A 1-1 in Columbus Left Both Clubs Near Bottom

Oluwaseun Adewumi poked in an 88th-minute equalizer as Columbus Crew and Burnley FC played to a 1-1 draw on July 12. Daniel Gazdag had put the Crew in front three minutes after halftime at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field.

The friendly was meant to shake rust off a Crew side sitting 10th in the East and to give a newly relegated Championship club minutes in Ohio heat. Two months on, Columbus is 13th with 23 points and Burnley is 23rd with 3 points and no league win.

Gazdag Scored, Then Adewumi Answered Late

The Crew had not played a full match in front of fans since a 2-0 win over Atlanta United on May 24, a seven-week gap that left the first half stuck at 0-0. Hugo Picard found Gazdag at the start of the second half, and the Hungarian midfielder slotted past Connor Edwards, the young goalkeeper Burnley had introduced for the restart, in the 48th minute.

At that point Gazdag had one MLS goal on the season, and he talked afterward as if the ball and the young players around him had finally settled.

To be honest, I think we played better than them before. You could see that we have the ball more and I think everyone feels a little bit more comfortable on the field. Even the young guys, you see them coming in and sometimes, I feel like they already know what they have to do.

Daniel Gazdag, Columbus Crew midfielder, after the July 12 friendly

Patrick Schulte started in goal and gave way at the break to Nicholas Hagen. Burnley, ragged after the restart, still found a reply three minutes from time when Adewumi, on as a substitute, poked the ball in at the back post after a defensive mix-up. Columbus almost won it in the second of four added minutes, but Edwards pushed a shot away with a strong hand down to his right.

The visitors had already used a full first-half side of Max Weiss, Oliver Sonne, Joe Worrall, Bashir Humphreys, Lucas Pires, Josh Laurent, Aaron Ramsey, Michael Edwards, Jacob Bruun Larsen, Armando Broja and Michael Obafemi. Worrall, Humphreys, Pires and Bruun Larsen stayed on into the second half while the rest of the XI flipped, a split that made the late equalizer look more like a salvage job than a statement.

Three MLS Stops and Zero Wins

Columbus was the middle night of a three-stop US pre-season, and it was the only one Burnley did not lose. Two days earlier, under interim coach Mike Jackson, the Clarets took a 3-1 defeat to FC Cincinnati at TQL Stadium in their first friendly of the US tour.

Kévin Denkey scored in the 16th minute and Laurent answered in the 29th, then Jackson made 10 changes at the break and left Weiss, Worrall and Sonne as the only senior players beside eight U21s. Ayoub Jabbari headed Cincinnati back in front in the 74th minute, and Kristian Fletcher converted a stoppage-time penalty after Worrall’s late challenge. New head coach Nicky Hayen, whose move from KRC Genk was announced hours before kickoff, watched from the stands.

BURNLEY’S THREE MLS FRIENDLIES

Hayen took the dugout for the first time three nights later in Utah and walked into a 4-1 at America First Field in front of 16,776. Rafael Cabral saved Broja’s sixth-minute penalty, Sergi Solans scored in first-half stoppage time and again in the 73rd, Zavier Gozo volleyed in the 62nd, and Diego Luna converted in the 83rd after Florentino’s 55th-minute volley had briefly made it 1-1.

Across the three MLS games Burnley scored 3 and conceded 8. They went home and lost 2-1 at Ajax on July 26. The Ohio week did not prove that a Championship squad bosses MLS friendlies. It proved the opposite, and the only thing Burnley took from Columbus was Adewumi’s late poke at the back post.

Columbus Slid From the Playoff Cut to 13th

When the Clarets came to town, Columbus sat 10th in the Eastern Conference, just outside the places that lead straight into the postseason. The club had won its last two matches before the World Cup break, including that 2-0 against Atlanta, and treated the friendly as a way to keep a playoff push intact. The East now sends the top seven straight into round one and the eighth and ninth clubs into a wild-card game.

COLUMBUS AFTER 24 MLS GAMES

• Table place: 13th in the Eastern Conference, with only Atlanta United and CF Montréal below.
• Record: 6 wins, 5 draws, 13 losses, 35 goals scored and 41 conceded.
• Points: 23 points, six behind ninth-place New York City FC on 29.
• Latest result: a 2-1 loss at D.C. United on Sept. 9, on two goals from Tai Baribo.

A 3-0 home win over the Colorado Rapids on Sept. 5, with Santiago Rodríguez in the 22nd minute, Gonzalo Tapia in the 81st and Taha Habroune in stoppage time, had snapped a four-match losing run. Rodríguez was debuting after arriving from Brazil, and Tapia was in his second game. Captain Sean Zawadzki asked how the group could build off that night heading to Washington, and D.C. answered by taking all three points.

Wessam Abou Ali, a designated player, remains on the season-ending injury list after tearing an ACL. Diego Rossi, Max Arfsten and Hugo Picard, who assisted Gazdag against Burnley, were all moved on during the summer window. The 1-1 did not carry winning form into the second half of the MLS calendar. It sat in a gap, and the table on the other side of that gap is worse than the one the Crew left in May.

Hayen Still Waits for a Championship Win

Burnley were relegated from the Premier League in 2025-26 with a 4-10-24 record, 22 points and a 19th-place finish, per FBref’s season log, and they opened the new Championship campaign with the same habit of failing to close games. After six league matches they sit 23rd, one place off the bottom, with an 0-3-3 record, a minus-6 goal difference and 3 points.

BURNLEY’S FIRST SIX LEAGUE GAMES

• Aug. 16: Burnley 2-2 West Ham United.
• Aug. 23: West Bromwich Albion 3-1 Burnley.
• Aug. 29: Norwich City 4-1 Burnley.
• Sept. 2: Burnley 1-1 Middlesbrough.
• Sept. 5: Burnley 1-2 Bristol City.
• Sept. 8: Wrexham 1-1 Burnley.

Three draws and three losses is a long way from the promotion brief that was attached to the US trip. Hayen’s first weeks have looked like the friendlies: minutes in the legs, late lapses, and no win to show for the travel. Utah was on the itinerary in part because of old club ties, with Real Salt Lake founder David W. Checketts on the Burnley board and chairman Alan Pace a former RSL president, but the 4-1 there set the tone more honestly than the 1-1 in Columbus did.

Gazdag’s Friendly Goal Became a Buyout

The man who scored Columbus’s only goal against Burnley is already gone. On Aug. 28 the Crew mutually agreed to terminate his contract and exercise a buyout of the guaranteed deal, freeing a designated player slot. Gazdag had joined from the Philadelphia Union on April 11, 2025, and finished with seven goals and five assists in 43 regular-season games over two seasons.

The New England Revolution announced his signing on Sept. 1, on a deal running through December 2027. He had not started Columbus’s previous three matches before the buyout, and the Crew used the open DP spot on Rodríguez. On the same deadline window, MLS insider Tom Bogert said Columbus also took Morocco international Anass Zaroury on loan from Panathinaikos, a 25-year-old winger with four caps who had already featured for Burnley.

That loan closed a strange circle, a Crew side that could only hold Burnley to a 1-1 draw later adding a Claret alumnus while shipping out the midfielder who had actually scored. Replies to the Zaroury news went straight to the back line. The club still needed defenders, and the window still looked like a pile of parts rather than a plan, which is a fair reading of a team that let Adewumi walk in at the back post in July and then spent August buying out its goalscorer.

Split Squads Told More Than the Score

Friendly lineups are a poor scout of league form, and both staffs treated July 12 that way. Burnley changed almost an entire XI at the break, as they had in Cincinnati, and Columbus swapped keepers and introduced new pieces for the second half. The 1-1 was always going to be a minutes dump first and a result second. What it still showed, because the substitutions made it obvious, was which ideas each club could not protect for 90 minutes.

Columbus had more of the ball, as Gazdag said, and still gave up a late goal from a mix-up. Burnley looked ragged right after the restart and still found one set of fresh legs at the back post. Those are the same patterns that have followed both clubs into September: control without a clean sheet in Columbus, and a Championship side that can nick a goal without winning the night.

The World Cup break also left holes the friendly could not paper over. Abou Ali’s ACL ended his year. Several of Hayen’s internationals were away when the tour began. A 4 p.m. kickoff in Ohio sun, which Schulte later described as 90-degree heat, was never going to look like April form, and neither table has rewarded anyone for pretending it would.

Lennon Debuted After a Seven-Week Silence

The one Columbus change that did stick was at right back. The Crew signed Brooks Lennon during the break as a free agent from Atlanta United, and he made his first appearance in black and gold after halftime. Schulte called him a ball of energy and a spark plug, and said the value of the night was getting minutes in that heat before going back to 7:30 p.m. league kickoffs under a covered roof.

Lennon was still in the mix by early September, one of the few July introductions who had not been moved on or bought out. Gazdag is in New England. Picard is on loan at Troyes. Rossi and Arfsten are gone. Adewumi’s goal is a line in a pre-season report. The Crew host the New York Red Bulls on Sept. 12 at the same stadium, still 13th, still six points shy of a wild-card place, still trying to turn a 3-0 against Colorado into a run instead of a one-off.

Burnley have not won in the Championship since they left Ohio, and the 1-1 that felt like a salvage at the time now reads as the high-water mark of the trip.