DC United Season Preview Part 4: Offense

It's important to have goals

We’re back with the fourth and final part of what has proven to be a mammoth preview of DC United’s season. If you need to catch up, here’s links to the previous parts in this series:

• Part 1: Overview

• Part 2: Goalkeepers

• Part 3: Defense

We’ll start today by considering how Troy Lesesne wants to play, then question how essential Benteke is to the offense, consider what evidence there is that Pirani is starter material, think about replacing Klich’s contribution, and then run through the attacking players on the 2025 to give each of them some scrutiny.

Although this post is going to wrap up the series by covering DC’s offense, I’m expecting at least two more preseason articles: a high-level preview of DC’s Eastern Conference opposition and a short preview of the season opener against Toronto FC.

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Lesesne’s Game Model: A Short History

This will be review for hardcore fans, but not everyone reading this follows the team day-to-day. Before we dig into players, I want to make sure everyone’s up to speed as to how DC wants to play. DC United’s coach, Troy Lesesne, came from the New York Red Bulls and so came heavily identified with the “energy drink soccer” that Red Bull teams around the world made famous. Briefly, this consists of relentless defensive pressure all over the field, aiming to win the ball back in dangerous positions, and then very direct, risky play once they have the ball.

I’m too lazy to find the quote but I think Jesse Marsch once said something to the effect that the easiest way for his team to move the ball from deep in their half to near the opposition’s goal was to just kick the ball to the other team and then take it from them. If he said that, it was hyperbole, but the classic Red Bull model isn’t interested in pretty passing patterns or slow build-up. Instead, it’s about aggression, first in defense, and then just charging forward on offense to see what happens. After all, if you turn it over, then you can play more aggressive defense!

At its best it’s exciting, but often this style results in chaotic, choppy soccer instead of the beautiful game. When Red Bull implemented this on all their teams in the mid-2010s, I think the theory was that this way of playing was economically efficient. Players with the skill to play gorgeous tiki-taka soccer are expensive. Players who have unusual speed and endurance but are somewhat less skilled are…not cheap, exactly, but they’re much more affordable. That was important for Red Bull, because its flagship team, RB Leipzig, needed to compete with Bayern Munich, a team with essentially unlimited resources that has spent the last decade winning nearly every German championship by buying the most skilled players from its rivals.

All of this has been pretty thoroughly digested by the worldwide soccer community, so it might be hard for young people to appreciate how shocking this style of play was ten years ago when most players hadn’t encountered it before. After a week of telling themselves and reporters they were going to be ready for the already famous intensity, I remember DC United kicking off against the Red Bulls and getting run off the pitch for thirty minutes.

Dave Kasper watched those games and must have said to himself: if this style of play can make RB Leipzig competitive with Bayern, surely it’ll make DC United competitive with Toronto FC and LA Galaxy! It seemed like the perfect option for a salary capped league where there aren’t any superteams. So Ben Olsen did his best to implement it. No one talks about it now, but in 2018, DC came out the gate pressing all over the field.

It turned out to be a harder system to implement than it looked. If the opposition manages to adjust to the heightened speed of the game, or worse, if the pressing team is too tired or unathletic to put the pressure on, then the opposition can pass through the press and generate chance after chance. Pressing worked well for the original New York Red Bulls teams and it’s worked pretty well for the Philadelphia Union, perhaps because in both cases their academies happened to give them some players who especially fit the style (Tyler Adams and Brandon Aaronson). It didn’t work for 2018 DC United with players like Lucho Acosta and Zoltan Stieber, then a 32-year-old Wayne Rooney arrived and the team pivoted to playing exciting, creative soccer.

After the Rooney and Edison Flores eras, Kasper tried again with Hernan Losada in 2021. The roster was a bit better suited to it this time and the team did okay, but injuries piled up and the team chafed under the physical demands. Then Rooney came back as manager and tried to put Christian Benteke into Losada’s energy drink roster and play creative, possession soccer.

Meanwhile, the press-all-the-time Red Bull model has been pretty much discredited. RB Leipzig is perennially in the Champions League but they never did beat Bayern. The New York Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union won a couple of Supporter’s Shields but failed to dominate the league or even win MLS Cup. Today’s soccer players aren’t caught off guard by the energetic pressing. Most players have been playing against (and sometimes on) teams like this for most of their lives.

So when DC hired Troy Lesesne from the Red Bulls, I was surprised DC sounded like it was going back to this well a third time. Poor Mateusz Klich left Leeds to escape Jesse Marsch and now he was stuck pressing again! But people familiar with Lesesne said he wasn’t a Red Bull purist, so I tried to keep an open mind.

Sure enough, in 2024 Troy Lesesne used a system that featured fairly heavy modifications from the classic Red Bull formula. DC defended aggressively, especially immediately after losing the ball, but it wasn’t maximum overdrive, it was situational. The defense will surge forward based on pressing triggers, but that’s become very common in the modern game. And once they had the ball, instead of lightning fast direct play, DC was happy to possess the ball, swinging it around the defense to hunt for weak points in the opposition.

In 2024, DC scored over half its goals out of a measured build-up and another 30% on free kicks, corners, and throw-ins. That leaves just over 10% scored in transition.

In particular, in 2024 DC relied on two mechanisms to advance the ball: goal kicks to Benteke or fullbacks/wingbacks advancing the ball down the sides of the field. To some extent this was probably him making the best of a very weird roster. But despite trying a lot of formational tweaks, one common thread was players out wide and just two players in central midfield. These players were often outnumbered and outworked, making play through the center of the field treacherous and unreliable. We’ll have to see if he tries to change that or if he considers it a feature, preferring to use the midfielders to create overloads on the sidelines.

Having described Lesesne’s game model, it’s time to look at the attacking players. We’ll run through everyone, returnees and newcomers alike, but there’s only one place to start.

Benteke: DC’s Once and Future MVP?

There is no question who was DC United’s 2024 MVP. Christian Benteke is paid almost as much as the rest of the team combined, and for the first time since Rooney was playing, the highest paid DC player earned every penny, captaining the team and winning the Golden Boot.

The only question is whether he should have also been the MLS MVP. He was actually shortlisted for the award, but everyone thinks MVPs have to come from contending teams. I don’t know other teams’ players well enough to comment in detail and arguments like that are silly sports talk time-filler anyway, but I bring it up because I heard last year on multiple occasions: “Sure, DC is on the playoff bubble, but without Benteke, they’re easily the worst team in the league.” Matthew Doyle said it again just this morning as he predicted DC would finish next-to-last in the East:

One Benteke injury from a 20-point season, maybe?

That may well be right. Hopefully we’ll never know. It’s a live question because we’re one bad injury to a 34-year-old player from having that exact scenario play out in 2025. Benteke could also play, but have a steep drop in form. This is a less likely problem than injury, in my view, since target forwards like Benteke seem to endure farther into their thirties than other types of forwards who rely more on speed and quickness. But it’s still worth mentioning because sometimes the form of aging players goes downhill fast. Wayne Rooney was fantastic when he arrived at DC, but by his second season it felt like he got worse every game.

Let’s face our fears and ask: just how screwed is DC United if Benteke gets hurt or if Father Time suddenly comes calling?

2024 offers a few clues. Benteke has been surprisingly durable, but he missed four complete games in 2024, two due to injury and two following a red card suspension. How did the team do? They drew three of those games and lost one of them. On one hand, I bet that’s better than you would have guessed? But that’s less than a point per game, so it is a rate that would have earned DC the Wooden Spoon across a whole season. Still, it’s interesting to note that DC scored 6 goals and gave up 7 in those games. Offense was down and defense was slightly better. Hmm.

When he played, Benteke mostly played 90 minutes, but he did miss just over one more game’s worth of minutes scattered across six games where he subbed off. When you look at DC’s total 466 Benteke-less minutes, they scored 10 goals and gave up 10. That’s actually 1.93 goals per game, substantially more than they scored overall (just 1.53 goals per game). So if you look at it that way, the offense was better without Benteke out of the game.

I’m definitely not saying that’s the right way to look at it. It’s a small sample (less than 14% of the season) and when, say, Badji scores playing in Benteke’s spot against Toronto, maybe Benteke had tired out the central defenders or something before being subbed off. But despite what the goal totals might have you think, DC at least wasn’t completely helpless without Benteke on the field.

What were the goal totals, anyway? DC scored 52 goals overall, of which Benteke scored 23. That’s 44%. Well, he did get five assists as well, but note that’s 28 G+A out of a possible 93, so just 30% when you add assists into the picture. It’s a massive contribution no matter how you measure it. DC also leaned heavily on Benteke’s aerial ability to win goal kicks far up the field. But…is it “an all-time carry job”?

I’m not an expert on other teams, but when I think of dominant target forwards, I think of Josef Martinez scoring 31 goals for MLS Cup-winning Atlanta United. They scored 67 goals that year, so Josef scored 46% of their goals. Josef was rightly celebrated for that season and won MLS MVP, but I don’t think people saw it as a “carry job” because Miguel Almirón had a monster season him with 12 goals and 11 assists. Julian Gressel also had 4 goals and 12 assists. To be clear, that was a much better offense (67 goals instead of 52) but it was also one that was more top-heavy in contributions. The 2018 Gressel equivalent for 2024 DC United is probably the aggregate of Jared Stroud and Aaron Herrera (4 goals and 11 assists between them).

That comparison should give us some pause when you hear national pundits minimize the contributions of Benteke’s supporting cast. I complain about pundits sometimes (okay, often) but they have a very hard job. It is impossible to really know 30 teams’ worth of players. Having a single Gressel get all the “cross to the target forward” assists makes it much easier for pundits to follow what’s going on than when you split those across two players.

The supporting cast is important because for DC United to be a solid playoff team, probably the best case scenario for 2025 given their DP situation, they need to at least maintain their offensive output while improving their defense. And hey, a better offense sure would be helpful.

Can Benteke score the same number of goals? Maybe. There have been four previous players who won the Golden Boot twice, but in MLS history no player has ever won it in two consecutive seasons. We should expect some regression to the mean. That means the rest of the offense has to produce more goals just to stay level.

A Tale of Three Teams

While I was working on last week’s defense preview, I noticed something interesting about DC’s performance in 2024. I remembered the team hit a bad spell during the middle of the season, but I guess I had blocked out the memory of just how bad it was. It turns out you can divide the season almost exactly into thirds and see starkly different performances:

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

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

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

DC started the season on a points-per-game pace (1.42) that would have earned it the #7 seed over the Red Bulls. Then things got bad. Real bad. Unexpectedly, they rallied and then finished the season on a pace (1.82 points per game) that would have seen them above Cincinnati for the #3 seed had they done that for the whole season.

I was writing the defense article and my first instinct was to blame the defense. The jump in goals allowed from the first 12 to the next 11 is rough. But the defense wasn’t that much worse in the final third of the season when the team’s results were at their best.

I think the biggest problem was actually the offense, which dropped down to a miserly one goal per game in that stretch. What do we find when we look closer there? Don’t worry, no weird advanced stats are necessary:

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

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

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

There is a huge, Benteke-shaped hole in the offense during the middle of the season. For what it’s worth, Benteke also had 5 assists on the season but none during the middle 11 games.

You might wonder if Benteke missed a lot of time in that period. His red card and associated two game suspension was during this stretch, but the difference isn’t huge: 896 minutes in the first 12 games, 744 in the middle, and 954 in the last 11 games. In terms of goals per 90 minutes, Benteke scored 1.10 in the first 12, 0.36 in the next 11, and 0.85 in the last 11.

My next theory was that the problem was the supporting cast. A target forward is only as good as the team passing him the ball! This was the time in the season where Tyler Miller, Steven Birnbaum, Garrison Tubbs, and Matai Akinmboni got the majority of their minutes, so maybe their poor play dragged down the squad’s overall performance? Also, five of the team’s seven red cards happened during this bad stretch. Playing a man down makes everything harder during the game and then players are suspended afterwards. Or maybe the coaching staff, adjusting to injuries and absences, struggled to find answers? The fact that the team still scored its usual number of non-Benteke goals makes me hesitate to blame the other players, however.

I had one last theory: the way I remember last season, after a strong start from Benteke winning aerial duels, the referees started calling him much tighter, causing him to get frustrated and less effective. I went to the foul stats hoping to validate this, but actually Benteke was called for fewer and fewer fouls: 30 in the first 12, 22 in the next 11, then 18 in the last 11. He did get four yellow cards in the middle period compared to two on either side of it, but doesn’t seem conclusive. On the other hand, his aerial duel win rate drops from 80.8% in the first 12 games to 73% and then to 65%.

Benteke’s shot volume drops during the middle period as well and it drops even more later in the year when the offense is humming (3.62 shots per 90, then 3.02, then 2.83). Maybe the telling stat is that Benteke’s expected goals for shot was 2.43 in the first 12 games, then 1.19, then back up to 2.01. He was still taking shots, but the shots were in less valuable positions.

I took a quick look at the goalkeepers. Overall, the completion percentage on “launched” passes goes from 50% to 42% and then to 39%. Tyler Miller’s five games weigh down the middle as he completed only 35% of his launched balls. It’s very tentative but I see this as some evidence that “hit it long to Benteke” stopped working nearly as well.

I wish I could tell you exactly why this happened. Maybe Benteke lost some mental sharpness. Maybe he had a nagging injury. Maybe his teammates weren’t able to set him up for success. My best explanation is that referees called Benteke tighter, he wasn’t able to win as many long balls, and although that never improved, the team adjusted and found new ways to advance the ball and score. If that’s true, maybe that can continue this season! But I admit I’m not super-confident it’s right.

The only thing I can say for sure is that it proves having Benteke on the pitch isn’t sufficient for the team to succeed. The really optimistic take here is that if Benteke is healthy for most of this next season, maybe he doesn’t get in the doldrums this time and scores at the rate he did in the other two thirds of 2024. He could score even more goals!

I know, I know, but hey, it’s possible!

Pirani Formation Disinformation

Part of what Ally Mackay said about trading Klich was that he wanted more minutes to the team’s young players. In literal terms this means guys like Matti Peltola and Boris Enow who play the position Klich was in. But I think the young player this puts the most pressure on is Gabriel Pirani. Klich provided a lot of the team’s creativity last year. In theory Peltola and Enow could replace that but…I sure haven’t seen much evidence of that so far. It’s probably going to have be the attacking players who pick up the slack, and while it could be Ted Ku-Dipietro or new arrival João Peglow, surely Gabriel Pirani, the #10, is the one who should be pulling the strings!

Coaches always say that formations don’t matter very much and that fans pay too much attention to them. Maybe so. But since Troy Lesesne arrived, I feel the biggest source of fan confusion about what’s going on with the team is the team’s formation. It’s often listed incorrectly on telecasts and stats sites. And from the beginning of last season, I heard many DC United fans complain that this Pirani guy is a terrible #10.

I’ll admit my bias here. Longtime readers may remember that I am Pirani’s biggest fan. There might have been stretches of last season where I was his only fan. I wasn’t so deluded that I thought he was amazing, but I thought he had potential in 2023 and I still saw that potential in 2024 despite some struggles. He deserved criticism, but I get defensive about him because I think he’s often criticized for the wrong reasons. And that starts with this #10 business.

Yes, he wears #10 on his jersey. But to most people #10 doesn’t just mean “creative player”, it means a central attacking midfielder. Yet Lesesne wasn’t lining him up as a central midfielder. For most of his 2024 appearances, Lesesne played Pirani on the left wing.

I understand why DC fans leap to these conclusions. The DC United teams of treasured memory all had a brilliant South American #10 pulling strings as a central attacking midfielder: Marco Etcheverry, Christian Gomez, and Lucho Acosta. Here we have a South American wearing #10 and he ends the season with a single measly assist. What a terrible performance for a central attacking midfielder!

But DC didn’t play with a central attacking midfielder. DC’s actual formation as 2024 began was a 4-1-3-2 where Peltola was the lone defensive midfielder playing behind Klich in the center of midfield and Ted Ku-Dipietro was playing as the second forward. Pirani was on the left side of a Pirani-Klich-Stroud line. Pretty soon, Lesesne felt like he had to switch to three in the back, and for most of the season the standard formation could be summarized as a 5-2-3. In this alignment, the wingbacks often were forced to hang back near the central defenders to make a line of five, Klich would pair with someone else in central midfield, and two attacking players—Pirani was usually the one on the left when he was on the field—flanked Benteke.

Understanding this illuminates some mysteries about Pirani’s play. Starting with: why is he so uninvolved? When someone is playing the #10 role in the center of midfield, you expect everything to go through them. Lucho Acosta’s touches per 90 minutes was in the 60s playing for FC Cincinnati and it was even higher when he played with Rooney in DC. Pirani averaged just 41.6 in 2024. Why wasn’t he finding the ball more? You can’t get assists if you aren’t on the ball!

But Pirani wasn’t playing as an attacking central midfielder, he was a wide attacker. Compare the touch counts for other players DC used in wide attacking players: 41.8 per 90 for Jared Stroud, 32.9 for Ted Ku-Dipietro, and 29.4 for Jacob Murrell. Meanwhile, turning to DC’s actual central midfielders, Klich had 63.3 and Martin Rodriguez had 65.3.

All right, so Pirani was being unfairly blamed for not being a #10 when he was being asked to play as a wide attacker. Am I saying everyone else was wrong and I was right? Uh, strictly about this, then yes. But the broader picture was fans were disappointed Pirani wasn’t playing better, and seeing as he got benched by the 6th match of the season, the coaching staff wasn’t happy either.

I believe in his potential, but even I have to admit that Pirani just isn’t a great wide attacker. Despite being young, he doesn’t have the burst to get past a fullback isolated one on one. He’s not left-footed but was almost always playing on the left, so instead of hugging the sideline and whipping in crosses to the league’s best target forward, he would drift inside and look to combine with short passes. None of Lesesne’s other left wing choices did much better on offense, but some of them did play a lot better on defense. I still think it was Pirani’s defensive energy—or lack thereof—that got him sent to the bench.

Despite being a card-carrying Pirani apologist, two thirds of the way through the season he was getting sparing substitute minutes and had one goal and zero assists. At that time, all I could think to say in his defense was that the players around him weren’t compatible with his short-passing style.

Fortunately, Lesesne and his staff knew better, and Pirani finished the season with five goals and one assist in the last thirteen games. His six total goals for the season fit neatly into two templates: in two of them, he dribbled past defenders to score, while the other four were calm control and finishing in the box.

Wait, you might be saying, didn’t I just say he couldn’t dribble and that was a big problem for him out wide? Pirani doesn’t dribble effectively in the open field because he doesn’t have the acceleration or top speed to leave a defender in his dust, but it turns out he can absolutely create space for himself in traffic to shoot.

What we have is a player who’s short, not fast, has a great touch, plays very good short passes, is a calm finisher, can dribble in traffic, and oh yeah, is quite poor defensively. Where should he be playing? It took the whole season to get him there, but with four games left in the season and needing a goal to get a much-needed point against the Crew, Troy Lesesne subbed Pirani in as a second forward behind Benteke. He got his first assist of the season a few minutes later, receiving a flick from Jacob Murrell and finding the incisive short pass for Benteke to score.

Lesesne continued playing him there in the next three games to good effect. I think we can finally say Pirani’s natural position is as a creative second forward, a bit like Jaime Moreno in his second stint with DC. For most of 2024, DC’s fullback woes meant Lesesne had to sacrifice the second forward position to get a third centerback on the field, and at the beginning of the season he was playing Ku-Dipietro in that position instead of Pirani.

The team isn’t making it easy to figure out what’s going on in preseason, but from reading various tea leaves, I think they’re playing with four in the back and two forwards. João Peglow and Jared Stroud are playing wide on the left and right respectively while Pirani is playing with Benteke as the second forward

That has me feeling optimistic that Pirani could have a strong season. A big step forward for him would be very timely, because more production is badly needed.

Replacing Klich in the Aggregate

With Mateusz Klich’s departure, a huge question is who is going to replace his creativity in the offense?

Klich had the second-most minutes on the team in 2024, pretty much all of them in central midfield. Besides his important role in build-up play, he scored goals (2), defended, and took the majority of DC’s free kicks. As I discussed in previous parts of this preview series, both goals were penalties and his defense was uneven at best. Losing those parts of his game doesn’t seem daunting. That leaves his role in the build-up and his free kicks.

Some national commentators spoke of Klich as underrated because of what I’m calling his role in the build-up. You might be surprised I’m not just saying “assists”. MLS stats credit him with 13. Only thirteen players had more assists, guys like Lucho Acosta, Evander, Leo Messi, and Riqui Puig. Acosta and Evander led the league with 19 assists and the quite celebrated Puig had just 14. Does that mean Klich was 13/14s as good as Puig and 13/19s as good as Lucho? Answer: absolutely not. The reason those guys were MVP contenders and most fans of other teams haven’t heard of Klich is because those other players all scored goals as well, a lot of them. Acosta scored 14, Evander 15, and Puig scored 13. And Messi? Yeah, Messi scored 20 in half the minutes any of these guys played.

Klich scored 2 goals. Both penalties. Sad trombone.

But since I just wrote tons of words trying to weasel Pirani out of blame by saying he wasn’t playing the same position as guys like Lucho, I have to acknowledge the same goes for Klich. He was playing farther away from goal than these #10 assist merchants. Besides the lack of goals, evidence for this comes when we compare MLS’ assist number for Klich (13) with FBref’s number: 5. MLS counts “hockey assists” and gives an assist for the pass before the pass before the shot, whereas FBref uses the standard definition. The guys above Klich on the leaderboard lose a few assists in FBref’s numbers, but not nearly so many.

All right, so Klich played an important role in the run-up to goals, even if he wasn’t often hitting the last pass. How important was that role, really?

If you don’t mind small samples, we can look at the three games DC played last year without Klich. Let’s see, a 0-2 loss at NYCFC, a 0-5 loss at Orlando (the worst loss of the season), and then a 1-1 draw against NYCFC again. There were other circumstances one could point to in those games, like Bartlett’s red card in the Orlando game, but that certainly isn’t a comforting record.

Another reason national pundits thought Klich was underrated was shot-creation stats. This is a useful advanced stat for seeing who is creating danger. After every shot, up to two actions are identified that led to the shot, things like a pass, a tackle, beating someone on the dribble, etc. The goal scorer might be credited with one or even both of these actions if they create their own shot, but most often it’s the two players who passed the ball before the shot.

The 2024 league leaders in shot-creating actions per 90 minutes are a who’s-who of MLS stars: Thiago Almada leads with 7.89, then Lucho Acosta, Carles Gil, Riqui Puig, Djordje Mihailovic, Lionel Messi, Evander, Hector Herrera, and Cucho. All big stars, all designated players.

I stopped the list at the top 9 because 10th on the league list with 5.55 SCA/90 is Houston’s Amine Bassi. Good for him, but it’s inconvenient for me because I’ve never heard of him and he isn’t a DP. However, after him there are two more DPs (Cristian Espinoza and Santi Rodriguez) and then, in 13th, also a DP of course, you have DC’s Mateusz Klich with 5.2 shots created per 90 minutes.

What about other DC players? If we ignore David Schnegg and Kristian Fletcher’s very small sample sizes, the next players are Gabriel Pirani with 3.63, Aaron Herrera with 3.54, Pedro Santos with 2.95, and Cristian Dájome with 2.76. Using SCA/90 as a proxy for creativity shows what we’re up against here. Not only does DC have to replace the league’s 13th most creative player in Klich, but also two others in its top five, Santos and Dájome!

Replacing those two might not be that hard. We know Lesesne leans heavily on fullbacks (or wingbacks) for offense and there’s reason to be optimistic that David Schnegg can replace Santos and Dajome’s contributions here. For what it’s worth, he had 4.46 SCA/90 in his very limited minutes, good for second on the team. Herrera could also increase his numbers if he’s playing fullback the whole season instead of deputizing so much as a third central defender.

That still leaves Klich. I’ve projected a starting central midfield pairing of Peltola and Enow, and they had minimal shot-creation in 2024. If I’m right, it’s Pirani who is going to have to shoulder the load from the second forward spot. Is he really up to this?

Before the 2024 season, Matthew Doyle complained about Pirani’s shot-creation every time DC came up in his articles or podcast. FBref prominently shows a percentile comparison for players and before 2024, Pirani was listed as bottom 5 percentile or something similarly awful. Having dug in on this, Doyle has continued to bring it up. In his article on DC during the playoff push after Pirani’s late-game heroics against Nashville, Doyle couldn’t resist a snide remark:

“Pirani, by the way, is very clearly never going to be worthy of that No. 10 on his back when it comes to chance creation. Even with his marginally improved playmaking performance recently…”

I don’t want to be too harsh on Doyle. He can’t afford to watch many of DC United’s games until they get good enough to force themselves into the national conversation. And yes, statistically, Pirani was poor in SCA/90 terms in 2023 with just 2.49. In that context, his 3.63 for 2024 was a nice improvement, but still miles from Lucho Acosta numbers (7.46).

Ahem. Miles away from 2024’s Lucho Acosta, the 29-year-old MVP contender. But what about Lucho when he was Pirani’s age, playing for a mediocre DC United team in 2016? Sadly, advanced stats only begin for MLS in 2018, so we can’t make the comparison. In conventional stats, though, Acosta had 0.47 G+A/90 in 2016 (mostly assists), whereas in 2024 Pirani had…0.47 G+A/90 (mostly goals). Hmm. Sticking with shot creation, in the 2018 LuchaRoo season, a year older than Pirani is going into the 2025, season, Lucho Acosta’s SCA/90 was 4.79.

If you excuse another trip into small samples, in the last third of the season when the team was playing better, Pirani’s SCA/90 was 4.14. And what the hell, in the last four games when he was playing as a second forward it was 6.59. Take that, Doyle! Of course, Acosta’s 2018 season was a tale of two seasons as well and his SCA/90 would be a lot higher if you just looked at it post-Rooney arrival.

Suffice to say, unlike Doyle, I believe Pirani can grow to become a strong chance creator. I’m not saying he definitely will, but the flashes of potential really are there, just like I remember seeing flashes in Acosta before 2018. I don’t want to make too much of the comparison. From the moment Acosta arrived at DC, his dribbling skills were incredible. Pirani’s pretty good on his day but he’s not in Lucho’s league when it comes to dribbling. In Pirani’s favor, however, his finishing is better than Acosta’s early days. In fact, Pirani’s goals per 90 minutes last season was better than any of Acosta’s seasons until 2023.

Free Kicks Aren’t Free

But we were talking about replacing Klich’s creativity. I’ve already said I’m optimistic that Pirani’s numbers are going to improve this year and help power the offense. But there’s another reason to be somewhat confident Klich’s production can be replaced: free kicks. Klich took most of the attacking free kicks last year, and when you’re kicking it into the box with Christian Benteke and Lucas Bartlett waiting for it, you’re going to look like you’re pretty good at creating shots.

And so it was. Klich was second in the league in total shots created from free kicks with 58. Now if you indulge a counterfactual, what if we posit someone else was taking those kicks and take them out of his numbers? Then his SCA/90 drops to an unimpressive 2.94.

Now the truth is, Klich wasn’t taking free kicks merely out of deference. I have always said, and continue to insist, Klich was really good at placing free kicks and corners. I have watched more DC United games than is healthy and I’ve seen players screw up these kicks in every way possible. Klich was extremely reliable.

Okay, so can Gabriel Pirani do the same? As his number one fan, I’m here to tell you…I have absolutely no idea. For DC’s purposes, though, the free kick taker doesn’t have to be Pirani. Can someone on the roster in 2025 take these free kicks? Again: no idea! I’ve never seen any of these guys take enough free kicks to know.

The dead ball stats are messy because for spots far enough from goal, defenders will take them short or the goalkeeper will launch it to Benteke, but I think corner kicks are a good proxy for who is trusted to take attacking free kicks. Klich took 73% of all of DC United’s 2024 corners. Pedro Santos took 21%. That only leaves 6% of corners and Martin Rodriguez took five of those. Yeah, the top 3 corner-takers in 2024 are all gone from the roster. That leaves a total of 7 corners in 2024. And one of those was taken by Dájome. So 6 corners all season were taken by players on the 2025 roster: Stroud (2), Pirani (2), Herrera (1), and Peltola (1).

Sorry, I indulge small samples, especially when it helps my argument, but I wasn’t dedicated enough to dig up those half-dozen corners and see who did well. We’re just going to have to see what happens. I am tentatively expecting the free kicks and corners to not be as good as what Klich and Santos were providing in 2024. But they won’t be that much worse, not when there’s still Benteke and Bartlett as targets. I’m confident whoever ends up taking these will rack up some decent SCA/90 from it.

To be honest, much more important than the shot-creation stats is whether the team can find ways to advance the ball up through the center of the field instead of being entirely dependent on the fullbacks. I’m not sure how much Lesesne cares, but I think it would be good. However, I don’t know how to shed any light on that here in preseason since the team won’t let us watch their preseason games, so again, we’re just going to have to see.

Attacking Player Roster Strategy

Finally, let’s talk about the rest of the attacking players. I’m going to list all the attacking players together since, except for Benteke, the positions shifted around in 2024 and remain speculative when it comes to 2025. Also, I talked about the fullbacks last time, so I’m not including Herrera, Schnegg, etc. even though I expect them to play a key role in the attack. The numbers in parentheses are the player’s age on opening day.

2024: Christian Benteke (33), Jared Stroud (27), Gabriel Pirani (21), Ted Ku-Dipietro (22), Kristian Fletcher (18), Jacob Murrell (19), Dominique Badji (31)

Pedro Santos (35) and Cristian Dajome (30) also played in the attack at times in 2024)

2025: Christian Benteke (34), Jared Stroud (28), Gabriel Pirani (22), João Peglow (23), Ted Ku-Dipietro (23), Dominique Badji (32), Jacob Murrell (20), Randall Leal (28), Hakim Karamoko (19)

A recent goal.com article on DC United raised some eyebrows among DC fans because the author described the team as “building around Benteke”. Benteke is 34 and his contract is only guaranteed through 2025. Shouldn’t the team be planning for the future, not building around him?

They should, and fortunately I think they are, regardless of how the writer phrased it. If the roster was really being built to support Benteke, the team would be signing Julian Gressel-type players to put in crosses. They would also be finding a young player who could play like Benteke does. Dominique Badji doesn’t have the youth or, to be honest, the quality to take over as the centerpiece when Benteke leaves.

I’ve already written at extreme length on Benteke and Pirani, so let’s run through the other 2025 players and consider both how they can help the team right now and what kind of game model they fit in with. For reference, this is my best guess at the formation and starters week 1:

Jared Stroud is the perfect player for DC United in its current form. He runs hard, he defends, he covers ground, and he can whip in crosses from the right. As an unheralded acquisition from St. Louis City, I was surprised at the time to see he had 5 goals and 5 assists in 2023. Could he really have 10 G+A again? Turns out he could and did with 3 goals and 7 assists for DC in 2024. DC has a lot of “maybe they’ll get good” young players, but Stroud is in his prime at age 28, so there’s every reason to expect similar output in 2025 if he gets the minutes.

He was with the starters on Saturday against Charleston and I’m sure he’ll get minutes, but my view is that the team would like to get to the point where he’s not starting. 10 G+A is great from a domestic right wing with a relatively small cap hit, but most good MLS teams have a high-priced foreign attacker playing that role who is supposed to provide a lot more than 10 G+A (whether they do or not is another story). When fans were hoping for a new DP attacker, they might not have realized it but I think Stroud is the most likely person a new DP would send to the bench. Instead, it seems the team is hoping to develop a young player who can take over the role. There’s a deadline: when Benteke leaves, Stroud’s crosses probably won’t produce the same results.

Ted Ku-Dipietro might be a candidate to eventually bench Stroud. Like Stroud, he’s a high energy player, and even at 23, Ku-Dipietro still has a bit of “young player potential” left. Unfortunately, 2024 was a step back for him, not a step forward, and I’m starting to worry. His best attribute is his quickness. His burst allows him to beat players on the dribble, beat an opposing player to a ball they expect to reach first, and react faster in the box to a loose ball. Once he’s on the ball, though, if he can’t immediately gain an advantage, he often turns it over with a misplaced pass or blocked shot. And in 2024, when he did get off a shot, it seemed to always go straight at the goalkeeper.

Apparently he had a lingering shoulder injury for much of last season that was fixed by surgery in the offseason. That will keep him out until at least March, but when he’s back, hopefully he’ll be fully healthy and able to take steps forward in his finishing and his ability to combine with teammates. I no longer see him as having the sort of ceiling that would get him a big move to Europe and a spot for the US National Team, but he still could become a solid MLS starter. The only problem there is his best position might be second forward, just like Pirani.

We won’t know much about the biggest addition to the attack, newcomer João Peglow, until we can start watching him play. He’s a 23-year-old Brazilian attacker…that sounds exciting! DC paid a roughly $600,000 transfer fee for him, which sounds…decent? But he comes to DC from the Polish league, which is…uninspiring. And he only had a goal and an assist in almost eighteen games’ worth of minutes there. That brings to mind the Estonian Messi, Erik Sorga. DC paid some Estonian club over $400,000 for him. He scored one (1) goal for DC. Today he is plying his trade in the Vietnamese first division.

Erik Sorga has 31 caps for the Estonian national team, so he’s got that going for him. How does that stack up against João Peglow? Peglow has played for Brazil. How about that? Ahem, correction, he’s played for Brazil’s U-17 World Cup team. 7 goals in 17 caps. Brazil won the U-17 World Cup. Like, the whole thing. Peglow started the final at left wing. The really good players don’t play in these tournaments, but still, that’s got to be good, right?

To answer this question, I looked at the Wikipedia articles for every single one of his teammates. It turns out almost all of them are still playing in Brazil. Brazil’s league is pretty good, actually, better than MLS, so that’s fine, but I was expecting to see guys playing for Barcelona and Real Madrid, not Talles Magno, who played 82 games for NYCFC before going back to Brazil on loan. There’s also one guy in Belgium. Hmm. The only player to really come good is Yan Couto, technically of Manchester City, but currently on loan playing right back for Dortmund. Couto’s got four senior team caps. That’s great! But he’s the only one so far to really come good.

So at the end of the day, all I can say for sure about João Peglow is that he played with the starters for a half against Charleston and tallied a goal and an assist. I think he’s the likely starter at left wing and hopefully he’ll be a more natural fit than Pirani was last season. It’s also handy to have another Portuguese speaker to hang out with Pirani.

Jacob Murrell is still just 20 years old, but as 2024 ended I confess I didn’t see much potential in him. He’s slow. He’s tall, at least compared to guys like Pirani and Ku-Dipietro, but he plays small. He also doesn’t have the burst to beat guys on the dribble. It didn’t help that he often was playing out of position in midfield where he was pretty helpless trying to defend. When he’s able to play his real position, he has a forward’s mentality and so is the only player on the team besides Benteke who is quick to shoot, but his finishing often let him down. It’s harsh, but my conclusion was that he was on track to be a starter-quality forward…in USL.

While recently reviewing goals scored for and against DC last year, I was impressed by Murrell’s touch in some of the highlights. On a good day, maybe he’s a poor man’s Pirani. Someone who can combine with short passes to get into the box, then take a touch to get space and shoot. I still wouldn’t put money on him becoming a real starter, but if I’m right that the team is going to eventually transition away from Benteke to Pirani-style “small ball”, maybe he could do a job.

Dominique Badji has 144 MLS starts in 12 seasons. He’s listed at 6’0” and 170 pounds, so he can’t really play the same way as Benteke, but his aerial duel numbers are respectable. Playing as a regular sub and spot starter for Supporter’s Shield-winning FC Cincinnati in 2023, he put up very good numbers (8 G+A in about 10 games’ worth of minutes) so he can be effective in the right situation. He’s probably the best case backup for Benteke, honestly, and so is a great player to have for this stage of the team, but not a guy who will help much in the long term.

Randall Leal is this year’s wildcard. He had 8 goals and 7 assists for Nashville in 2021. Not too many players have a 15 G+A MLS season to their name. Technically he was a DP, although this was an accounting move more than an endorsement of his talent, kind of like the way Matti Peltola was initially a DP for DC United. Unfortunately, in Leal’s following three seasons his G+A were 7, 3, and 1. That’s a very bad trendline! Of course he only played 47 minutes last year due to injury.

He’s played in both preseason games, so he seems like he’s healthy. If he can fit in well with the offense, he could bring some much needed punch. Or this could be a Yamil Asad version 2 or 3 situation where a past good year in MLS (two years, in Asad’s case) doesn’t count for much (Asad did go on to put up ridiculous numbers last season with Cincinnati, but it was in limited minutes and he again seems to be unemployed at present). It’s tempting to see Leal as a Pedro Santos-like figure, a declining attacker who can provide a veteran presence and some depth minutes. Except Santos was 34 when he arrived at DC. Leal is 28, the same age as when Santos came to the Columbus Crew as a DP. The potential upside here is real. I wondered if he might immediately send Stroud to the bench, but it doesn’t seem like it’s happened yet.

I don’t know anything about Hakim Karamoko, DC’s first round draft pick. The pickings are slim these days in the draft, but rumor has it he’s fast, in which case he might make for an interesting option when DC’s normal way of playing isn’t working. Unfortunately, he was injured the moment training camp started (or else arrived injured, who knows) and is out for months.

It’s also worth mentioning Kristian Fletcher is currently on loan at Nottingham Forest through the summer. He’s gotten a few minutes here and there for their U21 team, but there’s no signs yet that he’s doing anything to earn a permanent transfer. He scored a goal for DC last year against Portland, but I didn’t see anything that would make me expect him to be anything but little-used depth if he returns.

Conclusion

I feel like I’ve been very positive in this preview. Probably a little too positive. I guess I’m drinking the kool-aid on Mackay’s strategy, mainly because I was already not just drinking the Pirani kool-aid but trying to sell it to everyone else. If a few young players can step forward, I think DC can score goals roughly at the same clip it did previously. That’s good enough to be a solid playoff team if the defense improves.

I don’t see any way they compete for trophies this year, but by the summer transfer window we’ll hopefully know a lot more about the young players and whether they’re improving. If things are going really well, there might be some space for Mackay to make a move or two in the window and try to get some upsets in the playoffs. Otherwise, my hope is still that the team can make moves either in the summer or after the season to have at least an outside shot at being a contender in 2026.

Meanwhile, if most of these young players don’t pan out, questions are going to start being asked of Ally Mackay and Troy Lesesne. The MLS regular season gets justly criticized for being too long and too low stakes, but this is a big year for DC United that could make or break this attempted rebuild.

But that’s not for another two weeks. This post is the last one in my season preview series. If you’ve read this far, I sure hope you’ve enjoyed it! As I mentioned at the top, I expect at least two more posts during preseason (maybe more if we can ever see a game).

Once the season starts, the plan is to do in-depth analysis of wins and ties plus some sort of special topic. That’s what I did in 2024, but this time I might split the special topic into its own post instead of keeping it combined. And maybe there’ll be a little coverage of losses, mainly since I’d like to keep a running “goal blame” for 2025.

I hope you’ll subscribe and join me for the season!