What's Different With DC United This Season?

To try to get a different outcome than in 2025, the team is doing a few things differently

As preseason gets going and player movement slows down, I think it’s a good time to take a look at the big picture for DC United in 2026. After finishing at the bottom of the league in 2025, changes were urgently needed. So what is different this season? Of course there are different individual players, but I’ve already written about them (e.g Tai Baribo, Louis Munteanu, other roster moves). Today I’m talking about what is different in terms of the overall roster.

Along the way, we’ll have to talk a fair amount about 2025. So here at the outset, I have to admit that when I was writing long previews of the 2025 season for this newsletter, I was cautiously optimistic that DC would make the playoffs. That didn’t happen, and this article would be a lot more convincing if I didn’t remind you I was wrong last year here at the outset. Instead, in the spirit of accountability, I’m not only going to describe the changes from 2025 (and also the similarities to it), I’m going to try to pinpoint why I ended up being wrong in 2025 and how I’m thinking about things now.

What’s Different in 2026

Designated Players

The most important difference between the DC United of 2025 and the current team is that DC will start 2026 with two designated players instead of one. Sorry to drop a lot of math on you right as we’re getting started, but that is 2x the number of designated players. A 100% increase.

This is good, but stay with me here, do you know what is even larger than two? Three. I would greatly prefer DC to have three designated players. With no one from the team doing press conferences (and almost no press for them to conference with these days) we don’t have any official statement about whether they are done making big moves. I think until the European transfer windows close near the beginning of February there’s some hope, but if we get past that point we’re probably looking at the midseason transfer window.

And yeah, the midseason transfer window is a much better time to acquire high-end players. In the past I would have said waiting is fine, it’s not like DC is an MLS Cup contender, but this is the first thing I’ve changed my mind about after last season.

As you probably remember, DC played the entire season with only one DP on the roster, Christian Benteke, after DC ended up trading Mateusz Klich to Atlanta for peanuts (a few hundred thousand in cap space, plus a draft pick that DC flipped to Toronto for about $100K in GAM). At the time, DC was widely ridiculed for this trade and Atlanta fans were jubilant but, in retrospect, I think DC probably got the better end of it? I mean, both teams ended playing for the Spoon on the last day of the season so really no one won, but DC presumably used the GAM and cap space for…something…whereas Atlanta ended up waiving Klich before the end of the season to free up an international slot.

Even so, the Klich trade was still DC making something slightly less bad out of a bad situation where Klich’s Rooney-era contract was guaranteed but he was apparently very out of favor with the team. Now the team could have signed a “third” DP, but elected not to do so. In my season preview, I reasoned they were waiting until the midseason window (sound familiar?) and that maybe this made sense since the Klich contract meant the team couldn’t really contend in 2025. But that was just a guess. Maybe Mackay wanted a DP but ownership wouldn’t pay. Maybe the owners wanted to keep the slot open so they could sign Paul Pogba (thank goodness they didn’t, he’s managed to play all of 33 minutes in five months with Monaco). We don’t really know.

Whatever the reasoning, DC had only one DP going into the season and I spent most of the first part of my preview discussing this issue, so it’s not like I wasn’t aware of it. I focused almost entirely on the impact of having only one DP on DC United’s outcome ceiling. I went through historical examples to show that winning MLS Cup is nearly impossible without three good DPs.

So here’s the first mistake I made last year. I should have realized that lacking DPs lowers the team’s floor, not just its ceiling. I was thinking that to win in the playoffs against other good teams, you need three DPs, but to win an MLS regular season game, only one DP is often enough. And I was overindexing on the way Benteke seemed able to win games almost singlehandedly in 2024. What I’d say now is that even though it’s true one DP can sometimes win you a game, that leaves plenty of games where he isn’t up to it. If you have two or three DPs, the odds go up a lot that one of them is healthy, in good form, and really feeling it during a given game.

I also think this is an area where the bar has been raised. DC muddled along for years without the maximum number of DPs back when two was the max, but a lot of other teams were doing the same. By 2025, however, only a handful of teams entered the season with just one DP, and since Montreal and NYCFC signed DPs in the midseason window, I think DC United was the only team to play the whole season with just one.

Another mistake I made was I overestimated Klich’s negative impact on the defense and underestimated his positive impact on the offense. It’s bad enough revisiting 2025, so I don’t want to fully re-litigate 2024 as well, but basically my thinking last year was that Klich had been a defensive liability, especially in Lesesne’s system, since at his age he couldn’t cover enough ground in midfield. Replacing his minutes in the aggregate with younger players like Boris Enow and Jackson Hopkins, I thought, would improve the defense.

I think I paid too much attention to some very frustrating goals allowed where Klich was caught upfield and didn’t run hard to get back. And look, I still think he was a defensive liability and I think his play with Atlanta shows that was true even outside a pressing system. But as it turned out, DC United was quite capable of playing bad defense with younger and faster players.

Meanwhile, Klich’s creativity in offense really was missed. Since he had only 5 direct assists in 2024, I thought his offensive output was replaceable. But he had a lot of indirect assists because he was good at progressing the ball in ways that unbalanced the opposing defense. Klich led the team in 2024 with 154 shots created. In 2025, DC’s shot-creation went from slightly above average to well below, creating 184 fewer shots, so you can almost literally say they failed to replace his creativity.

Finally, a good portion of Klich’s shot creation was on dead balls. Surely someone else can pass to Benteke, I thought. Apparently not! DC’s dead ball shot creation suffered a great deal too as poor service wasted the combined aerial talents of Benteke and Lucas Bartlett.

But bringing this back to 2026, it’s good to see the team investing in two attacking designated players. But three would be better, and in particular midfield help continues to seem critical.

Diversified Transfer Strategy

In 2026, DC United’s front office has been much more varied in how it is adding starters to the team. Louis Munteanu is a big-money international transfer, the expenditure on Keisuke Kurokawa isn’t clear yet but he’s a much more affordable international acquisition, Tai Baribo is an in-league “casher”, Sean Johnson was a free agent, and Sean Nealis was a GAM trade. That’s five new starters, each acquired a different way. Two are new to the league and three are proven MLS veterans.

Now back in 2025 I also said DC was pursuing a diversified strategy to acquiring new starters, but it was a different kind of diversification. The DP rule tends to force MLS teams into making big, high-variance bets on a few players. It might not have been his choice, but since Mackay’s only DP transaction was extending Christian Benteke’s contract, he instead made lots of little bets. And at the time, I liked the approach. Mackay inherited a horrible roster from Rooney and I agreed with him that DC essentially needed almost entirely new players. Small investments meant the same money could spread across more players. And hey, with a diversified portfolio, a few misses wouldn’t be a disaster. However, I knew there was a chance that not enough of the players would work out.

Well, not enough of the players worked out.

Since we’re talking about 2025, I’ll restrict the aperture to players who I think were brought in to be starters in 2025, but I’m going to count the 2024 midseason transfer window since those players were still question marks after only a few appearances. Just as I counted five intended starters going into 2026, I’d say Ally Mackay brought in five intended starters in that time: David Schnegg, Boris Enow, Kye Rowles, Peglow, and Kim Joon Hong.

In contrast to this season, all five of those players were acquired internationally via significant but not enormous transfer fees. I think most fans would say there wasn’t much invested in the roster last season, but those transfer fees add up. Believe it or not, DC United spent about $7 million on transfer fees alone for those five players.

The players were different ages and from different leagues, but they shared a certain lack of distinction. They were either starters in lesser leagues (Kim in Korea, Rowles in Australia, Enow in Israel) or else unexceptional players in a roughly equivalent league (Schnegg was a rotation player for a top team in the Austrian Bundesliga, Peglow was a starter on a team near the bottom of the Polish league). And while Kim is definitely young enough to get better and perhaps you could say that about Peglow and Enow, remember all of these players were brought in to be immediate starters and sure enough, all five walked right into the starting lineup.

The bet here was that Ally Mackay and his scouts could find unheralded players who would make an impact in MLS larger than their pedigree would suggest. A year ago, I reasoned that whereas big money DP transfers often are busts, spreading across a lot of players meant it wasn’t an all-or-nothing gamble. At least some of them would work.

And in one sense, that’s what happened. Kim and Enow were busts while Rowles, Peglow, and Schnegg did fine. The problem is, Rowles, Peglow, and Schnegg “did fine” in the sense that (unlike Kim and Enow) they didn’t look out of place starting games for the worst team in the league. I still have a some hope that Peglow in particular will look better with better players around him, but even he was a major part of an attack that scored 20 goals fewer than it did without him in 2024.

Looking back, I think I failed to anticipate the obvious problem with Mackay’s strategy: it put a huge premium on the front office’s ability to scout and recognize talent.

That’s not always a bad idea. The Philadelphia Union is doing something similar this offseason, but since Ernst Tanner joined the Union in 2018 he has a track record of doing this successfully (supposedly he’s no longer making decisions, though, so that’s a question mark for them this season). DC United, on the other hand, has a long and distinguished tradition of turnover and underinvestment in its front office and poor results from efforts to find diamonds in the international rough.

The good news is that this season, of the five new starters (so far?), only one, Keisuke Kurokawa, is in the 2025 mold of an unheralded player, though you might even argue he has a better resume than Peglow or Schnegg since he was a consistent starter for a good team in an equivalent league. Louis Munteanu is a big swing that could certainly go wrong, but he’s hardly an unheralded player the front office dug up. He was the subject of a six month transfer saga involving bigger teams than DC. And Sean Johnson, Tai Baribo, and Sean Nealis are all proven MLS players.

Youth

In 2025, DC United was a younger team than it had been the year before. FBref’s minutes-adjusted age for the season was 26.2 compared to 27.6. The reduction in age was enough to move DC from being older than average in MLS to being younger than average.

It’s impossible to know for sure how that’s going to come out in 2026, but three of the five new starters (Johnson, Nealis, and Kurokawa) are older than the players they are replacing, and of course everyone else is a year older, so it’s a pretty safe bet DC will be an older team.

What should we make of that? A year ago when I was writing the previews for 2025, I thought one of the problems DC had back in 2024 was a roster that was too old. In some cases that made for injury issues, like Birnbaum and Canouse being unable to play significant minutes, but I reasoned it was also a poor fit for Lesesne’s pressing scheme. Back in the heyday of the Red Bulls system, the joke was that except for Bradley Wright-Phillips, they put players out to pasture by age 27.

So I thought it was positive that in 2025, the team got younger. Does that mean this season’s shift to older players is bad?

Maybe, but given the results last season, I’m questioning my assumptions. I still think youth is, overall, an asset to a pressing team, but teams also need veteran leadership. Leadership is mostly a locker room phenomenon that fans can’t really see, so I don’t know for sure that it was a problem in 2025, but given the outcome, it’s safe to assume most things that could go wrong, did go wrong.

And while younger players can be good leaders, mostly you look for this in older players. In 2024, guys like Pedro Santos, Mateusz Klich, Cristian Dájome, and Alex Bono were 29+ and playing significant minutes. You also had Steve Birnbaum for at least part of the season. All those guys were gone in 2025.

Who did that leave? Only five players were 29 or older: Lukas MacNaughton, Conner Antley, Jordan Farr, Dominique Badji, and Christian Benteke. From the little we can tell from the short clips posted on DC United’s social media, it seemed like Farr, Antley, and MacNaughton were good guys and pretty vocal. But it’s hard to lead when you’re a player who is not only a backup now, but a player who has never been a consistent MLS starter.

I hesitate to make confident assessments about something as opaque as leadership, but as I said at the outset of this section, odds are the players will be somewhat older, and from a leadership perspective, Sean Johnson has gotten great reviews for his locker room vibes on the US National Team and Sean Nealis served as a captain at times for the New York Red Bulls. So the extent that it’s important to have veteran leaders contributing on the field, the team could be better positioned in 2026.

Eastern Conference Competition

Going into last season, I thought the team had improved, but a common response from pessimistic fans was that a little improvement didn’t matter when every team is getting better. DC United might have improved, but they hadn’t improved as much as other teams. I felt this overestimated how much other teams would improve. In the offseason, big money moves are intimidating, but results on the field are often spotty.

Since DC ended up winning the Spoon, you might think I was wrong about this, but I maintain I was right…on average. It’s true that when you look across the decades, MLS improves a huge amount, but the amount it improves year to year is pretty small and swamped by other factors. I don’t think MLS teams in 2025 were that much better than MLS teams in 2024.

However, DC United doesn’t just play in MLS, they play in the Eastern Conference, and unfortunately the Eastern Conference was a lot better in 2025 than it was in 2024. I don’t have the interconference breakdown on hand, but we can just look at the playoff line. In 2024, the ninth place team, Atlanta United, had 40 points (staying ahead of DC United via tiebreakers). In 2025, the ninth place team had 53 points. If you add up the points from every team in 2025, the Eastern Conference had 718 points whereas the Western Conference had 684.

None this is to say that DC United would have had a good season or even made the playoffs had they been in the Western Conference, but I think it’s reasonable to at least say they wouldn’t have earned the Wooden Spoon had they swapped places with Sporting Kansas City (which finished only 2 points ahead of them despite playing in the West).

So what about this season? Has the East improved again? Or is it the same? Or better yet, has it reverted back toward the mean?

To be honest, I don’t know yet. Assuming time allows I’ll post an assessment of this before the season starts, but it’s hard enough to gauge one team’s offseason, much less fifteen!

So in this case, I’m still holding my previous held position: in any one year, MLS as a whole doesn’t get much better and the strength of the Eastern Conference compared to the West will deviate in some random way from the previous season. I put it in the different category because given it was so strong last season, odds are good it won’t be quite so strong this time.

What’s the Same

Not everything is different. There’s some continuity, and I don’t just mean the obvious things like the ownership, Audi Field, and so on.

Playing Style

With limited practice time, René Weiler opted for a back-to-basics approach when he took over the team late last season. With an entire preseason, he can “install his system” as they say in the NFL. But both the types of players being acquired (Tai Baribo and Sean Nealis in particular) and Erkut Sogut’s comments indicate DC wants to play an aggressive, pressing style of play.

That’s a very high-level generalization, but in those terms, that’s also what they were trying to do under Troy Lesesne.

The good news about continuity here is that players who were brought in because they fit with Lesesne’s “system” should still be a good fit now. The bad news is there’s really only two players who strike me as especially suited: Peglow and Hosei Kijima, both of whom have the quick acceleration needed to put pressure on opposing players and respond quickly to mistakes.

Now something I failed to anticipate going into 2025 was that the team might be seriously let down by the coach’s tactics. Even though I write about tactics a lot, I think they’re overrated by fans, mainly because they are the tip of the performance iceberg that is most visible on television. When you look at the really successful teams in MLS, it doesn’t really look like success comes from routinely out-thinking their opponents. Instead, it mostly looks like the secret is having better players. Bruce Arena is still a very effective MLS coach despite the fact he is famous for eschewing fancy tactics in favor of trusting talented players to do well with simple instructions.

Compare that to Wilfried Nancy, who the national media would have you believe is a tactical genius. Other than an instinctive dislike for anyone not associated with DC being celebrated as a genius, I don’t have a reason to doubt the plaudits. Nancy’s Crew did have a pretty good record in knockout tournaments. So fine, maybe he’s an especially good tactician. But all his fancy tactics couldn’t replace Cucho Hernández (despite getting Dániel Gazdag after huge years in Philly) and he just got fired after the shortest managerial tenure in Celtic history.

So I still don’t think amazing tactics wins many games in MLS, but I now realize that bad tactics can lose games. I thought I had a good account for why DC’s defense was bad in 2024 (tl;dr: lots of minutes from inexperienced CBs + old players at fullback and midfield who couldn’t cover much ground + no natural left back). But in 2025 all those issues were fixed and the defense was just as bad. In 2024 DC allowed 70 goals, in 2025 DC allowed 66.

So what’s the common element? I hate to say it because I liked Troy Lesesne, but…Troy Lesesne. He spent the whole preseason preparing DC to play a 4-back system, but once the regular season started the defense gave up goals at a rapid rate.

After the San Jose Earthquakes game, he switched to three at the back and largely stopped the bleeding, but adding the extra defender crippled the offense. After a while, Lesesne tried the back four one more time, against Chicago, and lost 1-7 at home.

I know the roster wasn’t great, but with essentially the same players, René Weiler played with four at the back and…well, statistically it wasn’t great because they got destroyed by Philadelphia, but they sure looked better in terms of the eye test.

Maybe the best takeaway here is that aggressive, pressing systems can be effective…but they are also fragile. If the press isn’t well-designed, or if the players aren’t fully bought-in, or if the players are too tired…it can get ugly. It’s not just Lesesne, it’s also what happened to Jesse Marsch with Leeds in the Premier League. Even Philadelphia got absolutely blown out in 2025 when they rotated players at Vancouver ahead of the Open Cup semifinals.

My current thinking, then, is that to succeed with a pressing system, a coach needs to be able to design a system that fits the strengths of the available players and needs to be able to motivate them to a high level of effort.

The tricky thing about motivation is that coaches can clearly get stale. It seems like even the best motivator only has a limited bag of tricks and eventually players start to tune everything out. Some coaches seem to last longer than others, though. DC United had ups and downs during Ben Olsen’s long tenure, but everyone says Olsen is a great motivator and I don’t think he ever lost the team until his last season.

But some coaches struggle sooner, and I think there’s some reason to think coaches of pressing systems get stale faster because of the demands they put on players. Hernan Losada lost his DC United locker room early in his second season, and Troy Lesesne didn’t last much longer. Now these were young guys and maybe neither was the second coming of Bruce Arena, but again you can look abroad and see Jesse Marsch falling apart in his second season at Leeds, and before him, the acclaimed Marcelo Bielsa seemed to lose the Leeds locker room in his fourth year (and seems to be struggling with Uruguay after two years).

Midfield

I’ve already talked about this in my depth chart article so I’m not going to go into detail here, but when talking about what’s the same, you can’t escape the fact that so far, the midfielders are the same, unlike the forwards, wide players, fullbacks, centerbacks, and goalkeepers.

That’s ominous because the midfield was a big weakness last season. What are we to make of this? Is it really going to be Matti Peltola and Brandon Servania on opening day?

I guess the optimistic read is that there’s still going to be another move or two and either a DP or TAM player will be added to the midfield mix.

But if the plan is to muddle along, it’s possible that after an entire preseason, the arrangement of players will somehow be different in some beneficial way. One possibility is that instead of Servania, a more attacking player will start alongside Peltola. This would be more similar to how the team lined up in 2024, when Peltola typically started next to Mateusz Klich. You’d think that would be a diamond, but they actually played alongside each other. That midfield wasn’t great, but that team overall did better than in 2025, so maybe it’s not the end of the world.

This season, that could mean Peltola starting next to Gabriel Pirani or Jackson Hopkins. Apparently Sogut has spoken highly of both of them at offseason events, and Weiler seemed to really like Hopkins. Last season Pirani and Hopkins both looked best as second forwards, but that’s surely going to be Louis Munteanu’s spot, so in my depth chart I put them on the bench.

But if you just want to get the best eleven players on the field, you’d put Pirani at right midfield over Caden Clark and Hopkins in central midfield over Servania. So…maybe that’s what will happen? I feel like neither Hopkins or Pirani is up to the defensive responsibilities of central midfield. But if there are three in midfield and one of them is playing as a #10, maybe that would work?

Right now we just have to wait and see if any more moves happen and hope for a preseason game to be streamed so we can see how the players line up.

Will DC United be better this season?

As always the answer is no one knows, but…I do think they’ll be better than last season. Maybe not a lot better, though, and in last year’s Eastern Conference they needed to be a lot better to make the playoffs. But I expect some other team to win the Spoon.

But I thought they’d be better in 2025 too, so what do I know? The roster moves make sense, and it would be hard to be worse, right? So far the farthest I’m willing to go on the limb is that they’ll improve to at least 29th in the league. Maybe at best they could reach 18th (in 2024, they were 21st).