Portland Thorns hire ex-Tottenham manager Robert Vilahamn to usher in ‘new era’

The Portland Thorns are on the cusp of a new era, and after an extended search, former Tottenham Hotspur Women manager Robert Vilahamn will be the head coach to lead them into it.

The 43-year-old Swede fills the final vacant head coaching position left in the 16-team National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) with less than two weeks until the start of the 2026 season.

“It’s Portland, it is one of those clubs you look at and say, ‘Wow,’” Vilahamn told The Athletic on a video call. “They have come so far in the women’s game, and now, I’m actually going to be a part of them. It feels amazing.”

Team president of soccer operations and general manager Jeff Agoos led an extensive global search and lengthy hiring process that started in December 2025 and took almost the entire offseason to be completed while Sarah Lowdon led the team in preseason on an interim basis. Lowdon will stay on with the team.

“We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 candidates initially,” Agoos told The Athletic. “I think we got down to about five or six candidates at the beginning of January, and obviously, with the holidays, made it a little bit more complex and trying to manage the process.”

The Thorns are trailblazers in American and global women’s soccer. Long before Arsenal, Angel City FC and Tigres UANL were filling stadiums, Portland was packing Providence Park. Supporters group The Rose City Riveters are revered around the world for their effervescent support, tifos and loyalty in the stadium’s North End.

On the pitch, the Thorns have a similar legacy. With three Championships (2013, 2017 and 2022), no team has won the NWSL more times than Portland. Consistently at the top of the standings since the league began in 2013, the Thorns have missed the playoffs just once (2015).

This is a large part of why the Thorns were so alluring to Vilahamn.

“I wanted to make sure I could find a team that I could compete with and push for the titles,” he said. “I want to be in a team where we can play a certain style and entertain fans. I got probably the best team with the biggest fan base.”

Now, the pressure is on Vilahamn to uphold the standard at the historic club and win trophies, something he has never done before in his career.

With BK Häcken in his native Sweden, from 2022-2023, Vilahamn had two consecutive second-place finishes in the Damallsvenskan and two defeats in the Swedish Cup final.

After that he managed two seasons with Tottenham in the English Women’s Super League. First, he took the London club to sixth in the standings and their first FA Cup final, where they lost to Manchester United. In his second season, the team sunk to 11th, one place above the relegation zone, and finished on a 10-match winless streak.

While out to dinner with his wife in June 2025, Vilahamn learned of his sacking in the English media before he had been informed by Spurs. Even so, his love of soccer has not wilted. Humble and understanding, Vilahamn knows that highs and lows are part of the game.

Over the last eight months, he has been reflecting on what went wrong during the end of this time at Spurs, as well as what the status of his stubborn soccer philosophy and game model are.

“You learn a lot when you’re winning … but you learn even more sometimes when you start losing. We went too much on the identity of playing. And we kind of didn’t know, how do you actually score goals,” said Vilahamn of his time with Spurs.

“You can play a certain style, but if you don’t win games as well, you’re not going to entertain the fans, the board and everybody. You need to find ways to win as well.”

The Thorns have been without a head coach since dismissing Rob Gale in November, after the conclusion of the 2025 NWSL season. Portland finished third in the standings and were eliminated in the semifinals of the playoffs by the Washington Spirit.

Results under Gale, even with an extensive injury list and star player Sophia Wilson on maternity leave, were not the reason for his dismissal. For a team with ambitions as lofty as the Thorns, it was about evolving.

“It’s about moving into a new phase, a new era,” said Agoos. “We really did feel like we got as much out of Rob Gale as we possibly could. I think he did a fantastic job here, but we knew that we wanted to shift into a different era, a different element of what we wanted to be as an organization.

“We knew that the game was changing, and we wanted to be ahead of it, and so we made a very difficult decision. But we felt it was right for the organization, and definitely wanted to move into less of a transitional game and more into a transformational game, more aligned with what the rest of the world is moving into and where the NWSL will be going.”

Agoos and the team’s owners, the Bhathal family, were not concerned about their coaching search taking longer than expected or going right up until the start of the new season. After consecutive internal hires in 2023 (Mike Norris) and 2024 (Gale), this hire had to be perfect. No stone could be left unturned.

“We wanted to make sure we got it right, rather than get it quick. And we felt like we wanted to make sure the process was thorough and deliberate,” Agoos added.

The first time Vilahamn set foot in Portland was for a week of in-person interviews and meetings in February. At that point, he was still auditioning for the role.

“The in-person interview was part of the process. It wasn’t the confirmation. Once Robert got back, we continued to have internal discussions,” said Agoos.

When Vilahamn boarded his flight back to Sweden, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever see Portland again. But there was a feeling in his gut that this was it. This was his new team. This is where he wanted to be.

“The best feeling is when you go with your gut,” said Vilahamn. “I really enjoyed the environment, I really enjoyed the people. I really had a feeling in my body.”

Vilahamn is the first head coach hired under Agoos, who was appointed in January 2025. It is also the first time the Thorns have held a coaching search under the Bhathal family, who acquired the team in January 2024. Gale was promoted from assistant coach during the 2024 season.

Vilahamn says he has watched and analyzed every Thorns match from the 2025 season. In addition, he has been studying the NWSL’s top teams and the nuances of how they are successful.

“There’s no league like the NWSL, and you need to understand that you cannot dominate each game with possession or press high the whole time. So you will see a team that can dictate games, but you will also see a team that can dictate each phase of the game.”

In the end, what Agoos says won Vilahamn the job was his commitment to attacking and attractive soccer, his global perspective and his ability to develop young players.

However, there is a curious tension at play with this hire. Agoos acknowledged the Thorns are in the second year of a 10-year strategic plan, and yet, the team is expected to go out and compete for trophies now.

Similarly, Agoos believes the NWSL is going to follow Europe into having more technical and control-based teams leading the way. But Vilahamn, at least in the short term, must quickly learn to mix his global experience and process-driven soccer philosophy with the directness and relentlessness of the NWSL.

“This league is going to be changing over the course of the next couple of years. You’re seeing this with our national women’s team,” said Agoos. “The league is going to change, the tactical identity, the technical identity is going to change. And having a real global perspective and fresh ideas was something that Robert brought with him in spades.”

Whatever evolution occurs, Agoos believes that Vilahamn is the right person to take the Thorns towards their ultimate goal: “to be the number one women’s soccer club in the world.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Portland Thorns, NWSL, Women's Soccer

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