Inter Miami's foundation, Columbus Crew's comeback & more from Matchday 24 | OneFootball

By Matthew Doyle

It felt like the Philadelphia Union made a pretty big statement about the gap between the best teams in the league and the chasing pack. Orlando City made a statement as well – that they’re probably in that second group, not the first.

San Diego FC are awesome. Charlotte FC might have their Patrick Agyemang replacement in-house (and should respect that). xDAWG’s back in style, and the defending MLS Cup champs are showing a little bit of life.

We are very, very close to the home stretch. In we go:

The Gang Gets Invincible

Yes, Lionel Messi scored both goals in Inter Miami’s 2-1 win over Nashville SC on Saturday night, snapping the ‘Yotes’ 15-game, three-month-long, all-competitions unbeaten streak. One was a clever-as-hell free kick (not his signature bender to the top corner, but a seeing-eye joint through the wall). The other came via a WPIOOTBGW special from Joe Willis – the expected punishment for a disastrous moment.

Those are the types of wins Messi can get you. It’s the type of win Miami rode to last year’s record-setting Supporters’ Shield title. Because he is who he is, Miami can get those – have gotten those – at a rate other teams can’t replicate.

But that’s not the greater truth. The greater truth Messi’s GOAT-ness has sometimes obscured is that the Herons look more like a complete team these days.

Earlier in the year, this group leaned heavily on talent and moments of brilliance (mostly from Messi, obviously), but could get played through too easily. There were holes in midfield, lots of lapses in transition and more than a few unforced errors at the back. They were winning in spite of their structure, not because of it.

Over the past two months, that’s changed some. The shape is noticeably tighter through central midfield, and the spacing is better overall. A large part of this – maybe the largest – is the fullbacks aren’t releasing quite so recklessly into the attack. But even when mistakes are made, Miami have been better about limiting risk and having the pieces in place to contain counters:

Terrible turnover from Federico Redondo? Yes. But that’s followed by smart, positional soccer. Jordi Alba and Marcelo Weigandt push up to offer width, but neither takes themselves out of the play. At the same time, the midfield closed ranks behind Redondo to snuff out any direct play from the visitors.

It’s who they are now, and who they’ve been throughout their excellent FIFA Club World Cup showing and their five-game regular-season winning streak. To that point, immediately after this turnover, they knocked the ball around for a minute, owned the tempo of the game and created a decent chance.

No wild, unnecessary risks. You can see it in the network passing graphic:

That’s much lower than the fullbacks were stationed a few months back.

“The reality is that Nashville SC is a very good team,” Miami head coach Javier Mascherano said post-game. “But that’s what it’s all about – being a serious team, knowing how to deal with tough moments and respond to what the game needs at any given time.

“And clearly, we’ve been grinding out results that are really good for us. We know there’s still a lot to improve, but in this kind of rhythm, everything becomes much easier."

Nashville want the ball, but had around 46% possession. They’re not afraid to play through a press, and when they do pull you apart, they go straight for the throat. Their goal came that way: a quick midfield combination that slid things to an isolated Andy Najar, whose early cross to Hany Mukhtar was absolutely perfect. That kind of sequence is what Nashville do well – understated buildup into a sudden strike. It's also the kind of play they’ve used to carve the heart out of some of the better teams in the league.

But this wasn’t early-season Miami. They absorbed pressure, kept their shape and never let the game get open. Sergio Busquets and Benjamin Cremaschi quietly controlled the middle third, while the backline (mostly) stayed compact and didn’t get stretched out by Nashville’s movement. The only real misstep was the one they paid for – otherwise, they limited one of the most tactically coherent teams in the league to mostly half-chances.

That’s a big step forward. They are now atop the Shield race on points per game (2.0) and I regret to tell you, folks… I think they’re gonna stay there.

As for Nashville, this loss won’t bother them too much. They went on the road on the back of a landmark midweek win – they’re through to the US Open Cup semifinals for the first time in their existence – to face the league’s most talented team, and didn’t back down. They played with confidence if not perfect clarity, and on another night, they maybe leave with a 1-0 win instead of a 2-1 loss.

Instead, it was Messi, again, who made the difference. And that will be the case for much of the rest of 2025. But if you’re Miami, the encouraging part isn’t that he can win you games (we already knew that – this was their fifth straight, and he’s got a brace in each). It’s that the group around him is doing the work to give those moments a foundation.

The Gang Goes to Hell

For 40 minutes on Saturday night, FC Cincinnati had the Columbus Crew in hell.

It took them 39 seconds to go up 1-0, after Pavel Bucha neatly finished Lukas Engel’s pullback to the top of the box. It took them four more minutes to go up 2-0, Evander sending the packed house into a frenzy when he laced one home from 24 yards. This was not a derby so much as a demolition, with the Brazilian DP gliding to and through the most valuable spots on the pitch, generally at the heart of everything good that was happening for the hosts.

Cincy had the lead. They had the crowd. They had the momentum.

But they didn’t have the game under control. For all the great individual moments and impressive individual talent Cincinnati put on display in the first half, they still don’t look like an entirely cohesive team. The spacing in midfield is inconsistent. The front two didn’t always press as a unit. And when Columbus started to get comfortable on the ball, Cincy had no clear plan to disrupt it. They backed off instead of stepping up, didn’t rotate and allowed Columbus to pull them apart:

Two things are true here:

Columbus, for their part, never panicked. That’s been a defining trait of Wilfried Nancy’s team: they stay committed to their style, no matter the situation. Down two goals on the road to their biggest rival, they didn’t start launching balls or rushing things. They stayed on the ball, trusted their structure (with a slight tweak, as Nagbe started dropping deeper – dragging Cincy's man-oriented press out of shape – to get on the ball at the beginning of the Crew’s builds), and started to tilt the game.

It worked, as Nagbe and Dylan Chambost took control of midfield. The wingbacks – Max Arfsten on one side, Ibrahim Aliyu on the other – started dragging Cincinnati’s wingbacks wider and deeper. That opened gaps between the lines, and the Crew did what they do best, connecting passes in and out of dangerous areas. The first goal came from that Nagbe magic; the next two from the type of push-and-pull build-ups Columbus have perfected over the past two years.

It ended 4-2 to the Crew. It’s one of the best rivalry games this league’s seen in a minute.

“To do it at Cincinnati, coming from behind like this…” Nancy said afterward. “To add it with the context of the game, this is a good feeling obviously for the players, because again, they are so strong mentally. I think that we try to challenge them all the time, that the difference between greatness and to be good is that mental aspect. If we're able to do it consistently, it can be really interesting.

“I'm happy for the fans, I'm happy for the club and I'm happy for the players.”

That “mental aspect” isn’t just the lack of panic, but the resoluteness with which they stay executing on their own principles. They still want to draw the defense, and want to have to break the press. One part of the mentality (don’t panic) feeds the other (be courageous on the ball) and vice versa. Get them in that virtuous feedback loop and they start dictating the tempo, controlling territory, and looking more organized, even as they have center backs underlapping and forwards dropping deep and wingbacks attacking, ball on foot, right up the middle and through the lines.

Cincy couldn’t match that. The Crew kept stretching the field, pulling defenders into wide channels and even opening space for a little bit of Route 1 at the end. That’s how the fourth goal – homegrown midfielder Taha Habroune’s first in MLS – was conjured.

“There were still a lot of good things,” head coach Pat Noonan said afterward. “Taking our foot off the gas would have meant we stopped playing. We could have scored two or three more goals after the two-nil lead. … Columbus is also a very good team – they found their rhythm in the first half towards the end there. So I wouldn't say it was foot off the gas as much as missing opportunities.”

There’s a lot of truth in there. The first half-hour really was all Cincy, and they could’ve had a third, which maybe would’ve killed the game.

But they didn’t, and still sometimes look like a collection of talented players who haven’t quite figured out how to become more than the sum of their parts. Evander is a game-breaker, as is Kévin Denkey. But the group overall have yet to settle into a clear identity, and it showed once the game turned.

For Columbus, it’s another win that reinforces what we already know: this is one of the most tactically disciplined and mentally tough teams in MLS. They’re never out of a game because they always know who they are.

A few more things to ponder…

13. The biggest, scariest and hopefully, eventually, not saddest story of the week came when Atlanta United president and CEO Garth Lagerwey announced he’s taking an indefinite leave of absence after a cancer diagnosis.

I know Garth a little bit from doing this job for 15 years. He’s one of the handful of funniest, nicest and smartest folks I’ve come across in MLS, and like a lot of folks around the league, my heart’s in my throat a little bit, hoping there’s a quick and positive update about the battle he’s going through. Please get well soon, Garth.

His Atlanta United side showed some resilience this past weekend, as Emmanuel Latte Lath buried a late penalty to give them a 1-1 draw at Toronto. The Five Stripes are 10 points below the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs line in the Eastern Conference, and the Reds are 11 back. Both have 13 games left, so a late charge at a postseason berth is possible… but seems really, really implausible for each.

12. The Union saw their midweek US Open Cup meeting with the Red Bulls postponed by some biblical rain, and it looks like they took that pent-up frustration and expressed it pretty emphatically this weekend in their 2-0 win in Chester. The first goal came off a corner kick; the second goal came when they caught RBNY napping (and down a man) on a quickly taken free kick out at midfield:

Little opportunistic moments like that… you can build a Supporters’ Shield campaign on those. The Union are doing their damnedest (and are back leading the overall table).

One note I want to make here: Quinn Sullivan coming into the half-space like that and playing one-touch into the space behind the Red Bull backline was a pattern of play we saw repeatedly, especially in the first half. By the time Sandro Schwarz adjusted, switching from a back three to a back four at the break, it was all done but the shouting.

Philly snapped their two-game losing skid. The Red Bulls are now winless in five and are sliding down the table.

11. Orlando City have officially hit the summer doldrums, as a late Prince Owusu PK gave CF Montréal a 1-1 draw down in central Florida.

Several things went wrong for the Cats, who were playing without captain Robin Jansson in the middle of the backline. And Jansson’s distribution is key for this team – virtually irreplaceable.

But still:

"We’re exploring different ways to improve. We haven’t had a bad record offensively this year,” head coach Oscar Pareja said afterward, and while he is technically correct – Orlando’s 40 goals put them among the league leaders – there have been a lot of these types of performances in which they fail to put the game away. “I think, in that regard, we’ve been good. But still, we want to do better. When you try to make those improvements, sometimes the game tells you, ‘Not that way.’

“It’s not as easy as just moving pieces around and expecting results. That’s a lesson for me, especially."

I’m disagreeing somewhat with that last bit. I think Orlando’s game model is good and has been flexible (Pareja deserves credit for both those things), and… the guys out there eating up starter’s minutes are not delivering.

Young Nico Rodríguez got a late cameo. Shakur Mohammed has been a consistent goalscorer down in MLS NEXT Pro. Could 18-year-old Justin Ellis get a run?

It’s time to see if there are other answers here.

Good result for Montréal, who nonetheless finished the weekend bottom of the league table. They made further news on Sunday with the reported sale of center back George Campbell to West Bromwich Albion in the English Championship.

10. Minnesota United did the PSG kickoff routine, lumping it down in the corner to force the opponents to take a deep throw-in straight from kick-off. The point of that routine is to immediately press, which the Loons did. That forced a change of possession, which led to a long Michael Boxall throw-in, then a corner, and eventually a 1-0 Minnesota lead inside of three minutes.

The Quakes must’ve felt like they got hit by a truck. That truck then threw it into reverse and backed over ‘em (Minnesota made it 2-0 on the break in the 42nd minute), and then shifted it back into drive and hit ‘em again (3-0 off another corner just before halftime).

It finished 4-1. I wrote last week that the Loons are maybe the best MLS team I’ve ever seen on restarts. They looked like it. Again.

The win capped off what might’ve been the best week in the team’s history, as it started with a 2-1 win at FC Dallas, hit its midway point with a commanding 3-1 win over Chicago in the US Open Cup quarterfinals, and culminated with this absolute thumping to move up to second in the Western Conference. Across all competitions, the Loons have lost just once in their last 11.

San Jose have gone the other direction, with three wins in 12 – including a PK shootout loss to Austin midweek in Open Cup play – over the past two months.

9. That PK shootout win might end up being one of the highlights of Austin’s year, as they’re stuck in neutral in league play. Head coach Nico Estévez got our Face of the Week here from their scoreless home draw against the Revs:

“We were disconnected at the end of the game, and it was at the end of the game that I didn't think we would deserve to win the game,” Estévez said afterward. “We were pushing, we were having effort, but not clear ideas. I think, until then, we had clear ideas on how to score goals."

I think he was largely correct: in their first game since losing Brandon Vazquez for the year with a torn ACL, Austin actually created a lot of danger. Diego Rubio, who replaced Vazquez in the XI, dropped into the half-spaces and facilitated a lot of the final-third play, which let Osman Bukari find space on one side and Žan Kolmanič on the other.

They just can’t put the ball into the back of the net. They've scored a league-low 15 goals all year.

The Revs have a few more than that and tested Brad Stuver several times. But they’ve now won just once in their past 12 across all competitions, and it feels like the wheels have come off.

8. And now, the usual brief from Armchair Analyst special correspondent Calen Carr, who was on hand for Charlotte’s much-needed 2-0 home win over New York City FC:

The Pigeons (hey, it’s Doyle again) are truly a Jekyll-and-Hyde team this year, especially over the past six weeks. They’ve gone win-loss-draw-win-loss-win-loss since the end of May.

7. William Agada got his second goal as a member of RSL, stabbing home a loose ball in the box off a corner just before halftime. That 1-0 lead eventually became a hard-fought, 1-0 final over visiting Houston.

That’s four straight results – three wins and a draw – for the Claret-and-Cobalt, who are starting to xDAWG folks again.

"We played some really pretty games early on in the season,” head coach Pablo Mastroeni said after the game. “And we lost on the margins."

That’s a very Pablo framing, and I’m not really going to argue with a guy who gets his team to the playoffs every year. I’ll just say that I don’t think it’s a binary – you can play pretty soccer and xDAWG the hell out of teams. RSL have done it! With Diego Luna back, Diogo Gonçalves finally playing some good ball and Agada dragging opposing defenders around, I’m confident in their ability to do it again.

I’m still holding my Houston stock, by the way, and they didn’t play badly in this one. It’s just a constant question of whether they have match-winners in the box.

Occasionally, the answer is yes. An uncomfortable amount of time, the answer is no.

6. Djordje Mihailovic is one of Colorado’s match-winners, and he absolutely thrashed the spiraling Whitecaps with a hat-trick of assists in the Rapids' dominant 3-0 win on Saturday night.

There’s so much about this opener that I love:

First, Ted Ku-DiPietro’s comfort in tight spots means he can get on the ball in those spots, but then still has the confidence/technique to turn pure possession into penetration, putting his team on the attack.

Second, the chance to do that isn’t there if Mihailovic doesn’t read the pattern – not just Ku-DiPietro on the ball, but what’s happening across Vancouver’s backline – early and slip into space. You can see him orchestrating the play before it even unfolds.

And finally, Djordje makes the final touch simple by playing the pass square and early into Calvin Harris’s run. Harris just has to guide it home.

Mihailovic is one of the very best in the league at that, and with him, Ku-DiPietro, Cole Bassett and Zack Steffen all back in the lineup, and Rafael Navarro doing fundamentally sound things up top, I like Colorado’s chances of staying in that seventh spot in the West.

Vancouver have now lost four of five. They’ve looked spent.

“I think that we were on the back foot, that we were slow and indecisive,” is what head coach Jesper Sørensen said afterward. “We were a little undisciplined, our positioning was not that good and we had difficulties defensively.”

The big thing, I think, is that indecision. A buddy – a Rapids fan – pinged me at halftime and asked what’s gone wrong for the ‘Caps over the past month, and my answer was I’d wager my life’s savings that they’re not sprinting as much. I don’t mean “they’re not covering as much ground.” I mean they spent the first half of the year literally sprinting into space (LOTS of sacrificial off-ball runs) in a coordinated way, and there’s just not much of that happening anymore. There’s no burst of movement that unbalances an opposing backline or breaks their shape, and without that, the ‘Caps are spending 90 minutes every game playing against an organized defense.

It’s not working.

It’s a good sign Sørensen has identified this, and I think the formation change – they moved from their typical 4-3-3 to a 3-5-2 at halftime – actually helped shake things up a little bit.

That’s not enough, though. This isn’t a tactical or a formational thing, and it’s not even really a talent thing. It’s a “the players absolutely emptied the tanks during that remarkable first half of the season, and now they’re out of gas” thing.

5. San Diego bounced back from last week’s disappointing home loss to Houston with a good, 2-1 win at Chicago – the fourth straight road win for los Niños.

Anders Dreyer had both goals. Chucky Lozano had both primary assists. Young Luca Bombino, the 19-year-old left back loanee from LAFC (San Diego will 1,000% exercise their purchase option at the end of the year), had both secondary assists.

This result was just a good example of Mikey Varas trusting his guys. There is space to attack behind Chicago’s fullbacks, so San Diego attacked that space:

From there, it was just a matter of locking in and holding on, because the Fire threw everything they had at reeling San Diego in during the second half.

“These guys gave everything. I mean, they ran so hard for the entire game against a team that was also playing with a ton of intensity and initiative, and that's what happens at the highest level,” Varas said. “Man, you play against a good team and you're going to have to solve for the moments. And these guys were able to suffer together in the moments that they needed to suffer.”

San Diego are atop the West on both points and points per game. None of this is a fluke.

Chicago have lost four of five. In a vacuum, that’s very bad. But those four losses were against the top four teams (Philly, San Diego, Cincy, Nashville) in the Shield race, and the Fire had a total goal differential of -5 in those games.

In all other games this season, they are 8W-5L-4D with a +7 goal differential.

I think the results tell the truth: The Fire are a good team who are not good enough to hang with the best.

They are also back under the line with 13 games to go. But the rest of the schedule – save for late August, when they travel to Philly and Miami back-to-back – is much kinder than what they’ve had to run through recently. So if they don’t make it back to the postseason for the first time in nearly a decade, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

4. Make it five results in six, and two wins on the trot for the LA Galaxy after their 2-1 victory over visiting D.C. United on Saturday night. LA also peeled themselves off the bottom of the table for the first time all year, and are playing well enough to be pretty confident they won’t drop back down into the abyss.

Well enough to make a real run at the final Wild Card spot, though? Probably not. They’re 12 points back with 12 games to go, and there’s a lot of playoff teams between here and Decision Day. Still, though, if they get all three points from Austin’s visit on Wednesday night, we might have something to talk about. At least a little bit.

D.C. were playing their first match of the post-Troy Lesesne era after the coach was let go following their 5-2 midweek loss at Nashville in the US Open Cup quarterfinals. Kevin Flanagan was the interim boss this weekend while United reportedly work to get a deal for veteran Swiss head coach René Weiler across the finish line.

3. LAFC pressed their way to the opening goal courtesy of Nathan Ordaz a half-hour in, then made it 2-0 just before halftime when Denis Bouanga converted a PK after being brought down in the box… and that was that. They held on for the 2-0 win over visiting FC Dallas.

It was a dominant performance that was only missing the third goal – Maarten Paes was excellent for the visitors – but also a pyrrhic victory because veteran center back Aaron Long was, I think, pretty badly injured in the 75th minute.

“It doesn’t look good, so that's a big blow, but injuries are part of professional sports,” head coach Steve Cherundolo said in the postgame. “Aaron will get through this and so will we.”

For the time being, the Black & Gold are down to two healthy center backs in Nkosi Tafari, who came off the bench to replace Long, and incumbent starter Eddie Segura. Maxime Chanot is expected back sometime in the next month (there’s no return date yet), and after that, the cupboard is bare (though left back Artem Smolyakov can, in theory, play left center back).

Co-president and general manager John Thorrington probably has some work to do.

Everyone in Dallas, meanwhile, has work to do, as it’s now four straight losses and just one win since April. There’s no north star for this team – no youth development, no go-to formation, no partnership between the attacking DPs, no rugged defense. Everything is patchwork and nothing has a clear direction.

2. St. Louis snapped their five-game winless skid and put three points of distance between themselves and the hard-charging Galaxy – I’m serious! Stop laughing! – with a 2-1 win over Portland in the Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire spotlight.

CITY weren’t perfect. They lost David Da Costa in transition midway through the first half and found themselves in a 1-0 ditch because of it; Roman Bürki had a couple of big saves to make to stop it from becoming 2-0; and they still haven’t figured out how to get Cedric Teuchert involved.

But they were more good than bad, and played with a good bit of energy throughout. Then when Eduard Löwen came on midway through the second half, they added a bit of orchestration and quality on the ball deep in midfield to that energy. It’s a good formula, one that immediately led to Marcel Hartel’s game-winner (he had a brace).

Timbers head coach Phil Neville was steamed heading into halftime despite the 1-0 lead.

“We need more quality on the ball and we need to be more intense with our defending,” he told our Michele Giannone. “If we do that, then we’ll win the game. If we don’t, then we won’t win the game because they’re dangerous in attack.”

Neville’s right – there was a lack of quality and intensity in his team, save for about a 15-minute stretch in the middle of the first half. But also, there are a lot of times where I don’t understand the way they’re arrayed both in the build-out, and once they make it to the final third.

This doesn’t look like a team that knows how it wants to get forward to find an equalizer:

Diego Chara ended up salvaging that build – he’s still brilliant, and underrated on the ball – but part of having quality on the ball is having chemistry off of it, and the Timbers have been lacking that too often.

They’ve now lost three straight on the road. The good news? Their next two are at home.

1. And finally, I’m giving the Sounders our Pass of the Week for this one:

Seems like they’re conjuring up one of those 20-pass, minute-long build-ups every single week now, and Jordan Morris – in his long-awaited return to the XI – is clearly very comfortable with that. He was excellent in his 45 minutes.

So were the Sounders, but about that second 45… it turns out Seattle really needed all three first-half goals because they just collapsed over the game’s final 25 minutes. Danny Musovski tracked back to concede one penalty. Reed Baker-Whiting dove in to concede a second. In between, Nouhou was sent off for chucking the ball into the stands during a Video Review break, making it four straight games with a red for the Sounders.

They turned a laugher into a nail-biter, and barely held on to beat Sporting KC, 3-2.

“We came out flat in the second half. We knew the message was we knew that this was a proud team – they've got a new coach, they're trying to play for their jobs, their livelihoods,” Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer said post-game. “We knew they were going to come out in the second half and we didn't adapt. We didn't deal with it very well. We gave the ball away a few times unnecessarily. Nobody really could step up and, you know, take control of the game, and so they put us under pressure.”

The words are saying one thing, but Schmetzer’s tone and face were eloquently saying another about his team’s lack of focus. The Sounders are 8W-3L-3D in the league over the past three months, and are clearly one of the league’s very best teams. But their inability to put together a full 90 minutes is kind of baffling, and the coach appears to be sick of it.

Sporting saw their three-game unbeaten run come to an end. This game began a brutal stretch in which they play seven straight against teams above the playoff line.

If they can bottle that second-half performance, they’ve got a shot at coming through the other side of this run with postseason dreams intact. If not, they’re cooked.