Colombo Crew stand out Darlington Nagbe is one of 10 players in Major League Soccer history to win at least four league titles.
But he couldn’t sleep without hearing a wise joke from his wife, Felicia, about the ultimate sacrifice he and his teammates made to prepare for another title chase this weekend.
Crew players have been training at altitudewhich includes sleeping wearing a contraption on their upper body, to help them adjust to the almost 2,500 meter altitude they will play at when they face Pachuca at the Estadio Hidalgo in Mexico during the Concacaf Champions Cup final in the Saturday night.
“She just thinks it’s funny. She scoffs at this. We’ve been together a long time, so she’s seen everything I have to do to try to win a football game,” Nagbe told USA TODAY Sports about her experience. “She says she will burn it and throw it away. I told her it’s here to stay forever. So we just joke about stuff like that. I can’t let her win, so I have to answer something.”
The Crew has a chance to be recognized as the best soccer team in North America and earn a spot to compete for the best team in the world at the FIFA Club World Cup 2025.
They enter as +400 underdogs away from home, with draw odds of +310, while Pachuca are -165 favorites at home, according to BETMGM.
The lack of oxygen at high altitudes above sea level will certainly play a factor in the current MLS champions competing in Saturday’s final.
COLUMBUS BEING BORN: From ‘Save the Crew’ to MLS Powerhouse and Champions Cup Final
“Perceived effort is perhaps the most brutal of all. It seems a lot more challenging,” Hypoxico CEO Brian Oestrike said Thursday before driving a 16-foot U-Haul truck packed with the training equipment Columbus used back to the company’s Hudson Valley headquarters, New York.
“So you get out of breath faster and your body simply can’t transport oxygen as efficiently, which leads to increased lactic acid and, at the cellular level, it’s also debilitating. No matter how acclimatized you are, you will still be limited in altitude. It only helps if you are more acclimatized, the effects of this are smaller.”
The crew players – in addition to sleeping inside Hypoxico’s bivy or in tents around their beds – also took 30-minute exercise bike rides while wearing oxygen masks attached to altitude training machines to increase their endurance.
Sports science and medicine team leader Chris Shenberger suggested the regime, which lasted around two weeks, and put it into practice three weeks ago when the club qualified for the European Cup final.
“We’ve done a number of things over the last few weeks to try to help guys prepare and put them in what we think is the best position to get there and be successful,” Shenberger said.
“We understand and know that the game will be won between the lines if we play well and execute our game plan. But if we can make adjustments here that help us better prepare for that, that’s what we want to do.”
Oestrike said there have been at least six other instances where teams have used their equipment before a big game. Here are the results:
-
The U.S. Men’s National Team faced Mexico in the 2017 and 2022 World Cup qualifiers at Azteca Stadium, some 7,000 feet above sea level. They played to 1-1 and 0-0 draws.
-
The NFL’s Raiders, before leaving Oakland for Las Vegas, played two games at Estadio Azteca – winning 27-20 against the Houston Texans in 2016, but losing 33-8 to Tom Brady and the eventual Super Bowl champion , New England Patriots, in 2017.
-
MLS club Toronto FC drew 1-1 against Club America at the Estadio Azteca in 2018, winning 4-2 on aggregate to reach the Concacaf Champions League final.
-
Sporting Kansas City beat Deportivo Toluca FC 2-0 in 2019 and became the first MLS club in Concacaf Champions League history to beat a Mexican club in a two-legged series when the second match was played at Mexico.
So there is a chance for the Columbus Crew.
“I think they did a great job of reducing all of this exposure in a short amount of time,” Oestrike said.
The Crew have already defeated Mexican teams Tigres UANL and Monterrey at relatively lower altitudes in Mexico during their run to the Champions Cup final.
They hope their altitude training can help them navigate the elements to win another major championship.
“We try to maximize everything in terms of the tools we have. The idea is not to scare them. The idea is to give them confidence in the tools and in adapting,” said Crew coach Wilfried Nancy. “Ultimately, it will be how we play on the field.”
This article originally appeared in USA TODAY: Columbus Crew face high-altitude Pachuca in Concacaf Champions Cup
