2025 MLS Season Preview Part 1: Learning From Last Year

What the 2024 season tells us about MLS teams now

This is part 1 of a multi-part season preview that aims to cover—at a very high level—every team in MLS going into the 2025 season.

Brief Introduction

I’m going to just lay my cards on the table. I’ve been a DC United fan for more than 20 years, so I know a lot about DC United and not a lot about other teams. This preview series is not going to provide deep insights into tactics, predictions about which teams are going to make the playoffs, who’s a lot better and who’s a lot worse, or anything like that. Unlike me, national MLS pundits like Matt Doyle, Tom Bogert, and David Gass do their best to watch tons of games and follow the whole league. What I know about other teams, I mostly learned from them, so for hot takes, you might as well go directly to the source. They’re doing their best at that very tough job.

What I'm trying to do here is something a little different. My goal, first and foremost for myself, but also for you the reader, is to learn what makes MLS teams different from each other so I can enjoy the games more.

When I sat down at Audi Field to watch DC play last season, beyond some vague sense of who was good or bad, I often had no idea what the strengths and weaknesses of the team I was watching were, how they liked to play, or who the important players were. I think only the hardest of hardcore fans could say they don't have this problem. The apple.tv broadcasts help a little bit when watching games from home, but except for a few teams, the knowledge of the announcers and pundits there is…let’s be nice and call it a mixed bag.

It wasn't always this way. Don’t get me wrong, the announcers have always been bad. But I've been watching MLS games long enough to remember when there were only ten teams, they played each other constantly, and it really was possible for a fan to know a lot about the frequent starters of all the teams. In almost every way, from stadium experience to quality of play, MLS back then was much worse than now, but in this one respect it was better: when I sat down to watch a game, I knew a lot not just about my team, but about the opponent as well.

For good or for bad, those days are behind us. With 30 teams, unless it's your full time job, it's simply not possible to know all the players. So failing that, I want to at least feel like I understand the big picture of the league and have information ready to hand so that when a game is about to start, I can quickly refamiliarize myself about the two teams and then feel more engaged watching the game.

My goal is that during the season, this newsletter will publish matchweek previews that briefly summarize team strengths, weaknesses, styles of play, and reminders about major storylines. Then, after the games, I’ll post a review of the results that tracks how teams are changing over time. But if I’m going to watch teams change, I need to have a sense of where they’re starting from, so that's what I’m going to lay out in these previews.

In today’s first part, I’m going to look back at team performances in 2024 to see how they played and how well they did. Then, in some follow-up posts, I'll do my best to come up with comprehensible summaries of the changes teams have made to their rosters, give special attention to the DP players since they're so important, and propose some storylines to follow for each team.

Somehow I want to get all that done before the season begins in less than two weeks. Wish me luck! I don't know the exact schedule for the next posts, but if you subscribe, you'll get them sent straight to your inbox.

With that out the way, let’s get into it.

Offense

We all want to see some goals scored when we watch an MLS game. Which teams are the best at doing this? We’ll get to some subtler things later, but this one isn’t rocket science. Even old-fashioned league tables often have a column for goals scored.

Although my approach to understanding teams that I've barely seen play is to leverage statistics wherever I can, soccer statistics can be hazy at best and deceptive at worst. I'm willing to add some subjectivity at carefully selected points where I think I can make judgments successfully.

The most important way I'm doing that in these previews is by grouping teams. I think it’s more helpful to say that an offense was one of several "Great" offenses rather than say it was 3rd in the league or that it scored 62 goals or that it scored 1.88 goals per game. All those other things are objective, true, but I think they can be hard to understand. If you scored 62 goals, okay, but how many goals do MLS teams typically score in the season? If a team is 3rd, was the 4th team just slightly worse or a lot worse? What about 2nd? Those questions can also be answered, but subjective groupings can save us a lot of effort, at the cost of just a little bit of subjectivity.

It’ll be easier to see this in action:

The data in the graph is objective, but I used my judgment to make the groupings indicated by the big font labels. I think those are self-explanatory, with the possible exception that although slightly above average is light green and slightly below average is light red, I grouped them all together as “Average”. Just because NYCFC and FC Dallas are slightly above average and DC United and Vancouver are slightly below doesn’t mean they aren’t more similar to each other than they are to better or worse teams respectively.

I don't think there's any big surprises here otherwise. If you follow the league at all, it's mostly the teams you expect at the top and the bottom. For example, if you take the top three finishers from each conference, you have five of the top six offenses.

The Portland Timbers and especially the Philadelphia Union are the exceptions in having lousy seasons despite having very good offenses. Ranking teams by goal difference also tracks pretty closely to finishing position for every team...except Portland and especially Philly. I think this means that they had a lot of close losses, but in wins, they both were better at "running up the score" into blowouts than most teams.

I have vague impressions from DC United's games against them that the Union play a high energy style and Portland likes sitting deep and counterattacking, so I’m tempted to spin a story here about how that enables each of them to really twist the knife on losing teams. But they aren’t the only teams that use each of those strategies. If Philly's style of play caused them to win more blowouts, I'd expect the Red Bulls to have a similar points/goal difference disparity, and it doesn't seem like they did. This is something we can keep an eye on in the 2025 season.

Since we're looking at 2024 as part of a 2025 preview, I should also mention here that MLS teams invest much more heavily in their offense than in other parts of the field, so these rankings ought to be even less stable from year to year than many of those below. In the next post in this preview, I’ll try to shed some light on that by looking at roster churn and investments.

Finally, I want to note I used goals scored as my metric here. That seems pretty obvious, but there's a competing stat: expected goals. You might argue that a good offense is one that consistently generates dangerous shots and therefore expected goals. Aren’t stats people always lecturing us that it’s getting to where you can make a dangerous shot that’s skillful, and that whether the ball actually goes in the net is just a matter of luck?

That's definitely true when looking at individual game expected goals and I think it’s probably true in leagues with more consistent talent distributions, but for MLS over the course of a season, I believe we’re better off looking at actual goals scored.

In MLS, some players consistently over-perform or under-perform their expected goals. In 2024, this was an especially important factor because two of the top three xG over-performers were on the same team: Lionel Messi (8 more non-penalty goals scored than expected) and Luis Suárez (6.6 more non-penalty goals scored than expected). Simply in xG terms, Inter Miami’s offense was 9th in the league, but in real goals they had the best offense by a mile. Is that dumb luck and they could just as easily under-perform if we played the season again? Or are Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez really, really good at soccer? If you’re sitting down to watch an Inter Miami game, I think goals scored tells you more about what might be about to happen than expected goals.

Defense

That discussion of expected goals and actual goals applies to defense as well, so I’ll focus on goals actually scored instead of expected goals allowed or other defensive stats. Here’s how it comes out:

Again there are clear groupings here, at least until you get to the really good and bad defenses. They’re not quite the same groups as I used for offenses, but I think it’s better to match the distribution closely than to be consistent across categories. The distinctive feature here is that it turns out there were 11 teams who gave up almost the same number of goals.

Maybe the most noticeable thing here is that several of the best defenses are paired with poor, or at least below-average, offenses. Maybe this is a coincidence, but it makes me wonder if Seattle, Charlotte, and Houston are achieving good defensive results more by playing conservatively than by having incredible defenders or coaches who are masters of defensive tactics.

I'm hoping to look closer at DPs in a later post in this series, but I’ve done most of that research already and it's worth mentioning here that only two teams in the league are using a DP slot on centerbacks in 2025. Those two players were playing in 2024 as well…but you wouldn't ever be able to guess which teams they played for from this chart.

It would be interesting to look at overall spend on defenders to see if there's any correlation, but I probably won't be able to do that before the season. What I can say right now is Columbus and LAFC managed to get into the "great" bucket while still enjoying high-powered, expensive attacks. That suggests to me that MLS teams are right when they try to moneyball their way to defensive solidity.

Goalkeeping

To evaluate goalkeeping, I'm using the advanced statistic often referred to as "shotstopping" or "goals prevented" but which is more technically called "post-shot expected goals minus goals allowed". Post-shot expected goals looks at shots on target and based on where they are ending up, along with some other situational factors, it estimates how likely the shot is to score. Compare that to actual goals scored and the difference, over a large enough sample, is down to the goalkeeper.

That’s the theory anyway.

Like all advanced stats, this is a fuzzy approximation of what we actually care about. It doesn't capture every bit of context about a shot. It doesn't even aspire to measure other valuable goalkeeping skills like aerial command of the box, passing ability that can help the team build out of the back, and so on.

But traditional goalkeeping stats like save percentage and clean sheet count are noisy to the point of being useless, so this is the best we’ve got.

Fans of the US national team are worried about a deficit in goalkeeping talent, but here in MLS, it was a good year for domestic goalkeepers. In 2023, St. Louis’ Roman Bürki and San Jose Earthquakes' Daniel led the league in this statistic, but in 2024 their performance slipped and...well, okay, Charlotte's Kristijan Kahlina rose to the top and is also a foreign goalkeeper. But Houston's Steve Clark and Austin's Brad Stuver are Americans who’ve spent their career in MLS.

The fact that Bürki and Daniel's shotstopping declined in seasons where the team in front of them just so happened to also be worse is more evidence the shotstopping statistic isn’t all about the goalkeeper, in my opinion. DC United's Alex Bono also had a worse season with a worse defense in front of him, and since I watched those games, I feel comfortable saying that although Bono certainly wasn’t amazing, he sure wasn't being done any favors by his defense.

But since our goal is ultimately to start watching an MLS game with a sense for what to expect, I still think this statistic captures something pretty important about how well the defense and goalkeeper together keep shots out of the back of the net.

By the way, I recently wrote a lot more about this stat and how it relates to success in MLS in a long article about DC United’s goalkeeping; if you’re a fan of another team you might still find it interesting, you can just skim past the stuff specifically about DC’s new goalkeepers.

Late Season Performance

One reason these 2024 rankings of teams won't be a perfect guide to 2025 is that, even before we talk about roster changes in the offseason, teams were changing during the year in 2024. Coaches made adjustments, players gained cohesion with each other, young players got better, players suffered from injuries, and players recovered from injuries. And maybe most importantly, there's always a decent amount of player movement in the midseason transfer window.

Maybe I should have looked at team performance after the transfer window closed, but the number of games varied from team to team. I decided to look at the points per game each team earned in their last 11 games, which is basically the last third of the season, and compare that against the first 23 games:

Wow, look at DC United up there! So impressive! What a coincidence that I, a DC United fan, picked this odd-sounding 11 game boundary that lined up perfectly for when DC's results suddenly improved!

Yeah, okay, fine, it's not a coincidence. This article comes out of research I was doing for my DC United newsletter. But…just let me have this one. The exact values aren't critical here anyway since I’m doing the grouping.

I’m looking at this now to see who might be better or worse in 2025 than their overall 2024 results might indicate, but you might also think this would apply to the playoffs. For decades, MLS fans have talked hopefully about "getting hot late in the season" and winning MLS Cup. At least in 2024, this didn’t turn out to correlate with playoff success. LA Galaxy won MLS Cup after going into the playoffs doing well, but they'd been doing well for much of the season by that point. The other team in the finals, the Red Bulls, did get hot at the right time, but that time was literally the playoffs. At the end of the regular season they lost four of their last six games!

Which is a better guide to how well the Red Bulls will play in 2025: the last 11 games of the regular season, or the four playoff games they won (three if you don't count their shootout win) before losing MLS Cup?

I don’t know enough to venture even a guess. And to be honest, the correct answer might well be neither, given their transfer activity. But again, we’ll get into that next time.

Set Piece Offense

“They’d better watch out, their opponent is really dangerous on set pieces!” How many times have I heard announcers talk about this over the years? So this seemed like something important to capture, but I almost didn’t include it in this article.

Why not? First, according to FBref’s Goal-Creating Action metrics, the Union led the league with 11 goals on set pieces. 11 goals is a good number, I guess, but...it’s not that many? I expected whoever led the league tohave more. Everyone agrees that DC United’s Christian Benteke is the league’s best target forward, but DC scored 10 goals on set pieces. That’s enough to tie them for second behind Philly, but it was less than one fifth of their goals!

Then there’s the fact that, partly because of the sample size being so low, there’s not clear places to group teams for this. But I did it anyway, so here it is:

Comparing each team against the average makes this a bit hard to read, but for the best team, the Union, this is saying that they scored off a set piece once every three games (0.16 more than the average of 0.16, so 0.32 goals per game).

A goal every three games feels pretty significant to how a fan should feel watching them get ready to take free kicks and why I decided to include this. In contrast, the Fire and the Red Bulls got just a single goal on free kicks the entire season.

There’s some caveats here, though. This is what FBref counts as “goal-creating actions” of the type “dead-ball pass”. That includes free kicks and corners, but only so long as no more than one other “action” takes place before the goal is scored. If there’s two passes, or a pass and then someone beating someone on the dribble before shooting, it won’t count. And despite what you might think seeing Miami up there, it doesn’t count direct free kicks.

Sorry Miami fans, I know I should have included direct free kicks, but it was going to be too time-consuming to separate them from penalty kicks, and to me those should be in a different category. Maybe I’ll revisit this during the season.

Set Piece Defense

Do we need to look at this? Shouldn’t being good at set piece offense naturally carry over to being good at set piece defense? I really thought it would. But…apparently not!

Vancouver and Philadelphia were consistent here, good at both offense and defense. But DC United was pretty poor for a team that has the league’s top two players in aerial duels won. The Red Bulls couldn’t score on free kicks, but apparently they did a good job defending.

Since I watched DC United games and recently wrote about their defensive issues in 2024 in exhaustive detail for my newsletter, I rewatched the goals scored against them and saw each of those free kick goals being scored. Why weren’t their impressive aerial duelists (Christian Benteke and Lucas Bartlett) defending better? Mostly, they were defending fine, but opposing teams…kicked the ball to the players they weren’t marking. How rude! There’s also a lot of American football-style “plays” where people are setting picks and and using misdirection to get open. In short, this seems like a team quality that is fairly independent from set piece offense.

That’s what it looks like, anyway. Alternatively, maybe the sample size is just too low and too much random noise is creeping in? We’ll see how this goes in 2025.

Age

Roster age seems like an important statistic, but even after adjusting for minutes played, I had some concerns. Age means such different things for different positions that it seemed crazy to mix it all together. The difference between a 27-year-old winger and a 32 year-old winger feels hugely significant, but less significant for a centerback and a lot less significant for a goalkeeper.

But there’s very strong differences among the teams here and I think they’re illuminating:

I’m not sure I needed quite so many gradations of “young”, but the teams at the top and bottom really do seem very extreme in a way that reflects clear roster-building philosophies. I’m not yet in a position to say anything definitive about roster spend, but both the very young and the very old teams have a whiff of being, uh, a bit cheap? It makes sense that teams that are trying to do more with less either end up leaning heavily on young, cheap players, or else riding their existing rosters past the sell-by date.

Next time we’ll look at who is shaking up that dynamic. CF Montreal and LAFC have made some major changes to their rosters, for example, whereas Portland and NYCFC are mostly bringing back the same players.

One surprise for me was Inter Miami. I think of them as being a very old team. Messi and Suárez were both 37 by the end of the 2024 season! I had a vague impression the team surrounded Messi and his friends with young guys who then had to do all the running, but I was surprised to find this was done to the point that their average age is a full year younger than four other teams. Messi missing a bunch of time to injury might have “helped” here, too.

Possession Style

When I think of MLS teams with a distinctive playing style, I’m probably not the only one who thinks of the New York Red Bulls. And the first thing that comes to mind when I think of them is an aggressive defense that presses all over the field.

They really did play like that in days past, but lately no one, not even the Red Bulls, plays in such an extreme style. Pressing is situational, and even the most relaxed teams will sometimes step forward for a certain trigger. That in turn makes it harder to distinguish different choices when casually watching a game.

I hoped there would be stats that could help, but unfortunately, this seems hard to spot in publicly available statistics. MLS-employed pundits will sometimes quote statistics like “passes per defensive action” that sound perfect, but as far as I know these aren’t available to the public.

The best I can do is chart something that isn’t the same, but is somewhat related, and that’s how “patient” teams are in the buildup. Teams playing like the Red Bulls are often very direct, storming forward with less concern about losing the ball since they will already be in position to contest it high the way they want.

There are a couple ways to get to this in available statistics. I chose the average number of attempted passes in a game:

I think this is pretty good since I see the Red Bulls, Union, and DC United in the “very direct” bucket, while Inter Miami (with a bunch of very old players who are incredibly skilled) is up in the “very patient” category.

On the other hand, was San Jose intentionally playing direct or were they just, um, bad? No idea. There seems to be at least a weak correlation with bad teams and direct play here, but LAFC and Colorado were quite good and still come out as direct.

Building Out of the Back

Another famous difference between teams is that some of them hit goal kicks up to the forwards and some try to move out of the back with short passes. Once again, teams usually aren’t at the complete extremes, but there are useful patterns:

Okay, teams usually aren’t at the extremes, but then there’s DC United. They almost always kicked it long to Christian Benteke. Still, even they played it short about ten percent of the time.

There’s a lot of similarity at the top here with the possession style chart we were just looking at, but there was enough variation I thought this was still worth including. The three Eastern Conference high-energy teams are at the bottom, but teams like Charlotte and San Jose are in the middle despite being considered very direct.

The correlation between bad teams and kicking it long is a bit stronger than it was for direct/patient, but the Red Bulls, Minnesota, and Colorado all got past the play-in game kicking long more often than not.

The Big Picture

Having run through all that, we can now throw all this stuff into a single, eye-melting table and see what conclusions we can draw.

What does it take to succeed in MLS? At least in 2024, it wasn't great goalkeeping. A team’s defense needed to be at least decent, but great defense wasn't essential either. On the other hand, every team at the top of the standings had a good offense.

An admission: I’ve always assumed that MLS teams overinvest in attacking players because attackers are more exciting for casual fans and thus are better for ticket sales, or maybe because goals and assists are just easier to measure than what other positions do, but now I’m starting to think this is simply the correct rational calculation. If you can only spend big on a couple players, it seems like attacking talent is the best way to win more games.

Nothing else has a strong correlation. LA Galaxy won MLS Cup and finished second in the west while being bad at both set piece offense and defense. LAFC won the West with an “old” roster while Real Salt Lake finished just two spots behind them with a “young” roster. And although as mentioned previously there’s definitely some correlation with team success and playing styles, I think the causal arrow mostly goes from being good to playing patient, build-from-the-back soccer, not the other way around.

I actually think it’s great that the correlations with season success are weak in so many of these categories. MLS teams are hard enough to tell apart as it is. The last thing we want is more reasons for them all to behave the same! There's not just one right way to build your roster or play the game on the field in MLS, so different teams can potentially succeed with different styles and approaches. That makes things more fun.

Although I used the blue colors for it, all things being equal, I do think having an older roster is a disadvantage and something to consider next time when we look at roster churn. There’s exceptions, but the best teams seem to be near the average. A young roster will slowly become average age with no intervention, but an old one needs active work from the front office to refresh it.

Wrapping Up

It feels weird to have written a huge post about 2025 that was entirely about 2024, but hopefully it will make more sense when I get to the next part in this series. That one will try to make sense of the many ways teams have changed since 2024: coaching changes, roster turnover, and transfer spending. Again, the goal is not to teach a team’s fans new things about their team, but to bring the big picture of the league into focus.

My goal is to have that out in a couple days, but there’s not an exact schedule. If you subscribe, you’ll get it dropped in your email once it’s ready.