Austin FC has a short — but mostly charmed — MLS history. Relying on a creative attacking style, the Texas club leaped from 12th in its debut season in 2021 to second in 2022.
This season, however, the team has floundered. Austin FC is 11th in the West and has the second-worst goal differential in the conference. In March, it was knocked out of the CONCACAF Champions League by a Haitian club that had not played a competitive match in more than a year.
Perhaps most alarming, Austin FC has gone 355 game minutes — and counting — without scoring. So, why is the team under-performing?
As it turns out, Austin isn’t under-performing at all. Instead, it is failing to live up to its massive over-performance from 2022.
The biggest giveaway lies in Austin’s expected goals or xG. In its simplest terms, xG reflects the probability that an offensive action will result in the ball finding the back of the net. There is plenty of hard data that nails down that probability, from the position on the field where the action happens to the part of the player’s body involved.
But it all boils down into that final figure. So if a team starts a game with an xG of 2.4, it means the data indicates the team will score 2.4 goals in the game. It’s a statistic that has proven to be simple, clean and reliable.
Austin’s xG for 2022 was 50.9. But somehow the Texas team managed to blow that figure out of the water and score 64 goals.
Austin FC forward Sebastian Driussi outperformed his own personal xG by six. These are massive variances on a team and individual level. This year, however, things look a bit more in line. Austin’s 2023 xG is 8.9 and the team has scored six goals — a bit less but nothing out of the ordinary.
What these gaps in xG tell us is the amount of luck Austin had on its side during a wild 2022 playoff run.
A season-wide surplus of nearly 13 goals shows that many of Austin’s attacks were not as incisive or reliable as they could have been — otherwise, those goals would have been reflected in the xG statistic.
And that’s a problem for Austin, because it appears that coach Josh Wolff may have seen the goals roll in and erroneously assumed everything was fine. After all, he has hardly changed his game tactics in 2023.
But things weren’t fine. Austin’s lucky goals were hiding a defensive weakness that teams have exploited mercilessly in 2023.
Wolff loves to play out from the back — an effective strategy when you’re scoring — but dangerous when you’re not. Just watch Chicharito of the L.A. Galaxy take advantage of a slow Austin defense last Saturday:
