DC United Season Preview Part 2: Goalkeepers

DC has a completely new set of goalkeepers in 2025

All-Points Bulletin’s in-depth season preview started last week with an overview covering DC United’s complex designated player situation and the age of the roster. Today I’m back with part 2 of 4, looking at DC’s goalkeepers. We’ll briefly cover the basics of who the new guys are for readers who weren’t following the team closely during the offseason, but then we’ll turn to some deeper questions:

• Why did DC surprise many fans by deciding to move on from the previous goalkeepers, especially the starter Alex Bono?

• What’s different about how Ally Mackay is approaching the goalkeeper part of the roster than previous DC general managers?

• How has this worked out for other MLS teams who’ve tried it?

• Do you need a great goalkeeper to win a trophy in MLS?

I obviously can’t promise definitive answers to those questions, but hopefully there’ll be something new here even for the most diehard DC United fan.

Next time, in the third part of this preview series, I’ll preview the defense, followed by the offense in the last part. I’m also hoping to do a few other articles prior to the season, so now’s a great time to subscribe if you haven’t already.

New Kid on the Block

Okay, let’s refresh our memory as to the goalkeepers in 2024 and now in 2025 (ages on opening day for their respective seasons in parentheses):

2024: Alex Bono (29), Tyler Miller (30), Luis Zamudio (25), Nathan Crockford (21)

2025: Kim Jun-hong (21), Luis Barraza (28), Jordan Farr (30)

A note on Kim’s name: From what I can tell, there isn’t any one definitive “right way” to transliterate Korean names. For now I’m using Wikipedia’s convention, Kim Jun-hong, until we learn his personal preference. But there are other ways to render it. The team wrote it as Kim Joon Hong in their press release, FBref has him as Kim Joonhong, and Transfermarkt calls him Joon-hong Kim. “Kim” is his last name, and when speaking Korean, the last name is said first, but even that is a gray area: do you say Kim first in English to respect the original language, or do you put it at the end since that’s the English convention? I’ve done the best I can.

Anyway, there hasn’t been much from the team about the goalkeepers yet, and this being training camp, I imagine what we’ll hear is that there will be a great competition for the starting job, any of the three goalkeepers could earn it, the coaches will base their decision on their performances in training and in preseason…the usual clichés.

But let’s face it, Kim Jun-hong is clearly intended to be the starter. By using the MLS U22 Initiative roster mechanism, DC United was able to pay a reported $550,000 transfer fee and (probably) a comparable salary with only a minimal cap hit. We won’t know for sure until we see the final numbers, but I am pretty sure this is the largest financial commitment to a goalkeeper in club history.

It’s an unusual move for a couple of reasons. For much of MLS history, goalkeeper was one of the strongest positions for players coming out of the American developmental system. MLS teams therefore were reluctant to use an international slot on a keeper, much less pay a transfer fee to a foreign club. And though homegrown keepers have debuted even younger, like Gaga Slonina at age 16 and Bill Hamid at 19, Kim is still quite young for a goalkeeper. It’s a position where players often mature later than other positions.

Despite this, DC has made a big commitment, giving him a three year guaranteed contract and using one its four U22 slots. If he does really well, the club could make a bundle selling him on to a higher league. The model here is probably Đorđe Petrović. Prior to the 2022 season, New England spent a million dollars to acquire Petrović from a Serbian team at the age of 22. He was one of the league’s best goalkeepers for two seasons, then they sold him to Chelsea for over $17 million dollars.

Is Kim Jun-hong anywhere near as good as Petrović? Unless you’ve been watching the K-League, your guess is as good as mine, but here’s what we know. He’s listed as 6’3” tall. It looks like he joined a top-flight professional team by age 17, got a couple minutes of game time as a backup in the next two years, then did his mandatory military service. This service included starting for the military’s team as it got promoted out of the second division and then competed in the first division in 2024. After finishing his required service, he went back to his old team and immediately was starting for them in the first division. Meanwhile, he played a big role on South Korea’s fourth-place-finishing U-20 World Cup team and was even called up by the full national team in mid-2023, though he hasn’t yet earned any caps.

All this is consistent with an exciting young prospect, and presumably Mackay and his scouts have seen game film and perhaps even have advanced statistics for him. Fingers crossed!

The Backups (?)

What if Kim gets injured or struggles to adjust? What are DC’s other options?

I think everyone expects the next in line to be Luis Barraza. He played college soccer at Marquette and was drafted by NYCFC in 2019. He started five games in their 2021 MLS Cup winning season and then started for much of 2023, so he’ll be the only goalkeeper on the roster with MLS experience. According to advanced shot-stopping stats, he was significantly below average in 2023, ending the season having given up 3.1 more goals than expected.. We’ll dive more into those stats later, but for now, it’s enough to say that his 2023 season was very similar—according to the advanced stats, at least—to Tyler Miller’s season in 2023 for DC. Towards the end of the season, NYCFC benched him for Matt Freese, who immediately looked much better statistically, remains their starter to this day, and is currently at January camp with the US national team. If you want a qualitative assessment of Barraza from someone who was watching his NYCFC games, Hudson River Blue wrote a fair amount about him in a 2024 preview article.

Then there’s Jordan Farr. I think most people, myself included, have been assuming he’ll be the third-string keeper since he doesn’t have any previous MLS experience. While writing this article, however, I started to wonder. Whereas Barraza has mostly been a backup in his career, Farr has started 120 games in the second-tier USL Championship, almost four times more professional starts than Barraza. Farr was also the 2022 USL Championship Goalkeeper of the Year. I don’t have advanced stats for him, but there must be miles of tape for DC’s front office to watch. This isn’t another Nathan Crockford, a kid out of college who’ll be lucky to get any professional playing time.

When DC brings in an older USL player, the best case scenario has historically been useful backups like Conor Antley, Drew Skundrich, and Rob Vincent. The jury is still out on Antley, but Skundrich and Vincent were guys who provided some veteran presence but didn’t have either the quality on the ball or the athleticism to ever be replacement-level MLS starters. Still, if USL experience at any position would translate better than most to MLS, maybe it’s goalkeeper? It’s actually the USL where a lot of starting MLS goalkeepers get their seasoning in their early twenties. It will be interesting to see if Farr can make a case for being at least the second-string keeper this year.

Do These Backups Ever Play?

You might be asking: if you’re so sure Kim is the intended starter, why worry much about who the backup goalkeeper is?

I’m always on the lookout for questions where there’s something quantitative we can say that moves us past sports talk clichés, so I took a look at past DC United seasons. Ignoring other competitions like the US Open Cup and Leagues Cup, how many different goalkeepers get on the field in a typical DC United season?

The answer, if you average together all 29 previous seasons, is 2.55. That’s a lot higher than one. To put it another way, here’s a chart showing how many seasons DC used a given number of goalkeepers:

That’s right. In 29 years, there has only been a single season where the starting goalkeeper played every minute of the regular season for DC United. That was 2002, when Nick Rimando started all 28 games. In every other season, at least two goalkeepers have been used, either because the goalkeeper was benched for poor performance or because the starter picked up an injury. Bill Hamid always seemed unusually injury-prone for a goalkeeper, so that probably hasn’t helped, but that only accounts for 9 of the 29 seasons where he began as the starter so the pattern goes well beyond him.

The backup goalkeeper, whoever he is, matters. He may not get much time, but bet on seeing him take the field for MLS action.

Was Bono Really the Problem in 2024?

Now let’s rewind and talk about why Ally Mackay decided to completely start over at the goalkeeper position.

For context, DC United (and most MLS teams) typically has a Starting Goalkeeper, a Backup Goalkeeper, and a Young Goalkeeper who in theory might develop into a starter someday but more likely will not amount to anything. Sort of like an NFL quarterback, since you can only ever have one goalkeeper on the field, you want the starter to be as good as possible. That makes it hard to get a good backup since they won’t get to play much. And often teams will just burn through kids in the third slot, with a new one every season or two.

DC has followed this model for most of its history, but is it really such a good approach? The drop-off to the backup is often steep, and sure, that college kid could be unexpectedly impressive, but will it help you? The dream is Matt Turner, who was signed as the Revolution’s young third goalkeeper, became the league’s best goalkeeper, and was sold to Arsenal for almost six million dollars, and…well, best to stop the story there.

DC has never sold anyone to Arsenal, but does their third goalkeeper ever pan out? I did a bit of research on this, and as far as I can tell, the last DC United third goalkeeper to become DC’s starter was Troy Perkins. Perkins contributed to DC’s 2004 MLS Cup season when Rimando was temporarily benched and became the starter for DC’s 2006 and 2007 Supporters Shield seasons. Great outcome! But that was a long time ago.

The closest hit since then was Joe Willis, but he never was more than a backup to Bill Hamid with DC United. He has gone on to start over 250 MLS games for Houston and Nashville, but that didn’t help DC any! In fairness, DC traded him to Houston, so it’s not like DC wasn’t compensated for developing him. Now let’s see here, what did they get in return? Ah, they traded Willis and Samuel Inkoom to Houston in exchange for the rights to departing Houston player Andrew Driver (he ignored this and went to Europe) and a fourth round draft pick that DC used on Liam Doyle. Doyle trialed with DC and wasn’t signed. Inkoom never played for Houston either. So DC traded a starting-quality goalkeeper and a guy who would never play to Houston in exchange for two guys who never even signed with DC. Great work. That’s MLS for you.

But we’ve gotten sidetracked. We’re talking about 2024. Well, recall that in 2023 DC signed a Young Goalkeeper but they elected to change the usual model just a bit and bring in two potential starters. Tyler Miller and Alex Bono both were former MLS starters and I think the intention was always they’d compete. Miller was better with the ball at his feet, something Rooney prized. Miller started for much of 2023, but he missed ten games due to injury where Bono played instead. In the advanced shot-stopping stats that season, Bono was 7th in the league in his limited time whereas Miller was near the bottom of the league.

Miller was still injured at the start of training camp in 2024, so Bono entered the Troy Lesesne era as the presumptive starter and ended up starting every game except for a short five-game stretch where he was benched for Miller in a move Troy Lesesne never explained. This was in the middle of the season and maybe Bono had some sort of injury, but I suspected at the time this was an attempt to build some trade value so they could unload Miller midseason. If that was the idea, it failed, because Miller played poorly. After July 13th, Miller didn’t even make the matchday roster and Luis Zamudio was used as the backup. Possibly he was hurt again, but if so, the club never properly explained what happened.

When it came time for end of season roster decisions in 2024, DC had option years available for all four of its goalkeepers. Fans expected changes. If nothing else, Miller’s salary was high enough that releasing him was an obvious move given his poor performances. The two Young Goalkeepers were both released as well after typically ineffective tenures. In two seasons Zamudio never played a minute in the regular season (though he did start for a whole season for Loudoun in 2022) and Nathan Crockford only made the bench six times.

Like a lot of fans, I thought Bono would probably be back this season. He clearly wasn’t an above average goalkeeper, but he felt average. Average-ish? Okay, only slightly below average? At least he seemed like a good locker room guy and his salary was quite low for an MLS veteran. From Bono’s comments, he also expected to be back. I thought they’d get another former MLS starter, someone with Luis Barraza’s profile I guess, draft a random college goalkeeper, and basically run the 2023 playbook by having them compete.

Ally Mackay had other ideas, however, and released Bono along with the other goalkeepers. Alone among the 2024 goalkeeping corps, Bono had a new job by the time 2025 training camps opened. He’s now serving as backup goalkeeper in New England. (Okay, I took long enough to publish this that it’s become wrong as I see Nathan Crockford just joined FC Cincinnati 2, good for him!)

Why did the club want to move on? I can think of five major reasons to release a player. In no particular order:

1. They’re overpaid for what they provide on the field

2. They’re not a good locker room presence

3. They aren’t a good fit for the team’s system of play

4. They can be replaced with a younger player without losing much

5. They can be replaced with a better player by spending an appropriate amount

With Bono, I think we can immediately remove #1 (Bono made just $200,000 in 2024) and #2 (we never know for sure, but by all accounts he’s a great guy). I’m a little less certain about #3. Lesesne doesn’t have Rooney’s reckless determination to use a sweeper keeper, but he does like to keep the ball once DC has it. A keeper with good ball skills helps maintain possession and “mostly adequate, occasionally terrifying” seems like the ceiling of Bono’s abilities with the ball at his feet.

DC also benefits from a keeper who can accurately find Christian Benteke with long balls. It’s hard to evaluate Bono on this. He was third in the league for accuracy on launched balls, but Benteke’s incredible aerial skills mean anything that gets near him gets marked as a completed pass. Maybe it’s damning that Bono didn’t lead the league by a mile in this stat.

Then there’s shot-stopping, measured these days by the advanced stat “goals minus post-shot expected goals”. Based on where on the goal frame the opposing player placed a shot on target, how likely is a goal to be scored? That’s post-shot expected goals. The theory is that a good goalkeeper stops more than the average, so you end up with fewer goals conceded than expected.

Attentive readers of this newsletter might remember I wrote about Bono’s shot-stopping near the beginning of the 2024 season because he had an extremely good game by this measure. In DC’s third match, FC Cincinnati had 2.4 post-shot expected goals but Bono conceded zero. Alas, that turned out to be one of just a handful of games where he ended up positive for this stat. Bono ended the season at -3.1 G-PSxG. On a per 90 minute basis, he was 26th in the league. Since there’s only 29 teams, that’s…really not good.

It’s also worth mentioning here that DC United conceded 70 goals in 2024, worse than every team except New England and San Jose. Was this all Bono’s fault? Can Kim fix this? Taken literally, the expected goals stat suggests that an average MLS keeper would have saved three extra goals, so DC would have let in 67. 67 goals allowed would still be worse than any other team save New England and San Jose. Of course, if one of those extra saved goals turned a single loss into a draw, or a single draw into a win, then DC would have gotten the last playoff spot instead of Atlanta.

The truth is, these stats aren’t perfect. When I think of the typical goal scored on DC United in 2024, it involves the ball ending up with a late-arriving opposing player who is wide open because DC’s midfielders didn’t track the run. Sometimes wide-open players take their time and shoot unsavable balls into the corner. That lets the goalkeeper off the hook, because there’ll be one goal allowed and a PSxG of .97 or something. But sometimes the pass to this wide-open player leaves the goalkeeper helplessly out of position, so the player kicks it through the center of the goal and it’s considered a huge miss by the goalkeeper when it’s not really the goalkeeper’s fault.

So this is an area I trust my eye test a bit more than the fancy stats: Alex Bono wasn’t as bad as the stats say (and therefore not as bad as national writers like Matt Doyle considered him) but he certainly wasn’t above the average and probably was comfortably below it.

A New Roster Strategy for DC

Remember my list of possible reasons for moving on from Bono?

1. He’s overpaid for what they provide

2. He’s not a good locker room presence

3. They aren’t a good fit for the team’s system of play

4. They can be replaced with a younger player without losing much

5. They can be replaced with a better player by spending an appropriate amount

Having already dispensed with #1 and #2, what about #3? Is Kim Jun-hong a better fit for Troy Lesesne’s system? No idea, but as a very general rule, younger goalkeepers are better with the ball at their feet since their entire development happened during the modern era of goalkeeping where this ability is much more valued. For whatever it’s worth (not much), in the team’s press release announcing Kim’s signing, Ally Mackay is quoted as saying Kim’s “goalkeeping profile fits what Troy is looking for from a goalkeeper in his system”. Great.

For #4, the reason a younger player is preferred, all things being equal, is they are more likely to get better while under contract, especially a very young player like Kim. If Kim turns out to be just as good as Bono in 2025 season, well, his salary cap hit under the U22 slot is actually slightly less than Bono’s even if the team paid out a lot more, and there’s still hope that in 2026 and 2027 he’ll improve.

Meanwhile, we can hope he’ll actually be better right away, in which case he’ll fall directly under #5.

As training camp begins, I think each goalkeeper can hope to impress Troy Lesesne and potentially start on opening day, but in the long run if Kim isn’t starting and doing well, it’ll be a painful miss for Mackay.

Is a Good Goalkeeper Needed to Win Trophies in MLS?

My #5 reason above said “spending an appropriate amount”. In MLS, you always have the option of spending millions to upgrade a position, but with a salary cap and limited cap-exempt slots, is it worth it? Goalkeepers in particular are a position where MLS teams have traditionally been reluctant to spend, but that’s been changing a bit lately.

I decided to look back at the last 5 MLS Cup winners and see how much they were paying their starting goalkeeper, how the goalkeeper did, and how they acquired him.

The first thing you notice about this list is that the five MLS Cup winning goalkeepers combined barely make more than Martín Rodríguez did last season. We likely won’t know what DC United will pay Kim until the MLSPA releases salaries in May (we do know it has to be less than the “maximum budget charge” that was $683,750 in 2024 and maybe a tiny bit higher this year). My guess is Kim’s pay will be about $600,000. If so, he’d make more than every goalkeeper on my MLS Cup list.

Another difference from Kim is that four of these five players came out of the US/Canada development system. McCarthy, Schulte, and Johnson were drafted out of college. Crépeau was a Montréal homegrown signing out of their academy. Eloy Room is the only player who developed internationally, though he was still a free transfer from PSV.

While none of these players required true transfer fees, Sean Johnson and Maxime Crépeau were both acquired by trading allocation money. In keeping with old-school MLS customs, it doesn’t look like the numbers for the Johnson trade were ever released, but I’d guess it was well south of Crépeau’s million dollar amount. In total outlay, probably only LAFC rivals DC United’s Kim transfer in terms of investment.

Finally, for an idea of quality, the G-PSxG column shows the goalkeeper’s full season figure for goals prevented with their league ranking (adjusted for minutes played) in parentheses. I’d call their numbers here a bit underwhelming, though all of them, even Crépeau, did better than Alex Bono’s 2024 figure (-3.1). You probably shouldn’t have a bad goalkeeper if you want to win MLS cup, but you don’t seem to need a great one either.

Of course, MLS Cup winners are usually not really the best team. What about the last five Supporter’s Shield winners?

Right away, the advanced stats ranks look more impressive with Matt Turner as the real standout. The salaries are still low, though, and the four new names on this list all played college soccer.

I think it’s notable that while most of these goalkeepers are forgettable, most of these trophy-winning teams, both MLS Cup and Supporter’s Shield, had at least one and usually several skill position players who made tons of money and were among the best in the league at their position, big-name guys like Carles Gil, Carlos Vela, Lucho Acosta, Cucho Hernandez, and, oh yeah, Lionel Messi.

Not only were these goalkeepers not making big money, they weren’t even making good money (though admittedly several went on to get raises sometime after their trophy-winning seasons). Also, of these nine goalkeepers, only Matt Turner and Andre Blake ever won the league’s Goalkeeper of the Year award (though Blake has won it three times).

All things being equal, it’s obviously better to have a better goalkeeper, but you can see why MLS teams are reluctant to invest in the position. Average seems good enough to win a trophy, even—sometimes—the Supporter’s Shield!

The Best Case Scenario

Still, you’ll recall I mentioned that—taking the advanced stats literally, which you kind of shouldn’t—Bono only let in three goals fewer than an “average” keeper would. Apparently when it comes to goalkeeping, at least, average can win championships. But what if you have a really good goalkeeper? What’s the best-case, Đorđe Petrović scenario?

Well, let’s look at the top five single season G-PSxG totals since 2018:

Now we are talking real impact! +10 goals instead of Alex Bono’s -3 would have seen DC let in 13 fewer goals in 2024, enough to vault the team’s goals allowed ranking up to, uh, middling. More importantly, 13 fewer goals surely would have made 2024 DC United a solid playoff team despite all its other flaws, probably finishing somewhere in the #4 - #6 seed. No play-in game and ahead of the Red Bulls…not too shabby!

While Stefan Frei and Andre Blake were drafted, the other three occupy international slots. Kahlina and Petrović each cost about a million in transfer fees. Bürki was a free transfer, I believe he’s currently the league’s highest-paid goalkeeper, making $1.5 million.

There haven’t been many big-money goalkeeper signings, so the good news is that there’s a decent hit rate here. That’s not to say teams are perfect when they try to pay more for a great goalkeeper. The Colorado Rapids paid Zach Steffen $900,000 to put up -9.1 PSxG in 2024, for example. Oof. Also, there’s been one team bold enough to use an actual DP slot on a goalkeeper. Actually, it’s Colorado again. They had Tim Howard as a DP from 2016 through 2019. Howard was past his prime and my recollection is that he was disappointing, but Colorado did have the second best record in the league in his first season, so maybe it wasn’t completely crazy. Advanced goalkeeping stats are only available starting in 2018, but by then he was slightly below average and making two million a year. Ouch.

So maybe the point to make here is that MLS teams have a great track record when spending big on goalkeepers…except the Colorado Rapids. And, in Petrović’s case at least, the Revolution also sold him two years later for a huge profit.

One caution, though: there’s five different names on the top season list even though all these players have played multiple MLS seasons. Petrović’s second season was still quite good (+6.0, 21st since 2018) but only half as good as his 2022 season. Kahlina’s first season was actually kind of bad. Blake is always above-average, but his league ranking varies a great deal. So there’s a lot of season-by-season variance, at least for the way this stat is calculated.

Conclusion

It’s still a fairly rare roster strategy, but DC didn’t invent the idea of paying more for a foreign goalkeeper and other MLS teams have shown it can be effective. Kim Jun-hong is young like Petrović (a year younger than Petrović was when he arrived) but he may need time to grow into excellence, like Kahlina. And young players are always a bit of a lottery ticket, so there’s always a chance he’ll be a bust. Still, if DC can get the other players it will need to contend in 2026, the number of MLS Cup and Supporters’ Shield winners with average goalkeepers shows DC can afford to be patient while Kim develops.

Whew! That’s more than I ever imagined writing about goalkeepers. Be sure to comment with your thoughts and then keep an eye out for the next installment in this series where I’ll be looking at DC’s defense: the central defenders and the fullbacks, but also the midfielders who Troy Lesesne expects to play a very active role in the defensive phase. It’ll probably be out in a week, but I can’t be certain about the timing, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already so you don’t miss it!