I was only slightly aware of Wilfried Nancy and his tenure at Columbus Crew prior to the recent speculation about his being part of Celtic’s managerial search. MLS is not a league I track closely, and after they placed their games behind a paywall on Apple TV, I have barely seen any games at all.
However, while taking some cursory looks at the various rumored names, some aspects of his profile caused me to do a bit more digging. Fortunately, MLS is a spreadsheet shagger’s dream, as American Soccer Analysis provides excellent open source data for the league.
All data within this column was sourced from their free web application.
Let us begin with the boring Expected Trophies foundation of relative payrolls, where we see for the 2025 season Columbus (CLB) are 18th out of the 30 teams. Nancy arrived at Columbus for the 2023 season, with the team ranked 9th for 2022, 6th for 2023, and 18th for 2024.
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