DC United Season Preview Part 1: The Big Picture

Ally Mackay finally has his roster in place. Almost.

The long road of the 2025 MLS season started on Saturday for DC United players as they assembled at the team’s training complex. By now, they are in Florida for the first phase of their training camp. There may still be a few moves, but after a massive amount of turnover there are 24 rostered players. This is a good time to take stock of how the team looks going into the season.

If you’ve read my game recaps you know I like going into detail, so instead of one wall of text I’m going to break up the preview into four, uh, slightly smaller walls of text. Today, we’ll talk about the big picture. Then in three more posts that are coming soon, we’ll look at the goalkeepers, the defense, and the offense.

Is Everything Still Dave Kasper’s Fault?

Ally Mackay replaced Dave Kasper as DC United’s general manager on November 20, 2023 and cleaned house, hiring an entirely new front office. Unfortunately, he found himself saddled with a lot of terrible guaranteed contracts that the previous regime signed in earlier seasons. I assume he knew roughly what he was getting into, but it still must have been wince-inducing to go through DC’s books and see how many underachieving players he was stuck with. One of the coaching candidates he considering hiring was reported to have said Mackay thought the 2024 season was hopeless and was focused on 2025 and beyond. As it turned out, DC was a playoff bubble team in 2024 thanks to MLS’ very forgiving playoff system, but the bubble burst and left them on the outside looking in when the season ended.

Only a few days later, DC announced that all of the pre-Mackay players with expiring contracts or club-held options were being let go. Christian Benteke and Ted Ku-DiPietro had gotten extensions earlier in the season and Gabriel Pirani’s loan was turned into a full transfer in one of Mackay’s first transactions; those were the only players extended from the previous era.

That just left aging DP Mateusz Klich and youth prospects Matai Akinmboni and Jackson Hopkins as the only players left on pre-Mackay contracts. Fast forward to today: Klich has been traded to Atlanta (much more on that below) and Akinmboni was sold to Bournemouth, so it’s just Hopkins who’s left. Like Ku-Dipietro, Hopkins has looked promising, but not nearly good enough that anyone wants to buy him for big money, so retaining him is fine. If Mackay didn’t like Hopkins, another team would have traded a small amount for him, so I think it’s safe to say that this is now Mackay’s roster.

So if the roster isn’t good enough this year, that’s definitely Mackay’s fault, right?

Not so fast.

Designated Player Problems

The most important players of an MLS team’s roster and the centerpiece of its team-building strategy are its Designated Players. DPs can be paid any amount of money and only count against the salary cap as if they were a low-end veteran. Teams can have up to three DPs. For years, DC United’s owners weren’t willing to use all of its DP slots, provoking a lot of very justified complaints from fans.

You’ll still see fans complain about ownership being cheap, but when it comes to the roster, this is outdated. Since Audi Field and the training center were finished and their associated cash flow burdens removed, DC United has been solidly middle of the pack in league spending. DC’s spending doesn’t compete with the six or so teams who spend hand-over-fist, teams like Inter Miami and Atlanta United, but roster spend—past a minimum—only loosely correlates with winning in MLS, so DC’s spending level is enough to compete for championships.

Since I just committed the sin (in some corners of the fanbase) of defending DC’s ownership, surely they have three DPs going into this season, right?

Alas, they have only one. At least it’s a very good one: reigning Golden Boot forward Christian Benteke.

What’s going on? Let’s jump back to the beginning of 2024. Ally Mackay inherited a team with two DPs, Benteke and Klich, and very little salary cap space. Benteke’s contract was up at the end of the year, and Klich’s was as well…pending certain incentives. Mackay temporarily designated his newly acquired defensive midfielder Matti Peltola a young DP as a cap maneuver, knowing he could free up the slot at the end of the season. That, along with the expiring contracts of the other two, could set him up for a clean slate of DP slots to use for 2025.

But some funny things happened along the way. First, Benteke had a massive season, singlehandedly keeping DC nationally relevant, not to mention in the playoff hunt, by scoring a league-leading 23 goals. When you add in his 5 assists, he had nearly one goal contribution per game. Exactly what you want out of a DP player!

Christian Benteke was 33, and theoretically a huge target forward isn’t the perfect fit for Lesesne’s running-heavy style, but Benteke’s health has been really good (he started 30 and 31 games in his last two seasons) and instead of insisting on the team sticking to a rigid system, Lesesne proved willing to build gameplans around Benteke’s record-setting ability to win balls in the air. Sort of like NFL teams picking quarterbacks in the first round, MLS teams frequently end up with busts despite putting in a ton of research. It’s enormously unlikely that a replacement DP would be as good as Benteke. Instead of holding out for someone who could be “his guy”, Mackay did the right thing and extended Benteke’s contract. The old regime likely would have extended him through age 57, but thankfully Mackay added just one guaranteed year. Age is undefeated in the long run, so if Benteke has health or form problems in 2025, the team can move on in 2026.

That left Klich as the other DP. Klich is a midfielder with a few really good attributes: he’s an outstanding free kick taker and was the team’s most creative player. His 5.2 shot-creating actions per 90 minutes was 13th overall in the league and led the team by a huge margin. Unfortunately, his defense was adequate at best, and it often was not at its best. In particular, at age 33 he couldn’t cover much ground in midfield. To be really successful in MLS, he would need a gameplan that’s built around his strengths and accounts for his weaknesses.

The problem is DC already had such a gameplan, but it was built around Benteke. A forward who can’t cover much ground is workable if everyone else is running. A midfielder who can’t cover much ground is a big problem under almost any system in the modern game. And even though Klich had all those shot-creating actions, he only ended up with a paltry 5 assists.

How did MLS journeyman Jared Stroud score more goals and tally more assists in fewer minutes than a DP who came to DC United from the Premier League? Well, Stroud lumped crosses in from the sideline to Benteke, the league’s greatest aerial threat, and he occasionally scored by making hard runs into the penalty area. Klich is a much more creative passer than Stroud, but his creativity manifests in setting up players making runs around the backline. On DC United, unfortunately, players not named Benteke were the ones making the runs, and no one besides Benteke was good enough to reliably score. And for goals, well, DC let in a bunch of goals because Klich didn’t make a hard run back to defend, and he wasn’t making many of those hard runs on offense either. Both of his goals in 2024 were scored from the penalty spot.

Based on all this, it made sense to move on from Klich. The problem: Klich’s contract became guaranteed through 2025 due to some kind of minutes-played or game appearances incentive. Yikes. You have to wonder: did Mackay and Lesesne know about that clause in Klich’s contract and play him anyway, hoping to squeak into the playoffs with his help? Or because he deserved to play and it was the right thing to do not to let contract terms impact his playing time? Or…did no one know about that contract clause—negotiated by the previous regime—until he hit the incentive and his agent made a triumphant phone call?

We may never know.

EDIT (1/14/25): Matt in the comments points out that reporting at the time, such as this tweet from Tom Bogert, indicated that the games played clause was for 2023, not 2024, so there’s definitely no way Mackay and Lesesne could have avoided hitting the clause. Oops! I still think this played out in an odd way that raises questions about whether the front office was aware of this. As late as his story published October 21st, Steven Goff was under the impression that Klich would only be back in 2025 if the club exercised its club-held option. Tom Bogert’s tweet that the contract was actually guaranteed was October 23rd. I didn’t find all reporting but I think that’s the right timeline. There aren’t a ton of reporters covering MLS so maybe DC knew the whole time, but no one asked, and when season wrap-up articles were written someone on the team started correcting people. But usually Goff is very accurately sourced on MLS contracts. I can’t find it right now, but I’m almost positive the mid-2024 contract report from MLS listed Klich’s contract as being up in 2024 with a club-held 2025 option, so at least someone at the MLS mothership was confused. Anyway, back to the article…

In the meantime, if you doubt whether Mackay agrees with my analysis of Klich above, or general managers across MLS for that matter, you have only to look at the Atlanta trade. DC didn’t give him up for nothing…but it was close. DC is still paying nearly all of his salary and he still occupies his DC United DP slot for 2025. Atlanta gave DC $300K in cap relief and a draft pick that DC sold to Toronto for another $50K. That’s enough to defray the salary hit from a DP, so as far as the salary cap goes, it’s like Klich isn’t even here.

But man, that DP slot…ouch.

That’s two DPs, but DC has one more slot. If the owners were willing to spend, Mackay could have used it, but elected not to do so. Not using it means they get an extra U22 initiative slot and $2 million in GAM. If you aren’t familiar with the oddities of the MLS roster system, suffice to say, not using the DP slot gives them a lot more roster flexibility, especially for young players.

My guess is that Mackay’s reasoning went something like the following: Because of both the Klich DP situation and the overall roster still being a work in progress, DC wasn’t in a position to compete for a championship in 2025 (more on whether that’s true below). So what’s going to put them in a good position for 2026? More young players who have the chance to develop into stars, or at least strong performers, at reasonable salary cap charges. That raises the floor of the roster, and then after the 2025 season there’s between two and three empty DP slots (depending on whether Benteke looks like he’s got another great season in him) to power the club to championship contention. Since DC’s owners have limits to their spending power, this keeps their powder dry for when it’s really needed. The summer transfer window is also a better time to acquire DPs than winter. DC could acquire one this summer, or potentially even two since it’s easier to use MLS roster tricks on half-season contracts.

Wait, if money doesn’t buy championships in MLS, why can’t we win MLS Cup with only two DPs on the field?

I actually thought we could and that there were some recent examples of this. The only problem, I thought, was that it was hard for DC to attract “really should be DP” players. Zlatan Ibrahimovic initially was on a non-DP contract for LA and Luis Suárez still isn’t a DP for Inter Miami. LA and Miami get away with crap like that because old stars want to live in those cities (young stars also really want to play with Messi, which has made Miami’s U22 slots unusually valuable). DC doesn’t have that kind of pull, I thought, but otherwise…

Then I did some research and changed my mind. You really need three DPs to have a good chance of winning.

Let’s look at the last five MLS Cup winners and their DP situation:

Each champion won with three DPs except LAFC, who had two. Sort of. They briefly had three when they added Denis Bouanga midseason, but then sold Brian Rodriguez, a disappointing young DP, to Club America in the same transfer window. They also signed Gareth Bale in that window to a contract structured so that he wasn’t a DP in 2022, but would be the following season if he could be bothered to play after the World Cup (as it turned out, he couldn’t and retired after the season).

I think it’s also worth noting that it’s not just that four of the five teams had three DPs. They had three really good DPs. You could say LAFC is the exception since their almost-third DP Gareth Bale didn’t contribute much…but he did score the crucial goal to help them win MLS Cup. Meanwhile, I’m not an expert but I believe that in 2021 Jesus Medina was disappointing for NYCFC, but lightning struck and Taty Castellanos made huge strides and won the Golden Boot on a tiny contract.

Still, MLS Cup is a a bit of a crapshoot. What about the Supporters’ Shield?

So there’s LAFC again, plus the notoriously cheap (yet surprisingly good in spite of it due to their academy) Philadelphia Union who had the best record in the shortened 2020 season with a single DP. The whole COVID situation was crazy so I’m not worried about that, but even there, Alejandro Bedoya had previously been a DP for four seasons but had signed a new non-DP contract. Sure, he was starting to get old, but it’s not like he was totally washed up…he’s still going to play for the Union in 2025!

So, okay, fine, it’s not impossible to win MLS Cup or the Supporters’ Shield with less than three DPs. But it’s extremely hard, hard enough I think DC United is right to rebuild at a slow and steady pace given the Klich situation.

Youth Movement?

The other big picture story is, as I mentioned in the previous section, Ally Mackay has clearly been focused on getting more young players. I thought to help demonstrate this, I would do some calculations and show how the roster has gotten much younger this season.

This turns out to be very complicated.

What, after all, is the right measure of the age of a roster? Maybe we shouldn’t overthink this. Why not just get all the players from 2024, all the players (so far) on the roster for 2025, and then average their ages as of opening day of their respective seasons?

I went ahead and did this, and it turns out in 2024, the average age was 25.21 and in 2025, the average age is…25.38. So…yeah. Older. Is this whole “younger roster” thing fake news?

Not so fast. My player list for 2024 includes 19-year-old Kristian Fletcher, who played just 246 minutes. Okay, that was across 13 games, but still. It’s also got 21-year-old Hayden Sargis (30 minutes in one game). It’s even got 21-year-old backup backup goalkeeper Nathan Crockford, who played zero minutes in zero games.

Surely including those marginal guys isn’t helpful. For last season, you can look at the minutes-adjusted age of the roster, so a player like Mateusz Klich who played tons of minutes counts a lot more than Kristian Fletcher or midseason addition Boris Enow. But for the 2025 season, everyone has zero minutes, so we can’t compare the rosters that way until the end of the season.

I tried splitting players up by position group to try to get a sense of things. So for example, 2024’s centerbacks (Lucas Bartlett, Christopher McVey, Matai Akinmboni, Garrison Tubbs, and Hayden Sargis) have an average age of 22.4, but 2025’s centerbacks (Bartlett and Tubbs again, plus Conner Antley and new acquisitions Kye Rowles and Lukas MacNaughton) have an average age of 26.8. A lot older! Ah well, I was going to say, maybe it’s good actually that our centerbacks are older. Isn’t it a position where players take longer to mature?

Maybe, but there’s still problems here. Sargis is still weighing down 2024’s average despite almost never seeing the field. And I counted Conner Antley as a fullback in 2024 but a centerback in 2025. Is that accurate? Very debatable! And it’s a dumb debate anyhow. What about Matti Peltola, is he a centerback, a defensive midfielder, or a fullback? Who cares?

So let’s back up. Why do we care how old anyone is? Two reasons.

1. Really young players are potentially valuable since, if they get playing time and develop, they could get a lot better and improve the club’s cap efficiency, either by contributing a lot more than their salary cap hit would imply or by earning the club money in the transfer market (in MLS that essentially is used to temporarily increase a team’s salary cap).

2. Lesesne wants to play with a system that involves a lot of hard running to cover lots of ground. You don’t have to be really young to do this—Jared Stroud did fine at 27—and youth isn’t a guarantee either (despite being 21 last season Gabriel Pirani always struggled to meet Lesesne’s physical demands). But the truth is that players over 30 really struggle to run this much.

So to be just a little data-based, let’s compare last year and this one on those two criteria.

First, players older than 30 on opening day. In 2024, that was:

1. Dominique Badji (31).

2. Mateusz Klich (33)

3. Christian Benteke (33)

4. Pedro Santos (35)

Incidentally, Cristian Dájome and Tyler Miller were both 30 on opening day, but their issues weren’t related to the intensity game plan so we’ll just stick with >30.

For 2025, we’re down to just Christian Benteke (34) and Dominique Badji (32), with Jordan Farr on the bubble at 30, but he’s a goalkeeper, that’s fine.

As I mentioned above, DC’s gameplan is designed to have lots of hard-running players around a single ponderous target forward, so Benteke and Badji aren’t a huge issue since Benteke is that forward and Badji is his backup (I know occasionally Lesesne started them both together, I think that’s an indictment of the other attacking players that hopefully we won’t see this season).

Meanwhile, while I can’t tell you exactly who will replace them, Mateusz Klich and Pedro Santos played significant minutes (2,664 and 1,800 respectively, that’s 29.6 and 20 full games of 90 minutes). Whoever replaces them will be younger than 30. That’s a big plus for how DC wants to play.

What about prospects? Here we’ll be a bit generous and define prospects as players under 25 years old. Jared Stroud is who he is at this point, but I hope Boris Enow might get better. If you disagree, well, I’ll list the ages and you can adjust as you see fit.

2024:

1. GK Nathan Crockford (21)

2. CB Matai Akinmboni (17)

3. CB Garrison Tubbs (22)

4. CB Hayden Sargis (21)

5. DM Matti Peltola (21)

6. DM Boris Enow (23)

7. DM Jeremy Garay (20)

8. CM Jackson Hopkins (19)

9. MF Gabriel Pirani (21)

10. MF Ted Ku-DiPietro (22)

11. FW Kristian Fletcher (19)

12. FW Jacob Murrell (19).

Of those 12 players, 7 are back (Tubbs, Peltola, Enow, Hopkins, Pirani, Ku-Dipietro, Murrell), 3 were cut (Crockford, Sargis, Garay), 1 was sold for a nice fee (Akinmboni), and 1 is kind of in loan limbo right now (Fletcher).

Besides those 7, the 2025 roster will have at least 4 more prospects for a total of 11:

1. GK Kim Jun Hong (21)

2. CM Hosei Kijima (22)

3. MF João Peglow (23)

4. FW Hakim Karamoko (19).

In overall numbers, the team is down one right now. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another signing or two, possibly one of the later draft picks. More importantly, I think there’s a lot of reason to expect that the minutes played by prospects is going to go up significantly. Most of the returnees except Tubbs and Murrell have a clear path to more minutes, Kim is clearly intended to be the starter (more on him next time), and I think either or both of Kijima and Peglow could play a very large number of minutes.

Conclusion

As far as I’m concerned, the two major storylines of this season are:

1. Can the team substantially improve on last year’s points record and comfortably make the playoffs?

2. Will some of the young players become star contributors? If so, we’re set up very well to roll the dice on some DPs and contend in 2026. If not, we might start asking questions of Mackay’s selections and Lesesne’s development of young players.

That’s my overview, but there’s a lot more to say about this season’s roster, enough that I’m planning to split it across three more parts. Next time we’ll talk about the goalkeepers. Yes, I know it sounds insane, but I am writing more than 2,000 words on three goalkeepers I have never seen play. I don’t know what to tell you, preseason is tough as a fan when they don’t broadcast the games!

But seriously, a lot of the goalkeeper preview is looking at last year’s goalkeepers, why the team felt it necessary to completely turn over the position, and how much of a difference a really good goalkeeper might make for us.

No idea when they’ll go out, though, so make sure to subscribe to receive the other season preview articles by email. Once the season starts, I plan to continue last year’s practice of doing in-depth game reviews whenever DC wins or draws.