2025 ended in disappointment for the Loons, but as the team walked off the field in late November, the path forward felt clear. They’d had a strong season and come up just short, but they had a clear identity and needs. It felt like 2026 was going to be a chance to build on that success and reach for more.
But after losing team mainstays Dayne St. Clair, Hassani Dotson, Joseph Rosales, and Robin Lod, one of the best young coaches in the world in Eric Ramsay, and spending most of the offseason scrambling to keep the ship from sinking, any clarity there was is gone.
Teams that get so close to multiple trophies seldom start the next season with this much ambiguity.
As the 2026 season kicks off, three major questions hang over the team. How effectively they’re answered will, in large part, determine how Minnesota’s 2026 season goes:
- What is The Loons’ Post-Ramsay Identity?
- Where Do The Goals Come From?
- What Does Success Look Like?
What is The Loons’
Post-Ramsay Identity?
Say what you will about the way the Loons played last season, but at least it was an ethos.
Their style was crystal clear even to the untrained eye: Defend deep, counterattack aggressively, and turn every set piece into a dangerous one. Per Futi, only FC Dallas was as committed to the bunker and counter as the Loons were. It wasn’t always fun to watch and required a huge amount of energy from a relatively thin squad, but it worked reasonably well, and utilized undervalued skillsets that made it easier to acquire interesting players without a massive budget.
Both new coach Cam Knowles and other members of the front office have suggested that the team is going to be more possession-oriented. This is good news, but it isn’t as though they could really go the other direction. Beyond that, tactical details have been sparse and nothing about the preseason offered much indication of what they hope to become.
Minnesota aren’t going to suddenly become tiki-taka Barcelona or bring totaalvoetbal back into fashion, but they need to figure out who they are under Knowles, not just who they aren’t.
With the way the roster is built right now, they seem to be less interested in forging a distinct identity and more in finding talented players and figuring out how to make it all work cohesively as everyone settles in. Call it the seasonal pasta theory of roster construction: Establish a solid base like an aerially impregnable defense or linguine, pick a few interesting in-season ingredients to add flavor and flair, and figure that it’ll all more or less work together with a few small tweaks as you go.
It’s very much how the team was built during Adrian Heath’s tenure, which isn’t meant to be condemnation since it worked genuinely well in a few seasons, but it relies on either superior talent identification or an ability to win bidding wars.
Offensively, the current Loons seem to be built to attack fairly directly, punishing teams that play too narrow and can’t get out to cover free runners on the wings. James Rodríguez will likely be deployed as a technical number 10, playing balls into space for his teammates to run onto. His ability to ping a cross into the channel for Tomas Chancalay to hit first time or go slightly deeper to an on-rushing Anthony Markanich will force defenders to stay back, as will Kelvin Yeboah’s proclivity for late runs into the box. Defenses forced to sit deep into their own box are less likely to break effectively and should give Minnesota the chance to recycle possessions.
Unlike last year, all will not be sacrificed on the altar of 11 behind the ball. Even so, all 11 players on the pitch are going to be asked to defend — ok, 10 will be asked to defend and James Rodriguez doesn’t have to — especially without St. Clair to bail the back line out. I would expect a low-risk gameplan focused on keeping the shape and defending fairly compactly with occasional counterpresses initiated by the attacking front.
Tactically, this all makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t tell us who these Loons are or who they hope to be in the future. It’s simply a way to make use of the team’s strongest assets at this moment.
Relatedly, as much as I like the James acquisition, his contract makes him a bridge player from one era to the next rather than indicative of what that new era is going to look like. Even if he were to extend beyond this year, it’s hard to imagine him still being part of the team in 2029. This is a long-term question to be sure, but with a big summer transfer window looming, the team needs to have at least some sense of the answer or they risk not only underperforming this season, but also the 2027 sprint season.
What Constitutes Success?
Since 2019, Minnesota has missed the playoffs only once: the 2023 season that cost Adrian Heath his job. Expectations for the team have grown steadily, and Khaled El-Ahmad has been consistent in speaking his belief that the team should be competing for trophies every season.
Another deep run in the U.S. Open Cup or even Leagues Cup would be fun, but unless it ends with a championship, I’m not sure that’s enough to be considered a success without a strong regular season to go with it.
In most leagues, making the postseason is a perfectly serviceable proxy for whether a team has had a good season, but MLS’ bloated playoffs make that too low a bar. RSL went 12-5-17 last year and made the playoffs; the year before, Atlanta limped in at 10-10-14. Mediocrity gets rewarded in this league, but we don’t have to pretend that it’s the same thing as success.
Fortunately, there’s a point where data and vibes line up to guide us toward the definition of a solid season: 1.5 points per game.
The Loons’ best seasons — 2019, 2020, and 2025 — find them ending the year with between 1.6 and 1.7 PPG. Seasons where they finish in the 1.4s like 2021 and 2022 aren’t bad but have typically felt a little underwhelming, and anything lower is the Slough of Despond. In the middle, we have the Goldilocks Zone of 1.5 PPG.
1.5 PPG gives the team 51-52 points in a normal season, making them a virtual lock to make the playoffs and even gives them an outside shot at hosting the first round. I’m not sure if a 1.5 PPG team is good, but I’m positive they aren’t bad.
If Knowles can lead the team to 1.5 PPG, a run to a semifinal or deeper, and play a more attractive brand of soccer, that seems like a successful season to me. Whether the front office agrees remains to be seen.
Where Do The Goals
Come From?
To hear the punditry tell it, the 2025 Loons were defensive maestros and offensive minnows, but reality tells a different story. Far from minnows, Minnesota scored 56 goals last season in MLS regular season play, 11th most in the league, marking their second best offensive season ever.
So why the disconnect?
Without a doubt, some of it is how those goals were scored. The team often felt plodding, like they were just waiting for a set piece opportunity, and even when things were clicking, it didn’t always feel repeatable. Their joint-leading scorer was Anthony Markanich, after all, and while that was incredibly fun to watch him ghost in at the back post time and time again, it felt like the tap might close at any moment and the Loons would be scrambling to replace his production.
Whether Markanich’s goal-scoring is a repeatable skill is one of the things I’ll be watching closely this season. Even if it is, Minnesota needs to be baking in a regression from him: The highest-scoring defenders in MLS usually max out at 5-6 goals a season, and season-to-season consistency at that level is rare. Here are the top five scoring defenders from the past five seasons:
| Year | Name | Goals |
| 2025 | Anthony Markanich | 9 |
| 2025 | Jordi Alba | 6 |
| 2025 | Alex Freeman | 6 |
| 2025 | Mathias Laborda | 5 |
| 2025 | Max Arfsten | 4 |
| 2024 | Jordi Alba | 4 |
| 2024 | Kervin Arriaga | 3 |
| 2024 | Guilherme Biro | 3 |
| 2024 | Jon Gallagher | 3 |
| 2024 | Griffin Dorsey | 3 |
| 2023 | Jon Gallagher | 5 |
| 2023 | Justin Glad | 5 |
| 2023 | Ryan Hollingshead | 4 |
| 2023 | Brooks Lennon | 4 |
| 2023 | Tim Parker | 4 |
| 2022 | Ryan Hollingshead | 6 |
| 2022 | Juan José Sánchez | 6 |
| 2022 | Bill Tuiloma | 6 |
| 2022 | Alexander Callens | 5 |
| 2022 | Lalas Abubakar | 4 |
As you can see, Markanich could drop his goal tally by 50% and still be the highest-scoring defender this season, but the Loons would undoubtedly feel that sting.
The burden falls heavily on Kelvin Yeboah’s shoulders, as it should, that is the job a DP striker after all. The question of whether he’s prepared to carry that weight unavoidably leads to the question of what happened to him last year. We know he was injured at the end of the season — he missed over a month due to a hamstring injury and was clearly diminished even when he returned — but his performance had been down long before then.
Of his nine goals in MLS last year, Yeboah scored four in the first five games of the season, then went from March 22 to June 14 without scoring another, a span of nearly 700 minutes. He scored his remaining five goals over the next eight games — a very solid scoring rate, albeit one buttressed by a pair of PKs against St. Louis — then closed the year with another dry patch, this time totaling just shy of 1200 minutes. 987 of those barren minutes came before his injury against Austin.
The two theories I’ve seen on the steep drop from his stellar 2024 debut to his 2025 slog are that he was nursing several smaller injuries throughout the season and that he struggled to find chemistry with Tani Oluwaseyi when both were on the field. If it was the latter, I would have expected him to rebound more quickly after Oluwaseyi left, but in either case, after a full offseason to reset, neither should be a factor this year.
The extent to which the Loons actually need more goals depends on how risk-averse Knowles wants to be (see question 1) but it’s a safe bet to assume that if their goal is to host a playoff game again (see question 2) they’ll need to score more goals than they did last year. And with Markanich very likely to regress, they’ll need to replace his contributions as well as Oluwaseyi’s.
James will help, no question, but he’s never exactly been a 20-goal threat himself. He’d need to be around 0.35 goals per 90 to make it into the top 50 MLS scorers on a per 90 basis; he hasn’t reached that level since 2018-2019 with Bayern Munich. I have the same amount of confidence that he’ll do it again this year as I do that Minnesota will win the Bundesliga.
I’m not as down on this offense as it may seem. There are a lot of compelling players in this attack that have shown flashes of brilliance if not consistent production. The numbers are what they are, however, and if the Loons believe they’ll need to score in the 50-60 goal range again this season, they’re either going to need several of those compelling players to find consistency or to bring in reinforcements during the summer.
It would be nice if each question could be easily assigned to just one group like to-dos after a low-stakes meeting: The coaching staff takes on determining the team’s tactics and identity; the front office sets the bar for success. And the goalscoring? That’s ultimately up to the players.
Instead, this season is going to be straight out of the calculus textbook: Related rates are back, baby! As each answer begins to take shape, it changes what the other answers look like as well.
For example, Yeboah turning into a genuine threat for the Golden Boot not only mostly solves the question of goalscoring, but also necessarily affects the team’s short-term identity and potentially its long-term one if he is willing to sign a new contract. A 25-goal striker playing ahead of James also raises the bar for success — especially with the team able to open a DP spot and most of Oluwaseyi’s fee still in the bank.
This is a tough position for Minnesota United. Questions as existential as these show how much of a transition period the team is in, just ahead of the league itself going through a massive change and a new CBA soon after.
But if they get them right, 2025 may end up being the foundation of a great period for the Loons after all. Just not in the way anyone expected.