Gary Smith fired as Nashville SC coach after six-plus seasons

Gary Smith, the only coach in Nashville SC history, has been fired after the club's worst-ever start in Major League Soccer, the team announced Thursday.

The announcement comes a day after Nashville (3-4-5, 14 points, T-9th Eastern Conference) beat Toronto FC 2-0 at Geodis Park.

Current Player Development Coach Rumba Munthali will take over as interim coach while the club searches for a permanent replacement. Munthali, 45, joined NSC last season after seven years at Sporting Kansas City.

Assistant coach Steve Guppy, a longtime colleague of Smith's dating back to the pair's days with the Colorado Rapids, will depart Nashville as well.

Smith led Nashville to the playoffs in each of its first four MLS seasons, but a run of bad form dating to August 2023 proved too much to overcome. The team has won just five of its past 27 games against MLS opposition. While the win over Toronto was NSC's second win in three games, the club preceded that stretch with a five-match winless streak in which it fell to second-to-last in the Eastern Conference.

An MLS Cup champion with the Rapids in 2010, Smith was hired ahead of Nashville's first season as a United Soccer League franchise in 2018 and brought the club to immediate relevance. In 2019, it finished third in the 18-team USL Championship. In 2020, it joined MLS and reached the Eastern Conference semifinals that season after earning the conference's seventh seed.

Under Smith, Nashville became just the fourth MLS expansion team to make the playoffs in each of its first four seasons and was one of four teams to reach the playoffs every season from 2020 to 2023. The club had only one season with more losses than wins (2018) and had a positive goal differential in every season.

But Smith could never get Nashville to take the next step to become one of MLS' elite. After a seventh-place finish in the Supporters' Shield standings and a second straight conference semifinal appearance in 2021, NSC slipped to 10th in 2022 and 12th in 2023, failing to win a playoff game in either season.

Last season, Nashville's organized, defensive playing style failed to make up for an attack that scored just 39 goals in the regular season, ranking 22nd in the league. NSC was shut out in eight of its final 12 matches, including a pair of 1-0 defeats to Orlando City in the first round of the playoffs.

There was one bright spot in 2023. Nashville came inches away from lifting its first-ever trophy, winning four straight games to reach the Leagues Cup final, where it lost on penalties to Lionel Messi's Inter Miami. Smith and his team hoped to find that form again in 2024, counting on a veteran roster led by 2022 MLS MVP Hany Mukhtar and United States international Walker Zimmerman to do so.

Instead, the bottom fell out. Nashville started solidly enough while dealing with a brutally condensed schedule, going unbeaten through four MLS games and reaching the round of 16 in its first-ever CONCACAF Champions Cup. That was before injuries started to take their toll and opponents began to pick apart Nashville's once-stout defense, while the attack remained more or less the same unit that was overly reliant on Mukhtar.

MORE: How a packed, unforgiving schedule has led to Nashville SC's worst MLS start since 2020

Nashville lost 5-0 at Los Angeles FC in a club-record defeat on March 23. It has coughed up three leads after 75 minutes, and allowed a game-winning goal in the 90th minute against the Philadelphia Union. It could only manage a draw against the San Jose Earthquakes, who had lost eight of their first nine games, on April 27.

Even Smith's final victory was an arduous process, as NSC needed until the 81st minute to score against a compact Toronto side which was without its coach, John Herdman, and several starters due to suspension.

Smith leaves with a 100-66-73 record going back to 2018. NSC went 49-36-52 under Smith in MLS regular-season play and won 39% of its games across all competitions as a top-division team.

Jacob Shames can be reached by email at jshames@gannett.com and on Twitter @Jacob_Shames.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Gary Smith fired as Nashville SC coach