LA Rot Squad: The fall of LA Galaxy
Once the standard-setter in MLS, the Galaxy now struggle for relevance. How did this happen?
Rowe, Cole, Van Damme, Steres, Rogers, Lletget, Hušidić, Boateng, dos Santos, Donovan, Gordon.
That was the LA Galaxy starting lineup the last time the MLS Cup playoffs took place in Carson. October 30, 2016.
Nobody from that XI remains on the Galaxy. Neither does the manager, as just weeks later, the USMNT brought back Bruce Arena in a desperate bid to salvage a 0-2 start to the Hex.
MLS is still a fairly young league, and so much change happens year-to-year that even though it was just six years ago, this feels an eternity ago. Of the MLS Best XI that season, only three remain in the league - Andre Blake, Matt Hedges, and Sacha Kljestan. RFK and the Citrus Bowl were still MLS home grounds. Only Jim Curtin. Brian Schmetzer, and Peter Vermes are still managing the teams they managed back then; Schmetzer was still officially interim, and Curtin was seen as a mediocre at best bench boss.
And of course, the LA Galaxy were still the biggest f’ing deal in the league.
From the time they won their first MLS Cup back in 2002, LA couldn’t stop winning. They struck again in ‘05, then won three in four years in the early 2010s. And that doesn’t even include their other trophies - four Supporter’s Shields, two Open Cups, and even a CONCACAF Champions Cup in 2000.
All of that is a distant memory now, though. Since that day in 2016, the Galaxy haven’t played a home playoff game, and have as many Wooden Spoons as they do playoff round wins. Every other team that was in MLS back then has hosted a playoff game since…except the Galaxy. That doesn’t even include some expansion teams that came after, as Minnesota, Atlanta, LAFC, and Nashville have all played playoff games in front of their fans. And as I write this, the Galaxy have just lost their two biggest rivalry matches - El Trafico and the California Clasico - in the span of just a few days.
What happened? How did we get here?
Let’s take a look at how MLS’s marquee team went supernova, and went from the brightest star to little more than a burned-out white dwarf.
Coaching Carousel
In November 2016, panic arose from the US national team camp. The US had lost their Hex opener 2-1 at home to Mexico, then followed it up with a 4-0 humiliation of a defeat in Costa Rica. Combined with a dud fourth-place finish in the 2015 Gold Cup, an inability to reach the 2017 Confederations Cup with a playoff loss to El Tri, and a bad loss in Guatemala earlier in qualifying, manager and technical director Jurgen Klinsmann was sacked.
That in and of itself is a story for another time. But where it’s relevant is who the US replaced him with, as they pried away former boss Bruce Arena from the Galaxy.
While the ending was of course disastrous for the USMNT, you can kinda understand the thought process here. Arena was highly successful domestically, and had gotten the US to the quarters of the 2002 World Cup. US Soccer didn’t have time to experiment and wanted to go with someone they knew. Of course, it didn’t work.
The Galaxy had to replace their highly successful coach, and their first choice was to keep it in-house, promoting Curt Onalfo from Galaxy II. Onalfo’s two previous managerial stints were bad, but his familiarity with the club helped keep some continuity going.
Of course, he didn’t even last the full season, as he was sacked in late July after five straight losses. Replacing him was Sigi Schmid, a godfather of the league who had won plenty of trophies in LA in the late 90s and early 2000s.
However, Sigi was in his mid-60s and his health was failing, and he couldn’t really go beyond the 2018 season; he resigned that September and passed away three months later with heart problems. Interim head coach Dom Kinnear was unable to get LA to the playoffs, so they went looking for a new full-time boss that offseason.
Their choice was Guillermo Barros Schelotto, an MLS icon of the late 2000s with Columbus who had won a Copa Sudamericana with Lanús and two Argentine titles with Boca Juniors. While the Galaxy did make the 2019 playoffs, and even won a round, it wasn’t because of him, but because of a band-aid (more on him later as well). In 2020, with a new roster, the Galaxy were nowhere virtually all season and he ended up sacked.
For 2021, in came Greg Vanney, a former Galaxy player who had a closetful of trophies from his time in Toronto. But so far it hasn’t been sunshine and rainbows; the Galaxy missed the 2021 playoffs on the final day, and are a meh team again this season, their position aided by a season of extreme parity.
When you’re churning through coaches like this and constantly getting the hires wrong, you’ve opened yourself to instability. It’s a problem that you by and large see from bad teams run badly. The early MetroStars. Pre-Giovinco Toronto. Chivas USA in general. Teams like that.
No Domestic Player Development
We have been hearing for years and years about how supposedly stacked the LA Galaxy academy is.
When looking further, a simple question emerges, brought to you by a 1980s Wendy’s slogan: “where’s the beef?”
In the Galaxy’s history of homegrown players, very few have actually gone on to do anything at the MLS level.
Gyasi Zardes is probably their most notable. He broke out at 22 with a 16 goal season playing alongside Robbie Keane, but the front office’s weird moves shifted him all over the field - as a wing, and even fullback. When he got traded to Columbus before 2018, it was almost a mercy-killing. In Ohio, Gyasi bounce back, putting up three consecutive seasons of 10+ goals and hoisting 2020 MLS Cup.
After Gyasi, their second best is what, Efraín Álvarez? Álvarez has shown promise, and there’s still plenty of time for him, but he’s not quite broken out. And he’s the best they got after Zardes. Then it’s what, Ethan Zubak? Ariel Lassiter?
Young players seem to know this, too. This past U20 CONCACAF Championship had four Galaxy Academy players on the US squad…well, actually only two, as Alejandro Alvarado Jr. and Mauricio Cuevas had both left the academy to join European setups. So, too, did recent USMNT debutant Haji Wright, and recent youth internationals Kobe Hernandez-Foster and Uly Llanez, all of whom dipped for German sides (Wright with Schalke and KHF/Llanez with Wolfsburg). Young academy players see the writing on the wall and know to get out if they can. It’s especially bad when you realize how many newer MLS teams have been producing homegrown players good enough to be sold to major European leagues and clubs.
The SuperDraft gives teams a chance to make up for a lack of academy production (look at the Revs’ all-drafted back line, for example), but the Galaxy really haven’t hit on one since the end of their dynasty. No Galaxy draftee has played more than 50 MLS games for them since Mikey Stephens back in 2010, and the team totally whiffed with their best pick in recent times back in 2018, selecting Tomas Hilliard-Arce second overall ahead of the likes of Triston Blackmon, Chris Mueller, Mason Toye, Brandon Bye, and Brian White - all guys who have been key pieces of some very good teams.
All this failure to develop young talent is mind-boggling when you remember that the Galaxy started the trend of putting their reserve team in USL, establishing Los Dos in 2014.
So much has changed. But there’s one thing that hasn’t.
Front Office Complacency and Poor Roster Construction
2013 was a retooling of the Galaxy, and for good reason. David Beckham had left the club, as had Tim Leiweke, the CEO of ownership group Anschutz Entertainment Group. (Leiweke would later become CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, and is often credited with the revival of Toronto FC.) The team also had a new president and technical director in two former players: Chris Klein and Jovan Kirovski, respectively.
In an era that has had so much instability, these two are the constants of this club. It’s fitting they were hired in 2013, because the club’s roster build has constantly been reminiscent of the era.
They inherited a team that, yes, had big names, with Donovan and Keane as the DPs. They had the domestic supporting cast in guys like Omar Gonzalez, AJ DeLaGarza, Sean Franklin, and the Brazilian midfield pairing of Marcelo Sarvas and the ever-underappreciated Juninho. In that 2013 season, they’d also scoop up Robbie Rogers, as well as Panamanian goalkeeper Jaime Penedo. That core, with Zardes thrown in for good measure, would win them the 2014 MLS Cup, and at that point it felt like the Galaxy would forever be dunking on the rest of the league.
Since then, the philosophy of “the right build” has been thrown out the window in the pursuit of names, and this really started in 2015.
The club nickel and dimed Penedo and Sarvas out of the club, but who cares when they signed two massive names that debuted in the summer: Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard and El Tri star Giovani dos Santos. MLS had set them up with an assist to facilitate the signing of dos Santos, as MLS had just introduced Targeted Allocation Money so the team could buy down Gonzalez’s DP tag. They had also pursued Sacha Kljestan, but couldn’t make a deal work in 2014 and got sniped by the Red Bulls.
Slight problem, though: how were you going to fit all of dos Santos, Gerrard, Keane, Juninho, and Zardes all on the pitch without putting guys out of position or turning your midfield into a giant sieve? WHO CARES. BIG NAMES. BUY OUR TICKETS AND JERSEYS PLEASE.
But once the three started playing together, it screwed up the team’s balance, and they fell apart down the stretch and were dumped out of the playoffs immediately by Seattle, with none of the DPs doing anything. Gerrard lost his man on the second Seattle goal, and dos Santos looked uninterested. They ran it back with the aging Gerrard and Keane and work-ethic-questionable Giovani as DPs in ‘16, but fell short in basically every front and were knocked out of the playoffs by Colorado. That year also saw the sale of title vets Juninho and Gonzalez, and the addition of a slew of guys over 30, including Ashley Cole and Jelle Van Damme.
When that core broke up, the team tried to do a youth movement by promoting a slew of players from Los Dos and adding Romain Alessandrini. It failed miserably, as the Galaxy lacked capable vets, and many of these young players were not MLS quality and crumbled under the pressure of keeping the dynasty going. So, back to the well of big names!
Despite diminishing returns, this cycle of chasing big names regardless of fit has continued. Some have worked - Ashley Cole was very good despite his advanced age (and a bad team) at left back, while Zlatan Ibrahimović was the band-aid that carried them to their only playoffs of the post-Keane era.
But Chicharito (an undersized poacher did not fit GBS’s 4-3-3, and history is repeating itself under Vanney, who currently employs 2 DP wingers) has run hot and cold, Giovani stopped caring after 2016 (from best XI in 2016 to bought out in 2019), and so far Douglas Costa has proven to be a flop. The record of less sexy DPs has been mixed; Alessandrini and Cristian Pavón proved very capable (the former until he got banged up by injuries), but Kévin Cabral has been horrific.
The team has also failed miserably at building capable supporting casts, with Ibra’s 2019 proving the best example. The Swede put up 30 goals that season, carrying the team into the playoffs as the 5 seed. Only one other player on that squad, Uriel Antuna, even had five goals. We saw it again last season, when Chicharito bagged 17, but d-mid Rayan Raveloson was his closest teammate with 5 (excluding Sacha Kljestan, who scored four of his five on penalties). You cannot rely on one player to constantly save you, no matter how good they are. This isn’t 2012 or 2002. You need depth, and LA has not had that.
While teams like Dallas, Toronto, Seattle, and the Red Bulls were re-writing the MLS meta, mixing in young domestic talent with talented foreign signings, savvy league vets, and the right gamebreakers, LA continued to chase tickets and merchandise sales over putting a quality product on the pitch. No team has adapted worse to the TAM era and homegrown revolution; a team that was constantly ahead of the curve is now being lapped.
The problem was, and still is, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee: Klein and Kirovski. The two constants during this period of rot.
Players and coaches have faced the axe, time after time. But Klein and Kirovski? Comfortable laying down in the lounge, a suitcase full of money from another batch of shirt sales, their jobs not under threat at all. And they won’t be until those sales stop rolling in. Who cares about winning trophies when you can simply make money off of name-brand players coming in to enjoy some sunshine?
Earlier this week on Fútbol Americas, Hérculez Gómez ranted that playing for the LA Galaxy used to mean something: You were the standard bearer of MLS that helped carry the league forward. Gómez would know, having won the Open Cup/MLS Cup double with the club in 2005. For those keeping count, Herc won as many trophies in one year with LA than the Galaxy have playoff rounds since their Cup triumph in 2014.
The way things are going, that could keep going for a while.
Great work - Even though they eventually almost salvaged something out of it, being down 3-0 at home to the Earthquakes at half feels about as far away from being "The Galaxy" as I've ever seen the Galaxy to be. (Maybe other than that abysmal 2017 year) Greg Vanney has led a rebuild before, and I still sort of think he can salvage this team into something at least decent - But you did an excellent job laying out all the structural problems they have. "Rot" is a good word.