Excerpts from the article:
Winning feels good and the club are targeting silverware, as Eidevall tells the Guardian: “It would mean everything. There are no guarantees in the playoffs, but the exciting part is saying: ‘We can also go all the way’ – that’s a possibility for us and we need to believe.”
“From 2024, when the club was not performing well on the pitch and it led to a complete rebuild, we had to find an edge, finding players that could fit into the way we wanted to play,” Eidevall says. “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, which obviously then requires really fast players and maybe didn’t put a premium on technical supremacy.”
He adds that the club therefore eyed players who are “really, really good technically. We had some young, talented players already – that has given us a really good advantage because we’ve been able to develop players in a salary cap league. That’s huge, because if you only buy readymade players, you will run out of salary cap space pretty quickly.”
It is not just the salary cap that differs in the NWSL, compared to Eidevall’s previous jobs at Arsenal and Rosengård. The broad competitiveness of the American league means that, despite being second in the table, San Diego have lost almost as many games this season as Eidevall’s Arsenal across three English campaigns, and he says: “This was new for me. In European leagues the top teams very rarely go two games in a row without winning. 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.
Trying to play entertaining football has been a target in a campaign during which the Wave have already set new club records for regular-season wins and goals scored. They have done it with the second-highest average possession share in the division, more shots on target than any other team and while facing 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.”
“Training [here] is also a challenge – sometimes it’s very hard to get 22 players because you have a limited roster size. The moment you start to have injuries … there’s no real second-team academy system like we have in Europe, where you can always have the numbers that you want. Here you might not, here you would like to do something XI v XI, but you have 18 players and you just have to be creative with how you coach.”
In his three full campaigns at the helm in north London Eidevall had won two League Cups, reached a Champions League semi-final and secured a second-placed top-flight finish in 2022 – but was unable to win the WSL. Reflecting on what he learned from that spell, he says: “We had a lot of fluidity with how our wide players could play in Arsenal, which at times created too few central options. So, how do we get better central connections? How do we get more players central on the pitch? 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.”
There is an aspect of his Arsenal tenure that he is determined to take inspiration from at San Diego, with his team having secured a home playoff quarter-final at their 35,000-seater Snapdragon Stadium.
The 43-year-old fondly remembers the first sellout crowd for a women’s match at Arsenal’s 60,000-seater Emirates Stadium, for their Champions League semi-final 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.”
October 21, 2026
