At the turn: Some historical perspective on Austin FC at the season's halfway point

Thanks to a May full of schedule mayhem, the halfway point of the season — if you're counting by games rather than the calendar — comes May 31 in San Diego, when Austin FC faces the league's newest expansion team.

It wasn't all that long ago that Verde was Southern California-bound as the league's newest expansion team. Forty-nine months ago, Austin FC trekked to what is now BMO Stadium for its inaugural match against LAFC. And since then, they've mounted what is one of the worst points-per-game (PPG) values in league history, while SDFC (albeit a small sample size) has one of the best.

What happens in these next three matches — starting Saturday night against a strong Minnesota United squad, followed by a Wednesday home match against Real Salt Lake and next weekend's trip out West — could tip Verde closer to its second playoff appearance ever, but with a current record of 5-6-3, it's likely they'll remain in a group of teams clustered around the 9th-place marker, whose postseason fate could ultimately be decided in the final few matches of the season.

And if that's the case, Austin FC will have to do something in the second half of the season it hasn't really done before.

Which led me to do something I haven't done in a while.

Let's make a table

It's table-making time! I did this to illustrate better where the team currently stands compared to past seasons. Records are displayed in the American wins-losses-draws format.

Of course you know that 2022 was, by far, Verde's best season, and at the halfway point, were on 2.11 PPG before having a 5-7-5 second half of the season to finish on 1.64 PPG, good enough for second in the West, but reflecting some of the being-found-out elements that ultimately led to a decisive loss in the Western Conference Finals.

Aside from that, Verde's best first half of the season came last year, getting to 7-5-5 following a win against Sporting Kansas City that led hopeful fans to ponder the playoffs (and less hopeful fans to ponder playoff qualification meaning Josh Wolff's continued tenure). But the team then went on a 4-9-4 collapse in the second half of the season — the exact same record they mounted their first half-season of existence, in a season where Manny Perez and Aedan Stanley combined for 19 appearances almost evenly split — to drop from 1.52 PPG to 1.24.

2023 is the only season in which Austin finished on better points per game at the end of the season than at the halfway point – a barely-perceptible jump from 1.12 to 1.14, getting 20 points in the last 17 matches as compared to 19 in the first 17.

I've also included goals per game and goals against per game in the table to give you a sense of the relative lack of goal events this season compared to all others. At just 0.64 goals per game in 2025, Verde are on pace for a 22-goal season. That would match D.C. United's 2013 season for least goals in a 34-match campaign. That ended up as a dismal 3-24-7 campaign (led by current Dynamo head coach Ben Olsen) in which they still hilariously qualified for CONCACAF Champions League as the last-place team in MLS by virtue of winning the U.S. Open Cup.

Verde would also only give up just 39 goals if current averages bear out, which would be the team's best defensive season in five per that metric. (Still, though, I have a feeling that only 22 goals would be the topline story on the 2025 season ... especially if Austin still managed to make the playoffs.)

What's causing this?

Perhaps Austin's literally feeling the heat of summer? While the heat is supposed to be a home-field advantage for Austin players training in unforgiving summers, as we've been led to believe by past and present higher-ups, perhaps it's not, and its effects on players could be having a measurable summer swoon, given the dramatic dropoff in what remain the team's best two seasons.

Perhaps, also, losing begets more losing. For as joyous as the win was on August 26, 2022 – the historic night in which Austin beat LAFC 4-1 — the next three matches brought losses to Portland, Nashville, and Seattle by a combined 8-1 score, revealing some very concerning team tendencies briefly tempered by the Moussa Djitté Hat Trick Match that got Verde into the playoffs. (But then Austin went winless in their final three matches of the season, needing a PK shootout to beat 10-man Real Salt Lake before finally getting a 90-minute win in the conference semis against Dallas. You know what happened after that.)

And in 2024, Verde started the second half of the season with a five-match winless streak, which they then replicated later in the season, which ultimately sealed their playoff-less fate. During that summer, we witnessed a team losing faith in their coach in real time and its star player functionally checking out, eventually being stripped of his captaincy to add to a very funereal locker room climate.

2025's brought a new coach and new optimism with it, and though that optimism might be wavering a bit for some. But there's also a burgeoning sense — as Ilie Sánchez told it Thursday in an uplifting media session you can hear for yourself — that progress is being made and the team might be trending upward rather than downward.

The cumulative data from the four past seasons tells us to expect a dropoff in points per game as Austin FC makes the turn into the second half of the season. But this is also a team that has shown itself capable of creating new and happier data to put into the mix. Past may not be prologue when we close the 2025 chapter, and as we discussed in the just-released latest episode of Emergency Podcast, June and July bring a much more manageable schedule than May, at a time when key players are returning from injury.

Summer is upon us. Now we'll see what Verde does with it.

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