Level Set 1, DC United: History & 2025, More of the Same, Only More So

DC United, first decade or so.

What follows is a brief history of DC United, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link below that explains what it does. With that... 

DC United: A Thumbnail History
Pretty much anyone who follows Major League Soccer knows that DC United was its first great dynasty. How that success came about may be less known. Bruce Arena built his reputation there, of course, but it also started with winning the lottery on one of their first Marquee Player picks (Marco Etcheverry; click here and scroll down to see the full list). His selection connected them to the Tahuichi Academy, Bolivia’s (then?) premier player development academy, which connected them to Jaime Moreno and those two signings, plus a semi-random striker who would hold the single-season record for goals scored for 23 years (Roy Lassiter) went a long way in the league’s early days. Thanks to defenses staffed mostly of recent amateurs and college grads, MLS was a free-scoring league over its first five seasons, and DC generally led the way (with the 1998 LA Galaxy as the other big swinger). After the 2001 contraction, scoring fell off cliff (from 51 goals scored/allowed in 2000 to 42.1 in 2002) and, with the DP Rule/the ability to buy talent seven to eight (or 12) years in the future, DC’s on-field successes gave them the reputation as the best team in MLS, which helped them bring in ambitious players, which one could argue (as I am) made their generally forgotten mid-2000s Renaissance possible. With Moreno back from a stint in the EPL, shiny new playmaker, Christian Gomez, pulling the strings from midfield, Ben Olsen and Brian Carroll doing the dirty work and OG Kiwi Ryan Nelsen anchoring the backline, DC won a fifth MLS Cup in 2004; with solid replacements shuffled into the lineup – e.g., Bobby Boswell at the back and Luciano Emilio spearheading the attack – they added back-to-back Supporters’ Shields in 2006 and 2007. If you’re just counting trophies, all of that early success created the firewall thick enough to keep DC among the all-time most successful teams in MLS history (for now). They’ve flirted with success here and there, particularly over the competent, yet trophy-free seasons of 2012-2019, but DC has been flaming fucking awful more often than most since their glory years, as demonstrated by (now) five (5!) Wooden Spoons and some of the worst seasons in MLS history (looking at you, 2013). It’s not so much that they haven’t tried – e.g., a young Luciano Acosta, Wayne Rooney and Christian Benteke delivered! – but all that talent labored under lineups, systems, rosters, coaches, etc., that made every good player work twice as hard. Part of that followed from a hit-rate on signing top-rate talent from outside MLS that failed to hit – e.g., Edison Flores, Gabriel Pirani – but few teams have fallen for the next “wunderkind” with more ardor and frequency than most. They signed Freddy Adu 20 steps out of the womb and pissed away too many seasons waiting for him to become the player his agent promised; one hears echoes of that in the seasons wasted waiting for Santino Quaranta and Nick DeLeon to fill their forever-potential. They’ve been equally unsuccessful when it comes to rescuing once-useful-to-great cast-offs from other MLS teams – e.g., Julius James, Fabian Espindola, Chris Rolfe, Alvaro Saborio, and Pedro Santos – all of which has combined to cause then to fall ever further off not just their once-lofty standard, but the league as a whole.

2025, Briefly
Is there anything to really say after "Wooden Spoon"? This was the second season of the Troy Lesesne Era, a concept I never put much faith in, but he got them close enough in 2024 (despite everything; see defensive record below) to justify the attempt; he didn’t last even half the season. From a distance (I barely watched DC last season, a choice that was mostly rewarded), the approach looked like a second pass at seeing how far Benteke could carry them. Brandon Servania and Joao Peglow might have counted as their “big” signings going in – not nearly enough to lift a team that finished 10th in the East in 2024 – and, with Benteke missing at least 10 starts, DC’s scoring collapsed (just 30 scored over the regular season). Add a defense that barely improved on a 2024 unit tangled in a three-way tie for all-time ninth-worst (i.e., 66 goals allowed in 2025 versus 70 in 2024), the mystery of DC’s latest season of misery dries up.

Hello, darkness, my old friend.

Long-Term Tendencies v Recent Trends
DC doesn’t have long-term tendencies so much as phases of success, some wild, and flaming failure. For instance, they built their first trophy-winning seasons on high-flying, live-wire attacks that often had to cover for bad-to-average defenses. Their mid-2000s team kept the strong attack (the Gomez/Emilio pairing really was something), but backed it with a half-decade long succession of equally strong defenses. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the shittiest attacking teams in MLS history delivered two of those Wooden Spoons – including DC’s 2010 season, which still rates as the worst-ever haul of goals scored over a full season (their 2013, second-worst) - and, just to note it, after seeing the San Jose Earthquakes add a fifth to their then-largest collection of Wooden Spoons in 2024, DC tied it up again in 2025. Insofar as DC has had a “normal” since their fall from grace (i.e., counting from 2015), it has featured sub-par defenses (sometimes sub-sub-par defenses) and barely-competent offenses. As noted above, that trend has held, if not worsened.

Players I Still Like/Additions So Far
The Cup of Suffering Benteke has carried and supped from for so long has been passed to what I have to assume is a nervous Tai Baribo. Even if they like the ball played to a different place, Baribo (feet) strikes me as close enough to like-for-like for Benteke (head). Adding Sean Nealis from Red Bull feels like a good pickup (though I do get my Nealises confused at times), but, awesome career aside, I do wonder how much more they’ll get out of Sean Johnson in goal. The last big signing I see is Keisuke Kurokawa, a left back out of Japan in his prime years, which suggests a strategy of Kurokawa and Aaron Herrera trying to find Baribo from opposite sides of the attacking third. The midfield still looks like a smattering of names I’ve seen hyped here and there – e.g., Matti Peltola, Pirani, and I rate Servania all right – but one has to think DC needs to do some building in that area if they want to do anything but wander around the Eastern Conference basement in 2026. Hell, maybe all they need to do is manage traffic and see what comes of the Baribo & His Flying Fullbacks Show.

Historical Success (/Hysterical Failure)
Total Joy Points: 33

How They Earned Them (& *How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 1997, 1999, 2006, 2007
MLS Cup: 1996, 1997, 1999, 2004
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 1998
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2006, 2012
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 2003, 2005, 2007, 2014, 2015
Wooden Spoon: 2002, 2010, 2013, 2022, 2025
CONCACAF Champions Cup: 1998
CONCACAF Champions Cup Runner-Up: 2008
CCL Quarterfinals: 2015, 2016
U.S. Open Cup: 1996, 2008, 2013
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 1997, 2009