Photo by Elizabeth Shaw
This season cannot be truthfully described as anything other than a failure to capitalize on last season’s slight momentum. It wasn’t all bad, just mostly bad. Every aspect of the club contributed to the failings: The Players, The Technical Staff, The Front Office, The Attack, The Defense, and The Ownership. I will give you my thoughts on each aspect.
The Players
Here’s how this will work on an individual level. For returning players, I will classify them into three categories: progressed in performance, maintained performance level, and regressed in performance. For new players, I will go with: exceeded expectations, met expectations, did not meet expectations.
Progressed in Performance
Players: Fischer, Milliet (2)
Kayla Fischer was the clear MVP for Racing this season, once the coaching staff finally stopped playing her in the midfield. Thankfully that experiment seems to be over (with this coaching staff). Kayla needs to score goals and the types of goals she scores are more likely to come with her playing as far forward as possible. She is now the star of this team. Lauren Milliet added goals and assists to her game this season, and was much more effective in midfield than she had been in defense in the early parts of the season.
Maintained Performance Level
Players: O’Kane, Wright, Morris, Flint, Ciorbu (5)
Katie O’Kane’s placement here instead of the category above is more indicative of the high esteem in which I held her last season. She was Racing’s best player at times this season, but not often enough as the season wore on. Arin Wright had another solid year, and she continues to be a league-average center back as her career winds down. That is a good transition for her as she approaches the end of her playing days. It was hard to know where to place Makenna Morris and the coaches seemed to have that problem as well. She is a “winger” but listed as a midfielder. Maybe next year she will finally find her true spot. Taylor Flint continued to be the best midfielder of her very specific type in the league. Racing was much worse without her on the pitch. Ciorbu continues to be a squad player.
Regressed in Performance
Players: Sears, Bloomer, Weber, Jean, Hase, Petersen (6)
Emma Sears is a USWNT player. All of her actions seem to indicate that being on the team for the World Cup next summer is the most important thing to her. I wish her well. That seemingly singular focus harmed Racing. There isn’t another way to say it. Bloomer ended up being the worst keeper in the league (that played significant minutes) according to Fotmob. I miss Katie in goal (more on her later, surprisingly). Weber looked really good for about 5 minutes and then proceeded to fall off a cliff. Ellie Jean never looked right and missed some early season matches that likely impacted her form. Hase got hurt, got her feelings hurt when she didn’t get minutes when back healthy, and then left. If you could sub in players to take corners, Petersen would be an effective player. However, on the rest of the pitch she ended up being a liability too many times.
Exceeded Expectations
Players: McKeen, McMahon, Hill, Gacioch (4)
McKeen ultimately showed great maturity and physicality and that was a pleasant surprise. I think she will be a good player in the league, it just might not be for Racing. McMahon’s performance allowed Milliet to move into midfield which was sorely needed. Rachel Hill put in a good shift every time she was on the pitch and filled in at an unfamiliar position. Gacioch will be the anchor of the defense moving forward.
Met Expectations
Players: Hodge, White (2)
I wasn’t sold on Hodge during the first part of the season. She was better suited subbing for Flint, but I don’t know how she fits in next year if DeMelo, O’Kane, and Milliet are all healthy. White’s season was shortened significantly by injuries, but when she played, she brought much needed pace.
Did Not Meet Expectations
Players: Lardner, Philippus, Prohaska (3)
Maja Lardner’s rating may seem harsh but the preseason reports on her were that she was NWSL ready. That proved not quite to be the case, although she definitely had moments of brilliance. I expect her to be in the “progressed in performance” category fairly easily next season. Philippus logged less than 200 minutes, and with her pedigree and Racing’s awful defensive performance on the season, that is a real head-scratcher. Prohaska to me didn’t seem to be much better than any other backup keeper on the roster, so Racing spending $50,000 on her seems like a questionable use of that particular set of Monopoly money.
The Technical Staff
Racing’s website lists GM Caitlyn Flores Milby as part of the technical staff so instead of giving here a one-person section I decided to lump the GM and coaches together. Seemingly, from all reports I have heard, the coaches are heavily involved in the personnel decision making so it made sense to do so.
Roster Building
Long time readers of this space will know my affinity for The Wire and know that one of my favorite quotes from the series is “all the pieces matter.” I could write a dissertation on the elements of that quote, but I will spare you. In a nutshell and for our purposes we’ll take it to mean that you can’t separate the constituent components of a system and assign full credit or blame to any one person. Penultimately, the GM in this structure has the final say (one assumes), but she doesn’t set the budget in insolation. Ultimately, that comes down to ownership, so let’s get them out of the way first here. There is no real way of knowing, but I believe that Racing works on a limited transfer budget. That is set by ownership. Therefore, we have to somewhat rate Racing’s roster building based on that.
The obvious, gargantuan elephant in the room is Janine Sonis. She could realistically win league MVP. Could Racing have done more to get her to stay? Possibly, but nobody realized how important she was going to be to Denver. In retrospect, Racing made a bad move here. The only way they were ever going to offset it was to use the transfer funds to bring in suitable replacements. McMahon and Hodge were ultimately the replacements for Sonis and Borges. Neither of them was at the level that Racing lost.
In order for Racing to be competitive, they are going to have to hit some home runs in free agency. Based on what I have seen this season, McKeen could be in that category one day, but that day is far enough off to not be fully useful at the moment. Gacioch could prove to be a better than league-average center back, but she isn’t yet. There are not that many unicorns like Taylor Flint whose effectiveness comes from her uniqueness. Racing’s biggest problem is that it can’t shop at Tiffany’s. Everyone likes to find diamonds in the rough, but the nice, big, polished stones are obviously the ones of the best quality and Racing can’t get those types of players anymore due to the draft going away.
Therefore, how critical can you be of a staff given limited resources and not being a typical destination location on the map? Actually, still pretty critical. This team collects goalkeepers like Elizabeth collects Pokémon cards. That needs to stop. Now they don’t even have a relatively decent one if you are basing things on this year’s form. The staff has fallen in love with players that are “flexible”. This year, that has been code for players who don’t excel at any specific thing. Makenna Morris is a microcosm of this. Racing paid a reported $115,000 for her services. What does she excel at? I am hard pressed to find anything. She is solid but doesn’t even have a natural role. That is the type of player you keep as a luxury, not as a building block. I also heard Bev mention that the team had their eye on Hodge for a long time. Why? She may be seen by some as a prototypical “Racing” player, but is that a good thing? She grew on me, but it’s hard to see her as someone who you can build around. Ella Hase ended up being a miss too, regardless of what she does next in her career she underperformed here.
Then, there is the whole Sears mess. Ownership may have handcuffed the GM here, but if Racing had a better roster around her, maybe she stays for another year. Look up and down the roster and count how many players are at their peak. I bet if you are honest with yourself, it’s only a handful. The worst part is that now I can’t even figure out what the team is building for. Maybe it’s only survival.
General Tactics
Taking everything into account about what I said in the previous section, Racing thinks it can probably only play in certain ways to win. Unfortunately for fans, none of those ways involved having any sort of decent possession. Racing has to play direct. It doesn’t have any other options. This season, there was no way they were going to consistently stitch together enough quality passes to break down an opponent. That’s one thing when your opponent is going to sit in on you. It is quite another when your opponent knows that if they can avoid enough self-inflicted injuries in a match, they should come out on top. Racing got figured out this season. There was the move to a three center back system that confused the league’s average to poor teams for a while, but once the good teams came around, it proved to be just as ineffective as the original system. Offensively, Racing wasn’t as abysmal as they were defensively, but a typical Racing possession that was extended for more than a few passes either ended in a tame shot, or a misplaced pass.
Player Development
As mentioned above, Fischer really grew into herself, so credit there. I do think Sears showed flashes of improvement in certain areas. Gacioch was brought along nicely and I think McMahon likely benefited from some development.
On the opposite side, O’Kane was still good, but I didn’t see much progression. Weber looked like she was poised to break out and maybe the offseason work helped her, but after a stint on the bench, she looked worse and never really took to the midfield when played there. Jean’s regression was frightening, but her time on the availability report might have contributed more than any lack of development. I am probably disappointed in Philippus’ lack of growth and Bloomer’s regression more than anything. On the whole, I would say that this was a step back in player development compared to last season.
The Attack
Here I want to get more into the results versus the tactics. Let’s take a look at the types of goals that Racing scored. Racing scored 38 goals this season. That was a club record for the league, but if you include the matches from The Women’s Club last season, they scored 38 in 2025 as well. The breakdown of goals this season compared to last is remarkably similar. Most of Racing’s goals came from pressing or in transition or directly after establishing possession after a transition move. I think this is likely pretty typical of most teams, but I don’t track other teams’ goals in this manner.
Moving Milliet into attack and lessening her defensive duties was likely the key turnaround in the performance of the attack in the middle of the season. Fischer turning into a more clinical finisher didn’t hurt. She was just outside the Top 30 in the league at having more goals than expected (8 goals on a cumulative xG of 6.78). Sears and Flint were also on the positive side. The numbers indicate that Lardner likely left a couple of goals on the pitch.
Racing set a league record for the number of different players for score a brace in a season. I think that shows that there is attacking quality on the pitch in most matches. To me, it’s always a good thing when the goals are spread across the team like this and the team doesn’t have to over rely on a single striker.
However, the attack was obviously missing DeMelo’s dribbling ability and knack for winning fouls in dangerous positions or to stop the opponent's momentum. The other obvious missing piece was Racing’s inability to demonstrate speed on the pitch. At varying points in the season, you would see a Racing player running on her own and getting double teamed on a break. Too rarely was Racing able to field a second willing runner in these crucial situations.
The set pieces were about as successful as last season from a number of goals scored perspective. However, there were times this year, especially in matches against the better defenses, when a set piece looked like the only way that Racing was ever going to score. You don’t want to be in that situation.
If Racing is going to have a better attack in the future, they are going to have to possess the ball more. Currently the players seem to be encouraged to press to disrupt and score. They also need to be able to press to possess. I remain fully convinced that many of Racing’s defensive issues stem from tiring out in the first 70 minutes because they have to chase the ball so much.
The Defense
Which leads me to Racing’s most glaring issue. This team just doesn’t defend well. I went a little bit deeper into the numbers here and I want to show what I found.
Before I do, I want to talk about something that really irritated me this week. Without calling anyone out or pointing to a specific site, there were some clear junk analytics floating around that identified a couple of Racing’s center backs as “elite”. That is just flat out wrong if you think critically about it for even a few seconds. The same methodology identified Angel City’s two excellent center backs, Emily Sams and Sarah Gorden as “limited”. If you wouldn’t do a straight swap of Wright and Gacioch for those two, you need to have your head examined. We as a society need to be increasingly aware of junk science and junk analytics as AI progresses. Trust me when I say that I know a bad model when I see one (or in this case one that works for some positions but not for others), but I know that many people probably don’t. My advice is that if the numbers don’t pass the sniff test, then you have every right to be suspicious.
For my analysis, I relied on FotMob for data. FotMob’s player rating system isn’t perfect, but it is time-tested and is applied to every major league in the world. Here is a question that I ask folks that consider themselves data savvy. When a data set doesn’t exist at your fingertips, are you willing to put in the work to build it yourself? I couldn’t find anywhere online that had “Shots Faced Total” for the season, but I needed it for the analysis that I wanted to do. Therefore, I built it by hand by going through every single 2026 NWSL match on Fotmob and recording the shot totals. Too often so-called analysts only work with the data at their fingertips. That leads to sloppy conclusions. Hopefully you will find this insightful.
I am not going to call out everything of significance here, but here are some things I saw. Maybe you will see more. The data is sorted by “Goals Conceded” from least to most.
Gotham’s excellent defense is anchored by a fine pair of center backs but also looks to be greatly aided by Berger’s outstanding performance this season. Gotham was about league-average in the shot quality they conceded (using xG) but was the clear leader in preventing more goals than expected. That could be something to watch in the playoffs and next season.
Washington is probably the most dependably solid defense as they were good in every category.
Utah’s defense tends to give up better shot opportunities than most of the league and has a relatively high goals/shot metric. They benefit by not conceding as many shots as most other teams.
The “xG per shot - Goals per shot” (the indicator meant to show a team ability to prevent more goals than expected) coloring lines up fairly consistently with the Fotmob Rating for the main keeper. This suggests that the keepers in the dark outline in the “GK Fotmob Rating” column are one of the drivers in stopping more shots than expected. While Chicago had a historically bad season defensively, the numbers suggest that Katie Atkinson was still a decent keeper this season. Everyone knows how good Jane Campbell can be, and this highlights that too.
Orlando is interesting in that they tended to not concede as many shots of high quality as the rest of the league, but their problem was a volume one.
As for Racing, I thought I might discover that the same thing that happened to Orlando happened to Racing, in that it was a shot volume problem. That turned out to be sort of true, but it wasn’t as stark. My assessment is that Racing conceded way too many shots, but those shots were of league-average quality. They pretty much conceded the number of goals one would expect and probably didn’t benefit from having the worst keeper in the chart above and the second worse center back pairing. It is a bit of a chicken/egg problem in that the overall defensive performance made the keeper and center backs look bad, but regardless of causation, the result was clear. This was a very, very poor defense. I think talent and playing style are to blame, but your mileage may vary on that one.
The Ownership
I have tried to write this section a couple of times and can't quite get it right, so I decided simpler is better.
When I started this site, I made it very clear that I am pro-labor. Put another way, I am always going to give the benefit of the doubt to the employees over the employer. I would have a bias against any ownership group that owned this team when it comes to labor issues and I am a firm believer that if you are in the sports ownership business to make money you are definitely in the wrong business. For better or for worse, sports ownership is the realm of the super wealthy whether you like it or not. Soccer Holdings fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective bought into a league as “rich” but not “wealthy” and into a version of the league that frankly doesn’t exist anymore. This ownership group is in over its head and doesn't have the resources to keep up. You can make value judgements about this or choose not to but the cold, hard reality is that this ownership structure can't compete anymore. Success is graded on a curve and what was once acceptable is now just baseline quality. I am of the opinion that they were never prepared and made just about every misstep one could practically make and you may be of the more lenient opinion that they tried their best. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how or why this ownership has failed, but it has.
Here is one specific failure I want to highlight. I like Bev Yanez, but if I was running things there is no way in hell I would let her run down her contract like this. Coach Bev has quietly held the organization in the politest hostage situation I have ever witnessed. There is no way there hasn’t been an offer on the table for a while. Ownership either doesn’t have the guts to force a decision or doesn’t care enough to, and I don’t know which of those is worse. Bev could sign a new contract or leave. If she leaves, Racing is more screwed than it has ever been in my opinion, if simply for the timing of it. If she stays, there will be even more burden on her along with Caitlyn Milby to try to right a sinking ship. I don’t necessarily think Racing could get a better coach. They sure haven’t given any indication that they want to pay for one. No matter how this saga ends, ownership has handled it poorly and look incredibly weak and indecisive or worse, disinterested.
The best owners in this league are heavily involved and invested in the teams on-field success and at least attempt to bring some level of expertise to their organizations. What I see from Soccer Holdings is complaining, blaming other people and begging for handouts. Its a weak position from a weak ownership group. I get the sense that the fact that Soccer Holdings still exists has become a nusaince to many of the individuals who are part of it. I may be off base here, but I beg someone to prove me wrong through any sort of postive action.
There are all kinds of environmental factors that Soccer Holdings would have to overcome to make the NWSL be successful in Louisville. It’s a small market. The name is confusing. People care way more about other sports and specifically their kids’ sports. I am not saying that it is impossible to turn things around, but ownership would have to invest in way more things than they seem willing to do. Everything I have seen looks like it is done with low cost. That doesn’t mean low quality and some of the things that get done are really good. However, Racing’s workforce is smaller than the rest of the league, and by a significant amount based on things I have heard and observed. They are asked to do more with less. That never works.
Radio Silence
As you can probably tell from my irritable tone in parts of this piece, I am ready for a break. I text Brendan Devine from Butchertown Rundown fairly regularly and it sounds like he will supply plenty of content for Racing junkies during my regularly scheduled hibernation. If news happens I might write something or I might not. I think news speaks for itself most of the time.
I will likely return in February for a preview/framing piece.
Goodbye for now.
