After the First Third of the 2025 Season, What's Not Working for DC United?

Nervously eyeing the panic button

Expectations…

In my multi-part DC United season preview a few months ago, I was wise enough not to make any specific predictions, but I did strike a somewhat more positive note than many other online fans. I thought that going into the season with only one Designated Player meant title contention or any kind of deep playoff run would be off the table, but I still expected at least a little improvement from 2024. A low ceiling but a higher floor, basically.

Why be optimistic at all? Two fundamental reasons:

• Back in 2024, the team had ups and downs but it felt like Lesesne was constantly struggling with a roster that made no sense. Not enough depth in central midfield and centerback, old players in a system that prioritized youthful energy, and no starting left back or wingback. In the off-season, it seemed like Ally Mackay corrected all these glaring roster construction defects.

• During the big turnover between 2024 and 2025, the roster got a lot younger. I thought these young players would be a better fit for the system, and also that most young players already on the roster (e.g. Pirani, Peltola, Murrell, Tubbs, Enow) would get at least a little better.

Against this, there were two arguments for DC being worse:

• Matuesz Klich provided a lot of the offensive creativity. All of that would have to be replaced just for the offense to stay the same. Without litigating all that again, by the end of last season I had convinced myself (and apparently Mackay did as well) that the team would be better without him

• Even if DC was a little better, each year MLS gets better, and maybe DC wasn’t keeping pace

Now we’ve seen 12 regular season games and…the team is worse than they were at the same time last season and on pace for fewer points. What’s gone wrong?

You could imagine some very simple answers to this question like “Benteke got a season-ending injury”, but I wanted to dig into this because I don’t think it’s all that easy to explain:

• On the surface, the roster construction really does look better to me, though I failed to anticipate the winger depth problem

• In my slightly educated opinion, the rest of the league hasn’t gotten much better than 2024 and, actually, might well be worse on average

• While none of them are amazing, many of Ally Mackay’s offseason acquisitions are meeting expectations (Peglow, Rowles) or even somewhat over-performing (Kijima, Servania)

…Reality

In preseason, I wrote that DC United’s 2024 season can be broken cleanly into three phases:

• First 12 games of 2024: 4-5-3, 17 points, 19 GF, 19 GA

• Next 11 games of 2024: 0-3-8, 3 points, 11 GF, 28 GA

• Last 11 games of 2024: 6-2-3, 20 points, 22 GF 23 GA

It’s a big coincidence that team’s massive midseason downturn in form lined up so beautifully with the end of the first 12 games, which in turn is as a good a definition of 1/3 of the season as you’re going to get with a 34-game season.

I mention this because now we can add another twelve games to this comparison:

• First 12 games of 2024: 4-5-3, 17 points, 19 GF, 19 GA

• Next 11 games of 2024: 0-3-8, 3 points, 11 GF, 28 GA

• Last 11 games of 2024: 6-2-3, 20 points, 22 GF 23 GA

• First 12 games of 2025: 3-3-6, 12 points, 13 GF, 25 GA

First, there’s a warning implicit to this: 2025 isn’t going well, but it could still go a lot worse if the team trends sharply downward in the middle 11 like they did last season.

Second, the record so far this season looks kind of like the first third of 2024…but five points worse due to three extra losses. The goal difference, on the other hand, looks pretty close to the bad middle stretch.

So what’s going on here?

Goalkeeping

We’ll quickly start with goalkeeping. Ultimately DC’s goalkeepers would post poor numbers in shotstopping for the season as a whole, but in the first third of the 2024 season, Alex Bono allowed 19 goals on 21.24 post-shot expected goals for a very respectable net +2.24. That would be around 8th in the league this season. Later in the year, his numbers would slip, however.

This year, though, DC is at -2.3, second to last in shotstopping. In 7 games, Kim Joon Hong was at -1.4 and in five games Luis Barraza is at -0.9 (almost identical in per 90 terms). This is a high-variance stat so it could partially be bad luck as opposed to just a straightforward story of two bad goalkeepers (Kim would be well into the positives if not for a single really bad game against San Jose). What’s definitely bad luck is that DC’s opponent goalkeepers are collectively at a very high +4.4. You’d think that would come down over the course of the season. Last year across the entire season opponents were +5.4, so even if some DC offensive incompetence is leaking in there somehow, the pace this season seems unsustainable.

I don’t think goalkeeping is the big issue, but it sure isn’t helping.

Defense: Formation

There aren’t great public advanced stats about defense and I don’t have time this week to calculate goals blamed for this season so far, but we know that formation—specifically the number of centerbacks—has been a big issue.

Last season, when David Schnegg arrived midseason, Troy Lesesne switched to four at the back, lost 3-4 to FC Dallas, and then Schnegg was injured for almost the entire rest of the season and DC returned to playing three in the back. “Sure seemed like the defense was shaky playing that way,” I thought, but with a whole preseason to work on it, surely it would work better this season…

Instead, after 7 games playing with two centerbacks and three straight losses, Lesesne has given up again and switched again to three centerbacks. The sample sizes are getting a little small but here’s the breakdown:

• First 7 of 2025: 1-3-3: 6 points, 9 GF, 17 GA

• Last 5 of 2025: 2-0-3: 6 points, 4 GF, 8 GA

It’s not an enormous improvement, but points and goals allowed are definitely trending better in the last five games, matching the eye test.

But the offense is worse.

There are a lot of conflating factors here, like Benteke and Peglow missing time and the varying opponent quality, but I think one story here is that Lesesne is struggling to balance the needs of the offense and the defense. He wants to help the offense both by adjusting the formation to add attackers and by aggressively pushing wingbacks and even outside centerbacks forward, but so far this aggression seems like it has harmed the defense more than it has helped the offense. This is not ideal.

Offense: Benteke

In my preseason article, I noted I looked through a lot of stats and the key distinction between the different parts of 2024 seemed to be Benteke’s output, so let’s see how that’s looking:

• First 12 games of 2024: 19 goals (11 Benteke goals, 8 non-Benteke goals)

• Next 11 games of 2024: 11 goals (3 Benteke goals, 8 non-Benteke goals)

• Last 11 games of 2024: 22 goals (9 Benteke goals, 13 non-Benteke goals)

• First 12 games of 2025: 13 goals (6 Benteke goals, 7 non-Benteke goals)

Benteke has missed some time due to injury this season, playing 899 minutes (almost exactly 10 games worth) but coincidentally, in the first 12 games of 2024 he played…896 minutes. Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

• Benteke first 12 games of 2024: 11 goals, 36 shots, 18 on target, 8.8 xG, 8.0 npxG

• Benteke first 12 games of 2025: 6 goals, 44 shots, 22 on target, 7.3 xG, 5.8 npxG

So there’s two differences here. First is that in the comparable period, Benteke over-performed his non-penalty expected goals by three (plus he scored one penalty). This season he’s under-performed by 0.8 (plus one penalty). I think it’s reasonable to say he was a bit lucky last year, but also he’s 2.2 non-penalty expected goals behind where he was at this time last season.

One other Benteke difference I should mention is that last season at this time he had won an insane 135 aerial duels in 12 games. This season he is merely dominating the league with 70 (second place has 42). He’s still winning about the same percentage of them (70%) but Lesesne is no longer having the team (especially the goalkeepers) play long balls up to his head all the time. I prefer the team to try to play prettier soccer so I’m not upset about this, but it might have been better for both the offense and the defense to be more crude about this last season.

Offense: Shot Creation

Since I think we all can see the offense hasn’t looked very dynamic this year, I took a look at my preferred advanced statistic for this, shot-creating actions. Overall, at this time last season, the team had 306 SCA whereas in 2025 they have just 196. That’s a big dropoff! What’s happened?

If you remember my preseason articles, you’ll remember that the team’s 2024 leader in SCA/90 was Mateusz Klich with 5.20. Leaguewide this isn’t a hugely impressive figure; last season three players (Thiago Almada, Lucho Acosta, and Carles Gil) got above 7.00. But Klich was 13th in the league in 2024.

In my preseason article about this, I noted a lot of this came from dead balls, and I thought surely someone else could look good hitting balls into Christian Benteke this season. Last year after twelve games DC as a team had 38 dead-ball SCA, whereas now they have 25. So: not as good, and qualitatively I’ve definitely noticed the corners and free kicks have suffered without Klich taking them. But a lot of the team’s dropoff is nevertheless coming from the run of play.

Could someone else be at fault? I thought maybe I’d see a big drop-off from Jared Stroud in these numbers, but he has 21 SCA vs. 25 after 12 games last season. In expected terms he ought to have 2 assists but has 0, whereas last season he was expected to have 3.5 and instead had 6 assists. If we dismiss that as being lucky, then he’s declined a bit, but nothing dramatic.

Other players seem fairly even when making some rough equivalences (Peglow is posting about the same SCA Pirani did in the same position last season, David Schnegg is similar to where Pedro Santos and Cristian Dájome were, etc.).

One exception: as reserve wingers, Jacob Murrell and Dominique Badji do seem to be a clear step down in this measure from last season’s (variously) Pirani, Ted Ku-Dipietro, Pedro Santos, and Cristian Dájome. This is probably the team’s biggest overall roster construction issue, but I put it with goalkeeping: it sure isn’t helping, but I don’t think it’s the biggest problem.

No, the biggest difference is in the middle of the park. Matti Peltola has 8 SCA, Boris Enow has 11, Brandon Servania has 14, and Hosei Kijima (including time spent at winger) has 23. That’s 56 total from central midfielders. At this time last season, Mateusz Klich, by himself, had 68. More than all of them combined. Okay, okay, he was taking dead balls and these guys aren’t, but taking those out, he still had 45. I suspect that’s still more than all of them combined if I went through the trouble of subtracting Kijima’s winger SCA.

For the first part of the season, you could argue Gabriel Pirani should be taking on some of that responsibility. He managed just 19 SCA from his more advanced position, much better in per 90 terms than the other central midfielders but still nowhere near enough. And meanwhile David Schnegg, Aaron Herrera, Peglow, and Jared Stroud are just holding serve on the wings, they haven’t improved much going forward compared to last year’s team.

Now if DC’s central midfielders were Tyler Adams-style defensive monsters who were making life extremely difficult for the opposition’s office, it might be a good trade to giving up some creativity but…uh…they aren’t doing that. Despite these offensive struggles, DC’s defense is hardly fearsome, it’s posting worst-in-the-league numbers.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Mateusz Klich has racked up—um—5 SCA. Yeah…5. Five. He’s missed time, but he’s still got just 1.0 SCA per 90, worse on a per 90 basis than all of DC United’s central midfielders. I know, I know, It’s a different team, with a different coach, a different system, different attackers in front of him, and different problems (that are probably even more severe: Atlanta still has fewer points than DC despite eye-watering spending in the offseason).

Still, it’s possible that the Klich “trade” was one of those moves that makes both teams worse. Or it’s possible that Klich, who will turn 35 next month, simply is at his expiration date as a midfielder. Or he just wants to be back in Poland and isn’t motivated anymore. If either of those is an issue, he might have been just as bad if he' stayed. Or maybe Lesesne’s passion would be firing him up and getting the most out of him, whereas Ronny Deila does nothing for him. Who knows?

Conclusion: Could This Get Better?

Can the season be salvaged and DC claw it’s way up to the play-in game? The odds are looking long, but you can’t count anyone out in MLS. How could it happen?

First, some bench players might help provide an injection of creativity. Randall Leal and Fidel Barajas each have sky-high SCA/90 numbers (7.61 and 6.67 respectively) but this is based on 6 and 2 actual shots created since they’ve seen so little time. For reference, Hakim Karamoko is even higher with 9.0 SCA/90 because he’s played so few MLS minutes, and after watching him in the Open Cup, yeah, I don’t think he’s the answer. Leal is clearly the most promising if he stay healthy and play enough defense for Lesesne to let him on the field.

Second, one of Enow, Pelotla, or Kijima could just…get better. I’ve found this hard to remember myself, but young player development isn’t linear. Part of developing players is enduring some uneven or just plain bad performances en route to growth. If they keep getting playing time, maybe something will click for them. Brandon Servania isn’t young anymore, really, but he’s still coming off a ton of missed time and might improve more as well. You can also throw Gabriel Pirani into this category when he’s healthy, and Fidel Barajas if he sticks around.

Third, it’s a long way until the midseason transfer window opens, but when it does, some kind of creative DP could go a long way towards helping this situation, though the leaguewide hit-rate on players like that remains iffy at best.

And finally, it’s possible that a different coach could find a better way to put these players together. Certainly most teams seem to have far superior rest defense with two central defenders than DC does. But midseason coaching changes rarely result in lasting improvement, not during the same season at least, but if DC’s results don’t improve we might get a chance to see what someone else can figure out.

With two games a week for the rest of May (including the Open Cup), it’s sink or swim time for Troy Lesesne and DC United.