Believe it or not, we're already almost a quarter of the way through the 2025 Major League Soccer season. Nashville SC currently sit in a comfortable sixth place in the Eastern Conference, four points above the playoff line.
Nashville are also 19 matches into BJ Callaghan’s tenure as head coach. Now seems like a good time to examine the improvement over those 19 games and evaluate how Nashville are performing in the early phase of the season.
We're looking at three rolling xG charts. Each data point represents a five-game average from the previous five weeks. Therefore, the datapoint for week eight would be the average xG and average goals gor from the Real Salt Lake, Charlotte FC, FC Cincinnati, and CF Montreal matches.
This sample size is intentionally small to illustrate how different, smaller variables impact the team throughout the season, yet it remains sufficient to minimize the influence of single-game outliers.
How are Nashville SC attacking?
You may recall from my preseason article on what it takes to make the playoffs that 79% of teams who scored 50 or more goals in a season from 2014 to 2024, excluding 2020, made the playoffs. This was also Callaghan’s stated goal at the start of the season: to make the playoffs and score 50 or more goals.
Nashville have been comfortably above this target for a few weeks after finding their finishing touch, and with 12 goals in their last six games, they don’t look like they're slowing down any time soon. As things stand, I'm confident that – barring significant injury – Nashville SC will return to the postseason in some capacity in 2025.
However, making the postseason and truly competing are two completely different things. Over the last decade, 18 of the 20 teams in the MLS Cup Final were among the top four seeds in their conference, and the home team has a record of 7-3 in the final. If Nashville intend to truly compete this year, they must secure a spot in those top four spots; otherwise, they'll just be along for the ride.
