Pinzone: Where Is The Revs 2025 Hype Train Headed?

Through the lens of Better Team Tracker's 2024 results, we find 2025's biggest question...

Photo By J. Alexander Dolan

The New England Revolution, by all accounts, are experiencing a tremendously positive preseason.

There have been many positive vibes, everyone’s getting along, in the best shape of their life, everything is great, grand and wonderful. The game model is coming together, these are the guys (for real this time) and so on type stories to absorb in recent weeks.

And why not, I myself am always the most optimistic as possible in preseason because the presentation of evidence to feel otherwise has yet to be presented.

In my youth as a Red Sox fan in the 90s and early 2000s, this attitude was a necessity, if you couldn’t talk yourself into believing that Pedro’s brother was going to be the answer as the number two in the rotation, don’t bother following the team. The Celtics for much of this period were also hopeless, so hopeless in fact as a fan you had to will yourself into thinking, that, yes, Jiri Welsch could be a key cog of a contending team.

Apologies for the nostalgia but to save you asking DeepSeek, Ramon didn’t work out for the Sox and Welsch left the Garden with the same number of banners as when he joined. Boarding the hype train at this time of year is just something the dedicated fan has to do no matter what. After all, the Red Sox broke an 86-year run of failure in 2004 and the Celtics pushed banner 17 into the rafters in 2008. Those moments are always the best moments for annual boarders of the hype train and the only reason we put up with the celebrations found over on the bandwagon.

In the final analysis of the 2024 edition of Better Team Tracker, the Revs were quite often not the better team and this tracker ignores actual goals and thus results and it has no eyes. It simply tracks eight stats and whether the Revs or their opponents won that category or if they tied.

Each statistical win was worth three points, a tie one point, and no points for a loss. Each MLS game offered 24 points and an Attacking and Entertainment Record.

The stats were shots, shots on target, shots inside the area, passes in the opponent’s half, passes in the opponent’s area, corners, xG, and xG from open play. The Revs wound up winning any one of those categories 92 times last season while tying 11 and losing 169. That record left them with 287 points, just 35% of what was available.

They were quite often not the better team as measured by these selected stats. The results and what many of us saw were in strong agreement.

But was something lost in all of this misery? Yes. Something happened after the eighth game of the MLS season that shows up starkly in looking back at the game by game Attacking and Entertainment Record.

Here is some of the evidence:

• The Revs gained 24 points by winning all eight categories three times all season, none of them occurred after the season’s fifth MLS game

• Including the above games, the Revs won more categories than they lost in a game five times in their first eight, they subsequently did so just five more times in the remaining 26 games

• Isolating just the xG battle, we see the same, five xG wins in the first quarter of the season, only five in the remaining three quarters of the season

• The Revs had more shots on target in three straight games, the fourth, fifth, and sixth games of the season, they never found the target more than the opponent in consecutive games again for the rest of the season

You may be asking who cares about last year? Everyone is gone!

Vrioni has gotten out in front of the annexation of Canada and gone to Montreal, we’ve got Campana the goal machine now, he won’t let us down! We added talented players at almost every position, and Polster might not even start (can you imagine?), everything is fine here now. Why talk about the past?

The concern is Caleb Porter is still here and he’s talking about his game model, again. He talked about the game model last year too and Better Team Tracker actually saw statistical cause to stick with it.

But that didn’t happen, the playing style shifted and so did the narrative. Porter went from talking about attacking, scoring goals, and deciding games with the ball to, in his words, not caring about what it looks like.

He also said he wasn’t happy with how the team was implementing his game model. He said he wanted them to go forward more often than they did, he also didn’t like the passes with no purpose in their own half we all suffered through for many games.

Eventually, the early season style of play drifted away and the Revs were rarely if ever the better team for the remainder of the season. It was briefly justified with a fluke of results anointed as the most talked about four-game winning streak in MLS history but it all ended in failure.

So let’s not worry, it’s a new year, new players, the “right” players. They’re certainly new and there’s certainly a lot of them, that much is true. What remains to be seen is whether will we see Porter’s game model for an entire season, what will he do if they go through a rough patch?

Matthew Doyle on his Armchair Analyst Substack account lent some guidance on this question when he said of the Revs preseason work on playing out of the back:

It’s a valid theory as there could have been an alternate version of last season where Porter refused to change his game model which is positional and possession-based and kept plugging away at finding incremental steps forward to shift what was delivering flattering stats but unflattering results to producing the points for Better Team Tracker and the MLS standings at the same time.

Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Or maybe it would have worked out and been a total bore to watch anyway. Maybe his style is too possession-orientated and over-reliant on such a strict positional framework it inhibits his players’ ability to create advantageous attacking moments that play to their strengths.

We didn’t really find any of that out last year but we need to find out this year.

Porter needs to either succeed or fail playing the game model he believes in. Because if he doesn’t believe in his own model strongly enough to stick with it, then why should we believe in him?

One of the most respected coaches in the history of soccer locked himself in a hotel room for a weekend, questioning his playing style, searching his soul, and asking himself if he was right or wrong. He decided he was right and decided his career would live or die by his methods working or not working.

Marcelo Bielsa went on to be beloved by the fans of the teams he coached for long after he was gone. His nickname might be El Loco, he might have signed the current USMNT manager by looking only at his calves while he was sleeping when he was a boy but he has a model coaches should live by. Be the coach you believe you have to be.

Can Porter have a little El Loco in him or is he going to keep us waiting for another season before he unveils his game model fully because it’s not ready yet, much like Derek Zoolander’s “Magnum” pose?

The Hype Train is ready to get a little loco.