For most of the past decade, D.C. United has been a punchline as much as a soccer club. One of MLS’s 10 charter franchises as the league was born in the 1990s, winners of four MLS Cups in the league’s formative years, United haven’t sniffed the playoffs since 2019, a six year drought that saw the club bottom out at 28th out of 28 teams in the MLS standings as recently as 2022. Ben Olsen came and went, Wayne Rooney came, went, and left little behind them. Audi Field, once envisioned as a downtown fortress to rival anything in MLS, too often felt like a beautiful stadium hosting a middling product. After an emotional come-from-behind draw with Eastern Conference leading Nashville this past weekend, that narrative is starting to crack.

The turning point wasn’t a single signing or a single result, it was structural. This offseason marked the club’s first full campaign under new managing director of soccer operations Dr. Erkut Sogut, an agent whom many questioned when he was given the job in club’s front office, and head coach René Weiler, and the fingerprints of a reorganized football department are all over the roster. Gone is the scattershot recruitment of years past. In its place is a squad built with clear positional logic and, for once, shrewd ambition in the transfer market.

United broke their own transfer fee record to sign Romanian international striker Louis Munteanu, then paid up to $4.6 million to pry striker Tai Baribo away from the Philadelphia Union. Baribo arrived as a Designated Player off the back of 35 goals and 6 assists in 67 games for the Union, the kind of proven, prolific MLS finisher United simply haven’t had at their disposal in years. This season the former Union star has already piled up 11 league goals with Munteanu adding five more. Around them, the club added experience and steel: veteran goalkeeper Sean Johnson, who brings more than 400 MLS appearances after three seasons in Toronto, and Swiss defender Silvan Hefti, who himself has made over 300 appearances in leagues across Europe. What’s more, United added promising LAFC starlet Nathan Ordaz for just under $3 million during the World Cup break.

It’s a marked departure from the reactive, star chasing recruitment of the Rooney and Benteke eras. This is a front office building a spine, not just buying names for the sake of buying names. Weiler hasn’t turned United into world beaters overnight, and nobody at Audi Field is pretending otherwise. But the club has stabilized in a way that’s been genuinely rare this decade. Under Weiler, D.C. have leaned into defensive discipline and structure, a shift that has made them a difficult side to break down, even if it occasionally caps their ceiling going forward.

The numbers tell a modest but real story of progress. United sit ninth in the Eastern Conference, the final playoff qualifier spot, with five wins already banked, matching their win total for the entire 2025 season with more than a third of the schedule still to play. They’ve strung together an unbeaten stretch since returning from the FIFA World Cup break, including a draw at Houston and a win over Toronto FC,

It’s not a runaway without obstacles, however. Orlando City and Columbus Crew are breathing down United’s neck for that final playoff berth, and there’s plenty of season left for it to slip away. But just being in the picture and controlling your own destiny is something D.C. United fans haven’t been able to experience much in recent years, and that alone feels like real progress.

Just as important as what’s happening on the pitch is what’s happening in the stands. Audi Field was built to be hailed as one of the elite modern venues in American soccer, a downtown, supporters first stadium designed around noise and proximity to the pitch, and this year it’s started to feel like that promise is being fulfilled again. The sound inside the stadium when Tai Baribo’s equalizing goal hit the back of the net on Saturday was thunder-clap that should remind us all what D.C. United have been in past eras.

The supporters’ sections behind the north end continue to anchor a matchday atmosphere that regularly draws praise as one of the best in the league, and the broader D.C. sports and civic community has leaned into the club’s resurgence, with the city hosting World Cup watch parties and soccer celebrations across the summer in partnership with United. A competitive product tends to be self reinforcing at the gate, and after years of asking fans to invest emotionally in a rebuild that never quite arrived, United fans finally have a glimpse of a team worth the trip downtown.

It would be overstating things to call D.C. United contenders for anything. This is still a club with a losing record on the season, still fighting off two hungry rivals for a playoff spot, still years removed from the Rooney era relevance, let alone the trophy laden 1990s and 2000s that made them one of the league’s original superpowers. But for a fanbase that has watched five consecutive playoff-less seasons and a carousel of false dawns, the current signs feel different, not just in degree but in kind. There’s a football department with an actual plan, a recruitment strategy that looks like it’s building something rather than patching holes, and a coach getting tangible results from structure and discipline.

Rebuilding a club’s identity takes longer than one transfer window or one summer of good form. But for the first time in a long time, D.C. United is starting to look like a club that remembers what it used to be, and is quietly trying to get back there. And for MLS fans of a certain vintage, it should be a welcome sight to see a truly historic club in this league rediscover some semblance of relevance.