Faltering down the stretch: A look at Austin FC's post-July performances

When July turns to August in Austin, what it means depends on who you are. For residents throughout the metro area, it's a time to brace for some of the most unrelenting heat of summer. For parents, it's a scramble to get school supplies and back into the routine of sending kids off to their classrooms.

For Austin FC, though, it's been a time of the year in which they struggle to get results — often at peril of missing the playoffs with those less than satisfactory performances.

In 53 regular-season matches that Verde have played in August, September, and October – plus a few stray November matches in 2021 — they've compiled a 13W 29L 11D record, for 0.94 points per game. That's decidedly below their total regular-season tally of 55W 69L 38D and 1.25 PPG.

Be it the cumulative effect of heat that typically doesn't begin to ebb until October, the grind of multiple competitions, the hunger of late-season opponents, or some combination of these, Austin FC tends to play its worst soccer at the point in the season when it matters most.

Let's explore year by year.

2021: Actually better from August on

In a schedule altered significantly by COVID-19, the league did get in a 34-game season, but it took until early November to get there. Prior to Aug. 1, Austin rattled off a 3-8-4 record for 0.85 PPG. They actually improved when August arrived, weirdly not getting a draw in their last 19 matches, going 6-13-0.

That did include continued mastery over Portland at home and two home wins over Houston (play was more regionalized in 2021 as a COVID-19 scheduling byproduct), but it did also include the 2-0 loss at Frisco with a rotated lineup (including a Manny Perez and Aedan Stanley start!) that fans didn't appreciate, and a 4-0 loss to San Jose prompting one of the most infamous question-and-answer episodes at a Josh Wolff press conference).

It still stands as Austin's worst season — the 2025 team got past that 31-point mark winning against D.C. — and playoff elimination in 29 matches is the earliest they've done it in five seasons. Yet this is the one season in which the team actually improved its total points per game by what it did after July 31.

2022: Skidding into the playoffs

As you know, 2022 was a special year in which Verde finished second in the West and reached the Western conference finals. Still, a trio of losses to Portland, Nashville, and Seattle kept Austin from officially clinching until the Real Salt Lake match at home – Match 31 — thanks to a late Moussa Djitté hat trick that broke a scoreless deadlock.

Austin finished the season on 1.65 PPG — easily a high-water mark — despite getting just 1.09 PPG by going 3W 5L 3D in their final 11 matches. (Doing the math another way, that's 12 out of 33 points down the stretch, whereas LAFC got 16 points on 5W 5L 1D to clinch the West's top seed.)

Take out the 2-1-1 August, including the momentous 4-1 win over LAFC, and that leaves them with 1W 4L 2D in their last seven. In the midst of that, Felipe Martins tried to make Austin media a foil, prompting me to write an open letter encapsulating fan frustration; the team did respond with the RSL win for a decent four-match sequence to close the season. But that three-match losing streak showed the cracks that would eventually fully manifest in that championship match in L.A.

2023: A forgettable stretch

Starting with a return from a bad Leagues Cup — in a season with an embarrasing Concacaf Champions League exit — Verde lost 6-3 to St. Louis SC, starting a second eight-match winless streak and dooming the team to one of the worst year-over-year performances in league history. In that final 11-match stretch, Verde got just one win and 0.64 PPG, the worst of their from-August-on performances in their history. (It's even worse than the two points from nine they've accumulated thus far in 2025.)

Let's just move on from this one.

2024: Josh Wolff's last stand

Weirdly, at 1.22 PPG on a 3w 4L 2D record, this is the best from-August-on performance Austin FC's ever had, even beating out a 2022 team that fared much better. It started with a 2-0 win over Nashville featuring a Brad Stuver penalty save and an electric Osman Bukari goal — his first in Verde — which resulted in my writing a recap in which I described Josh Wolff's mood as "jubilant" and described this as the start of a "playoff push."

What happened? Well, a five-match winless streak happened, leaving Verde players visibly deflated in post-match locker room interviews thick with tension. A 1-0 loss to Houston left Verde cruelly dangling at the edge of the playoff elimination cliff for three more matches; while they still could get to a point total where the goal differential tiebreaker figured in, they had an absurd goal differential — in the neighborhood of 20 goals — to make up.

They did get a 1-0 win at Portland in that stretch, but Dani Pereira's unusual goal didn't do much to chip away at that goal differential.

Finally, putting everyone out of their misery, Verde lost 2-1 to the Galaxy in the penultimate match of the season, officially lodging the e next to their name in the standings. Wolff was fired the next morning, opening the door to a coaching search in which sporting director Rodolfo Borrell boasted about "names you wouldn't believe," which brings us to Nico Estévez in his first Austin FC season.

2025: How will this end?

So far, Austin has a pair of draws and a loss from an August slate which looked like it could yield three wins.

At 0.67 PPG so far in August, this push toward securing a playoff place is not starting well, and while Verde has a decent cushion over its two nearest challengers in 10th and 11th, continuing at this pace could easily dip them below the playoff line.

The remaining schedule contains two tough home matches against LAFC and Seattle, but also includes four matches in which Austin can gain points over teams directly above and below them — a home match against San Jose on Saturday, a return leg against them on Decision Day, and away matches against Dallas and RSL in September. The other two matches on the schedule — away at SKC, home against a spiraling St. Louis that just fired its talismanic sporting director — appear winnable, though with this team and this time of year, "winnable" is doing a lot of work.

For Austin FC, September has been the cruellest month in this late-season block, with a 2W 11L 6D record amassed over four seasons. 2025 presents an opportunity to reverse the trend and perhaps even clinch a playoff spot earlier than even before should results break right ... or it could also doom Verde to a continued pattern of late summer swoons looking more and more baked into future seasons' outlooks. While banking points early is a great indicator of success for MLS teams in general, it might even be more vital for Verde.

Distressingly, they may have not banked quite enough at this point in 2025 to achieve their playoff goals.

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