What’s the worst half-season in Austin FC history?
Depending on how you count, we’re either experiencing it right now or we’re in danger of more of it unfolding before our eyes.
Look at the team’s last 17 matches in real time, and realize the longer the current winless streak goes, it’s likely — even with a string of draws like the one the team’s currently on — to nudge under the 16-point half season that the expansion version of Verde managed in 2021 by the time 2024’s half over.
If you start your last 17 matches count with the pair of Leagues Cup losses against Liga MX teams as Matches 1 and 2, Saturday’s 2-2 draw against the Philadelphia Union brings us to Match 17. In that stretch, Verde’s gone 1-9-7, with a 10-match winless streak kicking that off, with the sole win coming against D.C. United at home on Oct. 4.
If you only want to count MLS matches? We gotchu, fam – and it’s not much better. The 22nd match of the 2023 season was a loss: 2-1 to Vancouver at BC Place, with Pedro Vite scoring in the first minute, Rodney Redes getting the equalizer just after halftime, and then Sergio Cordova getting the game winner. Verde got a win against Sporting Kansas City just before Leagues Cup commenced, making it a 17 regular-season match stretch in which the team’s gone 2-8-7 for 13 points.
If you treat every season as its own entity, Verde’s got three points (or 0.75 points per game) nearly a quarter of the way through its seventh half-season. To get past the team’s worst full half-season ever, 2024 Verde will need to find at least 13 more points (let’s say, four wins and a draw) in the next 13 contests.
Draws in the remaining 13 games would also get them there, though that would probably doom Verde to missing the playoffs again. With math I’ll explain a little later, you’d want them to get at least 18 points in these next 13 games and then 24 in the back half of the season.
To put this all in a greater historical context, we need to go back in time. Specifically, back to a time when Manny Perez was getting starts as a forward (he’s now with AC Horsens in Norway’s second division as a right back), and players like Kekuta Manneh (most recently with Pacific FC of the Canadian Premier League), Aedan Stanley (currently at Indy Eleven in USL Championship) and Freddy Kleeman (with Tampa Bay Rowdies, also in the USL-C) were cracking the rotation.
What the current team’s doing (in whichever of these three permutations of half-season you prefer) is even worse than Austin FC’s debut season.
Let’s time travel, shall we? (And take it half-season by half-season.)
