Jonas Eidevall: 'We can also go all the way' as San Diego Wave chase NWSL success
Jonas Eidevall says San Diego Wave are on a five-game winning run and sit second in the NWSL, one point behind the leaders with two matches remaining before the playoffs, in an interview published on 21 October 2026; he adds the club is targeting silverware and that: “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.”
Eidevall, the former Arsenal head coach, says he is enjoying life in San Diego and the slower pace of living there: “I love the ocean,” Jonas Eidevall says, and he references walks along the beach at Del Mar. “People are very relaxed, life is lived at a slower pace here. I’m a very simple person. I like to read a book, go to the gym and spend time with my wife and kids, that’s sort of all I need.” He took charge 21 months ago amid a squad rebuild and has overseen a run of form that includes new club records for regular-season wins and goals scored.
The rebuilding phase followed a summer and autumn of departures: the United States defender Abby Dahlkemper’s sale to Bay FC in August 2024 was followed by Alex Morgan’s retirement a month later, then the USA forward Jaedyn Shaw’s move to North Carolina Courage and Naomi Girma joining Chelsea in January 2025. Eidevall says he opened his first video call with the squad by quoting a proverb—"if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together." He adds: “My ideas are not worth anything if we don’t believe and buy into them altogether,” and explains that early detailed tactical work was limited while the focus was on building human connections: “We focused everything on just building connections as human beings.”
Tactical groundwork in pre-season was specific; Eidevall says the squad spent about four weeks of a six-week pre-season concentrating on passing out from the back to develop their style. That approach has produced defensive players high in passing metrics — Kristen McNabb and Kennedy Wesley are the division’s top two players for passes completed this season — and has underpinned the emergence of teenagers Melanie Barcenas and Kimmi Ascanio, both aged 18. On recruitment and development he said: “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,” and he warned about salary-cap constraints: “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.”
Eidevall contrasts the NWSL’s competitiveness with his experience in Europe, noting the frequency of dropped points across the American season: “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.” He also described training challenges linked to roster size: “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 11 v 11, but you have 18 players and you just have to be creative with how you coach.”
San Diego’s season statistics underline the identity Eidevall wants: the Wave have the second-highest average possession share in the division, have recorded more shots on target than any other team and have faced by far the fewest shots on target. He framed those numbers as the result of a playing philosophy: “That’s the most pleasing part, results through an identity rather than getting results the other way around,” and added, “The identity we have is to allow the players to be creative.”
Eidevall reflected on lessons from his Arsenal tenure — he resigned on 15 October 2024 after a difficult start to that season — citing both achievements and tactical takeaways: in three full campaigns he 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. He said: “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.” He recalled Arsenal’s first sellout for a women’s match at the Emirates Stadium for the 2023 Champions League semi-final against Wolfsburg and argued the same matchday experience must be created at home: “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,” adding, “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.”
San Diego Wave have secured a home playoff quarter-final at their 35,000-seater Snapdragon Stadium, which underpins Eidevall’s aim to replicate the matchday experiences he remembers from Arsenal. With two regular-season matches to complete before the playoffs, the club will attempt to translate their current form and stadium plans into a sold-out quarter-final at Snapdragon.