For sale and smooth sailing: How the Vancouver Whitecaps have improbably thrived

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The announcement came six days after MLS Cup last season, a proverbial bomb dropped right as the offseason was beginning: the Vancouver Whitecaps were up for sale.

The communiqué landed just a few weeks after the Whitecaps declared a shake-up on the sporting side, with coach Vanni Sartini having been ushered out. It was easy to start to put the picture together of what might come next: a directionless team with a “for sale” sign in front languishing near the bottom of the standings. Predictably, that’s where most MLS season previews estimated the club finishing.

Instead, the Whitecaps have become arguably the best story in MLS this season. Led by Jesper Sørensen, a Danish manager who had last coached Brøndby, the Whitecaps have lost just twice in their first 15 games in all competitions this season. They sit atop the MLS Supporters’ Shield standings and have advanced to the Concacaf Champions Cup semifinals, where they will look to knock out Lionel Messi and Inter Miami, starting with Thursday night’s first leg at home.

The Whitecaps aren’t just winning. They’re doing so playing fun, attractive soccer. They have the second-most goals scored in MLS this season (17) and are tied for the fewest allowed (six). Their run to the Champions Cup semis has not been easy. They have advanced past traditional Costa Rican power Saprissa and Mexican clubs Monterrey and Pumas, the latter two on away goals with dramatic second-leg results in Mexico. Against Pumas in the quarterfinal, it was Tristan Blackmon’s stunning stoppage-time finish that put them through after Pumas had seemingly knocked them out with an 88th-minute goal.

OH MY GOODNESS@WhitecapsFC with a response in stoppage time! 😱 pic.twitter.com/jno07AAVcr

— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) April 10, 2025

Per Opta, the Whitecaps are just the second MLS team in 23 tries to advance against a Liga MX team in Concacaf’s modern era of Champions League/Champions Cup play (since 2008) despite failing to win the first leg at home, joining the Columbus Crew, which beat Tigres in the 2024 quarterfinals.

The success has driven interest, and that in turn has helped prop up the Whitecaps in their home market at a critical time for the club.

“Any time you start winning games and doing well, it just brings more attention, more excitement,” said Whitecaps forward Brian White, who leads the team in goals in both MLS (six) and the Champions Cup (four). “People want to go see you play, they want to see their team win. For sure that there’s been a surge in support and eyes and attention on the team in Vancouver.”

Putting the club up for sale could have had a hugely negative effect. Instead, ownership assured people both externally and internally that things would not change despite the sale process.

In fact, Vancouver co-owner Jeff Mallett told The Athletic during a break in the MLS board of governors meeting earlier this month that the ownership group, led by Greg Kerfoot, became “more engaged than ever.”

“We have so much at stake,” Mallett said. “We want this to end up in great hands.”

CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster had the toughest job. He had to assure his new coach that he still had the club’s support — and the resources he needed — to put a competitive team together. He also had to convince the Vancouver community that the club was intent on staying in the market.

“It was almost more work,” Schuster said. “Our day job was to continue to run the club. Our night job is actually to deal with all of this. And this was one of the most exhausting things to repeatedly say, ‘No, it’s not true. This club is not falling apart. No, this club is not moving.’

“(People would say): ‘The (NBA) Grizzlies owner, he was singing the anthem and said I will never move this team and six months later (it moved, in 2001).’ But why are you bringing this up? That’s not us. To have this conversation again and again and again. That was actually almost more exhausting than the actual work on the day-to-day business.”

White and Sørensen said they haven’t much discussed the team being up for sale within the locker room, but Schuster praised club employees for their belief even after the sale announcement. It became a sort of rallying cry internally.

“We have to make it the most attractive ride in North America, so that everyone wants to own it,” Schuster told the staff. “(So that) everyone wants to get this wonderful asset of having this club, because it’s a great thing.”

The Whitecaps eliminate Pumas UNAM from the Concacaf Champions Cup quarterfinals on Tristan Blackmon’s goal at the death. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images)

The team may not be letting the sale of the club weigh on them, but the on-field results have had an impact in those off-field discussions. The Whitecaps ownership group put out a statement on April 4 confirming that the club was “in discussion with the City of Vancouver regarding the construction of a stadium at the PNE fairgrounds site.” A new venue would be a huge step forward for the club, and Mallett and Schuster were at the board meeting along with a representative from Goldman Sachs, which is leading the sale, to update the league.

“This halo that’s out there with the results and the season going well, it definitely has an impact,” Mallett said. “There is a big funnel of interested people, we have a handful of people who want the team … (and) put it on a piece of paper. So it’s at that stage. All of these groups are staying in Vancouver. So I’m super encouraged. I’m also practical, too. To get it from here to there, as we know, is hard. But yes, the process is going very well.”

The sale process forced the ownership group to go through its entire history with the club and to account for its investment across the last two decades. The Whitecaps have never been among the highest-spending teams in MLS, but they also have one of the league’s greatest success stories in homegrown star Alphonso Davies, who was sold to Bayern Munich and became one of the best left backs in the world.

“You self-reflect,” Mallett said. “The mirror is right there. I think that was another lean-in moment where we say: We love this (club). Look at the dollars we put into this, look at the time we put into this. Then I go to the young players that we’ve developed over the years. I get super jacked over that. Kerfoot gets super jacked over that, too. … We had that moment. This is a great thing. We put in a good shift. We want to get it ready for the next chapter.”

The start to this season is a reminder of what winning can do to enliven a market.

Schuster obviously had belief that the Whitecaps were on the path toward building a winning team. If not, he wouldn’t have made a coaching change at the end of the season. He pointed out that Vancouver actually outscored LAFC on aggregate in a three-game series they lost last year in the playoffs.

“It felt like inches,” he said.

While the Whitecaps had performed admirably under Sartini, Schuster felt like “fresh energy” was needed to take the team to the next level. In his exit interviews with players, he could sense excitement in the locker room about the foundation that had been built.

“They also have been very clear what they thought they needed, aligned with what I thought it needed,” Schuster said. “And this is also what our business sometimes is: bringing in some fresh air. Sometimes only because you say it a little bit in a different way, it gets more direction by the players.”

Mallet said the coaching change was a sign that even amid a sale process, the ownership group was forward-looking.

“The easiest out would be to just sit on your hands and say, ‘Axel, we’ll just play through this next year and see how things go,” he said.

Instead, they gave the green light for the change. The club parted ways with Sartini on Nov. 25, 2024. The announcement that the club was for sale was made Dec. 13. Sørensen was hired on Jan. 14.

“Bringing in Jesper is a great example of just continuation, looking forward,” Mallet said.

Vancouver and USMNT striker Brian White scored four goals vs. Austin FC. (Photo by Anne-Marie Sorvin/Imagn Images)

Sørensen told the team from the start that he wanted them to control games and to be on the front foot with an attacking mindset, White said. It’s about being structured and building a “good base” in your identity as a group, Sørensen said. From the start, he saw a “commitment to where we want to go as a team.”

The decision to change coaches was put to the test immediately. Vancouver was in the Concacaf Champions Cup, which tests not just the quality of a team, but also its depth.

“We didn’t just dive, we cannonballed into the season with games every couple of days with Concacaf and the regular season,” White said. “And I think we just jumped into the deep end and figured out how to swim.”

So far, the Whitecaps have answered every question asked of them — and then some.

Statistically, the Whitecaps are an anomaly early in the regular season. According to American Soccer Analysis, their goals added on both the attacking end and defensive end vastly outrank their performance from last season. They own MLS’s best expected goal differential (1.1; nobody else is above 0.7) and actual goal differential (1.2; only three others above 0.7), per TruMedia via StatsPerform (Opta). They’ve done it mostly without star Ryan Gauld, who had 22 goals and 24 assists across the past two regular seasons, who has been sidelined due to a knee injury since March 8.

For almost their entire MLS existence, the Whitecaps have been a mid-table team. They finished second in the West in 2015 and third in 2017. Outside of those two seasons and a 12th-place finish in the conference in 2019, they have finished somewhere between fifth and ninth in the West in their 11 other seasons in MLS. They have made it to the MLS Cup playoffs in seven of 14 seasons, including three of the past four years, but never advanced past the quarterfinals.

But when Messi and Co. come to town on Thursday, it won’t be a David vs. Goliath situation. It’s very much a heavyweight showdown.

The rosters are built entirely differently. Miami is a juggernaut with its quartet of former Barcelona legends. Vancouver has historically been a lower-spending team, and this group is filled with domestic standouts like White, a recent U.S. call-up under Mauricio Pochettino, and Canadian winger Jayden Nelson. Still, the semifinal will feature the league’s top two teams by points per game, with Miami at 2.25 and Vancouver at 2.22.

“It’s a big game for the club and for the team,” Sørensen told The Athletic in a phone interview on Tuesday. “But I think that we are here for a reason. We’ve done well, but also we are up against a team where we know they have some special players, players that have been dominating this sport for many years, and maybe the best player ever to play is on that team. So of course, it’s always special to play them.

“But we are here to take our chances. We’re here to seize the moment. And that’s what we’ll try to do.”

(Top photo: Derek Cain/Getty Images)

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