2025 MLS Season Previews: Portland, Charlotte, NYCFC

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Evander Evaded

By Matt Barger

Portland Timbers fans likely left 2024 with much higher expectations for the 2025 season. With an “unacceptable” five-nil loss to Vancouver in the Western Conference Play-in game, the Timbers capped a season that oversaw drastic improvements everywhere except the league table. The attack in particular added a monstrous 19 goals to 2023’s total, flipping a 2023 goal difference of -12 to a 2024 goal difference of +9. With a tightened defense to complement the fourth-strongest attack in MLS, Timbers fans could have expected a playoff run this year.

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2025 MLS Season Previews: New York Red Bulls, Colorado Rapids, Minnesota United

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A Sweet 16 (Consecutive Playoff Seasons) in Harrison?

By Ben Bellman

After setting an MLS record and clinching their 15th consecutive season in the playoffs, the Red Bulls shocked the Columbus Crew in two matches as a 7th seed (47 points) and made a run to their second MLS Cup appearance in 29 seasons. The team started hot with new coach Sandro Schwartz and star attacker Emil Forsberg but hit a mid-season lull when Forsberg was injured, earning 11 draws in 15 matches in one stretch. But once October hit, Schwartz brought the team back to their energy drink roots. Interrupting actions increased 25%-40% and passes dropped by 50% compared to their pre-October levels, and they rode that sufferball through Columbus, Queens, and Orlando to the final. 

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2025 MLS Season Previews: Atlanta United, Austin FC, Vancouver Whitecaps

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The Most Expensive Rebuild in League History

By Kieran Doyle 

Let’s get it out of the way right off the top. This is a tremendous amount of money to spend, and Atlanta better be good more or less right away, or there’s going to be a whole lot of pressure on Ronny Deila, Garth Lagerway, and Chris Henderson. Luckily for you, intrepid Five Stripes fan, they shouldn’t just be good, they should be really good. 

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2025 MLS Season Previews: St. Louis City, Philadelphia Union, Chicago Fire

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St. Louis, St. Losin’... Unless?

By Kieran Doyle-Davis

St. Louis City SC had a pretty gnarly 2024 season, after what felt like an exceptional 2023 maiden expansion season. We cautioned about the likely regression coming off the back of a season in which they posted the seventh highest xGD overperformance ever. Unfortunately, it came. St. Louis posted a -13 goal difference on a -10 expected goal difference in 2024, a far cry from the +18 GD-xGD of the 2023 season. More unfortunately, St. Louis also just played worse.

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2025 MLS Season Previews: Sporting Kansas City, New England Revolution, Nashville SC

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The only thing constant is change (and Peter Vermes): It is and yet it isn’t the same Sporting Kansas City

By Phil West

Andreu Fontàs, Tim Melia, Alan Pulido, and Johnny Russell aren’t quite as indelibly part of Sporting Kansas City as coach-for-life Peter Vermes, but they have been foundational pieces of the team, playing together the past five seasons. Fontàs and Russell started there in 2018, and Melia’s tenure with the team started in 2015. They’re all gone now, and up until Feb. 1, those exits were the biggest news of the SKC offseason. Certainly, if your team goes 12th, 8th, and 13th in the West over the past three seasons, it’s probably in need of a bit of shaking up. 

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2025 Season Previews: San Diego FC, San Jose Earthquakes, Toronto FC

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Stay Classy, San Diego. San Diego 2025

By Kieran Doyle-Davis

Previewing a team who has never played a competitive soccer game is always a difficult task. How are they going to play? How do the pieces fit together? Are the pieces good? Luckily in the case of San Diego FC, we have at least some thinking behind things. 

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Chemistry 101

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Chemistry 101

In a recent-ish podcast by The Transfer Flow podcast, host Ravi Ramineni made an off hand comment that while working for the Seattle Sounders, the team had noticed that they could switch out up to three of their regular starters for bench players in a given game without causing too much of a problem. Any more than that and they began to run into trouble as a team.

This idea has been covered before - see American Soccer Analysis’ prior article on the Curtin Theorem by Eliot McKinley and Mike Imburgio - but the specific mechanism in question remains a bit of a mystery.

The connection between players and their level of familiarity with each other as a whole is a very important piece of the decision making of coaches, but it’s hard to quantify in a meaningful way. There’s also usually a tension between the coaches’ lineup choices and the desires of the fans, who often see the players on the bench as more exciting. Is the emphasis on familiarity and connection that important? Can we measure that on-field chemistry?

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