Wilfried Nancy leads soaring Columbus Crew into Hell is Real clash | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

Marco Donadel had reason to dread the Columbus Crew’s midweek visit to Quebec. It was a reunion with his former CF Montréal colleague Wilfried Nancy, who has led the Crew to two major trophies and reached a continental final since departing the City of Saints for central Ohio after the 2022 season.

Columbus remain ensconced among MLS’s elite and have lost only once in league play this season, while his struggling CFM side are propping up the Eastern Conference standings, having just won their first league match last weekend.

Yet it was quite the opposite, insisted Montréal’s Italian interim head coach.

“I know Wil very well. We have a good relationship. It's funny, because I told him at the end of the first game [a 2-1 Crew win in Ohio on April 5] that I really would like to play every week against them,” Donadel told reporters on Tuesday, ahead of his side’s creditable 1-1 draw with the 2023 MLS Cup winners.

“Because for me as a coach, it’s a great improvement to try for solutions to play against a team like them, and also because I have fun during the game. So I am happy to play against them, even if it’s probably the worst game possible in this moment.”

Heated rivalry

Whether they admit it as readily as Donadel or not, matching wits with Nancy has become an engaging test for many MLS coaches. That’s thanks to the bold, expansive game model he’s installed in Columbus, both its effectiveness and its aesthetic appeal, and the consistent success it’s reaped in results and player development, all of which has helped elevate the MLS originals into a model club.

Methodical, ball-dominant, assertive, brave to the point of recklessness, Nancy’s Crew have become a neutral’s favorite without compromising their competitiveness in every tournament, and earned him 2024 Sigi Schmid MLS Coach of the Year honors.

It’s also rendered the Crew’s cross-state showdowns with FC Cincinnati, a club of similar aspirations with a markedly distinct tactical approach and a different sort of coach in Pat Noonan, that much more compelling. Thus is the latest installment of “Hell is Real,” a Saturday night tangle at Lower.com Field (7:15 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+; FS1, FOX Deportes), one of the highlights of Rivalry Week.

A combustible combination of contrast and proximity fuels their respective fan bases, so much so that it drew the feature treatment in Onside, the MLS and Apple TV+ docuseries released earlier this year. The two organizations share history and ambition, and Saturday’s winner, should there be one, could find themselves atop the East standings as the season’s summer grind looms.

Cincy were widely expected to be in this position, in no small part due to having reportedly spent more than $30 million over the winter to acquire talented attackers Luca Orellano, Kévin Denkey and Evander. It has further bolstered Nancy’s reputation that the Crew are still here, too.

Last year’s marathon campaign delivered a Leagues Cup triumph, a historic run to the Concacaf Champions Cup final and a second-place finish in the Supporters’ Shield. Yet expectations have soared so high that the taste of disappointment predominated by its end, an early exit from the 2024 Audi MLS Cup Playoffs at the hands of the upstart New York Red Bulls.

“I was not able to watch any kind of game, because it was difficult,” Nancy told MLSsoccer.com of the aftermath of that setback in a wide-ranging one-on-one conversation at the Crew’s preseason camp in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, earlier this year. “But when I took the time to step back and to reflect, it was the best season in my life, simple as that. Simple as that.”

Building on a strong 2024

Nancy’s philosophical streak is well known by now, and it’s palpable in his analysis of 2024.

“Maybe you’re going to say I'm crazy, but I don't compete to win trophies. Because trophies, for me, this is the consequence of what we do every day,” he said. “So I'm happy when I see the trophy, yeah, for sure. But this is not my motivation. My motivation is how I can help my team to maximize our chance to get that.”

Last year, he notes, was not just the best season in Crew history in statistical terms, setting club records for points, wins and goals. It was, in essence, a laboratory for him and his staff, from tactics to fitness periodization and training structure to nutrition to managing the rigors of long-haul travel and beyond.

“It was powerful for my staff and myself, and also for the club, [even] for the chef at the facility also,” he noted. “It's been amazing. … Yes, difficult at the end, really difficult, but a really, really, really good season.

“I'm not playing to break records, but I'm playing also to write a legacy and to leave a legacy, and to write a story, and we did it well.”

Columbus managed a schedule that spanned nearly 50 matches across four tournaments around a far-flung continent with myriad climates and conditions, only eight of them losses, as the Ohioans dodged the dreaded ConcaChampions hangover following a stirring run to the final, where the team fell 3-0 to CF Pachuca after a nasty case of food poisoning ravaged the squad.

“And after that, the reaction – we'd been unbeaten for many games after that, and it could have been the opposite,” said Nancy. “The two cycles that we have in the middle of the year, when we had seven games in 21 days, it was the competitive spirit, the mental strength that we had. And for me, this was amazing – amazing.

“Because we were tired, yes, not physically, but mentally. But my players find a way to come back and to play the way we want to play, and to stay on the task and to control – to play with emotion, but also not [let] the emotion take the control of the way we play.”

Fearless leader

Listen to him for a while, and it becomes easy to understand how Nancy wins over his players.

“'We want you to play out the back. We know you're going to make mistakes. We want you to try these passes. Be calm on the ball,'” goalkeeper Patrick Schulte, one of several individual success stories under Nancy, explained to MLSsoccer.com.

“Having that trust from him kind of just took me to a whole ‘nother level,” added Schulte. “‘This is what we want you to do. This is how we want you to play.’ It allowed me just to kind of take my foot off myself and just be like, let's go play, and enjoy it.”

The sustainability of all this has been tested by their recent departures.

The sting of the Yellow Football Team’s playoffs heartbreak had barely faded when two-thirds of their impressive attacking trident left in short order over the winter. Seduced by the prospect of a return to LaLiga, Cucho Hernández flew off to Real Betis for a club-record fee reportedly around $16 million plus add-ons; he’s since helped Los Verdiblancos reach the UEFA Conference League final, scoring 5g/1a in his first few months back in Spain.

Days later, Christian Ramírez was traded to the LA Galaxy for a package of General Allocation Money worth up to $500,000; he’s scored 4g/1a for his hometown club. The Crew’s subsequent acquisition of Hungarian international Dániel Gazdag via a cash-for-player trade with the Philadelphia Union, worth up to $4.5 million, brought reinforcement but not exactly a full answer, either.

“For the moment, nobody believes in us,” declared Nancy. “This is fine for me. There is no issue with that. … It's totally normal that people is going to say it could be difficult. But to be honest, I don't care, because this is the assumption.”

His ideology, he says, is non-negotiable, regardless of personnel shifts. Yet the processes he guides his players through are subject to constant evolution.

And no one is irreplaceable.

“It's going to be the same. Because this is the way I believe that we can win games,” he said. “After that, depending each profile or each specificities, yes, I might adjust. What we did in the first year was not the same in the second year. What we did in the second year is not the same for the third year.

“Why? Because I always seek improvement, all the time with my team. So this is not about front three, front two, the players who are here or who left. It is the same for me, because as soon as I see that they understand what I want, I give them another challenge, and so on and so on and so on and so on.”

A method to the madness

There have been some differences. After racking up 72 league goals last season, second only to Lionel Messi's explosive Inter Miami, Columbus’ scoring productivity has tapered off a bit in ‘25. Yet it’s been balanced by a deceptively stingy defense: The Crew rank in the top three in MLS in both goals conceded and expected goals against.

Nancy’s style of play can resemble a high-wire act in the way it courts danger, inviting pressure from opponents in order to manipulate and disrupt their defensive shape, to plant “uncertainty” in their minds, as he puts it. Some of the Crew faithful fear he and general manager Issa Tall are taking similar risks with the top end of the roster, with the decision not to acquire like-for-like replacements for their exiting stars.

Most, though, would probably have to concede he’s earned some trust. There’s always a method to his madness.

“Now all the teams, they know how we play – no problem with that,” said Nancy. “Last year, we faced different styles of play, different ways to defend: high block, low block; how we can unbalance the low block, how we can unbalance the press that they're going to do? So this is all these kind of things, but there is no connection with players. The front office, they know that, yes, I want good players, like every coach, but it doesn't change because of the departure of those guys.

“No, this is the same vision, and this is the same objective: to seek improvement.”

Perhaps a deeper concern among the fanbase is the prospect of Nancy himself being lured elsewhere. His work has drawn attention abroad, with intermittent rumors of interest from clubs in his native France and elsewhere in Europe.

Though he’s not ruling anything out ahead of time, he sounds like a man content with the setting he’s crafted for himself.

“Life is about moments, like I like to say,” said Nancy. “I'm 47 years old. I did not plan to be in Columbus, Ohio with my family, two kids, a wife, in Columbus, and I'm really, really happy here.

“It's normal. It's football. This is also the dynamic in this type of environment, so I’m grateful,” he added of his growing reputation overseas. “And there is a lot of work behind that. But I'm happy also here. And what I've learned also is, yes, the project is important, but the people that you work with are most important.

"And after that, the future, I don't know it, and we'll see in the future," Nancy said. "But I am at peace.”

Rivalry Week: Columbus Crew & FC Cincinnati resume Hell is Real