ACFC 2025 Year in Review

There were definitely positives and negatives in 2025 for Angel City, but the question is whether the team is moving in the right direction. There was a lot of turnover, with a new sporting director and a new coach, but with that caveat, let’s compare this year to last year to determine if there was any growth.

Basic Statistics Between 2024 and 2025

I’m not factoring in the three point deduction from last year; for the purposes of team performance that was 27 points, and this year it was exactly the same. Goals For, Goals Against, and Goal Differential were all slightly improved in 2025, while xG For and xG Differential were slightly worse. ACFC did manage both more Shots and fewer Shots Against this year. I’m including Touches in the Attacking Penalty Box, also, because I feel like no team ever willfully concedes that space, and I think that any touch in the penalty box can be dangerous. However, I did run a linear regression on this, and it only has can r squared of 0.155 and a P value of .1664. So Touches in the Attacking Pen would not be considered as statistically significant, and only explains about 15% of a team’s total points. However I’m including the plot below, and I think that there is a clear positive correlation, just with some real outliers, of which Angel City is one.

However, I do think that this represents progress, and this is because of player turnover. Last year’s team leaders in Goal Contributions were Alyssa Thompson (12), Emslie (9), Leroux (8), Dougherty Howard (3), Vignola (3), and Curry (2). No other player had more than 1. This was a team that was heavily reliant on it’s attacking front three for goals. In fact, 70.4% of ACFC Goals last year were scored by one of Alyssa, Emslie, or Leroux. This year, those three players combined for 1,912 total minutes, or 27.24% of the minutes available, and none of them were on the gameday roster at the end of the year. There are obviously different reasons for the absences of all three, and I also think that all three are personal reasons that are outside of the purview of statistical analysis. My point is that at the team level, that production needed to be replaced, just to get back to the same level as last year, let alone be better than last year. So while Tiernan’s 8 Goals were excellent, that basically just replaced the 7 Goals that Leroux scored last year from the same position. The gains that were made this year could only make up for the losses.

Where I see progress is in the depth. Last year there were 6 players that had at least 2 Goal Contributions. This year there 10. Of course, the bad news is that 4 of those players no longer play for Angel City (Alyssa, Vignola, Alanna Kennedy, and Zelem). Still, as I said, almost all of the actual goals came only came from the front three in 2024. This year Gisele had 6 Goal Contributions (1G+5A), Fuller was third on the team with 7 (4G+3A), which was a big step up from the 1 Goal Contribution she had last year. And Endo and Emslie are also not part of the 10 players I mentioned, each finishing with 1. I would expect them both to do much better next year, barring some unforeseen developments. This is not to say that the team doesn’t need reinforcements, because they do. But there is a reason to think that the attack is more robust.

Defensively, we see that both Goals Against and xGA were both slightly improved from last year. There is actually a stronger correlation between Goals Against and Points than there is for Goals For (88.75% vs 85.86%). I also feel like there is a similar effect here, in that I consider Savvy King to have been the best centerback at Angel City in 2025. Of course, we all know that she was only able to play 30.3% of the available minutes for the season. I’ll get more into this when I do my individual player evaluations.

Vs. The League

The defense does still finish 12th out of 14, however, in both Goals Against and xGA. The offense does better, finishing in 11th in both Goals and xG. However, put together, Angel City is 10th in both Goal Differential and xGD. Actually, two teams that finished above Angel City in the table had worse xGD (Dash and Reign). In terms of the other stats that I used at the beginning, ACFC was 4th in Shots and 9th in Shots against. Shots are obviously a blunter measure than xG is, but I think that it is also a sign of improvement that Angel City had a positive difference between Shots and Shots conceded this year. And finally, for Touches in the Attacking Penalty Box, Angel City was 5th, although we can see in the chart that they underperformed that.

Pythagorean Predicted Points

Using the same formula from my End Of Season Playoff Predictions, we get 29.29 Pythagorean Predicted Points, which is down from the Pythagorean Total of 31.3 after 17 game. Of course, the real world value was even worse, at 27. Going down the stretch, Angel City only got 3 points out of their final 5 Games, getting outscored 3-6. A pair of 1-0 losses were particularly damaging. That is largely why the End of Season Pythagorean Points are getting dragged down. However, I think that it is important to note that the underlying numbers do look better here, and looked even better at that 17 game mark. 31 Points wouldn’t be enough to make the playoffs, either, but this is maybe more indicative of the strength of the team. 4 points could be converting two losses into draws and one draw into a win. This is also part of why I think that the team actually did make progress this year; I think those 27 points are a little misleading. This also corresponds with Angel City’s 10th place finish in xGD and Goal Differential. Goal Differential is the most predictive statistic for 2025, with 96.34% correlation to Points. Houston were in 10th place in the table with 30 points, so by multiple metrics, Angel City probably was more like a 30 point team than a 27 point one.

Conclusions

Early in the season, after 5 games played, when Angel City was 2-2-1, but coming off that horrific 0-4 loss to Gotham, I said that that I didn’t think the team was as good as their record, or as bad as that loss looked, but I didn’t expect them to make the playoffs. I’m a little amazed that that actually was spot on, mostly because of how much has changed between now and then. Since that point, a new coach was hired, seven new players were brought in, and seven players left (I’m including loans). A lot happened this year, and honestly, I don’t understand the people that felt like we should have been making the playoffs. I don’t think that was in the cards, even before all of the upheaval of the season.

Looking ahead, I think that Angel City is in a stronger position than they were a year ago. The 2024 team was highly dependent on a few star players making something out of nothing. Now, I see a strong core, with 5 players under-25 getting at least 1,000 minutes. I think the midfield, with the trades for Sugita and Martin, is stronger than it’s ever been. My prediction at this moment, before almost any offseason moves are made, is that this team is still two years away from a run at a trophy. I think that finishing somewhere around 5th-7th place, or around 37 points, would be a good goal for next season.

I’ll be doing my year-end player evaluations by positional groups, starting with the goalkeepers, so please watch for that.