MLS pundits predict 2025 season

With the 2025 Major League Soccer season set to begin on Saturday, it’s time to take stock of the recent predictions made by the punditry, and document how they see the year finishing.

That’s right: We’re keeping tabs.

To be fair, it’s always difficult to forecast the MLS table. Roster rules make it hard for a club to keep a winning squad intact, and MLS are a selling league: Even the best teams will part with their top players if the money is right. As Matthew Doyle, aka the Armchair Analyst, put it in the introduction to his projections, “Don’t take these as hard-and-fast predictions for 2025, but rather an idea of what I’m seeing so far and my relative confidence level for these teams.”

That said, the picks for the coming season usually are contorted by recency bias. These predictions have as much to do with last year’s performances as what clubs did in the transfer market, or how they look in the offseason. Exhibit A: Five of the seven pundits below pick Inter Miami to finish first in the East just one season after they won the Supporters’ Shield — which zero pundits predicted at the start of 2024.

2025 MLS Predictions

As for New York City FC, they finished 2024 in 6th Place, with 50 points after 34 games. This year, New York City are pegged to finish in 8th Place by the collective pundits at MLS.com†, 11th Place by Tom Bogert of Give Me Sport, 7th Place by Ben Wright also of Give Me Sport, 10th place by Joseph Lowery of Backheeled, 9th Place by Doyle, 12th place by Jeff Reuter of The Athletic, and 6th Place by Ben Steiner of Sports Illustrated.

That’s a remarkably poor projected outcome for a team that consistently finishes in the Top 5.

New York City FC | Results by Year

New York City fans should take comfort in the fact that the punditry has maybe the worst record of all. Last year, the experts at MLS.com made zero correct picks. We’ll do the math for you: That’s a success rate of 0.0%. They tapped Supporters’ Shield-winning Inter Miami to finish in 5th Place in the East, Seattle Sounders to finish first in the West (they finished in 4th Place), and New York City to finish in 9th Place (they finished in 6th Place).

2024 | mlssoccer.com Prediction vs Final

The staff at The Athletic were only marginally better last year— and that was because they cast a wider net. In 2024, not a single one of their six pundits correctly predicted the winner of the East, the West, the Supporters’ Shield, the MLS Cup, or the Golden Boot. Not one picked LA Galaxy or NY Red Bulls to make the MLS Cup Final.

But four correctly predicted that Lionel Messi would win the 2024 Landon Donovan MVP Award, and that counts for something. Thanks to those picks, The Athletic staff had an overall success rate of 8.3%.

In other words, these predictions are good fun, but they’re far from definitive: The season is wide open.

Still, feel free to print out the tables above and stick them to the fridge. We’ll check back in October and see how they look then.

† The predictions by MLS are from the “more than 30 submissions” made by “MLS Season Pass talent,” according to MLS.com.