The 2011 Portland Timbers season was the debut season for the Portland Timbers in Major League Soccer (MLS), the top flight professional soccer league in the United States and Canada. As the fourth incarnation of a professional soccer club to bear the Portland Timbers name, the MLS version of the Timbers began the 25th season in club history with three games on the road due to ongoing renovations to Jeld-Wen Field.

The club's first game was played at Dick's Sporting Goods Park versus Colorado Rapids on March 19, which the Timbers lost 3–1. The first MLS match in Portland was on April 14 when the Timbers bested the Chicago Fire by a scoreline of 4–2 in front of a sold-out crowd of 18,627 at newly renovated Jeld-Wen Field.

The building of the MLS Timbers began in earnest upon the completion of the 2010 MLS season on November 21, 2010. The very next day the club acquired midfielder/defender Jeremy Hall from New York Red Bulls in exchange for a third-round pick in the January SuperDraft and also traded allocation money to Los Angeles Galaxy in exchange for use of an international roster spot in the 2011 and 2012 seasons.

Two days after that, on November 24, 2010, the league conducted the 2010 MLS Expansion Draft which allowed both the Timbers and expansion cousins Vancouver Whitecaps to choose ten players each from those unprotected by their existing clubs. Portland drafted some players to keep, some players to trade, and some players to wait on in the future. In the expansion draft, the Timbers selected and kept five players: defender Eric Brunner (from Columbus Crew), midfielder Adam Moffat (Columbus), defender David Horst (Real Salt Lake), midfielder Peter Lowry (Chicago Fire), and defender Jordan Graye (D.C. United).

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