How NYCFC is approaching season-opening match vs. AD San Carlos in CONCACAF Champions League

New York City FC keeper Sean Johnson has played 100 competitive matches for the club since joining in 2017, appearing in the MLS regular season, MLS Cup playoffs and the U.S. Open Cup.

Match No. 101 will be a different animal.

After years of watching the CONCACAF Champions League from afar, Johnson and NYCFC are as ready as they can be for their first taste of continental competition. City faces Costa Rican champion AD San Carlos on Thursday in the first of two legs in the Round of 16, opening the club’s sixth season of play with one of its most important matches yet.

“I've kept a close eye on Champions League over the years. It's been an exciting competition for most clubs that have been involved,” said Johnson.

The CONCACAF Champions League is a 16-team knockout tournament contested by clubs from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Nine North American teams qualified by finishing at or near the top of their domestic leagues, or by winning a domestic cup competition, while the top teams from Central American and the Caribbean competed against each other for the remaining seven slots.

A first-place finish in the Eastern Conference last season earned NYCFC a berth in the competition, and a successful run could bring the club its first major trophy. Doing so, however, would take reversing more than two decades of American and Canadian misfortune. While teams competing from Mexico, Central American and the Caribbean currently are in the middle of their league seasons, the MLS regular season is still a few weeks away, making the early knockout rounds the first competitive matches of the year for MLS clubs after an abridged preseason.

No MLS club has ever won CONCACAF’s premier club competition, and just four have reached a final.

“Now with our club being involved in Champions League, I think what's important is you don't look too much to trends and what past trends have been,” Johnson said. “I think the road ahead for us is going to be unique. It's going to be something that we have to navigate as a group.”

Despite the offseason departures of head coach Domènec Torrent and sporting director Claudio Reyna, NYCFC’s season begins with much of the same group that finished atop the East last year, and new coach Ronny Deila expects to employ a similar system of ball control and build-up play used by his predecessor.

Deila believes he can deliver NYCFC its first trophy, and he’d start his tenure right with a signature win at San Carlos. But the Norwegian is just as focused on building for the rest of the season as he is on getting a result in one of the club’s biggest matches to date.

“I don't think you can think like that,” Deila said. “You have to think that you have to make a good performance. We have to give all the information that players need to know what San Carlos is. And then at the same time, we have to work with the things that we are doing because we need to have consistency in what we are doing. So, our pattern how we want to play has to shine through when we're playing. And if we do that good enough, we will win football games.”

In watching San Carlos, who sits at sixth in the Costa Rican league’s second-half table, Deila said he saw a team that likes to play direct and is strong on set pieces.

“We have to handle the space behind the defense and also the second balls, make sure that we are in good balance in the center of the pitch and of course, I see also the advantage that they have played a lot of games in the last three weeks,” Deila said. “Having said that, we see also things that we can take advantage of and things that we can exploit so we can win the game.”

Deila said NYCFC must remember that a strong performance Thursday won’t be enough to advance as City still must host the return leg next week, albeit at Red Bull Arena in New Jersey. While Deila stressed there will be more work to be done, he also doesn’t want his team sitting deep and simply waiting for the clock to hit 90 minutes on Thursday.

“I think this team is very into pressing. they are used to pressing, so I think to change everything and sit back will be too much of a change for them. So we have to be good in varying the pressure,” Deila said. “When we have the opportunity to press high, we have to do that and also when we can't do it we need to get lower and be compact and stay together, because if we start pressing all over the pitch in that heat, we are more vulnerable to get played through us and they'll open us up.”

Sticking to what they’ve done in the past will be just fine for Johnson, who believes the club’s continuity from last season is among its biggest strengths in this competition.

Said Johnson: “Understanding each other, having those relationships that we've kind of developed over the past 12 months, 13 months now with preseason, those are going to help us going forward in terms of sticking together in moments and understanding how we all respond to different situations.”