WASHINGTON, D.C. — It may have taken an astounding Maiara Niehues goal to do it, but Angel City have now won five of their last six games. Now, with four games left, the club stands in sixth place in the NWSL standings.
The Los Angeles-based club has been on a remarkable run. In the past 15 games, they have won eight, drawn five, and lost just two. Only league leaders Gotham FC have lost as few games over that stretch.
The start of that run coincides with the club installing Leif Smerud as their interim head coach to replace fellow Norwegian Alexander Straus.
Smerud was a late arrival to Straus’s project, arriving in April and only being announced by the team in May, the month before he was elevated to the top job.
And yet, he has gotten results that appear to be far more than just luck. Angel City’s goal differential heading into the June break was just +1. Now it is at +16, the best in the league. They scored 1.45 goals per game before Smerud took over, but that number has gone up to 1.87. Even more striking is their defensive improvement: They formerly allowed 1.36 goals per game. Enter Smerud, and that number is now down to just 0.8 a game.
Ask the interim boss and he will tell you that it’s a game-by-game process to turn those losses into draws and the draws into wins.
“Turning those margins comes from developing as a team, so we have learned from each game we have played. And we have good competition within the squad,” Smerud told reporters after his squad beat the Washington Spirit on Saturday.
Smerud noted that the stretch also came with players coming in and out of the team. Forward Prisca Chilufya left over the summer to play for Zambia in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, while the club’s two top goal scorers, Niehues and Sveindís Jónsdóttir, have missed time in the stretch since the summer break due to injury.
But Smerud saw a silver lining in giving many different players the chance to prove themselves. “I think now we have many competing, and that gives quality,” he said. “We have a good streak of good performances where we have started to win, and that breeds confidence as well.”
Angel City is no stranger to an interim manager bounce. In 2023, interim head coach Becki Tweed went on a similarly strong run in the second half after taking over for Freya Coombe, leading the team to a playoff appearance and then earning the full-time job.
Smerud’s journey has been a whirlwind. After nearly a decade coaching the Norwegian men’s under-21 national team, Smerud is now on his third job in roughly 18 months. He joined the English club Crystal Palace as their manager at the start of March 2025, then lost the job after a season where the club was relegated from the Women’s Super League. He then took over at SK Brann last August for the remainder of their season, before joining the Angel City staff officially on May 1.
By June 17, Straus was out and Smerud was in.
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“It was a strange situation and difficult situation, to be honest, when I came to be an assistant to Alex and then I was asked to step in when he was relieved,” Smerud said. “So I’m just trying to focus on doing my job now and sort of helping the players and the club in the situation that we were in.”
Helping the players has been arguably the most visible part of Smerud’s success. While the results may suggest that he has revolutionized the team, most of the indicators are that he helped the team get back to basics.
“Over the break, we just tried to simplify everything,” Angel City captain and center back Sarah Gorden said in July after the club’s road win against San Diego Wave. “Firstly to focus on us, to refine the things that we do well, and secondly to simplify the things that we need to get better at.”
In many cases in Saturday night’s game in DC, Angel City stifled the Spirit by leveraging their speed. Gorden is one of the fastest center backs in the NWSL, while both Jónsdóttir, a forward, and Gisele Thompson, a fullback-turned-winger, have the speed to recover even after the Spirit break through a press.
Washington has now scored one or fewer goals in five of their last seven games, and the shutout by Angel City adds concern to their goal scoring struggles.
“They were quick to track back,” Spirit fullback Gabrielle Carle said postgame. “For me, for example, Gisele Thompson was their winger, and she would track back all the way to the box. So they were very disciplined — once they were broken, we didn’t have that much time because they were coming back.”
Angel City’s ability to nab a win in Washington also had some additional meaning for Smerud. His family came to meet him this weekend, taking advantage of a considerably shorter distance to travel from Norway compared to Los Angeles.
Smerud’s young son Ellis took the chair next to him just off camera for the postgame press conference. While the elder Smerud took questions from reporters, Ellis was having a postgame snack and fiddling with the cloth background that Angel City had put up for their press conference.
With Smerud coaching in three different countries in eighteen months, a little slice of home can go a long way.
“Of course, I’m happy to have my family here now for a few days,” Smerud said. “It’s difficult to have them far away but they are used to me coaching teams so, happy for them to be here and share this with me.”
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