Rafa Marquez Suspended By Red Bulls After Critical Comments About Teammates

Ream is clearly not having a great season. Quite honestly, he is looking a lot more like a second-round pick out of St. Louis University than the guy who nearly won the MLS Rookie of the Year award. Unlike Marquez, though, he seems to be perfectly aware of this fact and there’s reason to believe he’ll do what he needs to do to get better.

Everyone in New York is frustrated with the state of things surrounding this club. Some have said Marquez has looked uninterested in playing this season and has battled a couple injuries along the way. Some questioned really how injured he was earlier this summer.

Saturday’s game could very well define the Red Bulls’ season. They are currently trailing the Timbers by one point for the final playoff spot and are in danger of missing the post-season, despite having a payroll that is almost five times as big as many of the teams in MLS. Marquez’s salary alone is more than their entire payroll of 15 of 18 MLS teams.

For more on Marquez’s situation, be sure to check out Once a Metro, SB Nation’s Red Bulls blog.

What started with people wondering aloud if the Red Bulls had assembled the greatest collection of talent in MLS history has unraveled to the point that missing the playoffs has become a very real possibility. If the regular-season ended today, in fact, the Red Bulls would be on the outside looking in. Even if the Red Bulls somehow manage to turn their season around, this season has clearly not gone according to plan.

After the game, he sounded very much like a player who was tired of the criticism, although he conveniently denied that he even heard the boos, let alone admitting that they got to him. In the process of telling Empire of Soccer that he actually thought he was playing pretty well, he made it clear that he didn’t think his teammates were meeting his level of excellence. He even called one of them out by name: