How they earned it: Six victories crucial to Austin FC making the 2025 MLS playoffs
As the maxim goes, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Here are some of the best milestones along the way en route to Verde's second-ever playoff appearance.
On Friday, when Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez spoke to local media for the first time since his team officially clinched a playoff berth last Sunday, the topic of backing into the postseason came up.
After all, Verde has lost their last two matches — the first a chance to clinch with a win, the second a chance to clinch with even a draw — and it took Vancouver beating San Jose after coming off a Wednesday tournament championship win to make the inevitable official.
But Estévez said this current hiccup shouldn't diminish what they've done over the whole season.
"I don't understand the narrative that we haven't earned it," he said. "We're in the playoffs because we did a really good job throughout a lot of months, and this is a whole season's work. It's not because you didn't win a game or not; you should ask the other teams you know that they didn't do well, why? Or as well as we did, probably they weren't the ones that didn't achieve that ... we already have those points, and they couldn't catch us."
Speaking of not getting the points one needs, both Real Salt Lake and FC Dallas lost last night, ensuring Austin FC will do no worse than 7th and avoid in the play-in match, also leaving the door open to Colorado and San Jose to vault into the playoffs on Decision Day and also leaving the door open to four teams making the playoffs with under 45 points (contrasted with the East, where all nine locked-in postseason contestants have at least 51).
"I am a little bit surprised of that narrative," he continued, regarding how Verde qualified, "because the team has now, [after we] made a playoff one time in four years, we just played a final and made a playoff. That is very difficult to do both, and we should be proud about how the team has fought throughout the whole season to be in a point that if the others don't do their homework, it could have favor to us ... we put ourselves in a really good position, and it was others that didn't do their homework as well as they should to put us in a different position."
He also said they now have two matches to get right for the postseason, including tonight's rescheduled match against LAFC — a team that has won six straight, but will be without the two players (Son Heung-min and Denis Bouanga) largely responsible for that recent win streak.
As we pointed out on the most recent Emergency Podcast, made more real by Vancouver's come-from-behind win over Orlando on Saturday, Austin winning on Sunday night makes it more likely that LAFC ends up 3rd and Austin 6th ... meaning the teams would face each other in a best-of-three series in which Son and Bouanga would be available.
A look at playoff odds (green means team controls its own destiny for getting to that place, and red means it does not)
It's a bit full circle for the 2025 season, given that looking at five victories key to Verde's body of work in 2025, the LAFC away match in March was among the most crucial — kicking off a three-match win streak that is begging us to include all three of those matches. While playoffstatus.com favors a San Diego-Verde matchup at present, the LAFC-Verde scenario isn't much farther behind.
Here's a look back at what Austin FC has done to get to this place.
March 15: LAFC 0, Austin FC 1
As I said in my post-match recap, "It's Austin FC's first road win of 2025! And, perhaps not the prettiest of wins, but out of four matches, it's Verde's signature win and a signal to the rest of the league that something positive is happening in Central Texas."
The lone goal came in the 12th minute, with Owen Wolff — recently named No. 4 on MLS's 22 Under 22 list — serving up a corner kick that Guilherme Biro headed in to beat veteran goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. Verde also managed to negate Bouanga, who has 24 goals and eight assists in 30 appearances, and had three shots on target going a full 90 in this one.
March 23: Austin FC 2, San Diego 1
This Sunday afternoon matchup featured Austin's first open-play goal in 370 minutes — which, despite the win over a surprisingly good expansion team — would be a concern that this game did not ameliorate, despite what Verde hoped for after putting this game in the rear view. Brandon Vázquez got that goal, and we also did not see the premature end to his season coming at the time.
But looking back on it, especially given San Diego's record-breaking expansion season, it remains a quality win and one of the best home performances in a year in which they've gone 6W 3L 7D at home, with a chance at 14 results out of 17.
By hanging on for the win, Verde has vaulted to second in the West (!) just five weeks into the season. The goals aren't yet coming in "bags and bunches," as [Jon] Gallagher alluded to on Thursday, but you can see the progress from week to week. And, for the first time this season, a pair of goals in a match!
As it turns out, they didn't again get to multiple goals in a match until June. (Put a pin in that one, though, as we'll visit that match on our journey.)
March 30: St. Louis City SC 0, Austin FC 1
Myrto Uzuni scored his first goal in Verde, connecting with Osman Bukari for a first-half goal — the first of the season in which one front-line player assisted another — that hinted at a promising partnership that hasn't quite materialized. It also put Verde into their first three-match win streak since 2022, and got them, as we pointed out in our post-match coverage, at two points per game through six, making it the best start they've ever had in a season.
It was then that the season turned somewhat, with Austin only getting one win in its next 11, but banking nine points of nine early turned out to provide a bit of a cushion that, combined with pulling out of the nosedive in summer, kept and ultimately got the team to playoff contention.
June 7: Colorado Rapids 0, Austin FC 2
I pointed out, in covering this match, that both the early opening goal and the second-half insurance goal were unusual for a team that went winless in league play in May and was struggling to score.
Verde's defense weathered 19 Rapids shots (five on target) totaling about 3.7 xG, leading the usually xG-minded Estévez to say, "I don't care about the stats today," before pointing out the xG that his team accumulated en route to the welcome win.
The big immediate story in this one was that Uzuni was off on international break, and the lineup seemed to gel better without him in it. I said in the lead-up article to this match:
Myrto Uzuni is off on international duty this weekend, though given his recent run of form in his last two matches — 30 touches, three shot-creating actions, no goal-creating actions, and just a single shot (not on target), while logging 158 largely anonymous minutes — he's very nearly been on international break over the past week.
About a month after this match, though, questions about how the two designated players could play together were put aside as Vázquez went down in the Open Cup win over San Jose, and Uzuni had to pick up the scoring load (and has done so, with six goals in the 12 matches he's been center forward out of necessity).
Aug. 30: Austin FC 3, San Jose Earthquakes 1
In this first rematch since their contentious Open Cup match, Verde got their best home goal tally of the season against the Quakes, with Bukari getting a goal on his own and engineering an own goal, with Uzuni contributing to the total as well.
After the match, Estévez said:
When you come to this league, and you learn about this league, if your DPs don't produce, you can have tough times. We had a slow start from our DPs on contribution, not on work rate, not on willingness to do well, not on belief, not on giving everything for the team, being a good teammate, and training hard and playing hard, but now we are getting the reward of all that work.
The win was significant, coming after a three-game dip in which Austin drew Houston and Dallas at home, ceding Copa Tejas in the process, and then losing at Montréal, playing one of their worst halves of soccer of the season to start that match.
To be fair, that did come at the end of a stretch in which Austin went 4W 2L 3D, making the "dip" a little deceptive, but without this bounceback, that Montréal loss could have been a negative inflection point for the team's 2025 fortunes.
Sept. 21: Austin FC 2, Seattle Sounders 1
This match might be my favorite win of the 2025 season for several reasons:
It came just four days after Verde beat Minnesota in a marathon Open Cup semifinal to reach the final;
For the second straight match, it featured the unusual partnership of Uzuni and SuperDraft-selection-turned-closer CJ Fodrey to engineer the extremely late winning goal;
It involved Brad Stuver making saves on 60th-minute subs Jordan Morris and Jesus Ferreira to keep Austin in a place where it could engineer a match winner; and
It happened at home, meaning we got one of the most electric stadium-wide celebrations of a goal in the club's history.
It kind of takes me back to 2022 a little bit, where everyone in the stadium, everyone in the locker room, kind of had this idea that it didn't matter what was going on in the game. You knew that this team was going to find a way to get a result. These late winners kind of have that same feeling. Obviously, it's only been a few games, but it brings so much energy and so much determination to the guys that it's like, okay, when you look at last year, these same situations, we may have been the ones that give up a goal, and that tanks your mentality. I think this year, everyone knows that as long as we're in a game going into the last 10 or 15, minutes ... we have a chance.
Despite its recent pair of 3-1 losses in league play and an Open Cup final loss in the midst of that, this win happened right before that recent three-match slump. What happens this evening goes a long way to either being the dip-and-return that happened in August, or being a more concerning end-of-season slide sending the team in the wrong direction heading into the playoffs.
Also, save for a single home match in the first-round best-of-three series (barring unusual bracket busting in the playoffs), it's Verde's last chance to use the home crowd energy as fuel this season.
Given that Seattle and Austin will start on opposite sides of the bracket, it's conceivable they could face off in the conference finals should they knock off favorites along the way.
For Seattle, it will take a win over the 4-seed and then most likely the 1-seed (though consider Miami getting bumped off by Atlanta just last season), and Austin will face either the 2-seed or 3-seed and then most likely the other should it emerge from the first test.
And we know, even though Seattle's now locked in the No. 5 spot, that it will be a tough out. Austin's shown, at times this season, they can be this as well. But capturing back what they were able to do against Seattle will be key to that.
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. You can comment here if you’re a subscriber, or reach out via Bluesky.
Austin's looking at a playoff picture ranging from 5th through 9th. We did a lot of math to map out the possible pathways for Verde and the 10 teams still in the postseason picture.
Saturday's loss to St. Louis City SC completed the team's first three-match losing streak since May. Verde can still make the playoffs today, but may not avoid the play-in game.
On Friday, when Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez spoke to local media for the first time since his team officially clinched a playoff berth last Sunday, the topic of backing into the postseason came up.
After all, Verde has lost their last two matches — the first a chance to clinch with a win, the second a chance to clinch with even a draw — and it took Vancouver beating San Jose after coming off a Wednesday tournament championship win to make the inevitable official.
But Estévez said this current hiccup shouldn't diminish what they've done over the whole season.
"I don't understand the narrative that we haven't earned it," he said. "We're in the playoffs because we did a really good job throughout a lot of months, and this is a whole season's work. It's not because you didn't win a game or not; you should ask the other teams you know that they didn't do well, why? Or as well as we did, probably they weren't the ones that didn't achieve that ... we already have those points, and they couldn't catch us."
Speaking of not getting the points one needs, both Real Salt Lake and FC Dallas lost last night, ensuring Austin FC will do no worse than 7th and avoid in the play-in match, also leaving the door open to Colorado and San Jose to vault into the playoffs on Decision Day and also leaving the door open to four teams making the playoffs with under 45 points (contrasted with the East, where all nine locked-in postseason contestants have at least 51).
"I am a little bit surprised of that narrative," he continued, regarding how Verde qualified, "because the team has now, [after we] made a playoff one time in four years, we just played a final and made a playoff. That is very difficult to do both, and we should be proud about how the team has fought throughout the whole season to be in a point that if the others don't do their homework, it could have favor to us ... we put ourselves in a really good position, and it was others that didn't do their homework as well as they should to put us in a different position."
He also said they now have two matches to get right for the postseason, including tonight's rescheduled match against LAFC — a team that has won six straight, but will be without the two players (Son Heung-min and Denis Bouanga) largely responsible for that recent win streak.
As we pointed out on the most recent Emergency Podcast, made more real by Vancouver's come-from-behind win over Orlando on Saturday, Austin winning on Sunday night makes it more likely that LAFC ends up 3rd and Austin 6th ... meaning the teams would face each other in a best-of-three series in which Son and Bouanga would be available.
It's a bit full circle for the 2025 season, given that looking at five victories key to Verde's body of work in 2025, the LAFC away match in March was among the most crucial — kicking off a three-match win streak that is begging us to include all three of those matches. While playoffstatus.com favors a San Diego-Verde matchup at present, the LAFC-Verde scenario isn't much farther behind.
Here's a look back at what Austin FC has done to get to this place.
March 15: LAFC 0, Austin FC 1
As I said in my post-match recap, "It's Austin FC's first road win of 2025! And, perhaps not the prettiest of wins, but out of four matches, it's Verde's signature win and a signal to the rest of the league that something positive is happening in Central Texas."
The lone goal came in the 12th minute, with Owen Wolff — recently named No. 4 on MLS's 22 Under 22 list — serving up a corner kick that Guilherme Biro headed in to beat veteran goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. Verde also managed to negate Bouanga, who has 24 goals and eight assists in 30 appearances, and had three shots on target going a full 90 in this one.
March 23: Austin FC 2, San Diego 1
This Sunday afternoon matchup featured Austin's first open-play goal in 370 minutes — which, despite the win over a surprisingly good expansion team — would be a concern that this game did not ameliorate, despite what Verde hoped for after putting this game in the rear view. Brandon Vázquez got that goal, and we also did not see the premature end to his season coming at the time.
But looking back on it, especially given San Diego's record-breaking expansion season, it remains a quality win and one of the best home performances in a year in which they've gone 6W 3L 7D at home, with a chance at 14 results out of 17.
Here's what we said post-match:
By hanging on for the win, Verde has vaulted to second in the West (!) just five weeks into the season. The goals aren't yet coming in "bags and bunches," as [Jon] Gallagher alluded to on Thursday, but you can see the progress from week to week. And, for the first time this season, a pair of goals in a match!
As it turns out, they didn't again get to multiple goals in a match until June. (Put a pin in that one, though, as we'll visit that match on our journey.)
March 30: St. Louis City SC 0, Austin FC 1
Myrto Uzuni scored his first goal in Verde, connecting with Osman Bukari for a first-half goal — the first of the season in which one front-line player assisted another — that hinted at a promising partnership that hasn't quite materialized. It also put Verde into their first three-match win streak since 2022, and got them, as we pointed out in our post-match coverage, at two points per game through six, making it the best start they've ever had in a season.
It was then that the season turned somewhat, with Austin only getting one win in its next 11, but banking nine points of nine early turned out to provide a bit of a cushion that, combined with pulling out of the nosedive in summer, kept and ultimately got the team to playoff contention.
June 7: Colorado Rapids 0, Austin FC 2
I pointed out, in covering this match, that both the early opening goal and the second-half insurance goal were unusual for a team that went winless in league play in May and was struggling to score.
Verde's defense weathered 19 Rapids shots (five on target) totaling about 3.7 xG, leading the usually xG-minded Estévez to say, "I don't care about the stats today," before pointing out the xG that his team accumulated en route to the welcome win.
The big immediate story in this one was that Uzuni was off on international break, and the lineup seemed to gel better without him in it. I said in the lead-up article to this match:
Myrto Uzuni is off on international duty this weekend, though given his recent run of form in his last two matches — 30 touches, three shot-creating actions, no goal-creating actions, and just a single shot (not on target), while logging 158 largely anonymous minutes — he's very nearly been on international break over the past week.
About a month after this match, though, questions about how the two designated players could play together were put aside as Vázquez went down in the Open Cup win over San Jose, and Uzuni had to pick up the scoring load (and has done so, with six goals in the 12 matches he's been center forward out of necessity).
Aug. 30: Austin FC 3, San Jose Earthquakes 1
In this first rematch since their contentious Open Cup match, Verde got their best home goal tally of the season against the Quakes, with Bukari getting a goal on his own and engineering an own goal, with Uzuni contributing to the total as well.
After the match, Estévez said:
When you come to this league, and you learn about this league, if your DPs don't produce, you can have tough times. We had a slow start from our DPs on contribution, not on work rate, not on willingness to do well, not on belief, not on giving everything for the team, being a good teammate, and training hard and playing hard, but now we are getting the reward of all that work.
The win was significant, coming after a three-game dip in which Austin drew Houston and Dallas at home, ceding Copa Tejas in the process, and then losing at Montréal, playing one of their worst halves of soccer of the season to start that match.
To be fair, that did come at the end of a stretch in which Austin went 4W 2L 3D, making the "dip" a little deceptive, but without this bounceback, that Montréal loss could have been a negative inflection point for the team's 2025 fortunes.
Sept. 21: Austin FC 2, Seattle Sounders 1
This match might be my favorite win of the 2025 season for several reasons:
Post-match, Stuver had this to say:
It kind of takes me back to 2022 a little bit, where everyone in the stadium, everyone in the locker room, kind of had this idea that it didn't matter what was going on in the game. You knew that this team was going to find a way to get a result. These late winners kind of have that same feeling. Obviously, it's only been a few games, but it brings so much energy and so much determination to the guys that it's like, okay, when you look at last year, these same situations, we may have been the ones that give up a goal, and that tanks your mentality. I think this year, everyone knows that as long as we're in a game going into the last 10 or 15, minutes ... we have a chance.
Despite its recent pair of 3-1 losses in league play and an Open Cup final loss in the midst of that, this win happened right before that recent three-match slump. What happens this evening goes a long way to either being the dip-and-return that happened in August, or being a more concerning end-of-season slide sending the team in the wrong direction heading into the playoffs.
Also, save for a single home match in the first-round best-of-three series (barring unusual bracket busting in the playoffs), it's Verde's last chance to use the home crowd energy as fuel this season.
Given that Seattle and Austin will start on opposite sides of the bracket, it's conceivable they could face off in the conference finals should they knock off favorites along the way.
For Seattle, it will take a win over the 4-seed and then most likely the 1-seed (though consider Miami getting bumped off by Atlanta just last season), and Austin will face either the 2-seed or 3-seed and then most likely the other should it emerge from the first test.
And we know, even though Seattle's now locked in the No. 5 spot, that it will be a tough out. Austin's shown, at times this season, they can be this as well. But capturing back what they were able to do against Seattle will be key to that.
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. You can comment here if you’re a subscriber, or reach out via Bluesky.
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