San Diego Wave head coach Jonas Eidevall says his team can "go all the way" in the NWSL playoffs, as they sit second in the table with a five-game winning streak and two matches remaining in the regular season.
The former Arsenal boss has overseen a rebuild at the club, which has secured a home playoff quarter-final at Snapdragon Stadium. The Wave are one point off top spot and have already set new club records for regular-season wins and goals scored this campaign.
Rebuilding after player exodus
When Eidevall took charge 21 months ago, San Diego Wave were enduring an exodus of senior players. The United States defender Abby Dahlkemper was sold to Bay FC in August 2024, Alex Morgan retired a month later, and forward Jaedyn Shaw departed for North Carolina Courage before Naomi Girma joined Chelsea in January 2025.
On his first video call with players that winter, Eidevall quoted a proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. "My ideas are not worth anything if we don't believe and buy into them altogether," he says. "We focused everything on just building connections as human beings."
Detailed tactical discussions were initially kept to a minimum. Around four weeks of their six-week pre-season focused entirely on passing out from the back. That work has paid off, with defenders Kristen McNabb and Kennedy Wesley being the division's top two players for passes completed this season.
Developing young talent in a salary cap league
Eidevall says the club had to find an edge after the poor 2024 season. "Back then [it] was a bit different to many other teams in the league, because the NWSL was seen as being dominated by athleticism and transitional play," he explains. The club targeted players who are "really, really good technically" and developed existing young talent such as 18-year-olds Melanie Barcenas and Kimmi Ascanio.
"That's huge, because if you only buy readymade players, you will run out of salary cap space pretty quickly," he adds. The salary cap is one of several differences from his previous roles at Arsenal and Rosengård. Despite being second in the table, San Diego have lost almost as many games this season as Eidevall's Arsenal across three English campaigns.
"This was new for me. [In] European leagues the top teams very rarely go two games in a row without winning," he says. "Here, even the team that wins the league might go through spells where they don't pick up points, so the way you handle those moments becomes very important."
Playing with identity and creating special experiences
The Wave have the second-highest average possession share in the division, more shots on target than any other team, and face by far the fewest shots on target. "That's the most pleasing part, results through an identity rather than getting results the other way around," Eidevall says. "The identity we have is to allow the players to be creative."
Reflecting on his Arsenal tenure, which ended with his resignation on 15 October 2024, Eidevall says he learned about improving central connections. "That was a long-term reflection on my time at Arsenal. And that's also led to some tactical changes that we've done here with San Diego."
With a home playoff quarter-final secured, he hopes to replicate the atmosphere of Arsenal's first sellout at the Emirates Stadium for a women's match, against Wolfsburg in 2023. "We want to sell out Snapdragon Stadium and in order to do so we need to do exactly what we were doing at Arsenal – we need to create special experiences at the stadium," he says. "That is what's going to draw people into there. Yes, play exciting football, but we also need to play games that mean a lot to be there. The ripple effect of that, that's so big."
