Have Verde done enough to make the playoffs? What performance after seven MLS matches tells us about the whole season (and post-season)

If there's not a maxim to this effect, there should be: You don't know how any MLS team is going to do at the start of the season.

The LA Galaxy, for now the reigning MLS Cup champs, picked by many (not me) to finish among the top teams in the West, is currently dead last in the conference. Seattle Sounders FC, also picked by many to be among the best in the West (including me), are currently 12th, though they're notoriously slow starters.

Meanwhile, expansion team San Diego FC is second in the West, and a Union team that worried one of their most observant writers heading into the season is third in the East. Just like everyone predicted!

Oh, and an Austin FC team that quite a few pundits predicted would be toward the bottom of the West is instead fourth after seven matches — with the chance to pull even on points with current conference leader Vancouver (another surprise) should they grab an away victory on Saturday.

While MLS preseason predictions are notoriously off base, the season does largely reveal itself at about the seven-match mark. With 34 matches in an MLS season, seven matches means a team's already a scooch more than 20 percent through its schedule.

And while you don't know how a team's going to fare in MLS at the start of the season, it's much easier to predict if that team's going to make the playoffs at this stage of the season.

And if you're an Austin FC fan, I have some good news for you. (I'm reasonably sure.)

Seven of Nine: Not just a Star Trek character

In 2023, MLS launched its maybe-too-many-teams playoff format, in which nine teams from each conference make the playoffs. There's a big asterisk-laden debate on this one, as some contend that the teams who make the play-in matches (the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds in each conference) aren't really in the playoffs, but I contend that if you are playing a match that follows the end of the regular season by reaching a certain place threshold in the table allowing you to be there, you are officially in the post-season.

Looking at the 2023 and 2024 Western Conference tables after seven matches and after all 34 matches, I found that in each season, seven of the top nine teams in the table at the seven-week mark remained in the top nine. Only two teams that were below the playoff line after seven matches were able to supplant two teams in the top nine by season's end.

Remember, both seasons included pesky bye weeks, so we have to factor in that a few teams only played six matches after seven weeks.

Also, know that we're going to talk about points per game in some of this, and to get to what's generally a playoff-clinching 45-point season (though that's varied some in recent years), you have to play at a 1.32 PPG clip to get there.

In 2023, the top nine after seven weeks looked like this:

1. Seattle (7 played, 16 points)
2. St. Louis (7 played, 15 points)
3. LAFC (6 played, 14 points — and they'd win their 7th game to get to 17 points)
4. Dallas (7 played, 11 points)
5. Minnesota (6 played, 11 points)
6. San Jose (7 played, 11 points)
7. Houston (6 played, 9 points)
8. Vancouver (7 played, 9 points)
9. Austin (6 played, 7 points — and they'd tie their 7th game, 0-0 at home against Vancouver, to get to 8 points)

See those two italicized teams? Yep, those are the two that were in playoff position and then dropped out. This is what the final table looked like, with their points total (and teams making the leap in bold):

1. St. Louis (56)
2. Seattle (53)
3. LAFC (52)
4. Houston (51)
5. RSL (50)
6. Vancouver (48)
7. Dallas (46)
8. SKC (44)
9. San Jose (44)

Remarkably, RSL had six points after seven matches, and SKC had THREE points — failing to get a win in their first 10 matches. SKC had to play at a 1.52 PPG rate over their last 27 matches of the season just to get into the playoffs — but then won their play-in game and knocked out St. Louis to be Peak MLS that season.

Austin, meanwhile, flubbed its position playing at a 1.19 PPG pace in those final 27 games. (Extrapolated over a full season, that pace gets you a 40-point season. Austin finished with 39. They somehow lucked into a playoff place at 1.16 PPG after seven matches.)

In 2024, it was largely the same story in the West. Seven of nine teams in playoff position after seven weeks of the season remained there — and Austin was one of the two in a play-in spot that dropped out by season's end.

Here's the table after seven weeks of the 2024 season:

1. Vancouver (6 played, 13 points)
2. LA Galaxy (7 played, 12 points)
3. RSL (7 played, 11 points)
4. Minnesota (6 played, 11 points)
5. LAFC (7 played, 10 points)
6. Houston (6 played, 10 points)
7. SKC (7 played, 10 points)
8. Austin (7 played, 9 points, 2 wins, -1 goal differential)
9. Colorado (7 played, 9 points, 2 wins, -2 goal differential)

Yep, Austin was in position to host the play-in game after seven matches, but went 1.22 PPG in their final 27 matches to finish on 42 points. (If they'd been in the East, they would have passed Atlanta for the ninth and final playoff spot in that conference. But they're in the West.)

The final standings looked like this:

1. LAFC (64, beating San Jose 3-1 on Decision Day to take the West by a single goal's worth of goal differential)
2. LA Galaxy (64)
3. RSL (59)
4. Seattle (57, after starting with six points in the first seven matches and going 1.89 PPG over the remaining 27)
5. Houston (54)
6. Minnesota (52)
7. Colorado (50)
8. Vancouver (47, who went 1.25 PPG in their final 27 after playing 2.17 PPG in their first six to drop from first to eighth)
9. Portland (47)

But wait, there's hope

So, yes, Austin was in a playoff place after seven matches in 2023 and 2024 and was the only team to fail to make it both seasons. That doesn't bode well.

However, standings-wise, 2025 is looking more like 2022 than the two subsequent years. In 2022, after seven matches, Verde was 4-1-2, in second place in the West, on 14 points. They remained in second throughout the season, playing at a 1.62 PPG clip their last 27 matches; that, combined with the 2 PPG pace in their first seven, left them with a 1.65 PPG rate for the whole season, only bested by three other teams in the league.

In 2025, at the same juncture, they're 4-2-1, at 1.86 PPG, in fourth, on 13 points.

To get to 45 points right now, they'd have to play at a 1.18 PPG clip the rest of the way, just above the 1.15 PPG level they got to for all of 2023. And they certainly seem capable of better than that just for the way they've played defense.

Also, if you're theorizing that they've been in an "easy" part of their schedule, San Diego and Portland currently sandwich them in the standings, and they've played two other playoff place teams so far (Colorado, now in 7th, and LAFC, now in 9th, though that's probably going to improve.)

Their opponents to date have a collective 16-17-9 record, for a collective 1.36 PPG. Their next seven opponents (Vancouver, the Galaxy, Houston, Minnesota, Cincinnati, Atlanta, and Vancouver again) have accumulated a PPG to date of ... 1.4. At the start of the season you might have surmised this upcoming block of matches constituted a tougher stretch than the teams they first faced, given it is against a group of six 2024 playoff teams. But because this is MLS, teams' relative strengths change from year to year, especially for the Galaxy and their hollowed-out midfield.

If there's bad news about what they've achieved so far, it's that the draw with Portland dropped them to fourth, and were the playoffs to start today, they'd match up with the No. 5 Timbers, and given indications from these two recent games, they don't square off against them particularly well.

But you should also expect some shifting in the table over the year. After all, just four points separate 4th from 10th in the West today, and in the final standings for 2024, only five points separated 6th from 9th, while in 2023, only three points separated 7th from 10th. While teams in the upper tier of the conference tend to create some separation to ensure their place in the playoffs, teams on the bubble often have their fates hinge on such thin margins.

And while it might be difficult to put the weight of an entire season on just a few late-season results, you could also make a case that Austin's 1-0 loss to Houston (on a late Coco Carrasquilla goal) on Sept. 21, coupled with the 2-1 loss to moribund Toronto the week before, did enough to drop Verde resolutely below the playoff line and into the slow death spiral that finally officially ended with Oct. 5's 2-1 loss to the Galaxy.

Verde may now have the cushion built up in these first seven matches, given where you might expect the ebb and flow of the season to go, to avoid such bubble-induced match-by-match dependency.

But there's no guarantee that being in fourth now means they'll be in fourth at the end of the season. The trendlines of the past two seasons indicate that they're likely to be in the playoffs given what they've been able to do in this first crucial juncture of the season. But they've also bucked those trends before to their detriment.

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