Level Set 15, Austin FC: Of Tulip Bulbs & Poor Construction Choices

An investment was made...

What follows is a brief history of Austin FC, 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 that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Austin FC came into MLS pretty hot, publicity-wise – look, Matthew McConaughey! He’s got a drum! – the fans showed up with drums of their own (and trumpets) and did “Keep Austin Weird” proud enough. The stadium looks great and there’s something charming about the way they bathe it in green light every time the home team scores (wait for it). The stage looks great, but…

Austin FC threw everyone a head-fake in 2022, when they finished second in the West and made a deep run in the MLS Cup playoffs (semifinals!). Their inaugural-season ringer, Sebastian Driussi, looked like a brilliant buy by their second season, his supporting cast of Maxi Urruti, Ethan Finlay and (particularly) Diego Fagundez combined with him in beautiful, four-part harmony, and the defense was…average, and goalkeeper Brad Stuver did everything he could to keep it that way (“Stuuuuvvv!”); Alex Ring directed traffic in midfield, Julio Cascante played better than he ever did as a Portland Timber: everything was clicking and the future looked bright. My memory's hazy on this - Austin's not a team I follow closely - but 2022 might have been the same season that pundits never stopped talking about how much Austin was over-performing their metrics. Even if that convo wasn't in 2022, having one super-freak of a season in what has otherwise been a short, barren history makes for a fitting way to wrap one's head around this team. Austin didn't make the playoffs in 2021 – no shame in that, debut season, etc. – but, after that 2022 miracle season, they missed again in both 2023 and 2024. They definitely showed better in 2025 (see below), while somehow still presenting as a team stumbling through another lost season. If you bought Austin FC stock after 2022, that would make you the proud owner of a bunch of tulip bulbs no one else wants. That expansion team stench doesn’t always wash off so easily...

FC Cincinnati 2-1 Austin FC: It's All Coming Up Evander

Mistakes can be made, that's all.

Today has been unexpectedly Cincinnati heavy. Before wrapping up FC Cincinnati’s broadly satisfying 2-1 win over a visiting Austin FC, I caught the tail end of an episode of the Partridge Family titled, “I Left My Heart in Cincinnati” that was positively drunk with old footage from Kings Island. Seeing the Blue Racer running against the Red one and The Banana Splits took my back to a world both of and before my time and it did me good (awww) and bad (so, so old).

About the Game
Cincy somewhere between a couple and a few chances to run riot over Austin over the opening 20 minutes. They took an early lead at the 12th minute when Yuya Kubo ran against a retreating Austin back-line that seemed open to giving him whatever option he wanted. After some briefly bobbled connections, the ball found Lukas Engel still farther to Austin’s right, who slipped a one-time pass into Evander loitering around the left side of the 18. I went with the verb “loiter” to capture the easy freedom of Evander’s positioning, but the opening goal showed the danger of leaving him there without an army of angry chaperones. And that puts Chehkov’s gun on the table for future reference.

Luca Orellano had come close two minutes before the opener and Kevin Denkey spurned a good opening with a shot straight at Austin’s Brad Stuver a mere three minutes on the other side of it. Consult the full highlights for some more highlight-reel adjacent moments – e.g., Denkey and Evander danced as well as they have all season Saturday afternoon – including what would have been an easy candidate for Goal of the Week (have that at around the 20th minute) had Evander clipped the curl on his one-time shot from 35+ yards out a degree or two shorter. Despite a bevy of invitations, Cincy’s second goal wouldn’t materialize for some time.

Austin pushed back, of course, and threatened to pull back a goal as early as the 17th minute on a cross that Brandon Vazquez should have put somewhere between on goal and away (which doesn't appear in the highlights due to the enshittification of MLS's video product), but, per the official stats they didn’t create a ton of chances and fired just two of them on Stuver’s goal. I don’t know how all that useless energy translated for Austin fans, but I’m guessing it felt like Purgatory for Cincinnati fans, or worse, the last episode of Lost. If you found this post, I don’t need to explain the perils of 1-0 lead to you, but seeing Cincy come within a desperate lunge or two of coughing up a stupid equalizer for the simple, stupid reason of failing to decisively clear a long ball provided a sobering reminder of said perils. It takes just one mistake, right? Say, an arm left thoughtlessly hanging when covering a cross from Cincy’s left?

Austin FC Scouting Report: Eating the Sandwich

EAT IT, WUSS! (...and never shit again)

The Portland Timbers hosted Austin FC in Week 2 of the 2025 season, so who knew the Texans would be returning the favor so soon? Portland won the game on a late, weird goal and a wrote a whole damn match report that more or less dismissed Austin’s chances for the season…and what do they do but win three straight?

In other news, I can't get the video on the Mothership to fly and that is scrambling all of my shit. Not that this is immediately relevant…

Austin FC
4-2-0, 12 pts., 5 gf, 3 ga (+2); home 2-1-0, away 2-1-0
Last 6 Results: WLLWWW
Strength/Location of Schedule
v SKC (1-0 W); @ POR (0-1 L); v COL (0-1 L); @ LAFC (1-0 W); v SD (2-1 W); @ STL (1-0 W)

Notes from the Field
Both teams have little streaks going, of course, but Austin has three games to Portland’s two and they smuggled six points out of tough venues – e.g., Los Angeles FC’s BMO Stadium and St. Louis CITY FC’s Energizer Park. Slide the win versus the theretofore unbeaten San Diego FC as a nice slice of well-cured pastrami between those two and you have yourself one hell of a sandwich. New head coach Nico Estevez has them grinding out every result they earn – show me a multi-goal win in the above list of results – and the secret to Austin’s early rise to second MLS’s Western Conference owes something like 60% of its success to its defense (i.e., five goals scored, three goals allowed; don’t call it stupid, a major economy just adopted the same logic). After sitting through about 30 minutes of Austin’s win at St. Louis and around 45 minutes of that home win over San Diego, two big-picture details stood out: a broad aversion to risk and the absence of a player that presented and played like a No. 10.

Notes on Formation & Personnel
Estevez has played a 4-3-3 and a pair of 4-4-2s (par example), but he has so far only tinkered with the personnel. The back four typically starts with Brendan Hines-Ike paired with Oleksandr Swatok as center backs and Guilherme Biro and Jon Gallagher to their left and right, respectively. Both fullbacks get forward quite a bit, but Gallagher gets way the fuck up there, more like a wingback. Owen “Son of the Prior Coach” Wolf and new kid Besard Sabovic have been the constants in midfield and, for what it’s worth, I’d call Wolff the closest thing they have to a playmaker. Ilie Sanchez generally starts and/or provides a composed, deep-lying passing hub and I think they like to get their live-wire No. 8, Daniel Pereira, out there often as they can (he missed the road win at LAFC, don’t know why). I suspect a 4-3-3 suits them better because it allows them to start a midfield three of Pereira, Sabovic and Wolff and to push Osman Bukari into a pure attacking/winger role – a choice that pressured St. Louis’ left just long enough for Austin to go ahead through Albanian striker Myrto Uzuni. I haven’t seen much of Uzuni – he didn’t play versus San Diego – but he presents as a poacher, i.e., I didn’t see a ton of him coming back for the ball or combining. Brandon Vazquez leads Austin’s line in just about every way you can think of. He finally broke his duck against San Diego, but a sterling season for FC Cincinnati aside, he appears to have reverted to his hard-working, low(ish) scoring roots as a forward.

Portland Timbers 2-2 Austin FC: A Test of Character (& Budgeting)

The Portland Timbers’ 2-2 home draw versus Austin FC gored at least one theory, but otherwise felt like weights falling on both sides of the scale. To be clear, I hated seeing the damn thing balance as much as any Timbers fan...like I said at the top of last night’s game thread, this was an occasion where the Timbers didn’t want to do anything they wouldn’t later regret. And then they went ahead and started Larrys Mabiala....I kid, I kid.

I’ll get to something like a match report in the next – sorry, no, one two three paragraphs after - paragraph, but I want to linger on Larrys for a bit (note: that’s a good adult film title, right?). For all their faults – and this is literally one of them – the Portland Timbers have brought me to an understanding of the true nature of defending. Those “[___] Days Since our Last Accident/Accidental Decapitation” signs at your local light-industry warehouse offers the perfect metaphor: the whole thing is about avoiding the next mistake for as long as possible, only all while knowing the mistake will come. Typing as someone who got dumped into the defense far more often than made sense (I sucked at defending), I wholly, fully and unashamedly embrace the argument that defenses get faulted for their failure to never fail in a way that the attacking side of any team rarely does...good Lord, these things are getting confessional.

Anyhoo, and to finally get back to Larrys, his game last night had a familiar pattern: he was fine for large stretches of the game – he even cleaned up a mess than Juan David Mosquera handed to him on a steaming, stinking platter – and then, nothing like out of the blue, Austin’s Owen “Coach’s Son” Wolff finds a bunch of space on Portland’s left late in the game (but not for the first time) and curls a cross into the heart of the defense. Now, I want to ask everyone reading this post to stop here and look at the Austin equalizer that yanked two points from the Timbers’ grasping hands. The video geeks did well with it, for what it’s worth, giving you plenty of time to see that Mabiala kept pretty fair track of Austin’s Will Bruin, he knew where he was and all that, only to somehow get separated in the decisive moment. Bruin almost certainly bumped him, but Larrys just played that whole thing wrong – if in a way I visible in 20/20 hindsight. Still, one lapse equals one goal allowed too often to count and the Timbers still lost two points on one brain fart...or two, if you want to count the fact that either Wolff and Ethan Finlay had time to whip in that cross.