USA TODAY National
The NWSL weekend was a cloudy one, even as several teams claimed important results amid some outlandish goals an individual plays.
It's hard to proceed without acknowledging former Boston Breakers head coach Matt Beard, whose passing over the weekend at 48 came as a shock. Women's soccer is replete with long-term figures whose legacy is cloudy or worse, but Beard's long-standing reputation was one you get from treating your players and staff with respect and care. He'll be missed.
On the field, the Kansas City Current lifted the NWSL Shield, which is a gift to their fans (particularly those who hung on from the FC Kansas City days), while the Washington Spirit's draw at Angel City FC put them one win away from a playoff spot. For everyone else, it's totally up in the air. Three points separate third and eighth place, and it's just a seven-point spread from hosting a playoff game and finishing 11th.
Naturally, the three teams to claim seven points over the last three matchdays are the imperious, Shield-winning Current, a North Carolina Courage side that just climbed into a playoff position, and the Utah Royals (who ended a nine-matchday run at the bottom of the table Friday's win). Over the last five weeks, four different playoff teams have one or zero wins.
The chaos league stays chaotic. Let's hack through the weeds:
All stats cited from FBref unless otherwise noted.
Kansas City Current 2:0 Seattle Reign
The Take-Off normally follows some kind of chronological order, but when you win a trophy, you get to cut the line.
The Kansas City Current are your 2025 NWSL Shield winners, sealing the deal at CPKC Stadium with a typically dominant 2-0 win over the Seattle Reign. Seattle didn't manage a single shot attempt until the 63rd minute.
The Reign seemed to be looking for a 0-0 draw, an approach that didn't seem to surprise the Current one bit. KC methodically took to chipping away at Seattle's uber-cautious hybrid of a 5-2-3 and 5-3-2.
Laura Harvey pulled out all of the stops when it came to that approach: the Reign inverted their wingbacks to get the speedier Madison Curry up against Temwa Chawinga, and shuffled their center backs as well. Phoebe McClernon moved to right-center back as a more experienced layer behind Curry, Jordyn Bugg shifted to left-center back (presumably to tilt Seattle's build patterns away from Chawinga), and Lauren Barnes was moved inside to keep everything organized. Wide forwards Nérilia Mondésir and Mia Fishel had extra duty filling in as auxiliary midfielders in defensive phases, dropping off to screen Claire Hutton and Raquel Rodríguez.
None of this seemed to surprise the Current a bit. Seattle worked hard to force play to the KC right flank, leading to Ellie Wheeler finishing the game with 77 touches, and it just didn't matter. Ally Sentnor took up unpredictable positions off of Angharad James-Turner's shoulder, Debinha shifted wide left at times when Chawinga drifted inside, and the ever-changing possession shape offered by the Current prevented the Reign from even approaching a moment of comfort.
30 minutes of scrambling was all Seattle could manage, and it's a rare thing to sustain this much pressure without something going wrong. James-Turner was caught handling the ball thanks to a VAR check (the booth needed a long time to find the clip, while referee Shawn Tehini seemed to be at the monitor for all of 10 seconds), Debinha just barely put enough on her penalty to beat Claudia Dickey, and that was kinda-sorta that.
We say kinda-sorta here, because Seattle did have a 20-minute spell in the second half in which KC looked moderately troubled. Harvey switched to a 4-2-3-1, though the usage of Mia Fishel as a No. 10 is worth noting as one more instance of the Reign's rather confusing usage of the U.S. women's national team striker since her much-heralded arrival.
It wasn't until Jess Fishlock replaced Fishel after what looked like a potential ankle sprain that Seattle finally had an 11 on the field where the players were in roles they'd be completely comfortable. Seattle created about three-quarters of their 0.8 expected goals (xG) during this spell...but also gave up the killer second goal.
Seattle's ability to get one more block in finally ran out, but that's what playing KC is like. They don't create one problem, but rather one never-ending problem. Watching a team try to defend them is like watching Flounder catching groceries in "Animal House." Eventually, it's just one too many things to cope with.
However, the nature of this column is build around some kind of soccer balance, and unless the Current broke NWSL parity (spoiler: they have not), there's only one real direction to go in. There is something to a couple of recent questions posed once teams shift out of whatever their KC containment strategy happens to be.
In KC's last outing, they found the Spirit harder to pin back after Hal Hershfelt was sent off. It's not because Washington was better off without an important midfielder, but rather that Adrián González's decision to add a vertical threat was a surprise that kept the Spirit from having to suffer deep in their own end for about 15 minutes. This week, Harvey bringing Maddie Dahlien on — again, a vertial attacking threat — and going with a 4-2-3-1 had a similar impact, though Seattle had a much deeper hole to dig out of with this adjustment.
Either way, despite seeming unstoppable, it seems that the Current do have at least one vulnerability, and the team that can threaten in behind while withstanding the early onslaught might be onto something against KC. Looking towards the playoffs, and teams like the Spirit and NJ/NY Gotham FC possibly have the ingredients in place. The underlying data is screaming "Current to win double," but if someone trips them up, this is probably how it'll happen.
All that said, this segment was initially going to be a long list of things the Current lead the league in: their xG for, their xGA (they're on pace to improve on last year's league-low 24.2 by around 25%!), and various categories pertaining to Chawinga. They're the best team in the league no matter how you slice it, with Best 11 candidates on every line. They're the only team that provokes this much of a tactical change from their opponent on such a regular basis. It's going to be a long time until we see another season where one team is so clearly ahead of the pack.
Apologies to Current fans looking for a well-earned victory lap and getting a segment on how someone might spoil the party. The "24-hour rule" is en vogue these days, and KC probably finished celebrating in the wee hours as Saturday became Sunday, had a day to regenerate, and got back to work Monday. The Shield is settled, and they're already going to be looking at the next challenge to come.
NWSL Mid-week Haiku
Angel City FC and the Washington Spirit are guaranteed to produce weird games, and they did it again Thursday night in a 2-2 game that had...if not everything, then almost everything.
However, this column has a tradition, and that is that mid-week games get a haiku and nothing more. In this case, the haiku comes directly from the Spirit's post-game press conference:
Deb Abiodun
"What a freakin' warrior"
— Trinity Rodman
Orlando Pride 0:1 North Carolina Courage
Let's start with a morsel of good news for Orlando, who need it right now: the Pride held the Courage to 1.0 xG, the lowest such figure for one of their opponents in about a month. Defensively at least, Friday's loss looked a little more like the Orlando Pride.
In the first half in particular, it felt more familiar for Orlando, who held the Courage to one shot valued at 0.07 xG. A more robust 4-3-3, deploying Angelina as a deep-lying playmaker underneath dual ball-winners in Ally Lemos and Haley McCutcheon, proved harder to play through. Ally Watt has never looked like an ideal fit as a No. 9 — Denver should be building a system that lets her hug the touchline as a right winger — but her willingness to put in a lot of running to lead the Pride's press left North Carolina wobbling.
With Marta and Jacquie Ovalle rather narrow as wide forwards, the Pride flooded the middle of the pitch, which is always going to frustrate a team that covets possession like the Courage. It's not clear that this will work every week, and it didn't come with enough going the other way (Marta and Ovalle combined for four shot-creating actions, which is a bit too low for this set-up to work at both ends). But remember, we're trying to start off with a positive for a team that hasn't won in nine games.
Unfortunately this latest result is another kick in the teeth, because what felt like a frustrating draw became a nightmare loss when Shinomi Koyama capped off a jailbreak counter with an 89th-minute goal:
This goal vaulted the Courage — who were without Ashley Sanchez and Brianna Pinto due to injury — into playoff position. The decision to fire Sean Nahas may have been explained in extraordinarily awkward fashion, but NC is 2W-3D-2L since then, and one of those losses came less than 48 hours after the bombshell dropped. The Take-Off isn't going to tell you the Current solved all their problems, but they have been a little more willing to embrace the vertical side of the game under interim boss Nathan Thackeray.
That said, the close of this game had more torment for Orlando, who had a potential stoppage-time equalizer (and the emotional jolt it could have provided going forward) denied by the top of Natalie Jacobs' head. It turns out that the dinosaur hair style is functional, and you could see Kaleigh Kurtz celebrating that play as much as she did Koyama's goal. Veterans know how you get into the playoffs, and it generally requires a few moments like that. If NC keeps hold of this postseason berth, remember this game.
By the way, the same goes for Orlando should this freefall continue. If the Pride were to lose in San Diego Friday, wins for either Racing Louisville or the Houston Dash the next day would leave the 2024 double winners hanging onto a playoff spot on tiebreakers. The Pride only have two home games left, and they're about to embark on a three-games-in-seven-days sprint that will take them to San Diego, Mexico City, and Houston.
Life comes at you fast in the NWSL.
Utah Royals 3:2 Racing Louisville
If you see these columns as having to eat your tactical vegetables in the hope for some dessert in the form of goal highlights, Utah and Louisville drove this whole enterprise to the nearest ice cream joint.
This game's structure ended up being dictated by Racing's press, but that wasn't frequently a good thing for Bev Yanez's side. Savannah DeMelo's absence was addressed by adding more bite in the form of Katie O'Kane, which pointed towards an intention. The rookie midfielder and Ary Borges have essentially played half a season each, and if you combine their tackle attempts in the middle third, you'd have a season total of 26, good for fourth in the NWSL behind Sam Meza, Taylor Flint, and Denise O'Sullivan.
Doubling down on a more rugged approach makes sense on the road in theory, but from the very start Utah found a solution. The Royals were willing to invite the first layer of pressure because Louisville wasn't well-connected. Utah avoided some of the preferred triggers Racing looks for, and when an attacker would step to the ball hesitantly, the gaps appeared instantly. The line-breaking pass was on too often for Louisville's signature approach to function.
What happens when a transitional team committed to aggressively pressing the ball doesn't stay connected? In this league, you might just give up a worldie.
Unfortunately the clip above starts a few seconds too late to show Racing's recurring issue: everyone wants to press, they're hungry to go confront the ball and get a tackle in. However, Utah keeps the ball moving, keeps the angles shifting, and you can see multiple Louisville players taking a hesitant step towards the ball, then deciding to stay in place. No one's sure when to go first, so no one can go.
Janni Thomsen and Cloé Lacasse offered superb finishes later in the half, but both came out of Louisville's uncertainty. On the second, Janine Sonis had nowhere to go with the ball under pressure, hacking a clearance up the line as the entire Racing front six didn't get into a place to help her out. 11 seconds later, Thomsen's shot slipped into the bottom corner, as Tanaka had a huge gap to move the ball through zone 14 to find the fullback.
Lacasse's goal is an example of when pressing goes wrong. Louisville had Utah in a bit of a blender and seemed to be building towards one last chance in first-half stoppage time. Utah clustered the ball on a throw-in to end the threat, but Racing couldn't do the same, and Tanaka just barely found the exit, swinging play wide as Ella Hase dumped her to the ground.
Thomsen's hard sprint forward, coupled with some admirable fight to keep the play alive, did most of the rest, and it took just 18 seconds from mistake to goal. Utah wasn't having to connect 10-plus passes to do damage; this sequence came after three passes and a successful counter-press. Racing got a taste of their own medicine, and it's safe to say they didn't enjoy it.
Now, there was some bad luck here for Louisville: Flint's ninth-minute goal was called back because Ellie Jean was unwittingly offside (did she really interfere with Mandy McGlynn? Maybe just enough to prevent a save, but that's a call that lives right on the edge), and Ary Borges' bid for an equalizing golazo crashed off the crossbar.
You're not going to give up goals like Tanaka's with any regularity, and a modest break for the visitors anywhere in the first half would have changed this game significantly. Racing could be forgiven for getting into the locker room at halftime and wondering how on earth that half ended in a three-goal deficit.
It's just that these are the risks of building around such an aggressive press. If the triggers don't show, or if a team can call on someone as press-resistant as Tanaka to play matador amid all the charging bulls, what's the solution? Louisville's structure fell apart once pressing was off the table, and a team that looked to be penciling themselves in for the playoffs is now on the outside looking in.
Other NWSL scores
- Angel City 2:2 Washington Spirit
- Houston Dash 1:0 Chicago Stars
- Portland Thorns 1:1 San Diego Wave
- Bay FC 1:1 NJ/NY Gotham FC
One more thing
The players are right: Vlatko Andonovski has got to dye his hair. Don't tempt the soccer gods.
This article originally appeared on Pro Soccer Wire: NWSL Weekend Take-Off: Kansas City Current win Shield, Orlando Pride struggles continue
Reporting by Jason Anderson, Pro Soccer Wire / Pro Soccer Wire
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