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Even though the Columbus Crew have matched Inter Miami as the only unbeaten teams in MLS, they have not been blind to areas that could use improvement.

For example, with Sunday’s visit to St. Louis City looming, the Crew needed a scorer to replace star forward Cucho Hernandez following his transfer to Spain’s Real Betis prior to the start of the MLS season.

With that in mind, the Crew (4-0-3, 15 points) acquired Hungarian international Daniel Gazdag from Philadelphia for $4 million Thursday. He was the Union’s leading scorer last season with 17 goals and produced 58 goals over four seasons.

Gazdag feels he’s a perfect fit as an attacking midfielder in the Crew’s possession-oriented schemes.

“It’s exciting and good for me that I can try myself in that position,” he said. “I proved in Philadelphia I can score a lot, so I will just do my job and I think everything is going to happen.”

It is unknown whether he will be playing when the Crew play at St. Louis City, though Gazdag has claimed he will be available.

If he doesn’t play, that would be good news for St. Louis (2-3-2, 8 points), which has been shut out in three straight matches and heads into its first regular-season match versus the Crew without a goal in 345 minutes.

It has been a trying start for playmaker Marcel Hartel, who scored a career-high 17 goals last season for FC St. Pauli of the Bundesliga 2. He owns just one goal in seven matches as St. Louis City have been blanked five times. Their four goals are second-fewest in MLS.

However, St. Louis City have conceded just four. That’s also second-fewest in the league.

“I think we had a lot of focus at first on our defense, defense line to (not) concede that many goals, because in the last season, if you see how many goals, you can see it was way too much,” Hartel told MLSsoccer.com “But now we have to start to change, because now we see our defense works, and now we have to go a bit for our offense line, because you can see we only have four goals.”

–Field Level Media