St. Louis City fires head coach Olof Mellberg, seeks ‘return to a winning culture'

New York Times

28-05-2025

On Tuesday, St. Louis City announced it had fired head coach Olof Mellberg before the midpoint of his first season. The Swede lasted just 15 regular-season games in the job.
Mellberg is the third MLS coach to be dismissed in the 2025 season, following Laurent Courtois' firing by CF Montréal and Peter Vermes mutually parting ways with Sporting Kansas City. David Critchley, the head coach of St. Louis' MLS Next Pro affiliate, will serve as interim head coach.
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'The decision to part ways with Olof goes beyond just results,' sporting director Lutz Pfannenstiel said in the club's press release. 'We've analyzed the team's performance across a number of factors, including the need to execute against a style of play that led to the team's initial success and has been part of our DNA for four years.
'As a club, we have certain standards we need to meet and believe a coaching change was necessary to improve our overall performance and return to a winning culture. Our fans deserve a better-performing team, and we intend to give them one.'
St. Louis CITY SC part ways with Head Coach Olof Mellberg.
🗞️ https://t.co/xjAGPxzThY pic.twitter.com/VkPYMddrnv
— St Louis CITY SC (@stlCITYsc) May 27, 2025
The move is the latest in a series of attempts to reignite a spark under St. Louis City.
Pfannenstiel became St. Louis City's first sporting director, joining the club in 2020 to help oversee the process of building out the club's sporting department. Among his most important decisions was naming Bradley Carnell as the club's first head coach, fresh off his impressive stint as interim coach of the New York Red Bulls.
Carnell and St. Louis were an instant hit upon debuting in 2023, fueled by a system that took many cues from the Red Bull Football Group's guiding ideology. Under Carnell, St. Louis had the league's most voracious forward press, creating plenty of goals and chances by forcing opponents into turnovers in their own third. The success came despite very little squad stability, as Carnell utilized 32 different starting lineups across the 34-game season.
St. Louis City shocked MLS by finishing atop the Western Conference in its first season, winning 17 games and totalling 56 points as many of the conference's usual powers underwent relative down years. Unfortunately, any momentum from this remarkable debut was quickly extinguished, as No. 8-ranked Sporting Kansas City upset St. Louis in the first round of the playoffs, needing just two games of the best-of-three series to eliminate the top seed.
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Despite the strong first impression, Carnell was dismissed midway through 2024 as St. Louis notched just three wins and 10 draws in its first 20 games. After overperforming their expected goals by 18.01 in 2023, the team was narrowly underperforming by -1.4 just over halfway through the year. Technical director John Hackworth oversaw the rest of the year as Pfannenstiel began the search for Carnell's successor, with Mellberg appointed in late November.
'Olof has an incredible work ethic and reputation for being disciplined and detail-oriented,' Pfannenstiel said at the time of Mellberg's hiring. 'His leadership qualities as a captain, both at the highest club level and with his national team, will be key to managing our group. Olof's ability to develop young talent was seen at his Swedish club and we can't wait to see it translate here in St. Louis.'
A former center back at Aston Villa, Juventus and Villarreal, Mellberg's coaching CV was highlighted by bringing Brommapojkarna to the top-flight of Sweden, keeping them in the Allsvenskan for three consecutive years (a first in club history), including their record-high finish of 10th in the 2024 season.
Mellberg seemed to struggle to make the leap to MLS, though, even while inheriting many of the same players who had started under Carnell.
The squad saw few reinforcements ahead of the 2025 season, with two players signed on free transfers, one joining through the MLS SuperDraft and another on loan.
At the time of Mellberg's dismissal, St. Louis ranks 28th in the 30-team league. Only three teams have dropped more points from leading positions than St. Louis' ledger of 10. That doesn't count last week's U.S. Open Cup round-of-16 loss to Minnesota United, where the team came back from a 1-0 deficit to lead 2-1 in the 65th minute. Minnesota flipped the result again, with Anthony Markanich scoring two goals in the final five minutes to eliminate the visitors.
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Adding further insult, Markanich was only available for the Loons after they acquired him from St. Louis in August 2024. Minnesota sent St. Louis just $50,000 of allocation money for the left back, the lowest denomination MLS allows teams to trade.
Although Mellberg didn't have much time to build a robust sample size, he seemed to want his team to play in a very different style from the 'DNA' Pfannenstiel cited when referring to the 2023 iteration. The team ranks 23rd in PPDA (passes per defensive action, a measure of pressing intensity), affording opponents more time on the ball in dangerous areas. While Carnell's side had a field tilt of 49.5% in 2023 — that is, possession when only counting attacking-third touches — Mellberg's version ranked last in MLS with just 34.5% of attacking touches.
Study the team's xG performance since their launch, however, and it's hard to see where this team should have been expected to fare better — including in their emphatic debut. The viz above charts the expected goals St. Louis accrues to the total it concedes; for the majority of their nearly two-and-a-half years of operation, they've played at a deficit in pure chance creation.
And so, for a second consecutive season, St. Louis will spend a crucial stretch of the season looking for a new coach. Meanwhile, Carnell has transitioned well to his new job with the Philadelphia Union, who lead an Eastern Conference boasting preseason favorites including the Columbus Crew, FC Cincinnati and Inter Miami. With the Union, Carnell has inherited a squad that reached the MLS Cup in 2022. It's a level of recent success that St. Louis seems desperate to attain, but another lost season running coaching interviews will do little to foster the requisite momentum to win in MLS.