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 unusually difficult to forecast the MLS table. Roster rules make it hard to keep a 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 predictions for the coming season usually are contorted by recency bias. They have as much to do with last year's performances as what clubs did in the transfer market, or how they play in the offseason. Exhibit A: All four pundits below pick Inter Miami to finish first in the East just one season after they won the Supporters' Shield — which zero pundits picked them to do at the start of 2024.
