The Opposition Report II — MD30 vs Union Omaha
Fort Wayne Football Club travels to Morrison Stadium for its third meeting with Union Omaha this season, facing a league leader that has not lost a league match at home since July 2025. Omaha will want every point in a one-point race for the Players’ Shield.
Saturday, October 10 | 5:00 PM ET | Morrison Stadium, Omaha, NE | ESPN+
Prior Proceedings
All-Time vs Union Omaha (W-L-D): 0-2-0
The Opposition Report
MD18 Recap & Analysis
Fort Wayne FC has played Union Omaha twice this season and lost both. The first came in the USL Cup on June 6 at Morrison Stadium, where Mike Avery made eight changes and the reserves went into halftime level at 2-2 on Daniel Oyetunde’s first professional goal in the 41st min. and a Ryan Becher strike in first-half stoppage time. Kempes Tekiela came off the Omaha bench and scored twice, in the 66th and 85th min., to settle it 4-2. The league meeting on August 1 at Ruoff Mortgage Stadium was 0-0 at the break in the rain. Omaha attacker Allen Gavilanes scored in the 61st min., winger Sergio Ors Navarro, Omaha’s leading scorer, added a second in the 74th, and Fort Wayne’s Michael Rempel was sent off in the 88th. Across both matches, Omaha has won the second half 4-0.
Omaha has only gotten stronger since. The Owls sit first in USL League One at 19-6-4 (W-L-D), one point clear of Charlotte Independence with three matches to play, and they have won five straight. Their last match was a 3-1 win at Greenville on September 26, so they arrive on two weeks of rest. We arrive on our third match in eight days. A win against us would also give Omaha a 20th league win, a single-season record for USL League One.
The Matchup III
This is starting to look like the Rocky series. Saturday is our third meeting with Union Omaha, and our second trip to their place. And it’s an underdog story. Nobody has beaten the Owls at their place all season in USL League One play, and that unbeaten stretch goes back into 2025. When the Owls lose, they lose away and there’s an interesting pattern on those matches.
They almost never score.
That’s the Fort Wayne FC game plan. Defense wins championships, and whether that’s home or away is irrelevant at this time of the year. Union Omaha loves to score, and they currently have a home scoring streak in league play that goes back to 2024. Omaha creates more big chances than anyone in the league and misses more of them too.
The danger comes from the wide areas. Ors Navarro, Diego Gutiérrez and Gavilanes all play off the flanks, and fullbacks Younes Boudadi and Sami Guediri overlap behind them. Boudadi has created more big chances than anyone on the roster, which is how he set up the opener at Ruoff. Omaha also keeps the ball as well as anyone in the league. We should expect long spells without it.
I would break out the back three. A 5-3-2 out of possession puts a body on every Omaha runner in the wide channels, and it is the shape we opened the season in. The concern is the wing-backs. They carry the heaviest running load on the pitch, and ours will be doing it on short rest against a team that has won the second half in both meetings. If the shape holds into the final half hour, the bench decides the rest. I’m not sure Avery and the coaching staff are going to mess with the formation we’ve been playing, but I’d like to see us experiment in this match. Earning a draw is a win, winning would be historic by Omaha’s measures and a loss is expected. We can play with freedom, as long as that freedom starts and ends with airtight defense.
Set pieces are our way onto the scoreboard. We are tied with Forward Madison for the most set-piece goals in the league, and Javier Armas and Tiago Dias both scored that way at Corpus Christi on Wednesday. Omaha, though, concedes fewer than almost anyone from set pieces. A third center back adds another aerial target alongside Dias. Becher, who spent 2025 with Union Omaha and scored against his old club in June, scores when the ball finds him in the box. In a match where we will see little of the ball, the deliveries have to count.
If we want to dream big, Fort Wayne will need to become Omaha’s villain. It starts Saturday.
Always FWD