The Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire roadshow heads up to the City of Angels, home of what’s become the best rivalry in MLS over the past seven years: El Tráfico (9 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).
This has always been a “throw the records away” type of affair, which is especially good news for defending MLS Cup champions LA Galaxy. The hosts in this one, they set a record last weekend by going 12 games without a win to start a season, which is now 13 after a late, heartbreaking 3-2 loss at Philadelphia midweek.
Meanwhile, LAFC have turned things around a bit over the past month after a rough start of their own, but have yet to really kick it into fifth gear. Maybe Wednesday’s commanding win over Seattle is the switch being flipped?
Huge rivals. Dire straits. A whiff of desperation. What more could you want?
Editor's note: Matchday 14 features a Sunday Night Soccer doubleheader, starting with Inter Miami CF hosting Orlando City SC (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).
LA Galaxy
- German legend Marco Reus is healthy enough to start these days, but we’re still waiting for him to prove an adequate fill-in for the injured Riqui Puig. LA need Reus to be their attacking brain. He mostly hasn’t looked up for it, though two assists midweek vs. the Union felt like a good start.
- The defensive failures of the team have been collective. Within that collective, Emiro Garcés’ regression after he was so, so good down the stretch and into the Audi 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs has been shocking. I'm not 100% sure he’ll play in this one as he limped off with what looked like a late injury on Wednesday.
- With DP wingers Gabriel Pec and Joseph Paintsil nursing injuries – both are expected to play, though it’s not clear how much – even more responsibility falls onto the shoulders of veteran center forward Christian Ramírez. He’s maybe the only Galaxy player who’s even been adequate this season.
LAFC
- It starts, as always, with winger Denis Bouanga. He’s still rounding into form – goals and assists, plus better overall play, but not yet the unstoppable force he can be when everything’s clicking. Even so, he’s capable of blowing any game wide open.
- At the heart of the rebuilt midfield (LAFC’s front office did a lot of surgery this past offseason) is veteran Mark Delgado. This time last year he was at the heart of the Galaxy’s midfield. I don’t think we need a better hook than that.
- Left back Ryan Hollingshead remains one of the most underrated players in MLS history. He’s a dynamic attacking presence who has been a ruthlessly efficient, big-game goalscorer since signing with the Black & Gold as a free agent ahead of the 2022 season.
Remember when they started the year by hanging a banner celebrating their record sixth MLS Cup triumph? Seems like a distant memory.
The Galaxy are the most successful team in MLS history, and they were supposed to use last year’s win to build back toward the glory days of the early 2010s, meaning there was supposed to be some amount of progress this season. Sure, Puig would be out at least until mid-summer, but that meant it was a chance for the collective to do the heavy lifting.
None of it has worked. This hasn’t been one step back to take two steps forward. This has been one step back to "oh my god, we’ve fallen off a cliff."
It’s not just the record, which, you know, is historically bad. It’s that the underlying numbers say the record is a 100% fair representation of how this team has played – both American Soccer Analysis (going back to 2013) and FBRef (going back to 2018) have this year’s Galaxy as the worst MLS team in their respective databases. It has been almost unimaginably bad.
A win over the noisy neighbors would give the fans at least a moment’s respite from their misery.
LAFC haven’t really bullied anyone yet this year, which is surprising, because even on their worst days over the past few years, they struck hard, struck fast and showed no mercy. And their standard of success from Day 1 can be matched by few teams in the league’s history.
What does that look like? Well, since Steve Cherundolo became head coach in 2022 it’s:
- Two MLS Cup finals (winning one)
- Won the 2022 Supporters’ Shield
- Won last year’s US Open Cup
- Made it to the final of the 2023 Concacaf Champions Cup and 2023 Campeones Cup
- Made it to the final of the 2024 Leagues Cup
- Topped last year’s Western Conference regular-season standings.
They are arguably the best MLS team of the half-decade.
But since hoisting that Open Cup trophy last September, things haven’t been great. First they were handled by the Seattle Sounders in last year’s playoffs, then they got off to a slow start in the league, and then they got smushed by Messi & Friends in the second leg of the CCC quarterfinals. Along the way, Cherundolo announced he's departing the club after the season.
A dominant, signature win in the local derby sure would be a nice way to start climbing back to the mountaintop.
LAFC: Mirror mirror on the wall, which center forward gets the call?
Jeremy Ebobisse is the most consistent goal threat. Nathan Ordaz is the snuggest fit systematically, uber mobile, industrious and impactful on both sides of the ball. Olivier Giroud is Olivier Giroud, even if the production hasn’t so far matched the pedigree.
Ebobisse got the call midweek… and scored a banger. Ordaz came off the bench against Seattle and maybe should have had a one-shoe assist (the goal was called offside). Giroud was inches away from his first open-play goal in MLS.
So who does Steve Cherundolo go with? It feels like rotation is the name of the game, and that might work just fine for LAFC as long as Denis Bouanga is the fulcrum around which everything revolves.
LA Galaxy: Are we looking at a historically bad season?
Let’s zoom out on the Galaxy’s last three matches, all losses…
Lose without allowing a shot (and lose both remaining DPs to injury). Lose 7-0 in a rematch of the last game you won (incredibly, MLS Cup!!!). Lose on a last-second goal (right before El Tráfico to stay winless in 13).
I am a cynical optimist, which is to say I hope for the best but show no signs of surprise when the worst happens. The worst – defending champs last in the Shield race, playoff chances three of six feet in the ground after a third of a season – is fully in focus for this Galaxy group.
How bad could it get? Well, let’s think historically, sticking to the post-shootout era (2000 on) and excluding a truncated 2020 season:
- 2001 Tampa Bay Mutiny: 14 pts (four wins)
- 2013 D.C. United: 16 points (three wins)
- 2005 Chivas USA: 18 points (four wins)
- 2005 Real Salt Lake: 20 points (five wins)
- 2021 FC Cincinnati: 20 points (four wins)
For reference, the Galaxy are currently on pace for 7.84 points. Now, do I think that’ll happen? No, LA will win at least one game. Could they end up among this group of historically bad teams? The cynical optimist in me says, “Hopefully not, for their sake, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility!”
They’ve got 21 games to escape that fate, starting Sunday against their biggest rivals.
LA Galaxy
To be fair to head coach Greg Vanney, he’s had to shuttle guys in and out of the lineup all year. That includes Reus, Gabriel Pec and Joseph Paintsil (those DP wingers mentioned above), some goalkeeper musical chairs, and backline leaders Maya Yoshida and Miki Yamane. There’s no clear replacement for Delgado in central midfield, either.
It’s hard to be a team that wins with chemistry and cohesion when that’s been the story of your first three months. It's meant they’ve sat in a low block pretty often, which hasn’t gone great:
But then when they come upfield with the ball – which is really what Vanney wants from his side; he’s always been a possession-oriented coach – they’ve had… well, they’ve had some real problems:
All of this culminated in last weekend’s 7-0 loss at the New York Red Bulls in a rematch of last year’s MLS Cup. It was a big game, and an absolutely massive no-show, one that Vanney finished by getting his squad in a circle and reading them the riot act after the final whistle. Don’t see that very often!
Which is to say things are exactly as bad as they look. LA had probably their best attacking performance of the year against Portland a few weeks back, but you can see in the clip directly above that it didn’t lead to a good outcome, and it was probably their worst defensive performance before the trip to RBNY. In between they managed to lose a game in which they didn’t allow a single shot. And on Wednesday, they took a 2-0 lead… then utterly collapsed.
So there is absolutely nothing that is off the table here. The Galaxy’s form tilts things one way; their desperation tilts them another; LAFC’s counterattacking bent sends things in a third direction; the nature of El Tráfico, and rivalries in general, opens up a fourth possible path.
Really, I have no idea what we’re going to see. Which is the appeal of El Tráfico in the first place, isn’t it?
LAFC
You’ve heard me say this before: back in the day, LAFC were the preeminent possession team in MLS. They didn’t just win games; they dominated them by using the ball to create aesthetically pleasing passing sequences that, with shocking regularity, ended with them finding a gap to run through or a soft spot to run to. And once they were in those gaps or soft spots, goals followed.
Under Cherundolo, the aesthetically pleasing passing sequences were pared down as they became a more direct and pragmatic team. Over the past two years that has veered toward much more direct and “pragmatic to the point that it isn’t actually pragmatic anymore, it’s just predictable.” Are you comfortable with the idea of sacrificing both possession and field position for space to counter into? Okay, sure. That’s one thing.
It’s quite another thing to shift into that mode to the virtual exclusion of all other phases of play, which is what LAFC have too often done in big games. That includes their second-leg CCC loss to Miami, and last week’s 2-2 draw up in Vancouver. LAFC blew multi-goal leads in both because they haven't shown the ability to put their foot on the ball and control games.
Cherundolo knows this and says he's working to rectify it, so at times LAFC have rediscovered some facility with the ball. That has maybe accounted for some of the early-season choppiness this year, a choppiness exacerbated by that rebuilt midfield. Delgado is a very good player, as are Timothy Tillman and Igor Jesus. There is not a visionary passer among them, though, which means their transitions from pure possession to full attack can sometimes be laborious, and other times far too linear.
So at times it really feels like it’s Bouanga on the break, set pieces or nothing.
At other times, however, there has been visible progress:
Miami, Vancouver and Columbus would all be thrilled to have that in their highlight reel. And look, last weekend the Galaxy made the Red Bulls look like 1970 Brazil, so there will probably be a few chances for Cherundolo’s men to knock some passes around in the final third.
And the defense remains solid, though a bit more error-prone than in past seasons. The biggest reason for that is personnel, as Jesús Murillo spent most of last season playing at something close to a Best XI clip, and replacing him this year has not been easy. Neither Eddie Segura nor Marlon have really grabbed the job with both hands, while goalkeeper Hugo Lloris has looked like a guy who’s maybe approaching the end of the line.
They scrapped the 4-4-2 diamond after last week’s disastrous result at RBNY. Gonna guess it’ll be a 4-2-3-1 again, though Vanney will have to get creative with the wingers depending on Pec and Paintsil's readiness.
I thought the center forward job officially belonged to young Nathan Ordaz, but veteran Jeremy Ebobisse made quite a statement on Wednesday. Both, of course, have outperformed Olivier Giroud. Ebobisse and Giroud are more classic target forwards than the type of mobile No. 9 Cherundolo has traditionally preferred, which is what Ordaz is.
