Is Austin FC better under Davy Arnaud than it was under Nico Estévez?
Davy Arnaud took over an Austin FC team in May that was headed for a disastrous 2026. How has he changed a team that's about to be helmed by new head coach Jim Curtin?
With Treehouse of Horror season upon us, I'm reminded of a classic episode of The Simpsons' annual Halloween special, in which Homer wants to buy Bart a gift. He stumbles into a curio shop where the shopkeeper has a talking Krusty the Clown doll. The shopkeeper warns Homer it comes with a terrible curse, which leads Homer to observe, "That's bad," but then the shopkeeper counters with, "But it comes with a free frogurt," to which Homer brightly notes, "That's good," which goes for another round and a half before the 30-second bit ends with a punchline that is characteristically Homer.
The Davy Arnaud interim head coach era — spanning just over six months from Nico Estévez's May 18 dismissal to head-coach-in-waiting Jim Curtin's anticipated December arrival — has been a bit like that talking Krusty doll. Arnaud came with an inverted winger system that arguably plays multiple players away from their best positions ("that's bad"), but we got an eight-match unbeaten streak that kept Austin FC on the periphery of playoff conversations ("that's good).
As Verde readies to play Real Salt Lake on Wednesday night with playoff elimination looming — only a win staves it off — they're at least emotionally transformed from the team that lost May matches to San Diego and Kansas City, results that ushered in the coaching and sporting director changes. It's been evident, talking to players about Arnaud as coach, that he's inspired a renewed fight and belief, even in the recent losing streak against three of the league's best teams to all but seal Verde's postseason fate.
When Estévez left — albeit following a successful 2025 in which Verde made its second-ever postseason appearance, finishing with their second-highest point total for a season — his 2026 record was 3W 6L 5D, exactly 1 PPG. Under Arnaud — taking out the Sept. 19 draw in Frisco that Terry Boss coached, making the interim-for-an-interim also 1 PPG — the team has gone 5W 7L 4D, good for 1.19 PPG. Taken over a full season, a 1.19 PPG pace works out to 40 points, which is an improvement over where Estévez had the team headed, but is still a sub-playoff total.
We haven't visited American Soccer Analysis' data visualizer in a while, so with the assistance of some images, let's take a look at the season — specifically, its Estévez and Arnaud halves.
First, some rolling NPxGD
If you want a statistical snapshot of how a team is playing over the course of the season, the rolling NPxGD (non-penalty expected goal differential) is a great place to start. It looks at how a team is doing progressively over the course of the season, charting five-match averages along the timeline, tracking how many goals a team is expected to score and let in based on its play — but not factoring in the goals that result from penalty kicks, awarded for momentary lapses (or even referee errors) that sometimes don't reflect the true flow of a match.
Before we get to Verde, let's look at St. Louis City SC, just to see what a team that had a 21-match unbeaten streak followed by a recent lapse looks like. It's not as dominant as you might expect, given that the team has raised itself to 3rd in the West (flirting with 1st), but it's showing positive trending. (Blue indicates positive goal differential, and pink indicates negative goal differential. Remember that these are ASA's color choices and as far as I know have nothing to do with gender reveal parties.)
And, for reference, this was Austin's 2025, which included some strong play out of the gate, an eight-match winless streak in April and May, and enough recovery after that to qualify for the playoffs as a No. 6 seed.
And now, 2026 Austin FC:
That is an alarming amount of negative goal differential.
To help illuminate how the team played before and after the change, here's Estévez's portion.
And here's Arnaud's — that, again, includes an eight-match unbeaten streak which allowed Verde to creep momentarily into positive territory.
Overall, these trendlines are improved, though you can see where the negative goal differential gulf, at its greatest, matches the Estévez version of 2026 Verde at their worst. Teams that perform like this don't make the playoffs — though, if they do end up winning these last four winnable matches of 2026 (and they're a quarter of the way there), this number should tick up, as teams that win usually — but not always — register positive expected goal differential in those winning matches.
What about the defense?
As much as I hate to revisit the statistic about points lost due to late goals, it's worth mentioning here because of the significant improvement that's come under Arnaud.
Considering all the goals Verde let in at minute 67 or later that transformed leads into eventual draws and deadlocks into eventual losses — leading to 19 dropped points this season — it's notable that 15 of those 19 dropped points were in the Estévez era, even with the latest episode coming in the Oct. 14 loss at LAFC.
Arnaud, in talking about the goal that allowed LAFC to take the lead, a goal that came from a misplayed Brad Stuver pass that pinged off Son Heung-min to an unmarked Denis Bouanga, offered, "These things happen," and fortunately for his version of Verde, they happen a lot less than they once did.
In the recent win against SKC, there were late attempts in which it appeared a lead would be lost, but better attentiveness to situations like that (plus some luck) allowed Verde to escape The Stadium Across the Way from the Nebraska Furniture Mart with a win. That's progress.
To give a sense of how the defensive structure has changed, let's look at the before.
The defensive actions and offensive goals-plus allowed per 96 (those are very ASA-coded stats) are near league bottom, and in Curtin's introductory press conference, he talked at length about how he wants his teams to defend and how he plans to hold individual players accountable.
Here's how it's evolved under Arnaud.
The average height of defensive actions is nearly six meters higher, the more glaring pre-Arnaud stats are somewhat better (still in the bottom third of the league, but not as dire), and the biggest change, of course, is the involvement of three center backs and two wingbacks in a reconfigured defense that, frankly, needed reconfiguring.
What about passing networks?
ASA maps its passing networks by determining what formations teams are setting up, and so there are multiple passing networks mapped each year, accounting for the number of minutes in each formation.
In 2025, Austin most commonly rolled out in a 4-4-2 with one weird quirk.
Note how the two midfielders are highest up the pitch, and how the forwards and midfielders are grouped together behind them, effectively on top of one another.
Has this improved with the shift to a base 3-4-3, which is the formation Arnaud sets up in most often?
That's debatable. There's an even tighter clustering of players with average positions around midfield, with right (sigh) wingback Joseph Rosales getting almost as high up the pitch as the right wide forward drifting to his left, which is mostly a combination of Facundo Torres and Myrto Uzuni with a bit of Christian Ramírez thrown in. Again, the center forward — of late, mostly Brandon Vázquez, with a bit of Christian Ramírez thrown in — is more withdrawn and in line with the center midfielders.
One thing that the color-coding shows is that in Estévez's 2025 squad, the forwards were doing more to contribute to goalscoring (the essence of the goals plus megastat), whereas the 2026 edition of the team has those contributions a little more spread out but maybe a little less effective.
Here's how 2025's core numbers compare to 31/34 of 2026:
Trendlines from 2025 are continuing, even though the overall slate of numbers in 2026 is worse. Verde exceeds the number of points they're expected to get based on how they're statistically playing, and they're giving up significantly less goals than their defense should be allowing, which most certainly involves Brad Stuver.
This year, the difference is that even though they're expected to be scoring less than they actually are in 2026, they've exceeded 2025's goal total — but you'll remember that 2025 was the year that Vázquez and Uzuni had alarming goals minus expected goals numbers and Verde was challenging for fewest goals scored in a season for much of the first half of 2025.
Still three matches to go
The season's epitaph still hinges on what happens in these remaining three winnable matches. 43 points won't be enough to get to the playoffs in a year where the 9th-place team seems destined for at least 45 points, but 43 is decidedly a tier above 34, for a club so young that 31 is its lowest total and 47 is its second-highest. Getting to 43 points would best 2024's 42 points as Verde's third-best season, which is more a statement on the paucity of good Verde seasons than looking back fondly on 2024.
Unlike recent seasons, though, there's no mystery about what happens with Austin FC's coaching heading into 2027. There's a successor picked, and it's really ultimately a successor to Estévez rather than the person who has been coaching since late May.
It's quite possible — given all that we've heard — that Arnaud will return to the assistant head coach post that he initially had going into the inaugural season. It remains to be seen if Arnaud's 2026 will put him on the radar of front offices looking for a head coach, or if Arnaud would even entertain such a possibility.
Based on all of this, 2026's fortunes turned on Arnaud taking over the team and deciding to change its approach. We'll know more conclusively in 10 days' time just how dramatically they ultimately turned.
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. For more coverage, check out Emergency Podcast! (an Austin FC Podcast) wherever you get your podcasts, and join us on Instagram to get updates on all our stories and podcast releases.
Austin FC II lost via a heartbreaking stoppage-time goal at home on Sunday night to end its playoff run. Head coach Jason Shackell saw it, ultimately, as a learning opportunity for his players.
Austin FC showed grit and resilience in its Saturday night win over SKC. However, several results around the conference made the playoff table match increasingly dire.
Austin FC fell behind in the second half but got two goals from Myrto Uzuni to secure the rare road win. The win allows them to evade an ignoble fate dating back to 2021.
Austin FC plays SKC tomorrow in its first elimination scenario match of 2026. We checked in with an SKC expert to learn how the team's changed since playing Verde in May.
With Treehouse of Horror season upon us, I'm reminded of a classic episode of The Simpsons' annual Halloween special, in which Homer wants to buy Bart a gift. He stumbles into a curio shop where the shopkeeper has a talking Krusty the Clown doll. The shopkeeper warns Homer it comes with a terrible curse, which leads Homer to observe, "That's bad," but then the shopkeeper counters with, "But it comes with a free frogurt," to which Homer brightly notes, "That's good," which goes for another round and a half before the 30-second bit ends with a punchline that is characteristically Homer.
The Davy Arnaud interim head coach era — spanning just over six months from Nico Estévez's May 18 dismissal to head-coach-in-waiting Jim Curtin's anticipated December arrival — has been a bit like that talking Krusty doll. Arnaud came with an inverted winger system that arguably plays multiple players away from their best positions ("that's bad"), but we got an eight-match unbeaten streak that kept Austin FC on the periphery of playoff conversations ("that's good).
As Verde readies to play Real Salt Lake on Wednesday night with playoff elimination looming — only a win staves it off — they're at least emotionally transformed from the team that lost May matches to San Diego and Kansas City, results that ushered in the coaching and sporting director changes. It's been evident, talking to players about Arnaud as coach, that he's inspired a renewed fight and belief, even in the recent losing streak against three of the league's best teams to all but seal Verde's postseason fate.
When Estévez left — albeit following a successful 2025 in which Verde made its second-ever postseason appearance, finishing with their second-highest point total for a season — his 2026 record was 3W 6L 5D, exactly 1 PPG. Under Arnaud — taking out the Sept. 19 draw in Frisco that Terry Boss coached, making the interim-for-an-interim also 1 PPG — the team has gone 5W 7L 4D, good for 1.19 PPG. Taken over a full season, a 1.19 PPG pace works out to 40 points, which is an improvement over where Estévez had the team headed, but is still a sub-playoff total.
We haven't visited American Soccer Analysis' data visualizer in a while, so with the assistance of some images, let's take a look at the season — specifically, its Estévez and Arnaud halves.
First, some rolling NPxGD
If you want a statistical snapshot of how a team is playing over the course of the season, the rolling NPxGD (non-penalty expected goal differential) is a great place to start. It looks at how a team is doing progressively over the course of the season, charting five-match averages along the timeline, tracking how many goals a team is expected to score and let in based on its play — but not factoring in the goals that result from penalty kicks, awarded for momentary lapses (or even referee errors) that sometimes don't reflect the true flow of a match.
Before we get to Verde, let's look at St. Louis City SC, just to see what a team that had a 21-match unbeaten streak followed by a recent lapse looks like. It's not as dominant as you might expect, given that the team has raised itself to 3rd in the West (flirting with 1st), but it's showing positive trending. (Blue indicates positive goal differential, and pink indicates negative goal differential. Remember that these are ASA's color choices and as far as I know have nothing to do with gender reveal parties.)
And, for reference, this was Austin's 2025, which included some strong play out of the gate, an eight-match winless streak in April and May, and enough recovery after that to qualify for the playoffs as a No. 6 seed.
And now, 2026 Austin FC:
That is an alarming amount of negative goal differential.
To help illuminate how the team played before and after the change, here's Estévez's portion.
And here's Arnaud's — that, again, includes an eight-match unbeaten streak which allowed Verde to creep momentarily into positive territory.
Overall, these trendlines are improved, though you can see where the negative goal differential gulf, at its greatest, matches the Estévez version of 2026 Verde at their worst. Teams that perform like this don't make the playoffs — though, if they do end up winning these last four winnable matches of 2026 (and they're a quarter of the way there), this number should tick up, as teams that win usually — but not always — register positive expected goal differential in those winning matches.
What about the defense?
As much as I hate to revisit the statistic about points lost due to late goals, it's worth mentioning here because of the significant improvement that's come under Arnaud.
Considering all the goals Verde let in at minute 67 or later that transformed leads into eventual draws and deadlocks into eventual losses — leading to 19 dropped points this season — it's notable that 15 of those 19 dropped points were in the Estévez era, even with the latest episode coming in the Oct. 14 loss at LAFC.
Arnaud, in talking about the goal that allowed LAFC to take the lead, a goal that came from a misplayed Brad Stuver pass that pinged off Son Heung-min to an unmarked Denis Bouanga, offered, "These things happen," and fortunately for his version of Verde, they happen a lot less than they once did.
In the recent win against SKC, there were late attempts in which it appeared a lead would be lost, but better attentiveness to situations like that (plus some luck) allowed Verde to escape The Stadium Across the Way from the Nebraska Furniture Mart with a win. That's progress.
To give a sense of how the defensive structure has changed, let's look at the before.
The defensive actions and offensive goals-plus allowed per 96 (those are very ASA-coded stats) are near league bottom, and in Curtin's introductory press conference, he talked at length about how he wants his teams to defend and how he plans to hold individual players accountable.
Here's how it's evolved under Arnaud.
The average height of defensive actions is nearly six meters higher, the more glaring pre-Arnaud stats are somewhat better (still in the bottom third of the league, but not as dire), and the biggest change, of course, is the involvement of three center backs and two wingbacks in a reconfigured defense that, frankly, needed reconfiguring.
What about passing networks?
ASA maps its passing networks by determining what formations teams are setting up, and so there are multiple passing networks mapped each year, accounting for the number of minutes in each formation.
In 2025, Austin most commonly rolled out in a 4-4-2 with one weird quirk.
Note how the two midfielders are highest up the pitch, and how the forwards and midfielders are grouped together behind them, effectively on top of one another.
Has this improved with the shift to a base 3-4-3, which is the formation Arnaud sets up in most often?
That's debatable. There's an even tighter clustering of players with average positions around midfield, with right (sigh) wingback Joseph Rosales getting almost as high up the pitch as the right wide forward drifting to his left, which is mostly a combination of Facundo Torres and Myrto Uzuni with a bit of Christian Ramírez thrown in. Again, the center forward — of late, mostly Brandon Vázquez, with a bit of Christian Ramírez thrown in — is more withdrawn and in line with the center midfielders.
One thing that the color-coding shows is that in Estévez's 2025 squad, the forwards were doing more to contribute to goalscoring (the essence of the goals plus megastat), whereas the 2026 edition of the team has those contributions a little more spread out but maybe a little less effective.
Here's how 2025's core numbers compare to 31/34 of 2026:
Trendlines from 2025 are continuing, even though the overall slate of numbers in 2026 is worse. Verde exceeds the number of points they're expected to get based on how they're statistically playing, and they're giving up significantly less goals than their defense should be allowing, which most certainly involves Brad Stuver.
This year, the difference is that even though they're expected to be scoring less than they actually are in 2026, they've exceeded 2025's goal total — but you'll remember that 2025 was the year that Vázquez and Uzuni had alarming goals minus expected goals numbers and Verde was challenging for fewest goals scored in a season for much of the first half of 2025.
Still three matches to go
The season's epitaph still hinges on what happens in these remaining three winnable matches. 43 points won't be enough to get to the playoffs in a year where the 9th-place team seems destined for at least 45 points, but 43 is decidedly a tier above 34, for a club so young that 31 is its lowest total and 47 is its second-highest. Getting to 43 points would best 2024's 42 points as Verde's third-best season, which is more a statement on the paucity of good Verde seasons than looking back fondly on 2024.
Unlike recent seasons, though, there's no mystery about what happens with Austin FC's coaching heading into 2027. There's a successor picked, and it's really ultimately a successor to Estévez rather than the person who has been coaching since late May.
It's quite possible — given all that we've heard — that Arnaud will return to the assistant head coach post that he initially had going into the inaugural season. It remains to be seen if Arnaud's 2026 will put him on the radar of front offices looking for a head coach, or if Arnaud would even entertain such a possibility.
Based on all of this, 2026's fortunes turned on Arnaud taking over the team and deciding to change its approach. We'll know more conclusively in 10 days' time just how dramatically they ultimately turned.
Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. For more coverage, check out Emergency Podcast! (an Austin FC Podcast) wherever you get your podcasts, and join us on Instagram to get updates on all our stories and podcast releases.
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