Days before the Colorado Rapids opened their 2026 season, an executive with the team’s ownership group made headlines by calling the club “embarrassing.” Specifically, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment President of Team and Media Operations Kevin Demoff was talking about the Rapids’ annual revenue ($50 million) and overall valuation ($450 million), both of which are 28th in Major League Soccer (out of 30 teams). Last year, attendance at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park ranked 29th in the league.

The key to reversing those fortunes? Putting a better team on the pitch, Demoff said. Since finishing first in the Western Conference in 2021, Colorado has only made the playoffs once during the past four seasons. They haven’t won a playoff game in a decade.

Demoff’s comment could have unnerved Matt Wells. The Englishman has just been hired away from Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur, where he served as an assistant, to become the Rapids’ head coach. Raised in North London, Wells had moved his family thousands of miles to a city he’d never visited before. Now, he was being told that the future of his new club depended on his ability to right years of disappointment in Commerce City. Oh, and he’d never been a head coach before.

But Wells didn’t flinch. “Responsibility and excitement are the two things that I feel with that,” Wells says of Demoff’s comments. “And I was actually glad Kevin said that. I like honesty.”

He also likes his team to dominate. In pursuit of that goal, Wells put the Rapids through a brutal series of preseason practices. He’s also not afraid to, um, register his displeasure when his players fail to meet his lofty expectations by providing what he calls “clean” feedback. And he’s tough to please.

So far, the results have been mixed. The Rapids lost their season debut against the Seattle Sounders, but rebounded to defeat the Portland Timbers in the club’s home opener last weekend. Ahead of Colorado hosting Los Angeles Galaxy on Saturday, we spoke with the new coach about his philosophy, his ambition, and how he hopes to help the Rapids clean up their act.

Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo courtesy of the Colorado Rapids

5280: To soccer fans, your decision to leave a Premier League club for an MLS team, one that hasn’t had a lot of success, might seem strange. What appealed to you about the job?
Matt Wells: It was the opportunity that I saw here to come and do something exciting, something special, and potentially something unexpected. The predictions came out a couple of days ago from a lot of the media and pundits over here, and I think most of them have tipped us to finish bottom of the division, 14th or 13th. So I think that was a large part of it for me: To come here and do something wholly unexpected and create something special—maybe even a legacy.

What’s your coaching philosophy?
The word I use a lot here is “dominate,” because I want to dominate every single game, every time, every time we step on the pitch. We have to be the dominant force. And obviously, the best method to do that, in my mind, is to have the ball. So every single game, we’re going to try and dominate possession. Obviously, to get the ball back, we have to be an incredible pressing team. My version of control is that we create loads of chances and we concede few. It’s a very, very attacking style of play, but there’s a lot of detail that underpins that. So it takes time to coach.

Is that why you killed your players during the preseason?
You heard the rumors? Yes, it’s a large part of it. For me, that’s the intrinsic link between the physical and the mental. I spoke to the guys early on [and said], “Before we arrive at the tactical side of things, which for want of a better phrase, is going to blow your mind in terms of the amount of stuff I’m going to throw at you, we have to build rock-solid foundations. Because in the difficult moments this season, which will inevitably happen, it will be in those moments we rely on our foundations. How strong are the foundations that we built?”

Last year, the team suffered a lot of goals in the last five minutes of each half, which generally could point toward some issues around fitness and physicality. So that was something I wanted to address. But I would do that anyway, because mentally, I felt the guys didn’t see themselves in the way that I see them. We have big players here. I believe we’re capable of playing in the identity of a big team that always dominates games. But my initial interactions with the players, I didn’t really sense they felt that. They were a lot more reactive in their approach to games. So the hard work’s definitely been about improving the physical side, but also about smashing their barriers and making them see that, actually, you think this is the limit. Actually, it’s all the way up here.

Some players on the team have received a lot of attention, most notably forward Paxten Aaronson, who the Rapids acquired for a club-record fee of up to $8.5 million in August 2025. But who else are you excited for?
Jackson Travis is a very young left back. I’ve put a lot of demands on him through preseason—I have with all of the guys, but he’s one who’s really stood up. I like players who can take criticism. I’m very direct with the guys, for good and for bad, and I like the way he takes, let’s say, “clean” feedback, and he tries to put it into practice. So he’s made a good impression. I think a guy like Lucas Herrington should be on everyone’s radar. He’s still 18 years old, a center back who played the other night against Orlando like he was 28.

I’m trying to think of the guys who wouldn’t be as well-known or as well talked about…. Wayne Frederick, a young midfielder, had a really good preseason. Before I even came out to Denver, I had individual meetings with every single player online, and I sort of spelled out exactly how I see a central midfielder in my system. And I really liked his determination and his ambition in that meeting. I told him, “Well, if you’re half as good on the pitch as you are at talking on camera, then we’ll be in a good spot.”

Photo courtesy of the Colorado Rapids

Does “clean” feedback mean ripping into somebody?
I’ll leave that up to your translation. I said to the guys in the first meeting, “I think I know myself pretty well. I’m definitely not for everyone, and there’ll be some of you that will be absolutely sick of me, I’m sure, and will realize perhaps this isn’t the environment that you want.” But I think the guys who are really ambitious want to be pushed, want to be stretched, want to be shown a different version of themselves. I think those are the guys that will thrive long term here.

We didn’t make the playoffs last year. So when you go from that to the journey I want to take us on, realistically we’d be naïve if we think we can do it with the same group of players. There has to be, over time, players moved on and players brought in that fit the bill and fit my way of playing a little bit better. So they’re all decisions that I have to make over the coming months. We’ll use the next [transfer] windows to truly shape the team into the image that I want. But I’m very, very impressed with what we’ve got here in the building.

At your introductory news conference, Kevin Demoff mentioned that the club is considering a rebrand. Have you provided any input about that?
No, I think I’m part of the rebrand in the sense they appointed me. I don’t know the popularity of the ownership and the guys at the front office. It’s hard for me to get a grasp of that, but what I do know through my conversations with them is they’re desperate to succeed, and they’re desperate to put something on the pitch that is bigger than just Colorado. They want buzz around this organization that spreads across the whole country. The good news for them is I want that. I want a buzz that spreads also to London, to different countries. If there’s a coach in Germany who wants to use the best practice at pressing, I want him to use some Colorado Rapids clip.

That’s ambitious.
That’s why we get out of bed in the morning. I have a young daughter. I have a wife who, of course, I’m very close to, and that’s why I left them for six weeks and came to America and convinced her to move countries and live here with me. It’s to do something special, not to do something average.