Minnesota United Come From 2-0 Down to Beat St. Louis CITY 3-2 and End a 19-Match Unbeaten Run

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA · SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2026

For ten minutes at Allianz Field on Saturday, this looked like a coronation being rudely interrupted by nobody at all. St. Louis CITY, the hottest team in Major League Soccer, led 2-0, were unbeaten in 19 league matches and 21 in all competitions, and were four-fifths of the way to owning a single-season record outright. By full time they had lost 3-2, the record had slipped through their fingers at the last step, and Minnesota United — a team that had not won a regular-season home game in 182 days — were listening to the Wonderwall sing again. The Associated Press report, carried by Sportsnet, put the ending plainly: Marcus Caldeira scored in the 86th minute and Minnesota ended St. Louis City's 19-match unbeaten streak with a 3-2 victory. Everything in between those two sentences was chaos of the best kind.

Start with the start, because St. Louis's opening was as good as anything their streak had produced. In the fourth minute Simon Becher ran through the centre and shot; Drake Callender deflected the effort and Rafael Navarro, alive to the rebound, slammed it in from the left for his eighth goal since joining CITY from the Colorado Rapids. Minnesota United's own match report tells the second goal with a wince: six minutes later Navarro sprinted down the left, Cherrion Valerius's attempted slide failed to stop him, and the cross found former Loon Jeong Sang-bin, who swept the ball into the bottom right corner to double the lead — and, being classy about it, did not celebrate against his old club. Two goals in ten minutes, from a side that had gone 13-0-6 across its streak, against a side on an eight-match winless run. The afternoon had a script, and everyone in the building could read it.

The Loons refuse the script

What saved Minnesota was that they kept creating the chances the script said should not matter. In the 14th minute Kelvin Yeboah's shot was brushed by Roman Bürki's fingertips onto the crossbar. Two minutes later a Jefferson Diaz run set up Bongokuhle Hlongwane, whose deflected effort he then chased down himself before Becher blocked at the last moment. The game turned physical — Aziel Jackson was booked in the 24th minute, Miguel Perez two minutes after him — and in the final minute of the half a Valerius long throw bounced around the St. Louis box with four different Loons trying to force it home before Bürki held the ball right on the line. Minnesota went in 2-0 down, but they went in believing, and belief is a dangerous thing to let a home crowd carry into a second half.

Three goals, one comeback

The comeback took four minutes to start. In the 49th minute Yeboah drove down the right, beat Fallou Fall and crossed low for Jackson, who slammed the ball past Bürki in close quarters for his first goal of the season — the Associated Press noted he did it with assists from Yeboah and Hlongwane, and Minnesota United's report noted the horns that greeted it. From there the pressure became relentless: a trio of corners around the hour, all delivered by Jackson, produced scramble after scramble in the CITY box. The equaliser arrived in the 68th minute and it belonged to the man who has carried this team's attack all season. Mauricio Gonzalez outmanoeuvred two defenders in the left corner and found Yeboah unmarked in the box; Yeboah took an extra touch, stayed cold-blooded, and finished for his club-record 17th goal of the season — the Associated Press adds that he has now contributed to a goal in ten straight matches, a streak inside the streak this game was busy ending.

St. Louis nearly reasserted themselves at exactly the wrong moment for Minnesota. Caldeira, sent on for Gonzalez in the 70th minute, immediately forced a save from Bürki, and Jackson forced the goalkeeper's fifth save of the match in the 75th — and at the other end, in the same minute, Callender produced a double save, denying Navarro and then Mykhi Joyner in close quarters to keep the game level. The Associated Press counted four saves for Callender and six for Bürki by the end, and those two minutes were why the Minnesota ones mattered more. Then, in the 86th minute, Joaquin Pereyra — the club's assists leader, on as a substitute and working back to full fitness — turned a St. Louis attack into a counter, sending a long pass upfield for Caldeira to chase. The substitute outran Daniel Edelman and three other converging defenders, shot from just inside the box, and scored his seventh goal in his first 12 league appearances. Then he jumped into the Wonderwall, and an Allianz Field that had waited 182 days for a regular-season win absolutely exploded — Minnesota United's own words, and for once a club report underselling nothing.

What the ending means

The five minutes of stoppage time were a siege survived. An altercation brought a yellow card for Diaz, Rafael Santos bent a free kick that Callender rose to save, St. Louis loaded set piece after set piece into the box, and Minnesota still found a moment of ceremony inside the defending: captain Michael Boxall came on to finish the game, making his 500th appearance for club and country. When the whistle went, Wonderwall played over a 3-2 scoreline, and the two streaks that had framed the afternoon had traded places in the record the Associated Press laid out — St. Louis, 14-6-10, settling for a share of the 2004 Columbus Crew's 19-match single-season unbeaten record instead of owning it, their first loss since Austin beat them 2-0 on May 3; Minnesota, 8-12-10, finally winners again, and winners against the one team nobody had beaten in five months.

There is a steep hill still in front of the Loons — their own report concedes the playoff climb remains a hard one, with a trip to Houston next Saturday — and St. Louis, who head to Real Salt Lake next Saturday, remain the side everyone else has to catch. A single afternoon does not reorder a season. But it does reprice belief. A team that can be 2-0 down in ten minutes to the league's form side and still find three second-half goals from three different scorers, with its goalkeeper saving the lead it had just been handed, is not a team the rest of the league will enjoy visiting. St. Louis came to St. Paul to make history. They watched it get made at their expense instead.