“I love the ocean,” Jonas Eidevall says, and he references walks along the beach at Del Mar. “People are very relaxed, life is lived at a slower pace here. I’m a very simple person. I like to read a book, go to the gym and spend time with my wife and kids, that’s sort of all I need.”

The former Arsenal head coach is reveling in a calmer world as the head coach of San Diego Wave but it is not merely the beaches that are lowering his stress levels; his team are on a five-game winning streak in the NWSL and sit second in the NWSL, one point off top spot, with two matches to go before the playoffs. Winning feels good and the club are targeting silverware, as he tells the Guardian: “It would mean everything. There are no guarantees in the playoffs, but the exciting part is saying: ‘We can also go all the way’ – that’s a possibility for us and we need to believe.”

Success did not originally look destined, when the Swede took charge 21 months ago, at a time when San Diego Wave were enduring something of an exodus of senior players; the United States defender Abby Dahlkemper’s sale to Bay FC in August 2024 and Alex Morgan’s retirement a month later were followed by the USA forward Jaedyn Shaw’s departing for North Carolina Courage and her international teammate Naomi Girma joining Chelsea in January 2025. A reconstruction was needed.

That is why, on a video call that winter, when Eidevall spoke to his players for the first time after taking charge, he began by quoting a proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. “My ideas are not worth anything if we don’t believe and buy into them altogether,” he says. “We focused everything on just building connections as human beings.” Detailed tactical discussions were initially kept to a minimum. They spent – as he recalls – around four weeks of their six-week pre-season focusing entirely on passing out from the back, to develop their style. Fast forward to the present day and it has paid off, with the Wave defenders Kristen McNabb and Kennedy Wesley being the division’s top two players for passes completed this season. More notable, though, has been the development of young players, such as the 18-year-olds Melanie Barcenas and Kimmi Ascanio.

“From 2024, when the club was not performing well on the pitch and it led to a complete rebuild, we had to find an edge, finding players that could fit into the way we wanted to play,” Eidevall says. “Back then [it] was a bit different to many other teams in the league, because the NWSL was seen as being dominated by athleticism and transitional play, which obviously then requires really fast players and maybe didn’t put a premium on technical supremacy.”

He adds that the club therefore eyed players who are “really, really good technically. We had some young, talented players already – that has given us a really good advantage because we’ve been able to develop players in a salary cap league. That’s huge, because if you only buy readymade players, you will run out of salary cap space pretty quickly.”

It is not just the salary cap that differs in the NWSL, compared to Eidevall’s previous jobs at Arsenal and Rosengård. The broad competitiveness of the American league means that, despite being second in the table, San Diego have lost almost as many games this season as Eidevall’s Arsenal across three English campaigns, and he says: “This was new for me. [In] European leagues the top teams very rarely go two games in a row without winning. Here, even the team that wins the league might go through spells where they don’t pick up points, so the way you handle those moments becomes very important.

“Training [here] is also a challenge – sometimes it’s very hard to get 22 players because you have a limited roster size. The moment you start to have injuries … there’s no real second-team academy system like we have in Europe, where you can always have the numbers that you want. Here you might not, here you would like to do something 11 v 11, but you have 18 players and you just have to be creative with how you coach.”

Trying to play entertaining football has been a target in a campaign during which they have already set new club records for regular-season wins and goals scored. They have done it with the second-highest average possession share in the division, more shots on target than any other team and while facing by far the fewest shots on target.

“That’s the most pleasing part, results through an identity rather than getting results the other way around,” Eidevall says. “The identity we have is to allow the players to be creative.”

We are speaking around two years after Eidevall resigned as Arsenal’s head coach on 15 October 2024, following a disappointing start to that season. In his three full campaigns at the helm in north London he had won two League Cups, reached a Champions League semi-final and secured a second-placed top-flight finish in 2022 – but was unable to win the WSL. Reflecting on what he learned from that spell, he says: “We had a lot of fluidity with how our wide players could play in Arsenal, which at times created too few central options. So, how do we get better central connections? How do we get more players central on the pitch? That was a long-term reflection on my time at Arsenal. And that’s also led to some tactical changes that we’ve done here with San Diego.”

There is an aspect of his Arsenal tenure that he is determined to take inspiration from at San Diego, with his team having secured a home playoff quarter-final at their 35,000-seater Snapdragon Stadium. The 43-year-old fondly remembers the first sellout crowd for a women’s match at Arsenal’s 60,000-seater Emirates Stadium, for their Champions League semi-final against Wolfsburg in 2023: “We want to sell out Snapdragon Stadium and in order to do so we need to do exactly what we were doing at Arsenal – we need to create special experiences at the stadium,” he says. “That is what’s going to draw people into there. Yes, play exciting football, but we also need to play games that mean a lot to be there. The ripple effect of that, that’s so big.”