Anders Laustrup Dreyer and the late equaliser made a mess of tidy forecasts in MLS Round 26

The round had a decent idea of where goals would come from. It just kept picking the wrong people to carry them.

Five correct calls out of fifteen is not a disaster, but it is a reminder that broad attacking logic is only half the job. Fipster was right often enough about which matches would open up, and wrong often enough about who would finish the work. The round leaned into late goals, odd scorers and a few scorelines that looked neat on paper and then promptly lost their manners.

The cleanest hit came at Sporting Kansas City against Philadelphia Union. The model expected an away win and, more importantly, it had Milan Iloski and Bruno Damiani in the frame as live threats. That part held up even though the match itself went sideways for the forecast: Philadelphia still found goals through Bruno Damiani and Milan Iloski, which meant Fipster’s read on their attacking edge was sound even if it badly underestimated how much Sporting Kansas City would get out of André Luiz instead. The point is not that every detail landed. It is that the model identified the right side’s scoring spine, and that mattered.

Houston was where the numbers got too fond of their own neatness.

Houston Dynamo against FC Cincinnati was the miss that stung most because it looked so orderly beforehand. Fipster liked Guilherme and Mateusz Bogusz at home, and both did score, so the basic attacking read was not absurd. But the forecast over-weighted Houston’s control of the game and under-priced Cincinnati’s ability to stay alive long enough for Ahoueke Denkey to matter twice in different ways: first as provider for Bryan Josías Ramírez León, then from the spot at 90 minutes. Jonathan Bond’s six saves helped explain why Houston did not simply fold after taking a lead; they also explain why this one escaped the model’s tidy 2-0 shape. A clean sheet was doing too much work in the prediction.

The round belonged to players Fipster half-saw — and one it missed entirely.

The player story starts with Lionel Messi Cuccittini and Luis Suárez Díaz, who both scored for Inter Miami exactly as expected, only for Anders Laustrup Dreyer to spoil the evening with two goals San Diego were never meant to find so easily. That was one of several reminders that calling a star correctly is not quite the same as calling a match correctly. Carles Gil did what he so often does for New England Revolution, scoring twice in a game Fipster thought Orlando City SC would nick; Peyton Miller matched him with two of his own. Marco Reus also justified his place in the pre-match thinking by scoring for Los Angeles Galaxy, while Brian White and Thomas Müller did enough for Vancouver Whitecaps to support another correct away-win call.

There were also proper surprises worth naming. Reid Roberts arrived with San Jose Earthquakes’ late equaliser against Los Angeles FC after Fipster had already spent its scorer budget elsewhere. Carl Holse Justesen and Tomas Totland turned St. Louis City’s win over Toronto FC into something less polished than predicted but still comfortably within range. And André Luiz at Sporting Kansas City was impossible to ignore: two early goals changed that game before Philadelphia began their comeback work. Those are useful corrections because they show where pre-match attention should have gone — not just to established scorers like Dejan Joveljić or Germán Berterame, but to players who were actually shaping these matches on the day.

+ There is still something useful here: keep trusting clear attacking patterns, but stop assuming familiar scorers will always be the ones who cash them in next week.