Your 2025 Revolution Post-Mortem: Who Could Have Predicted That?
Breaking down the season that introduced Andy to the stat "Sadnesses-Per-Hour"
For the last several years I have endeavored to put together an article that summarizes the Revolution’s season and aims to determine the figurative cause of death. These articles take some cues from a long-standing series by the excellent Matt Doyle of MLSsoccer.com.
He used to start those articles with a gif that summarized the season, a tradition that I will carry on here:
Arc of the Season
To understand the way 2025 went for the New England Revolution you need a bit of context. For posterity, I’ll summarize that context here.
*deep inhale*
In 2023, the Revs rebounded from a tough 2022 season and found themselves near the top of the standings midway through the year. During that summer, head coach Bruce Arena stepped down from his role as head coach/sporting director after being placed on leave for alleged inappropriate remarks. The team’s form spiraled downward, though they still made the playoffs. They crashed out immediately.
New England’s front office dragged its heels on filling the vacant sporting director position, eventually landing on Curt Onalfo (who already had the role on an interim basis). Additional feet-dragging yielded 2x MLS Cup champ Caleb Porter as New England’s head coach ahead of the 2024 season. Porter inherited what was thought to be a good roster but quickly found it not to his liking, making several changes midseason.
*gasping for air*
Results were… well they were bad. Really bad.
Worst xG and xGA in the league, bad. Arguably the worst season in club history bad.
In the offseason, the front office knew that a change needed to be made. The change they landed on was “get a new team”.
Meanwhile, Bruce Arena (remember him) returned and was hired by San Jose. In doing so, he became a willing trade participant for the Revs.
Arena got players familiar with his style, and New England got some assistance in the eventual offloading of 19 players during the winter. The Revs brought in 14 players that were, according to Caleb Porter, the “right players”.
*vision blurs*
The season starts with a draw and three losses. Rumors begin flying that a late March match against NYRB is considered “must win” for Porter to retain his job. The Revs earn a PK in the 90+8’ and “do win”.
That result kicks off something of a golden era for the Caleb Porter-led Revolution. The defense becomes nearly unbeatable as the Revs switch to a 3/5 back formation. New England rattles off 5 wins in 6 games.
Eventually, however, the engine starts to lose steam. The defense starts to sputter. Would-be wins turn into draws, and would-be draws turn into losses.
*soul begins to leave body*
And then… well… look at this chart.
This represents a rolling 5-game average in terms of points per game. The league average was 1.37 ppg earned. The Revs did have a good stretch of about 6 weeks where they averaged above that mark.
But struggles at home eventually came back to bite them. New England finished the year with just 4 wins from the friendly confines of Gillette Stadium.
A 9-match undefeated streak (5W 4D 0L) in April/May was immediately followed by a 9-match winless run (0W 2D 7L) in June/July. After that it seemed the writing was on the wall for Caleb Porter, who was let go on September 15.
What went right?
It’s another light season on the “what went right” front.
But I do think, in spite of the results, there were a few positives to highlight.
New Look CB Room Succeeds Early
Whenever there’s a lot of turnover at a given position, it’s reasonable to expect a bit of a rough patch as players gain familiarity with one another.
The Revolution cleared out their central defense in the offseason, offloading Tim Parker, Jonathan Mensah, Dave Romney, and Xavi Arreaga (not to mention Henry Kessler during the 2024 season). A loan move for Tiago Suarez ensured that the Revs kept only 32-year-old Andrew Farrell on the active roster through the offseason. They replaced those 5 center backs with 4 new faces: Mamadou Fofana, Brayan Ceballos, Tanner Beason, and Wyatt Ombsberg.
One of the big talking points as to whether or not the Revs would be able to improve upon a dismal 2024 was ‘how quickly can the defense gel?’
Fortunately, they gelled nearly immediately. This chart shows 5 game averages for goals against (in red) and expected goals against (in gray). There’s a good chunk from the beginning of the season where New England greatly outperformed their expected goals against.
Things unraveled as the season went along, but the Revs conceding 51 goals in 2025 (league average was also 51) sure beats a nearly record-setting 74 goals conceded the year prior.
Not amazing, but … you know… progress.
Carles Gil
If you thought that this would be the year that the New England Revolution stopped relying on Carles Gil to carry the team you would have been wrong. The Revs continued to drive the offense through the 32-year-old midfielder to the point where it may have skewed the entire direction of New England’s buildout.
Here is a heat map of Gil’s positioning throughout the 2025 season.
And here is a chart that maps the slant in direction of passing.
The origin on this chart would indicate that a team passes equally forwards, backwards, to the left, and to the right. All teams passed forwards more often than backwards, but no team passed to the right at a higher rate than New England.
Obviously, there are other factors in whether you pass one direction more than another, but Carles Gil’s presence on the right certainly didn’t hurt.
Best Stat of the Season
Well, for one, Carles Gil managed another top 5 season by FotMob rating, even with poor results. His 7.87 rating fell behind only Leo Messi, Evander, and Anders Dreyer at 4th 4th-highest average.
Does that count? No?
You want a less subjective stat? One that comes with a chart?
OK. Umm. Dribbling success rate?
New England won their dribble take-ons at the highest rate of any team in MLS. Probably something to do with Carles Gil being good at soccer and attempting the 4 most dribble take-ons in the league.
But also possibly helped by the fact that Matt Polster (70.6%), Brayan Ceballos (65.4%), and Leo Campana (64.7%) all made the top 20 in terms of take on success rate.
That level of success makes a lot of what you’re about to read all the more frustrating in hindsight.
What Went Wrong
We can nitpick about specific stats and trends (and oh boy do I intend to), but the real culprit, to my eyes, was a failure to accurately gauge the issues of last season.
2024 saw New England setting the wrong kinds of records. Caleb Porter finished his first season with the Revs with the lowest points-per-game earned of any Revolution manager.
The Revs also had an abysmal track record, both offensively and defensively, in 2024. They generated the fewest expected goals AND conceded the highest expected goals against in the league last season. They put together one of their worst seasons at Gillette Stadium and (as we see below) only managed to look competitive for about a one month span.
A lot of those negatives will feel familiar because, in spite of a major overhaul to the roster, the 2025 Revs performed quite similarly to the previous season.
A quick scroll to the top of this article will show that this team also performed below average, with the exception of about a month-long period. The Revs also actually managed to get worse at Gillette Stadium, racking up 9 losses and earning (a club record low) 0.94 ppg at home.
Now, I’m not being entirely fair. New England did improve in many ways.
They improved their league position from 14th to 11th, year-over-year, and went from the worst expected goals differential (xG -xGA) in the conference to merely 4th-worst.
But these gains were modest and, I’d argue, born from a failure to recognize the depth of the problems inherent in the 2024 team. The front office made moves to rectify the situation but failed to recognize the role that coaching and tactics played in those disappointing results.
The front office may have argued, after 2024, that Caleb Porter could find success with the right players.I think that failed to account for a lack of consistency and forward progress.
Good coaching should have been able to show progress, even with a flawed roster. We didn’t see that continual forward progress in 2024 and it shouldn’t have been a surprise that we didn’t see it in 2025.
Campana
Oof. I really wanted Campana to succeed in a Revs jersey. A quick watch of his highlights, and he really looked like the kind of player that New England had been missing. He could work in tight spaces, receive the ball in the box, and finish.
And… just none of that came to fruition in 2025.
In just about every way you want your striker to excel, Campana took a step back from previous seasons. He did take more shots per 90 than any of his previous years in MLS, but got less from them. He posted his lowest goals per 90 (of course), but also his lowest shots-on-target per 90, with just about 1 on target per match. His on target percentage also fell from the mid ~40s% down to 31% and his expected goals per game fell from the ~0.5-0.6 range down to 0.38.
The hope was that with consistent minutes, he could build on past performances. Instead, he went from 1 expected goal (roughly) every other game to every 3 games.
Worst Stat of the Season
Touches in opposing penalty area
I brought this up in last year’s post-mortem so I won’t belabor the point.
New England was, simply put, not good at getting into the opponent’s penalty area. New England took the 5th fewest touches in the opposing PA of any team in MLS this season. The Revs had the 3rd lowest rate of penalty area touches in the league. In the most highly valued real estate on the field, New England averaged about 15% fewer touches than the rest of MLS.
The best teams in MLS saw about 27-28 touches per game in their opponents’ box. On a per-game basis, New England saw about 19.35. The good news is that this is higher than last year’s 19.24 tPA per-90. Marginally higher.
Crossing Success Rate
The Revs actually completed the 8th most total crosses of any team in the league this season.
That sounds pretty good. Until you ask yourself how many cross attempts they made in order to reach that number.
Now, there’s no rule saying that you have to be successful at crossing the ball in order to be allowed to do it more often. If it were a rule, though, it would make basic sense.
The above chart shows each team's total cross attempts (x axis) vs their crossing success rate (y axis). The line is a simple best-fit regression, with a (admittedly weakly correlated) upward slope. This would seem to support the idea that clubs with better crossing success do so more often and vice versa.
New England, despite attempting the 3rd most crosses, had a success rate of only 18.8%. If you take an average of the other 9 teams in the top-10 most attempts, you get 23.3%. With the best crossing teams succeeding in the 25-30% range, the Revs are significantly below the curve.
So what?
What’s the problem with the Revs crossing at the 3rd highest rate, even if they succeed at the 5th lowest rate? After all, they were still averaging about 3 successful crosses per match (towards the top of the league), even if they needed about 15 attempts to get there.
I think this feels more indicative of what I just mentioned above, that New England didn’t have a reliable way to move the ball into the penalty area. For whatever reason, low percentage crosses from wide areas were determined to be the best option of attack. I’ll let you make of the tactics what you will.
Best Performance
I’ve pointed out New England’s poor home record in 2025 — it won just 4 times at Gillette Stadium — so I feel it’s fitting that I show you one of their rare good home performances.
This match took place on April 19, New England’s 8th match of the 2025 season. Despite having a pair of wins already by this point, New England had still yet to score a goal from open play.
You read that correctly. 7 matches with 0 open play goals to start the season.
This is, mind you, in spite of the record-setting trade for striker Leo Campana and the loan of potential future DP forward Ignatius Ganago. For whatever reason, those two had really failed to make any sort of consistent impact.
That is, until this match against NYCFC.
This win showcased a goal from each, and some high quality chances were generated in between. It was the sort of game Revs fans had hoped to see a lot more of.
Worst Performance
I’ll begin this section with some honorable mentions:
A 3-3 draw away at Sporting Kansas City (who ended the season 2 points ahead of wooden spoon winners DCU) despite rushing out to an early 2 goal lead ended up being somewhat of a tipping point for the rest of the season.
One game prior, a 0-0 home draw against San Jose in Bruce Arena’s return to Foxboro was about as uninspiring a performance as I can remember. San Jose didn’t start Chicho Arango, Christian Espinoza, or Josef Martinez and still managed to win the xG battle 1.6 to 0.3.
And who could forget their 3-1 home loss against CF Montreal, a game many expected to be Porter’s last in charge.
All of those matches are worthy opponents, but any time you concede 5 goals in 32 minutes… that’s the winner.
New England carried a 2-0 lead into the second half with Campana making his presence felt in the 2nd minute. And then… disaster struck in the form of Red Bull goals in the 56th, 70th, 72nd, 83rd, and 88th minutes. During that span, Revs fans felt disappointment at a rate of 9.375 sadnesses-per-hour (that’s SPH on your odometer).
So, What Now?
It’s another early offseason in New England, and with the firing of Caleb Porter, the Revs are once again in a position to change the direction of the club.
They won’t have as much freedom to overhaul the roster this year, with only 5 players contracts ending in 2025 (just 3 of those contracts offering the club an option to extend).
Instead, they’ll look to make the biggest impact by choosing the right coach for the moment.
There are myriad options available for consideration. Will they swing for the fences or will they go with the easy or familiar option?
One option in particular has been described as comparable to Caleb Porter. If they go that route, how long will it be until we find ourselves right back here, lamenting another season of unrealized potential?
Really nice work here, Andy!
Fire Kurt, Hire Andy!