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| No longer ready for their close-up. |
[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]
Thumbnail History
The Los Angeles Galaxy started as the first Buffalo Bills of Major League Soccer. True story. They reached MLS Cup in literally half of the league’s first six seasons only to flop on the biggest stage. Those failures gave them the opposite of stage-fright: the Galaxy became the first dominant team in league history, making the playoffs every season over the first ten years – virtually always in the top 5 too. Hell, one of their “Bills” seasons saw them claim the Supporters’ Shield (1998), but they didn’t have to wait long for their first Cups, either: the first came in 2002 – which they paired with another Shield – then again in 2005. Their fallow seasons – 2006-08 – look like hiccups today because OG LA dominated the first half of the 2010s, chewing up and spitting out one trophy after another. The Galaxy didn’t become the team current fans know until 2017- the same season the Wooden Spoon slapped their bottoms for the one and only time in team history. By now, the glory years have faded enough to where you have to wonder if their fans even remember them. The Galaxy have missed the playoffs in five of the past seven seasons. Worse, they haven’t looked like doing much the two times they didn’t.
Best Season(s)
The Galaxy ran away with their ’98 Shield at a sprint that would have left Usain Bolt’s jaw on the ground, but their best years came between 2009 and 2014, when they won another Shield (2010) and reached MLS Cup four times and won three of them (2011, 2012, 2014; they were runners-up in 2009). Those seasons saw Landon Donovan and Roy Keane running absolute riot up top while absolute rock defenders like Omar Gonzalez and A. J. DeLaGarza held things down at the back in front of a succession of strong goalkeepers (e.g., Donovan Ricketts, Josh Saunders, and the underrated Jaime Penedo). Absolute juggernauts, I tell you, and I still hate them for it. Oh, and they won the CONCACAF Champions’ Cup in 2000, but that shit was so goofy that the Mexican teams didn’t pay it much mind…until 2001.
Long-Term Tendencies
Their very best seasons (1998 and 2014) saw the Galaxy do very well in defense and even better on offense, but they built their best seasons on sturdy defenses and Bruce Arena’s second great run as a head coach. [Sidebar: does anyone know what words or actions cost him the New England gig?] There’s a lot of reverting to the mean on either side of that, but nothing has defined the bad years (2017 to…well, now) like defensive fragility: they’ve been over the league average for goals allowed in six of the past seven seasons.
Identity
Glamour team, baby. They’ve always called in – and have sometimes relied overly upon – big name players. Even the biggest stars need a strong supporting cast.
Joy Points: 45 (* See below for how this is calculated)
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| Period accurate, down to the cavernous, empty stadium |
10 Names to Know
Andrew Shue (1996-1997)
A star from the original cast of Melrose Place and an original player on the Galaxy. He barely played for them, but, again, his signing set the “glamour team” tone for LA. If there is one team in MLS that consistently reaches for every bright shiny object they see (e.g., Carlos Hermosillo, Luis Hernandez, Giovanni dos Santos, and…Steven Gerrard?), it’s the Galaxy. (Those are all fine players, but...)
Mauricio Cienfuegos (1996-2003)
Arguably, the first great playmaker in MLS history that no one had really heard of. He wasn’t one of the league’s original “Marquee Players,” but he outshined (outshined! outshined! outshined!) at least 75% of them.
Dan Calichman (1996-1998)
The kind of sturdy, no-bullshit defender any team needs when they launch. The big redhead didn’t last long (only 1996-98), but he started the Galaxy’s once-venerable tradition of plopping an anchor at the back to keep the ship steady.
Cobi Jones (1996-2007)
It takes work to cast the mind back to a time when raw athleticism carried a player to stardom in MLS, but Jones offers a great example. Even if he managed just one season of crazy numbers (1998, I believe), calling him “Mr. Galaxy” for the first, oh, six seasons of the Galaxy’s existence feels all right.
Guillermo “El Pando” Ramirez (2005)
A random Guatemalan international who stunk up the field in virtually every game he played for the Galaxy; I’m talking Kevin Cabral levels. And yet who scored the lonely game-winning goal in MLS Cup 2005? Pandooooooooooo! Again, a good enough foundation means any schmo can win a game, even the big one.
David Beckham (2007-2012)
The league named a fucking rule after the man, aka, the "Beckham Rule," aka, Designated Player Mark 1. Think Messi before Messi, only without the promotional porn deluging your streaming apps (didn't exist back then, of course). Despite being internationally famous (he even inspired a movie’s title), Beckham struggled with injuries and kept flitting back to AC Milan - and to a point where people doubted his heart was really in it - but he produced in the end. Oh, and regular MLS Joes really did love kicking him for sport.
Landon Donovan (2005-2014, 2016, if barely)
I’ve never seen people argue against hard, cold, real-world statistics the way people did around Donovan, who was, without question, one of the greatest players in MLS history and it's not for the nothing that MLS's MVP award bears his name. He may not have traveled well – see those early, fraught years with Bayer Leverkusen (which he redeemed somewhat with a loan to Everton) – but Donovan racked up goals, assists and trophies at the beginning of his career with the San Jose Earthquakes and to the end of it with the Galaxy.
Juninho (2010-2015)
The absolute beating heart of the Galaxy’s glory years and easily one of the best 6/8s during MLS’s 2010s seasons. Not the loudest, never the dirtiest, just got shit done. He, along with Marcelo Sarvas (if only for a season or two) was the platform on which the stars stood on whilst grasping for glory.
Omar Gonzalez (2009-2015)
I think it’s hard for anyone who came to MLS after, say, 2015 to appreciate just how rock-steady Gonzalez was over LA's best seasons. Omar came on as a rookie in 2009 and played damn near every game for the next three years and fair chunks of the next three. Literally, the rock on which LA built its dynasty.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (2018-2019)
On the one hand, leaving Robbie Keane off this list feels borderline perverse, but he, along with Donovan, belongs to their glory years. The Zlatan Years, meanwhile, shows what happens when a team throws all its chips into one large, Swedish basket. An incredible player, obviously, borderline freakish even, but he’s also a cautionary tale about the extent to which soccer truly is a team sport.
Where They Finished in 2023 & What the Past Says About That, If Anything
A dismal and generally hopeless 26th place, with an underperforming attack and a defense that would make your dog vomit (they got the rare "very, very over" the goals allowed average). That’s horrifying against the grand back-drop of the Galaxy’s history, obviously, but it’s been a couple minutes since anyone but LAFC had to worry about LA’s original team. The great Nora Desmond comes to mind…
Notes/Impressions on the Current Roster/State of Ambition
I don’t want to say the Galaxy falls off a cliff after Riqui Puig, so let’s go with a steep, long hill. And yet, doesn’t that go with the long-time LA tradition of surrounding glittering stars (some named above) with aggressively average role-players and/or dime-store reclamations? To name a few from the current roster, I’d go with Mark Delgado, Chris Mavinga, and Eric Zavaleta (i.e., they went to Toronto FC for scraps). Long-term-to-season-ending injuries to players like Martin Carceres and Gaston Brugman only deepened the Galaxy’s reliance on a shallow pool of talent. Still, teams that live by star players (e.g., Chicharito) die when they don’t produce.
As for ambition, it’s hard to say what finally pushed the Galaxy to strip Chris Klein of his presidency, but years’ worth of bad results should have cut him down well before the supporters’ group protests boiled over in 2023. I saw reports that the Galaxy have targeted a couple players, but they’re young (or young-ish) and that always comes with risks. They’re also attacking players, a detail that suggests LA has yet to address its most glaring issue from their flaming crap of a 2023 season: a defense that couldn’t stop taking on water. It’s fine to have ambition and all, but, as the Galaxy’s history suggests, ambition can only go so far without a foundation to hold it up.
[UPDATE: Nashville just pinched Tyler Boyd for MLS Buck$; I like Boyd, fwiw, but I'm a bit shocked at the price (steep!), which makes this feel like the Galaxy F.O. doing a boner.]
* Joy Point Index
Winning the CONCACAF Champions’ League: 5 points
Claiming Supporters’ Shield : 4 points
Winning MLS Cup: 3 points
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 2 points
Winning the U.S. Open Cup: 2 points
Winning CONCACAF Champions Cup: 2 points
CONCACAF Champions League Semifinalist: 1 point
Making the Playoffs: 1 point
Missing the Playoffs: -1 point
Missing Playoffs in 1996-97, 2002-2004 (when 80% of the league qualified): - 2 points
Wooden Spoon: -3 points
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