If St Louis had built Energizer Park as an indoor venue, then Marcel Hartel’s worldie would have surely blown the roof right off.
After shocking MLS in their 2023 debut by winning the West, St Louis have struggled for consistency. 2025 was a necessary transition year; the club parted with initial chief soccer officer Lutz Pfannenstiel after his most recent coaching appointment, Olof Mellberg, was sacked after just 15 games. Corey Wray was named as Pfannenstiel replacement in early November to top the sporting department, with the Thunder Bay native installing Yoann Damet as head coach soon afterwards.
It took St Louis five games to find a win this season, one of three teams in the league to go winless in the opening four matchweeks. Finally, the Wray and Damet era found its first three-pointer with New England visiting. St Louis held a 2-1 lead in the 83rd minute, when Hartel pounced on a poor pass by Brayan Ceballos. Rather than attempting to wind down the clock, Hartel sent St Louis into rapture with an audacious chip over Matt Turner.
The win was a feelgood moment not just for the club’s new leadership, but for the locker room altogether. Before kickoff, the stadium paid tribute to Ilona Löwen, the wife of City midfielder Eduard, who passed away on 9 March from cancer. The players and coaches donned black armbands bearing her initials, while some fans wore gray in a coordinated show of support.
“It’s been emotional, to say the least,” Damet said afterwards, “but at the same time, I think the guys, what they wanted to do is to show those values that we embody as a team, for him.”
Damet also saw plenty of positives on the field, especially in midfield. Chris Durkin and winter acquisition Daniel Edelman offer a promising all-American engine room, two former US youth internationals whose boyhood teams (DC United and Red Bull New York, respectively) hadn’t entrusted them with as much on-ball responsibility. While one win in five won’t get St Louis back in the playoffs, the early returns of their new partnership make it easier to project brighter days lay ahead.
In the meantime, a few more golazos like Hartel’s won’t hurt.
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Bamba buries Union
A 30-team league offers so many storylines that it’s rare to concentrate on a single trend. But when a Supporters’ Shield winner begins their defense in unprecedentedly poor fashion, as the Philadelphia Union have, it’s impossible to ignore.
No Shield holder had lost their first five games the following spring until this Union team, who lost 2-1 at home to Chicago on Saturday. The Fire have come a long way since appointing Gregg Berhalter, with Joe Mansuetto continuing to invest in his squad and construction under way on the team’s new $750m stadium in the 78 neighborhood.
Chicago have opted for three senior designated players, hoping the investment can swing close games in their favor. It was mission accomplished in Chester, then, with Hugo Cuypers bagging his fourth goal of the season just before half-time. Jonathan Bamba scored the winner with a fine volley in the 58th.
Philadelphia are woefully behind the pack. Only one other team (the Columbus Crew) have fewer than three points at this stage. Bradley Carnell is struggling to find answers, although the slate is now a bit less congested after Philadelphia exited the Concacaf Champions Cup last week.
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Sam Surridge can’t stop scoring
Through five weeks in MLS this season, 11 players have already scored at least four league goals.
Usual suspects such as Lionel Messi are on the list. But perched at the top is someone no doubt familiar to longtime Guardian readers and MLS lifers alike: Sam Surridge. A product of the Bournemouth academy, the 27-year-old struggled to stick with Stoke City or Nottingham Forest before landing in Tennessee in 2023. He’s become one of MLS’s most dependable scorers, with 45 league goals in 75 games and leading the line for Nashville’s first trophy, the 2025 US Open Cup.
On Saturday, his hat-trick helped put his side three points clear atop the Eastern Conference after they eliminated Inter Miami in continental play midweek.
Given his age and homegrown qualification, some around MLS are wondering when, not if, a Premier League team will try taking him back across the Atlantic. To his credit, Surridge is approaching his situation with considerable transparency.
“I’ve always expressed, eventually I want to be playing in England,” Surridge told the Tennessean in February, after signing an extension that could keep him in MLS through its 2028-29 season. “But at the same time, I’m playing my best soccer here now in America. It’s easy to stay at the moment. They’ve shown massive faith in me, and I’ve wanted to pay them back in signing and extending and replicating that for the next couple years.”
Ultimately, a player has to weigh what will make for their most fulfilling career. Surridge arrived just a year after Riqui Puig elected to continue his career with the LA Galaxy after Barcelona made him expendable, opting to be the focal point of a club in a global city rather than toil for minutes at a smaller club in his native Spain. Puig led the Galaxy to their record sixth MLS Cup title in 2024 and is sorely missed as he spends a second consecutive season recovering from knee surgeries.
Time will tell whether Surridge will score another Premier League goal or if his lone strike for Forest in 2022-23 will stand alone. With the goals flowing freely in Nashville, he seems happy for the moment.
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Dos Santos: nine unbeaten
Marc Dos Santos couldn’t have asked for a better start at Los Angeles FC. Elevated to the top job after Steve Cherundolo’s departure, Dos Santos has started his time as LAFC’s head coach with an unbeaten run of nine matches.
Along the way, they’ve become the first MLS club to begin a league campaign with five clean sheets, a feat made more impressive by their run to the CCC quarter-final. The latest unblemished defensive showing came in Austin, playing to a scoreless draw. Dos Santos rolled out his preferred front-three of Denis Bouanga, Son Heung-min, and David Martínez despite their midweek match in the Champions Cup. While they outshot the hosts 12-10, with eight attempts inside the box, LAFC put just one of those dozen attempts on Brad Stuver’s goal.
Still, that stout defensive record will keep LAFC among the West’s contending class. Even before leading the Vancouver Whitecaps from 2019 to mid-2021, Dos Santos’s reputation in the US lower leagues was one of a culture builder who kept a stout shape that was difficult to break down. He notched the final win of the NASL’s second iteration, leading the one-and-done San Francisco Deltas over the vaunted New York Cosmos.
Now, he’s at the wheel for one of his league’s glamor clubs. While it’s still early days, signs are that he’s more than up for the responsibility.
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Goals are still flying in
Saturday’s slate included a notable trio of goalfests.
Dean Smith’s Charlotte FC thrilled the home faithful with a six-goal glut against youthful Red Bull New York, with four goals coming after Red Bull defender Gustav Berggren saw red in the 53rd minute. The advantage allowed Wilfried Zaha to score his first goal of 2026, having played all but eight minutes of the season to date.
FC Dallas claimed interstate superiority in a seven-goal thriller with the rival Houston Dynamo. Dallas’s Logan Farrington bagged a brace within 14 minutes, but Dynamo stormed back to a 3-2 lead by scoring three goals in the span of four minutes. An own goal allowed FC Dallas to level the scores, while Petar Musa scored their winner with mere minutes remaining.
Under former Tottenham assistant Matt Wells, the Colorado Rapids earned a third win in four games, passing laps around a still-undermanned Sporting KC. Paxten Aaronson led the blowout with his first brace since April 2024, when he was on loan with Utrecht in the Netherlands. While KC are still barely pulling together a full squad for each match, the Rapids will look to this broader 360-minute sample as a positive first adoption of Wells’s ambitious approach. Through five weeks, only Nashville and Vancouver have generated more ‘big’ chances than Colorado’s 19.
