Coach Pascal Jansen’s first season with NYCFC delivers strongest finish since 2022

While coaches Mikey Varas, Bradley Carnell and Jesper Sørensen have grabbed MLS headlines for their outstanding first seasons, “in the background, Pascal Jansen has done a really steady job and kept a firm hand on New York City FC,” Tony Husband, play-by-play announcer for MLS Season Pass presented by Apple TV, told amNewYork.

The Dutch head coach for NYCFC was signed five days into 2025, replacing Nick Cushing, who had taken City to a conference semifinal loss against cross-town rivals New York Red Bulls in 2024. Jansen was bought out of his contract at Hungarian side Ferencvaros, where he managed for six months.

This season, Jansen was one win away from matching a club-record 18 wins in the regular season and finished on 56 points, the highest points tally the Boys in Blue have collected since 2019. Jansen also took NYCFC to its highest finish in the Eastern Conference since 2022 — sixth — under 2021-MLS-Cup-winning coach Ronny Deila, and later Cushing.

Ross Smith, an analyst for MLS Season Pass and a former Portland Timber in the USL, told amNewYork that people close to the club have said, “he is the best coach that NYCFC has ever had.”

“You’re only going to see the upside to him more and more as he starts to get in, perhaps, more players, and the more time he has players that he wants with a system that he wants to play with,” Smith continued. “You know that the Dutch sort of background is such an attractive style of play. You see it come out of the team, but you also see a backbone in the team.”

Jansen has kept his back five relatively consistent this year, with a pairing of Justin Haak, “who bleeds the club,” and “no-nonsense” Thiago Martins at the heart of defense starting in front of Matthew Freese, who is “one of the best goalkeepers in the league,” according to Smith.

The Boys in Blue have kept 10 clean sheets so far in the league this season — their best since the 2022 season when they kept 15 in the MLS — and conceded 44 goals, four less than Cushing managed with his team last year.

“When you have that spine intact and performing well, everybody else has to fall in line,” Smith said. “In times when things could go against [them], and they don’t, they don’t unravel because of the characters I’ve mentioned.”

Jansen also righted the NYCFC ship, winning four of its last five road matches after picking up only two wins in the previous 12. The turning point, at least on the road, was a four-game stretch that preceded NYCFC’s Leagues Cup action in July.

Having lost eight of City’s first nine matches away, Jansen managed to turn his side around with his “bulletproof mindset” and “game-by-game” mentality he emphasized to his team — and the media — all season long.

“I think that actually bulletproof perfectly describes the performance in Charlotte in the first game [of the playoffs],” Husband said. “NYC went in there, they had their armor on, and Charlotte didn’t lay enough of a glove on them at all.”

Not given much credit before their matches to Charlotte, Orlando, Kansas City and Dallas, the Boys in Blue picked up seven points from 12 and cemented their status as a playoff-contending squad this season. It showed last Tuesday in Game 1 of the first round of this season’s playoffs, when NYCFC beat the best home side in the MLS — Charlotte picked up 13 wins at home, one more than Supporters’ Shield-winning Philadelphia Union.

“I think it’s even more impressive when you consider Charlotte has been just about one of the best home teams in the league, certainly this year, and they were very good last year as well,” Husband said. “I don’t think anybody going into this first round of playoffs, when they looked at all the matches on the slate, would have looked at NYCFC’s game in Charlotte and necessarily immediately thought that, ‘Well, I think NYC can win that game.’”