Nashville sprint through the tape, Chicago barely move & more | Matchday 32

Nashville SC won the Supporters’ Shield this weekend. They did it in the way you'd expect, going up to Montréal and taking a comfortable 2-0 win behind goals from two of their magnificent DPs, Sam Surridge getting the first and Hany Mukhtar the second.

And if it hadn't been one of those two guys, it would've been someone else, because that's just who they are as a team. We've been seeing it all year. Thus, this Shield has been coming all year – I congratulated them for a job well done in last week's column – to the point that it's been academic since mid-summer. Their ticket was punched in mid-August.

And it was punched because the 'Yotes are a team with no real weaknesses, one that is equally adept at playing on or against the ball, low-block, mid-block or high-line. No matter the game model or game state, BJ Callaghan's created an optimal-decision-machine that has spent most of the season making the rest of MLS look like it's playing a different, slightly more confounding sport.

They play out of the back as well as almost anyone in the league. They've got a goalkeeper who can straight-up steal points. They've got role players who embrace their roles (there are no small parts, only small players). And they've got three high-level attacking DPs whose skillsets amplify one another rather than compete for the same space, which is a pretty good trick that more teams should consider.

Are they the most beautiful team I've ever seen in MLS? No. They don't quite have the balletic inevitability of my holy trinity: the 2001 Miami Fusion, 2019 LAFC and 2024 Columbus Crew. Those teams made dominance feel like an art form; Nashville are a little more functional than that, so they don't always make you fall in love with the game. Though pretty often they made me wonder why the other team bothered showing up, and there is a ruthless sort of art in that, isn't there?

So for me, they're in that next tier down in terms of pure enjoyment (note the distance between the tiers isn't particularly large). More important than the aesthetic, though, is that they are worthy champions to an unprecedented degree.

Consider the numbers. With three games still to play, Nashville have:

• A 15-point lead in the standings, largest in league history.
• 70 points, four shy of the record mark of 74.
• A goal differential of +43, within striking distance of the league record of +48.
• Just three league losses all season, putting them on course to set a new MLS record in that category, too.

And this isn't a team that padded its resumé by playing one game a week while everyone else dealt with the grind* – Nashville made it all the way to the Concacaf Champions Cup semifinals, remember. They've played a ton of games across multiple competitions, won most of them and lost very, very few. The usual late-season excuses about fatigue, fixture congestion and the inevitable wobble (remember, that 2024 Crew team I loved so much faded hard down the stretch – though unlike that team, this year's 'Yotes blew off the Leagues Cup) have simply refused to materialize.

(*) 2025 Philly was always gonna catch at least one stray.

For a while, the one legitimate caveat was the underlying data. Nashville's xG differential didn't quite tell the same story as the actual results, thanks to some unsustainably hot finishing at one end and Brian Schwake Matt Turner'ing at the other. You could make a case that the margins were built on a foundation that wasn't going to hold forever.

But look what's happened in recent months: