2025 MLS Season Previews: Sporting Kansas City, New England Revolution, Nashville SC
/The only thing constant is change (and Peter Vermes): It is and yet it isn’t the same Sporting Kansas City
Andreu Fontàs, Tim Melia, Alan Pulido, and Johnny Russell aren’t quite as indelibly part of Sporting Kansas City as coach-for-life Peter Vermes, but they have been foundational pieces of the team, playing together the past five seasons. Fontàs and Russell started there in 2018, and Melia’s tenure with the team started in 2015. They’re all gone now, and up until Feb. 1, those exits were the biggest news of the SKC offseason. Certainly, if your team goes 12th, 8th, and 13th in the West over the past three seasons, it’s probably in need of a bit of shaking up.
For a visualization of what that looks like, per Paul Harvey’s 2024 MLS Dashboard, here’s a glimpse at player ages and minutes played in 2024. The gray circles are players who are not returning in 2025.
You could also argue that maybe it’s time for a new head coach, as similarly-snakebitten teams like Austin FC and Toronto FC parted ways with their coaches in recent months, and even playoff-qualifying teams like Vancouver and NYCFC felt it time for change. Currently, 14 of the 30 MLS head coaches have been on the job less than a year, and seven more are just three months or less into their second year.
Not Vermes, though. He’s been at his post for 15 ½ years now, starting on August 4, 2009, and has been SKC’s coach for longer than FDR was president. He has, however, moved away from the dual role as head coach and sporting director, first ill-advisedly bringing in Gavin Wilkinson for nine days in January 2024 before ownership heard insistent fan outcry, and then bringing in former Revs GM Mike Burns this past June.
Here’s how Vermes feels about that:
Over the last week-plus, the fruits of Burns’ labors have been revealed: First, SKC brought in Dejan Joveljić from the Galaxy in the league’s first trade under the new cash-for-player provision (barely beating out Jack McGlynn’s trade from Philly to Houston to be first), and then landed two teammates from Greek club Aris, attacking midfielder Manu Garcia and winger Shapi Suleymanov, two days later. That’s two designated players and a TAM player coming to Vermes’ squad less than three weeks before they open the 2025 season on the road at Austin.
So, if you’re wondering how they were going to go about replacing Pulido (who played a lot at the 10 last season) and Russell, well, that’s how.
Joveljić is perhaps the most surprising of the three acquisitions – even though they didn’t have much-seasoned depth behind William Agada to start the offseason, they did have Agada. That begs the question: Do they really need both?
Why not both?
Here’s how Joveljić and Agada compared in 2024.
What jumps off the page most is how comparable they are. Their npXG + xAG numbers are stellar, as are their assists, shot-creating actions, and touches, but even though Joveljić and Agada have different defensive strengths and Agada’s arguably better in possession, they’re not all that different from one another.
Agada’s quite shot happy (with 84 and 26 on target last year in 1729 minutes, resulting in 10 goals (plus three assists), while Pulido logged 1959 minutes, shooting 43 times with 17 on target, getting seven goals and five assists on the year. (Those aren’t wretched DP numbers, but they’re down from his 14-goal, three-assist 2023 season.)
Joveljić, on a team stacked with offensive talent, netted 15 goals (plus six assists), with 57 shots and 33 of those on target in a surprisingly-low 1942 minutes. On the whole, Joveljić looks to be more efficient, but that’s also to do with the system Joveljić got to play in. When you have the best chance-creator in the league and two DP wingers — all of who also got at least 10 goals — you’re going to have better chances come your way.
SKC also picked up Mason Toye in free agency. It’s Toye’s third club in three seasons since starting his MLS career in Minnesota, and having him as depth behind Agada and Joveljić seems a good place for him, considering his xAG (0.17 per 90) and npXG + xAG (0.46 per 90), making him a better than average threat in those two categories even if it doesn’t show up on the score sheet.
It’s really Pulskamp’s job?
While the attack has some resounding exclamation points freshly added to it, goalkeeping remains a question mark with the Melia Era ending. It appears to be John Puslkamp’s job to lose, as Vermes confirmed several weeks ago.
Among players in FBref’s Men’s Next 14 Competitions, the grab bag of leagues that MLS and Liga MX are included in, Pulskamp is in the 99th percentile for post-shot expected goals per shot on target at 0.41, meaning he’s facing the most difficult shots of pretty much any keeper, but his PSxG minute goals against is -0.52 and his save percentage is 43.5%, putting him in the first percentile in both categories (that’s not good), and lets in 2.17 goals against per 90 (third percentile).
He’s also in the first percentile in touches (26.33 per 90) and crosses stopped (1.5%). His goals added for 2024? A dismal -3.48, but it is admittedly a very small (and very bad) sample size. That’s not to say that Tim Melia’s numbers were great last year. While he makes saves 60% of his penalties faced, he only saves 59.2% of all shots on target. You read that correctly.
He’s also in the 33rd percentile in touches (32.96 per 90) and 30th percentile in crosses stopped (4.6%). His goals added was a -2.75, putting him between Zac MacMath and Alex Bono in a slightly lesser tier of futility. I suspect some of this might have to do with what SKC got out of its defense last season. Here are two charts that paint a picture of how play on that half of the field affected SKC’s fortunes.
In the first image, you can see that SKC’s the least defensively efficient team in the league last year, with opponents averaging less than 60 passes per xG, indicating players in the final third aren’t as bottled up. The negative field tilt indicates that about 9% of touches in SKC games are by opponents in SKC’s final third. Only the Crew had a lower negative field tilt (probably for different reasons than SKC).
In the second chart, you can see the correlation between goals against and points per game. The Quakes are the true outlier here, as you’d expect from a Wooden Spoon winner. But SKC’s right in a similar zone with two other teams that let in a lot of goals and struggled to mount wins and draws: Chicago and New England. SKC scored enough to be middle-of-the-pack in goals, with their 51 besting the Sounders, Dynamo, and Five Stripes. It’s ultimately the defending and the goalkeeping that let them down.
They may have not done enough to repair that in this window; this is likely a multiple-window rebuild to get back to their heyday (when they won three Open Cups and an MLS Cup in the six-year window between 2012 and 2017, in a league much different than when they went on that run.
But, of course, Vermes was leading the team then, and he’ll seemingly lead the team for as long as he wants. The difference this season is he might be poised for a lot more high-octane wins with many goals scored in both directions. They might not be good yet, but they’re certainly going to be fun.
Revs Trek 30 - The Search for a Roster
“Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam” – Qeleb Pora'tor
0:40:41 on Day 9 of Nay'Poq, Year of Kahless 650
The IKS/UFP Cold War
The IKS OurOldLogoWasBetter has entered the Transfer Sector on a 6 month mission to find critical dilithium players to find a source of positivity to replace that from the exploded moon Arenaxis. The Revs are undergoing the biggest roster rebuild in MLS entering 2025, and it’s not even close. At 21.6% fewer returning minutes than the next closest team, they have the lowest returning player minute percentage of any MLS team since 2019.
This is the result of noted Klingon coach Qeleb Pora'tor’s herculean effort to change the Revs’ fortunes in any way possible. It's certainly going to result in an unpredictable season, which makes this preview difficult.
Paul Harvey wrote an excellent article on team cohesion - Chemistry 101 - on American Soccer Analysis about the effect of roster changes on team performance. When teams perform massive rebuilds, it sends cohesion into the depths. It took a heavily rebuilt 2022 Inter Miami until that July to even get above the 25th percentile in pass cohesion in MLS. The Revs are almost certainly going to look uncoordinated for the first half of the season.
That lack of cohesion is going to be a real problem for a team who finished bottom of MLS in xG and xGD.
On top of that, the Revs have transferred out almost half their entire 2024 goal output. Giacomo Vrioni, Bobby Wood, and Esmir Bajraktarevic contributed 14 of New England’s 37 goals. They dishonored their ancestors, and have answered for it. To be fair, the Revs’ offense was incredibly anemic. Watching the Revs on the attack was rather like watching Starfleet cadets running the Kobayashi Maru simulation - you know how it was going to end, but you want to see the new and interesting ways they find to fail.
Well, the offense is out. What about the defense? David Romney, Nick Lima, and Xavier Arreaga were the three defenders with the most minutes played in 2024, and, you guessed it, they’re all gone. Again, this is a good thing. The Revs had the worst xGA in MLS at 62.8, and still somehow underperformed that by allowing 74 goals. In a sort of “Thank God for Mississippi” moment, at least San Jose allowed 78.
The Augment Crisis
As of this writing (2/10/2025) have dispensed with 18 players and signed only 14. While the transfer window is open through April 23, 2025, the first game of the regular season is on February 22nd. Possibly serendipitously, the first announcement of Star Trek’s 1966 debut on television came on February 22. One hopes that means Pora’tor’s attempts to reform the roster are more Gorkon than Gowron (or, for you pitiful humans, more Picard than Archer).
That is not to say that outlook is good in the short term, just that it’s better than one might think. It took 41 years for true peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire after the first Khitomer Accords. Maybe New England can do it in 18 months. They’ve certainly got the free roster and cap space to make more moves, though it is getting awfully close to the wire.
tlhopDaq (At the front)
Speaking of moves, the largest single event in the offseason was the signing of Leo Campana from Inter Miami for $2m in gold-pressed latiGAM. Campana is a huge upgrade on Vrioni in every way. Campana posted 8g/2a in 1280 minutes, compared to Vrioni’s 9g/1a in 2236 minutes.
On most teams, Campana would be a key player around which the squad would be built. Unfortunately for him, he was a forward at an Inter Miami club stacked with bigger names, and so was surplus to requirements. That meant that the Revs were able to follow the Third Rule of Acquisition: Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
Arriving with Campana at forward are Maxi Urruti (who, based on his Instagram, spent most of the offseason in Austin putting his shoe-clad feet up on tables) and Ignatius Ganago (see below). Neither looked like worldbeaters in 2024 (or indeed over the last few years). Out wide, Ignatius Ganago (on loan from Nantes, with a semi-interesting stat profile in low Ligue 1 minutes) and returning-to-MLS Luis Diaz should absorb the minutes left by Bajraktarevic and Boateng. Diaz did not have a particularly good 2024 at Deportivo Saprissa, providing 1g/5a in 852 minutes.
qoDDaq (in the middle)
At the 10, Carles Gil, second top scorer with seven, will try to orchestrate the offense. Gil played 26 games in 2024 and, when he wasn’t starting, the Revs had no real alternative. They used alternate formations and tried to use Polster and Bajraktarevic - though in this case the replicator created blue water instead of Romulan Ale.
The big midfield signing (and indeed, only pure midfield signing) is Jackson Yueill who swam against the tide taking players TO San Jose, instead. He’s much more of a deep passer, and certainly not a good deputy for Gil. There are approximately 700 churches in the greater Boston area - the Revs need to light candles at each one for Gil’s health. If he goes down, it is unclear how any service will get through to Campana. As noted above, the wingers aren’t world-beaters.
I wish there were more to say here - the Revs clearly need more depth at midfield - but it’s been quiet in the Neutral Zone.
‘o’Daq (at the back)
As noted above, Lima, Romney, and Arreaga are all out. Joining Yueill on the Botany Bay from San Jose is Tanner Beason. Mamadou Fofana arrives from mid-bottom Ligue 2 side Amiens, where he’s played almost every minute of every game over the last four years. Wyatt Omsberg comes from a bottom-dwelling cold city to another bottom-dwelling cold city, presumably using this misery to replace painstiks in his Rite of Ascension.
Arreaga was the most complete CB on the roster in 2024. Romney was more limited in his skillset. FBRef doesn’t have much detailed data on Fofana, but, if Sofascore’s player comparison is in any way valid, he looks very similar to Arreaga. Omsberg and Beason have far less impressive resumes. The Revs will look to Fofana to anchor the back line, with Omsberg and Beason presumably rotating for the other CB slot.
Nick Lima was the Revs’ most consistent starter at RB, with Brandon Bye as his understudy. Bye was much better in attack than Lima. As there hasn’t really been another incoming RB, Bye is the odds-on starter. The LB role was a committee (the Revs like committees more than Starfleet) between DeJuan Jones and Ryan Spaulding. Jones now plays for the Crew, expect young homegrown Peyton Miller to get a big uptick in minutes. That he was a league average fullback for that team as a 16 year old is crazy.
The Undiscovered Country
It's about the future, Madame Chancellor. Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, we haven't run out of history quite yet. Your father called the future - "the undiscovered country". – James T. Kirk
Truly the Revolution are entering the Undiscovered Country. A brand new offense, a brand new central defense, and a thin roster make it hard to think that 2025 is going to be anything other than painful. This is a rebuilding year, and the fans are going to have to hope that someone else is bad enough to get the Wooden Spoon. There is room for hope - this roster is better than it was. Another transfer window or two and it may even be good again. Once you’ve hit rock bottom there’s nowhere to go but up.
It’s Time to Rock and Roll
In last year’s preview for Nashville, I wrote that Nashville’s season relied on a healthy and productive Hany Mukhtar and that Gary Smith might be in trouble if the team did not get off to a good start. What happened was that Mukhtar ended up getting injured early and put in his least productive season in Nashville so far, and Gary Smith was sacked 11 games into the season, and Nashville missed the MLS playoffs for the first time. By the time former USMNT assistant BJ Callaghan took the reins in August, Nashville was already out of the playoff race. However, the team showed some signs of life transitioning to a more possession based style from Smith’s sufferball countering tactics.
Offseason Changes
For the first time since joining MLS in 2020, the rebuild is on in Music City. Going into the off season, Nashville had one of the stickiest roster builds of any MLS clubs, full of aging players on long and expensive deals, and all three DP spots full. General Manager Mike Jacobs did what he could, turning over most of the midfield by declining options on Tah Brian Anunga and Anibal Godoy, trading Sean Davis, and buying out Randal Leal’s contract. Additionally, starting defenders Shaq Moore and Lukas MacNaughton were traded away.
Nashville signed a trio of veterans as replacements with MLS Champion Gaston Brugman from LA Galaxy presumably to start in central midfield, center back Jeison Palacios joined from Colombia to provide competition with Jack Maher, and 2010 MLS Rookie of the Year Andy Najar to start at right back. Also bolstering the central midfield are 24 year old Norwegian international Edvard Tagseth from Rossenborg and former FC Dallas DP Bryan Acosta.
Key Questions
Can BJ Callaghan remake the team?
Gary Smith was Nashville’s first and only head coach until he was let go a third of the way through the 2024 season after a slow start. Rumba Munthali took over as interim and initially got a handful of results before losing his final 6 games in charge. BJ Callaghan finally took over during Leagues Cup at the nadir of Nashville’s season and was able to take a team in woeful form and turn them into a league average team by the end of the season.
Callaghan brings a different tactical outlook to the Coyotes compared to Gary Smith’s defensive counter attacking strategy. Callaghan comes from the Berhalter coaching tree which focuses more on possession and pressing. Looking at the types of passes that Nashville made more often than other MLS teams shows Smith’s teams’ penchant for long balls down the wings. This was mostly maintained by Rumba Munthali in addition to a lot of passing around the defensive half. In a limited sample size, Callaghan’s players were more likely to play more passes around the midfield.
Callaghan also had Nashville pressing more in their attacking half, as their Per100 against (a proxy for high pressing that compares actual - expected passing per 100 passes) went from -0.8 to -1.38, indicating a more robust high press. With a full pre-season and a new batch of players that should fit his system better, Callaghan will have the chance to revive a Nashville SC team that had their worst results in their short history last year.
Key Players
Nashville’s new midfield
Of the 6 players that played center midfield for Nashville in 2024, only one, Patrick Yazbek - representing only 5% of center midfield minutes, is coming back for 2025. Following the departure of Dax McCarty after the 2023 season, Nashville didn’t really have any center midfielders that would reliably pass the ball forward into dangerous areas of the field (see last year’s preview for more). In 2025 Nashville will likely have a starting duo of Brugman and Yazbek, which should provide a bit more attacking verve from the midfield than Nashville has ever had. Brugman, if he can stay healthy, has already produced three MLS seasons with higher g+ passing than any single season of any Nashville center midfielder since 2020. Yazbek showed some promise after signing as a U-22 initiative signing over the summer but is still young and largely unproven in MLS and veteran Bryan Acosta may provide a depth option. Based on pre-season matches, Nashville will likely implement a narrow 4-2-2-2 system and Edvard Tagesth looks to be a likely starter as one of the more advanced midfielders, but could also see time in the double pivot. While some of the individual pieces are proven in MLS, as a whole, Nashville will need this reformulated midfield to click for the team to have success in a more possession-based style than the club has used in the past.
2025 Prognosis
Nashville will almost certainly improve from 2024, because it will be hard not to. If nothing else, BJ Callaghan will put a more entertaining product on the field than what was seen at Geodis Park since Nashville cratered after losing the 2023 Leagues Cup final. With a more attacking style, Sam Surridge may be primed for a breakout year especially if Hany Mukhtar can rekindle some of the magic that was lost last year to injury and coaching turmoil. Expect Nashville to be in the hunt for a playoff spot, but not much more than that.
Prediction from my 9 year old son, Rhys: Nashville will probably get in the playoffs again, but not go far.