Welcome back to Under the Surface. This month I’ll be taking a look at some graphs I compiled to summarize the overall goal scoring from both sides of the ball from the 2025 season and comparing it to the inaugural 2024 campaign. As such, everything has been scaled to properly account for the new 30 game regular season format, a decrease from 34 to accommodate for the USL Cup group stage added last season. Much of what is unpacked here has been well documented by Tide Talk and the greater RIFC community, but it’s nice to see it laid out visually to give statistical backing for our observation. If you couldn’t tell, there’s not much else to talk about before my final blog of the offseason next month. Time to beat that dead horse of the 2025 Rhode Island FC season for one last time in this blog series. Let’s dive into it.

Goals Scored

Rhode Island FC’s issues on the right side were a topic of conversation all season, with the revolving door that was meant to replace the departed Stephen Turnbull in the aggregate failing to find hardly any success, most notably here in the attacking phase of the game with a 87% dropoff in goals scored from that channel. It would appear the RIFC has finally addressed that need with the acquisition of Nick Scardina to put an end to the Clay Holstad right wingback experiment.

Put on your tin foil hats one last time (hopefully…) for the disappearance of RIFC’s set piece production, scoring only once from a dead ball situation outside of penalties which came in the 38th minute of the final regular season match against New Mexico that required a strange deflection to even get that one. If not for the goals supplemented by penalty kicks (which increased by 369%), we are very well talking about this 2025 team much differently than we are after securing a playoff berth with those valuable points picked up against North Carolina and Detroit via goals from the penalty spot. It’s definitely not the goals from open play (54.1% decrease) that propelled this team. Look forward to 2026 where The Tide seeks to score its first goal from a direct free kick in its history.

In 2024, RIFC were lethal in the final 15 minutes of matches, a stat that was brought up on nearly every broadcast that season. But those goals dried up in 2025, with a 70.7% decrease. The part I find the most interesting is that RIFC was able to maintain its goal production during the 15 minutes leading into halftime, but saw its biggest decrease (76.6%) during the 15 minutes after the break. I’ve got no clue what Khano has been saying in the dressing room, but he should probably switch it up in 2026, because it clearly wasn’t working.

I don’t know that there are many meaningful big picture takeaways from this one, but I did want to mention the fact that RIFC scored 3 goals from outside the box during the away fixture against the Rowdies, which matched their total from the entirety of the 2024 season.

With the previously mentioned set piece issues, it should be no surprise that there was only that single goal scored by an RIFC defender during the regular season. Though in all honesty, that’s a point of contention in and of itself for it was scored by Hugo Bacharach. He’s still listed as a defender on the RIFC roster, and that’s the criteria for this stat. The bigger issue here is the fact that RIFC midfielders scored just as many league goals as the forwards. With the first real shakeup in that room coming in the form of the departure of Chico and the addition of Leo Afonso, let’s hope that Khano has found a way to change the dynamic of that group to hopefully find a way back to its 2024 form.

Goals Conceded

Though RIFC was not able to replicate RIFC on the attacking side, it was able to defend slightly better down the opposition’s left side with a 29.7% improvement in goals conceded. However, that pales in comparison to the defensive improvement down the middle from our center backs, with a 48.7% decrease in goals conceded from that defensive channel.

While RIFC wasn’t scoring from corner kicks, they sure as hell were still conceding from them, 134.5% more than 2024, no less. They were less vulnerable from other set pieces, which decreased by 80.5%.

RIFC wasn’t scoring goals during the final 15 minutes in 2025, at least they weren’t conceding. They decreased their goals conceded during that window by 89.3%, protecting some valuable points in 1 goal matches that they were unable to pull away from on the other end. If you wanted to watch some goals scored, you should have tuned into the RIFC matches around the half hour mark. The ball was flying into the net on both ends unlike anything that you would see during any other segment of the match.

Thank you all for your support! Come on back next month for some more RIFC stats content! Feel free to connect with me in the Defiance 1636 Discord, Twitter (@TylerJHatch), or Instagram (@tjhatch2001) if there’s anything you would like to see come of this blog! Preseason is upon us, and we can finally see the light at the end of this long tunnel. Only 36 more days until we’re back at Tidewater. Until next month, Up The Tide!