With a month gone in the 2025 USL Championship season, things are looking very interesting at the top of each set of conference standings.

There are, of course, your usual suspects. Louisville City is the last undefeated team standing, San Antonio’s going through a good bounce-back to regain its prior position as a Western contender, and no-one would have thought Detroit City, New Mexico or Pittsburgh was out of place after their progress last year.

But there are also some very pleasant surprises in both sets of standings. In the case of clubs like Monterey Bay FC and Loudoun United, however, there are contrasts in their underlying numbers as to whether they might have real staying power.

Let’s start with Monterey Bay, which sitting in second place in the West has some of the best analytics in the league. MBFC ranks second in the Championship with a 3.35 Expected Goals Against mark in five games and is fifth in the league with a 6.45 Expected Goals mark. The only other team sitting in the top five in both? That’s Louisville City. Pretty good company to keep.

How about current Eastern Conference leader Loudoun United FC? Well, there the picture isn’t quite as rosy. Loudoun is, in fact, under water in its Expected Goal Differential, ranking 21st in the league with a 6.39 Expected Goals Against mark and sitting on 5.31 Expected Goals, which while above average may not be enough to cover up the cracks consistently.

It’s still early in the season, and there are many more games to be played and much more data to be collected, but it bears watching closely in the next few weeks as to which teams are the real deal, and which might be fools’ gold.

Here are this week’s rankings.