Now that the calendar has turned from 2025 to 2026, we can start to put last season and its accompanying wooden spoon in the past. Even though many of the problems that were laid bare last season are still there, the team has begun to address its many shortcomings in the offseason. As the list of players either announced as acquisitions or rumored to be imminent grows, Numbers Only is here to focus on two – forward Tai Baribo, previously of the Philadelphia Union, and goalkeeper Sean Johnson, most recently of Toronto FC – and how both of them will fit in in 2026.

Tai Baribo
Baribo has the profile of a pure finisher. He scored 16 league goals last season, tying for 11th in MLS. That haul came despite placing 46th among players with 900 or more minutes in shots per 90 with 2.6 and 45th in shots on target per 90 with 1.06. Even though he has a low shot rate, his goals per 90 of 0.77 was fifth, his goals per shot of 0.28 was 6th and his goals per shot on target of 0.68 was 10th. Baribo also shoots from very close to goal, with an average shot distance of 10.9 yards, tied for 12th. These statistics say he’s a very efficient but low volume shooter who makes his living below the penalty spot, and while I personally could do for a few more shots per 90 minutes, it’s hard to argue that Baribo is a strong acquisition for D.C. United… and yet.

Behind Baribo’s finisher profile is a player who does not do much else. Beyond his mere three assists, he doesn’t carry the ball forward or create shots for himself. His job is to get on the end of passes and score, and he’s very good at it to the extent that the Union’s social media team made a supercut of him that touted his ten goals at the time all having come on first touch finishes. The Union were very good at creating chances, ranking fifth in xAG (expected assisted goals – the tally of expected goals that come from shot assists) with 44.0. By contrast, D.C. United were not very good at this, ranking second to last with 26.6, just ahead of last place Toronto at 25.5. D.C. United were also quite bad getting the ball into the penalty area, completing the third fewest passes into the area with 238, tied with Austin and better than Minnesota and Toronto. Philadelphia’s roster last season boasted six of the top 104 players in creating shots from passes (Quinn Sullivan/80/22nd, Kai Wagner/74/35th, Jovan Lukic/67/47th, Indiana Vassilev/55/78th, Danley Jean-Jacques/52/87th, and Bruno Damiani/47/104th.) D.C. had one player (Gabriel Pirani/59/62nd) in the top 104. How is Baribo expected to score goals from inside the penalty area when his team is one of the worst at getting the ball into the penalty area and does not have many players who are good at creating shots with passes?

I’m not saying that I would not have signed Baribo, especially with Christian Benteke now gone. I’m saying that he cannot be expected to score at his Philadelphia rate if he doesn’t have passes to get on the end of. The first game this season is February 22, which means the team has seven weeks to make appreciable improvements behind Baribo in order to make acquiring him worth it.

Sean Johnson
As excited as I was about Kim Joon Hong being brought to MLS from South Korea, it goes without saying that he was not up to snuff in goal, and Luis Barraza may have been a slight improvement statistically, but his season was not one to write home about. It was clear that the team needed to make a move at goalkeeper, and they did, bringing in 35-year-old Sean Johnson, the goalkeeper for a team, Toronto, only slightly better than D.C. United last season.

They did what?

Before I go into statistical analysis of this move, I put together a list of the six best seasons in MLS since 2018 in terms of PSxG+/-, post shot xG plus/minus, a stat that subtracts a goalkeeper’s goals allowed from the total expected goals the goalkeeper faced based on how likely they are to have saved a shot. The difference between xG, expected goals, and PSxG is xG measures the shot before it’s taken based on where and how it’s taken and things such as the players around the shooter, and PSxG measures an on-target shot’s placement and velocity among other things. In layman’s terms, PSxG+/- tells you how many goals a goalkeeper should have allowed relative to how many they actually allowed. A positive number is good, a negative number is bad. These are the only PSxG+/- seasons in the last 7 years with a number at or greater than 9.0.

With one exception, the 2022 stat line with 10 PSxG+/-, every player on this list led the league in PSxG+/-. Who are they?

That’s right. D.C. United just acquired a goalkeeper coming off of one of the best recorded (fbref does not have this stat before 2018) PSxG+/- seasons. The numbers say he faced 51.9 goals worth of shots and allowed 41 goals, and the per-90 number of 0.35 is the best in the league among players with more than 900 minutes.

I’ll be the first to tell you that this stat isn’t the definitive one for goalkeepers, as that position is the hardest to reliably measure quantitatively, and PSxG+/- doesn’t account for goalkeeper positioning, a crucial part of playing the position. That said, D.C. just went and got a player coming off a historically great season where he performed better statistically than the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year award winner, Minnesota’s Dayne St. Clair, who I can only assume won the award because Toronto was abysmal and Minnesota finished fourth in the West.

It must be said that one significant issue with the signing is that Johnson spent the last three seasons with negative PSxG+/-, even if he spent the preceding four consecutive seasons in the positive. Was 2025 an aberration, or a signal that Johnson is returning to his earlier levels? If he was a 35-year-old field player I’d think it was the former, but 35 is not old for a goalkeeper. One thing is for sure, D.C. has upgraded at goalkeeper; Barraza and Kim had negative PSxG+/- numbers.

With the 2026 season on the horizon, D.C. United has made key acquisitions at forward and goalkeeper, two positions where they badly needed to make a splash. I like both moves, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make sure the moves are successful, and time to do that is running out.