Charlotte FC’s first half was a ‘whimper.’ Now the MLS playoffs get even harder
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Charlotte FC lost Game 1 of playoffs to cede homefield advantage in series vs. NYCFC.
- Coach Dean Smith’s team now faces a must-win Game 2 at Yankee Stadium Saturday.
- If Charlotte wins Game 2, it hosts Game 3 of playoff series at Bank of America Stadium.
The weather and Charlotte FC’s performance mirrored each other Tuesday night: They were both extremely dreary.
And after Charlotte FC’s 1-0 home playoff loss to New York City FC on Tuesday in Bank of America Stadium on a cloudy night where the temperatures were in the 40s but felt colder, the local soccer team finds itself in quite a hole.
Major League Soccer playoffs are played in a best-of-3 format in the first round, so Charlotte FC hasn’t yet been eliminated. But the Crown will now need to win a match Saturday at Yankee Stadium and then another one on Nov. 7 in Charlotte to avoid being eliminated in Round 1 for the second year in a row.
That’s a hard road, but Charlotte FC put itself in this unenviable position before a bundled-up crowd of 33,709 Tuesday. NYCFC dominated the early possession, as Charlotte FC came out as flat as the Carolina Panthers had done two days before in the exact same stadium against another team from New York. The Buffalo Bills won that one by 31 points, and NYCFC only won by a single goal, but it all counts the same — a crushing loss and a lot of disappointed fans.
In the first half, Charlotte FC played like a team not sure whether it deserved to be in the playoffs or not, much less as a top-four seed.
“I just felt we didn’t quite handle the pressure of being the home team in a playoff game,” said coach Dean Smith, whose team’s fourth-place finish in the Eastern Conference had given it home-field advantage over No. 5 seed NYCFC. “It’s the first time we’ve done it, and I didn’t think we handled it well enough. ... I thought we were really poor in the first half. We gave the ball away too often. We broke down with our touch at times. In the final third, we misplaced passes. Gave the ball away too cheaply. If you do that against any team, you’re going to struggle a little bit.”
Smith also wasn’t happy that Charlotte FC had to play on a Tuesday night, which undoubtedly kept the crowd down for a playoff match in Charlotte (of course the weather didn’t help, either).
“By the way, MLS, thanks very much for the Tuesday night game,” Smith said sarcastically.
If this sounds like a head coach who was upset, well, that’s exactly what he was. Smith was particularly incensed about that slo-mo first half his team played. Charlotte FC had gone 11-2 over its final 13 games of the regular season but in this one started quite tentatively.
“The first half was like a whimper,” Smith said. “We never really laid a glove on them.”
Charlotte FC’s worst moment came on the only goal of the match, scored by NYCFC striker Alonso Martinez in the 34th minute.
Martinez managed to dribble through or fake out five Charlotte players on the way to a point-blank shot from the center of the box. When asked what defender was responsible for that error, Smith scowled: “You can take your pick. I mean, he went past a few people, didn’t he?”
Ashley Westwood, Charlotte FC’s captain, agreed that the team’s mistake-filled early play “cost us the game, simple as that.”
Added Westwood: “Giving the ball away cheaply — if you’re doing that in the playoffs, you get beat. And we deserved to get beat.”
The second half was somewhat better, but Charlotte never created the great chance at a goal it needed.
So now what? Charlotte FC’s best season is in serious danger of ending with a “whimper,” to use Smith’s word. The Crown will travel to Yankee Stadium to play Game 2 on Saturday on a modified baseball field that is tighter than the average pitch.
NYCFC now has home-field advantage itself and can finish Charlotte off Saturday.
But Charlotte will make the road trip with star winger Wilfried Zaha (who got a red card in the final seconds of the previous game and missed this one, watching it from a stadium suite). Zaha’s presence will help considerably, but still won’t be enough if Charlotte FC doesn’t play any better.
If it does, the Crown will return to Bank of America Stadium once more, on Nov. 7, for a winner-take-all first-round game.
As for the happy NYCFC team, Smith said: “They probably think it’s over. And I hope they do. The beauty or the madness of having a three-game series is that you’ve still got a chance to bring it back here.”
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This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
