego got here, he was very one-dimensional in that he was very attack minded,” Mastroeni said. “He was basically a passenger defensively and the biggest growth that I’ve seen this year are two things. He’s become one of our better defenders — and I’m not saying chasing back, I’m saying being switched on when we don’t have the ball. His commitment to winning the ball back has been awesome. Those are two things that weren’t here even a year ago when he joined the club.”

In El Paso, Luna split time at either the number 10 role or on either wing. That positional flexibility has helped him more quickly integrate in with his new team after arriving halfway through 2022. It will make him a key player to watch against Houston on Monday, having already scored in the series opener to remind the Dynamo not to take his threat lightly.

If there’s inspiration to be found for a playoff comeback, RSL need only look at the very beginning of this season. On April 8, Charlotte FC came to RSL’s America First Field and took an early lead, only for RSL to flip the script in the second half, scoring three unanswered for a 3-1 final.

“That Charlotte game, it kind of clicked for us,” defender Justen Glad said. “We got the first goal and then you kind of feel that momentum shift to get a bigger result like that. It changed the mood of the locker room. It can be one play, one little moment, and it can have a drastic effect on the year.”

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Still, RSL needed time to find its groove. The Claret and Cobalt alternated wins, draws and losses throughout April and May, entering June ranked 11th in the West. On June 3rd, USL acquisition Rubio Rubín notched a brace in Austin to pick up three crucial away points at a conference rival, keying the start of a nine-match unbeaten run that extended until the Leagues Cup break while making it to the semifinal of the U.S. Open Cup, where RSL lost to the Dynamo.

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The 2023 season has been unusually busy, even by MLS’s breakneck standard. The Leagues Cup meant that all 29 teams were active in three different competitions, testing the depth of every squad whether they were challenging for hardware or not.

“Whoever we put in there did a great job, and we were getting results along the way as well,” Mastroeni said. “In a really strange way, the schedule being so congested has really given us some great insight into the group that we have and the mentality of the group that we have. It’s actually made us a deeper team than we anticipated.”

In total, Mastroeni used 31 players in the regular season — the most of any of the West’s nine playoff qualifiers. Of those, 22 played at least 550 minutes as several teammates battled long-term injuries. No RSL players scored 10 or more goals this season – the only West playoff team to lack a double-digit scorer. Everyone from veteran defender Marcelo Silva to 15-year-old academy forward Axel Kei had a part to play.

In other words: The team is still very much the star.

“If you’re able to adapt, then there’s more players that are available to you,” Mastroeni said. “If you’re really set fixed in one particular way of playing and that player’s gone, now it becomes more (difficult). We’re asking guys to kind of stretch themselves a little bit, and in doing so, it broadens the availability of the players that we have.”

Most of the team’s chance creation comes down the right side; fittingly, both right back and right wing have been rotated depending on availability. Gómez has fared well in his first MLS year, alternating starts with Savarino and Maikel Chang, who started in Real Monarchs’ 2019 USL Championship final triumph. Further back, Emeka Eneli (selected 25th in the 2023 SuperDraft) logged more playing time than any other MLS rookie with 1,318 minutes, ahead of homegrown Bode Hidalgo’s 1,176.

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Defensively, RSL conserves its energy a bit more than many other MLS teams. They averaged 3.2 high turnovers per game, 20th in MLS and just below the league average of 3.5. Although the 12.3 shots they allow per game are also just below league average this year (12.4), those chances are coming in with an average xG per shot of 0.118 — fourth-highest of any MLS team this year. The quality of those chances will need to be better contained for RSL to fight back against Houston and make a deep run.

That said, the nature of the playoffs means that no team can be discounted — especially one with as much depth as Mastroeni’s side.

“I feel like it’s tight every year in the West,” Glad said. “There are so many games that could have gone a different way, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself either up the table, three spots or down the table three spots.”

Like Fall, Glad has seen RSL at its best as well as its lowest. The center back began with RSL’s Arizona academy in 2012, making his MLS debut three years later as an 18-year-old. Even as coaches and owners have changed in the ensuing eight years, he’s become a mainstay, making over 200 league appearances despite only being 26. RSL extended his contract last month, ensuring he stays with his boyhood club through at least 2026.

With his future — and that of the club’s — secure for the first time in years, whatever transpires this month will be another chance for the rest of the league to check in on the new-look RSL. Just like past iterations, however, they’re here to win.

“I think that’s the ultimate goal, to bring a trophy here,” Glad said. “I mean, it would be unreal. I know how much it meant to the city in 2009 when they won (MLS Cup). To be able to be a part of something like that is the stuff you dream about as a kid. That’s the goal. That’s what I’m focused on, what the club’s focus on, and hopefully we can turn that into reality sometime soon.”

(Top photo: Maria Lysaker-USA TODAY Sports)