Getting Reacquainted with Los Angeles FC, It Rose from the Corpse of MLS 2.0

The Honey Pot, starring Henry Higgins (1967)

Thumbnail History
As a preliminary, I decided to burden Los Angeles FC with the Chivas USA’s record of failures and accomplishments. The judges (in my head) have allowed this on the grounds that, 1) Chivas USA was created with a potential advantage – e.g., access to the player pool/any rising talent of their parent club, Mexico’s Club Deportivo Guadalajara, S. A. de C. V. – and 2) only three years separate the good and wise demise of Chivas USA and the founding of LAFC. To anyone aggrieved by the choice, bringing in the predecessor’s softer numbers does less damage than you think (only shaved off four Joy Points*), while also imbuing the successor project with the air of a phoenix rising. Anyone paying attention to the chronology of this series may be crying foul on behalf of Atlanta United FC and Minnesota United FC, but I liked the idea of putting Major League Soccer’s two foreign-held subsidiary franchises in back-to-back posts (the New York City FC post went up yesterday).

To quickly touch on Chivas USA, it was conceived as a honey-pot to lure Mexican-American fans to MLS at a time when the league was hard-up for eyeballs. The initial concept boiled down to bringing in, admittedly surplus (i.e., aging), but still famous talent from Mexico’s Chivas, sweetening the pitch by throwing in some potential future stars for the parent club (aka, longshots), and rounding out the roster with whatever non-Mexican players Chivas USA could find between the 2005 Expansion and SuperDrafts. Legendary Mexican midfielder Ramon Ramirez and (I think) Francisco Palencia headlined the effort, but the first-year model went to shit in one short season. It took only one swat from the Wooden Spoon at the end of 2005 for Chivas USA to (largely) abandon all that and become a more or less regular MLS team, effective immediately. The front office gave the team an MLS face-lift for Year 2, calling in midfielder Jesse Marsch as an on-field Svengali, while also bringing in proven experienced pieces for the attack (Ante Razov) and the defense (Carlos Llamosa and Tim Regan). All it took from there was one good (Jonathan Bornstein) and one great pick (Sacha Kljestan) from the 2006 SuperDraft to carry Chivas USA to their first post-season in 2006 and lift them higher still in 2007, when they won the Western Conference. From there, things fell off one season at a time and, slowly, the organization fell apart. By the time all concerned pulled the plug after the 2014 season, I think most MLS fans forgot Chivas USA was around until they showed up on the schedule…

So, Chivas USA was Jean Grey?

…and then came Los Angeles FC. MLS had changed by the time they joined, of course, but LAFC still got just about everything right for their debut. On top of signing two great, game-ready designated players (Carlos Vela and Diego Rossi; Andre Horta, less so), they filled out the roster with some of the league’s best young talent – e.g., Walker Zimmerman, Mark-Anthony Kaye, Eduard Atuesta, and Tristan Blackmon. Future seasons took a little shine off a couple of those players, but it took just two seasons for then-head coach Bob Bradley to goose that original roster into a machine that ran over the rest of MLS on its road to the 2019 Supporters’ Shield. Between a brick-wall defense, the midfield pressing like an avalanche and Vela scoring freely as a certain famous I. P., LAFC seconded the premise laid down by Atlanta the season before: being an expansion in MLS didn’t have to mean a damn thing in the DP-driven, bigger money era. Both then and now, LAFC carries that premise forward better than Atlanta has. LAFC has competed in six finals since 2020 – two MLS Cups (they won one), two CONCACAF Champions’ League finals (lost both), and both the Leagues Cup (lost) and the U.S. Open Cup (won) in 2024. One season after their one and only slip – i.e., missing the playoffs entire in 2021 - LAFC won Shield and Cup in 2022, notably with a roster that, besides Vela, had been completely turned over and put under a new head coach (Steve Cherundolo) since it won the 2019 Shield. If that’s a flash in the pan, it’s long one.

Total Joy Points: 26

How They Earned Them (& * How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2019, 2022
MLS Cup: 2022
MLS Runner-Cup: 2023
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2019
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2018, 2024
CCL Runner-Up: 2020, 2023
Leagues Cup Runner-Up: 2024
U.S. Open Cup: 2024

Long-Term Tendencies
LAFC has a proud, if short, history of scoring lots of goals, including being tied for first for all-time goals scored in a single season (2019, 85 goals). Scoring lots of goals has been their calling card from Year 1: LAFC have scored either very over or very, very over the goals-scored average in six of their seven seasons. Despite going a little squishy in defense during the lean seasons (2020 and 2021), their defenses have generally been either very good, or just good, every other year. Given the record laid out above, I don’t know what else one would expect and I can’t think of anything to add, so…

How 2024 Measured Up
It didn’t look so good against LAFC’s highest standards, but the team still looked and stayed competitive to the end of the regular season. They had a sniff in the Shield competition until a post-Leagues Cup collapse – so-called because they dropped some winnable games (e.g., v Houston right after, v Austin three games later, and a 1-3 loss at Dallas the week after) – took them out of the running in what became a run-away for Miami. Even so, LAFC scored plenty and they got genuinely impressive consistency out of a defense where Aaron Long was the only CB to clock over 2,000 minutes; Maxime Chanot showing up ready and able at the right time probably gave them a boost (this one still pisses me off, tbh). I don’t know how much first season ‘keeper, Hugo Lloris, helped with that (I expected more hype if he had), but having Denis Bouanga raise his level, even if just a hair, Mateusz Bogusz chipping in a wild card’s worth of goals, and a strong season from Timothy Tillman gave LAFC a well-built machine to drive through last season. This was a good team, where “good” actually means something. The fact it fell short of good enough is a separate issue.

Questions for Their 2025 Season
I don’t see anything egregious or even odd in their outbound traffic: I’m a little shocked by Jesuus Murillo’s departure and they’ll need to do something to replace Ilie Sanchez’s minutes/composure, but Vela is at least halfway past it, so no surprise there. I’m happy to see Jeremy Ebobisse get a cleaner shot at a trophy and, while I wonder what he can do in a better team (under better coaching), not much about his career so far tracks as “game-changer.” At a glance, their latest signing, Odin Thiago Holm, doesn’t look poised to shake the pillars of Heaven, so either LAFC goes into 2025 as the same good team that left 2024 with a tiny nod toward ambition (Ebobisse), or they’ll be making bigger moves later. Yeah, yeah, Olivier Giroud. I’ll buy in when he makes me do it. So....have they done enough, and did they even need to?