It's just one match ... but here's one worrying metric from the 2024 Austin FC season to revisit

It's just one match, right?

Austin FC beat Sporting Kansas City 1-0 on Saturday night to start 2025 with a win, and from a defensive perspective, it was a successful first outing, with players commenting on playing tight and tough in transition defense and in the relatively few times that SKC attackers threatened.

But Verde only got off two shots on target on Saturday, out of 12 shots total, and the phrase "shot on target" is doing a lot of work for the match's lone goal.

Last July, as Verde still held hopes for the playoffs following a win over NYCFC, I wrote an article looking at Verde's woeful shots-on-target numbers. At that juncture, 22 games in, Verde only had nine matches with three or more shots on target, compared to 13 with two or less (including five with two SOTs, five with one, and three with none). They finished the season with 39 goals scored, last in the West and only "bested" ("worsted," perhaps) by two East teams.

Extrapolating from an extremely small sample size, Austin's on pace for 34 goals scored and just 68 shots on target this season. In 2024, Verde was lowest in the league with exactly 100 shots on target. (The Galaxy, league leaders in that category, had 195.)

Where does Austin stand now?

Just one match in, with all 30 teams registering a match, Verde is grouped with three other teams with just two shots on target. (One of those, incidentally, is SKC.)

Only four teams fared worse in Week 1: Charlotte, Minnesota, and New England got one apiece, and the Rapids failed to get a single shot on target in what is, in the best-case scenario for that, a 0-0 draw.

For total shots, Austin's 12 puts it in the middle of the pack. It's not Colorado getting off just two shots in that scoreless draw, neither of them on target, but it's also not Real Salt Lake, getting 22 shots and seven on target but landing none of them (in a 4-0 loss to the Quakes in which they "only" shot 14 times, eight on target), or Vancouver, which also got 22 shots but ten on target and four goals total in the rout of the Timbers.

(That's going to be important info to hold on.)

As for non-penalty xG, an indicator of shot quality times volume (see "xG Means Nothing Anymore" from the last time Verde played the Timbers), Austin's 0.9 is better than seven other MLS teams but a far cry from the Whitecaps' currently league-leading 2.8.

Wait, no, this is silly

You'd be right in pointing out that this is just one match, and it's a match that only included Myrto Uzuni in pre-match waving to supporters. Put Uzuni on the field next to Brandon Vázquez and get Bukari on the other side of that, and you're likely managing more than two shots on target and 0.9 npxG in a given game just with the quality of that front three alone.

(This is when we don't worry about Bukari only getting one goal and two assists in 619 minutes his first mini-season in Austin ... different time! Different circumstances!)

If you look at the defensive actions map from Saturday's match, which we visited in our post-match review, you'll see that SKC set its defense up in a low block for much of the match, making most of its defensive actions in its own half of the field.

Here's how Portland set up against Vancouver on Sunday. (Remember, Austin FC legend Kamal Miller got a red card less than 15 minutes into this match, contributing to the Timbers getting thumped by the Whitecaps in their home stadium, which has now happened in their most recent two outings: the MLS West play-in match last year, which they lost 5-0, and Sunday's 4-1 season-opening loss.)

This looks uncannily similar to the Austin-SKC match! The Timbers defensive action average height line is maybe two meters higher than SKC's was on Saturday, and the Whitecaps' was about two higher than Austin's, in a game that was arguably more open (thanks in large part to Vancouver's Jayden Nelson, who looks like a nightmare matchup for fullbacks).

While it might be another low block for Austin to break down this coming Saturday, Portland will be missing a key defender and playing on a day's less rest. This should allow Verde's numbers to instantly improve (and, should all go well, make Timbers coach Phil Neville's seat a little bit hotter).

One thing to be concerned about

Another stat jumped out to me as I was perusing FBref — average shot distance. Verde is currently seventh (as in seventh-longest) after Week 1 with 18.3 yards per shot. Here's a look at all the shots in the match against SKC. What do you notice?

The only shot Verde took inside of 12 yards was Bukari's face-goal off a corner kick that first deflected off Julio Cascante. The next closest attempt was Guilherme Biro's just-wide header from 12 yards out in the 18th minute. While they managed five shots in an active stretch between the 16th minute and the 27th minute, three of those were from 28 yards or longer.

Let's add this visualization from MLS Analytics, quickly becoming one of my favorite MLS resources, to show where the individual shots were coming from (four outside the box, four on the outer edges of the box, four more ideally central and close).

While those long shots indicate positively aggressive play, they also are lower-chance attempts that seek to defeat a low block merely by shooting through it. None of those had an xG higher than 0.07, while Bukari got himself into the 0.38 xG zone with his goal, being close and not terribly well-marked.

As you get a shorter average distance from goal down the table, teams are more in the four to eight shot-on-target range per game, which stands to reason.

If Uzuni does indeed play on Saturday, I'm expecting him (based on his highlight reel) to take some shots from distance. He does it enough to wind up with some highlight-reel-worthy goals, and those don't seem to be anomalies – he averaged 17.9 yards a shot with Granada in his '23-'24 La Liga season, with 58 shots, 24 of those on target, and 11 goals, getting off 2.13 shots per 90 minutes.

Being accurate with long shots allows your team to force keepers into saves, and in Austin's case, Uzuni doing this gives players like Vázquez and Bukari opportunities to take advantage of positioning and sheer speed respectively to take advantage when a save attempt goes awry.

It's also something we know Austin FC head coach Nico Estévez is thinking about. He put "find ways to get the ball to Vázquez" on his to-do list in his post-match press conference on Saturday, and perhaps that means more Besard Šabović as he works into match fitness, and perhaps it also means encouraging Owen Wolff do more of what he did in the attack.

(Using American Soccer Analysis' goals added measure to assess on-ball actions, Wolff was second to only Mikkel Desler for the match, with Dani Pereira just behind them. Maybe Austin's going to be okay in midfield without a pure No. 10 to plug in after all.)

So, in short, we shouldn't expect only two shots on goal per match to be the norm in 2025. But if it settles into that over the first stretch of matches, it's certainly a thing to be concerned about – unless the defense forces the opponent into the same sort of play as Verde did on Saturday. (Then, it's just less aesthetically pleasing, unless you're a fan of stifling defense.)

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