Rydström out in Columbus, attrition crushing Colorado & more | Matchday 14

Fourteen matchdays in the books. That makes it 12 weeks of "it's early" and "small sample size" and "let's wait and see."

Well we've waited, and we've seen, and the 2026 MLS season has now generated enough of a sample size that the skeptic in you can stand down (or at least take a breather). Because we've hit the point where the table is mostly telling the truth: Vancouver and Nashville are legitimately good, while Philly and Austin are legitimately in trouble. Most of the middle is a jumble. Many of teams that can't defend are figuring it out, and most of the teams that can't attack aren't.

And here's the other thing the data is telling you: you can see the coaching problems now. There are the ones that need more time, and the ones that just need a roster upgrade. And then, most pertinently, there the ones where the system isn't landing and the players aren't buying in. Those are the ones where Tuesday isn't going to look any different from Saturday.

Twelve weeks is enough. We've hit the point where it's okay to act on what you've learned.

Which brings us to Ohio:

Before the Deluge

When Henrik Rydström was hired in Columbus, the expectation was continuation – or maybe even elevation. On the one hand, the Crew had been excellent during the Wilfried Nancy era, winning trophies and competing deep into nearly every competition they entered. On the other, by late 2025 they'd clearly gone a little stale, and a new voice seemed like the right medicine. Rydström fit that bill: reputed to be tactically sharp, inheriting a roster good enough to log 50-plus points in last year's blender of an Eastern Conference, and a foundation as well-drilled as any in the league. He was going to iterate on that, not replace it.

Then the whispers started.

Bit by bit it got out to me, via conversations with multiple folks around the league starting in March, that Rydström thought this Crew squad was "soft."

I laughed the first time I heard it, because it was ridiculous on its face. The players on the current Columbus roster are largely holdovers from the Nancy era, and Nancy took this team to four finals in three years. They won two. You don't hoist an MLS Cup if you're soft, and you don't follow that up by winning the Leagues Cup if you're soft. And you certainly don't do those things the same year you make it to the Concacaf Champions Cup final – eliminating both Monterrey-based gigantes along the way – and finish second in the Supporters' Shield.

That kind of workload breaks soft teams. This Crew group has proved to be the opposite.

What it actually sounded like to me is that Rydström wasn't clicking with a squad that was justified in eyeing him with skepticism. Nancy, after all, had built a beautiful machine based on dynamic but precise movement of and off the ball. Rydström, meanwhile, was a believer in creating chaos – and through chaos, the preconditions for victory. By week four the Crew were playing out of a vanilla 4-4-2, sitting deep and counterattacking.

Rather than iterating upon or elevating Nancy's system, Rydström had scrapped it entirely.

Whatever other cultural or personality issues were at play, that's the big one: the Crew kept Nancy's players, said they wanted to keep Nancy's game model, and then hired a coach whose vision of how the game should be played was the exact opposite.

And so today Rydström is, like Nancy, a former Crew head coach.