When the LA Galaxy take the field against the New York Red Bulls on Saturday evening, it will have been 154 days since the two MLS originals squared off in last year’s MLS Cup final.
The Galaxy won that game, 2-1, returning to their place as the most decorated club in league history.
That remains the last MLS game LA has won.
The Galaxy made MLS history last weekend when they lost to Sporting Kansas City 1-0 without giving up a shot. Not a shot on goal. Any sort of shot. The lone tally in the game came off an own goal from defender Maya Yoshida. It sent LA spiraling to an 11th consecutive game without a win to start the season (0-8-3, three points), another MLS record.
“When it rains, it f—ing pours, man,” LA goalkeeper John McCarthy said. “You’ve got to figure out how to get out of it, and no one’s going to help you besides the 28 guys in the locker room. You can’t start looking around and going, ‘Who’s going to do it for us?’ It’s truly got to be an ‘us’ thing.”
There were warning signs that this would be a difficult season for the Galaxy. They lost star player Riqui Puig to a torn ACL last season in the Western Conference championship and will be without their talisman for most of this season.
That was an especially difficult task because so much about how the Galaxy played was built around Puig. His 13 goals and 15 assists didn’t tell the full picture of his influence. No one in the league touched the ball more than he did last season; Puig led the category by nearly 500 touches. He also had the most passes and most pass attempts in the league.
The Galaxy haven’t found a way to totally adjust their style of play without him.
Puig’s absence was compounded by salary cap issues going into the season. The Galaxy was so tight up against the cap that they moved several players to get compliant. That included midfielder Mark Delgado, who has started nine games for LAFC this season; Gastón Brugman, who won MLS Cup MVP; and forward Dejan Joveljíc, who had 15 goals and six assists last season.
The loss of three veteran players, as well as injury issues for stars Joseph Paintsil, Gabriel Pec and Marco Reus, who was expected to step up in Puig’s absence, has made matters worse.
“With each player we lost, we lost something,” Galaxy coach Greg Vanney said. “Even when you talk about transition defending and cutting off the series of errors that maybe happen at the top part of the field and transition all the way down to the bottom part of the field. We have two very experienced midfielders who aren’t with us anymore that cut off those types of errors, that make reads and understand their priorities. So we have younger midfielders in those situations who are learning these moments and that are going there.
“Each guy that we lost, there’s a percentage of who we were that went out the door with those guys. And now we are trying to add new guys, build them up, get them to the same level.”
Getting just 322 minutes out of Reus, the German legend, this season has been especially difficult. To be without a designated player and a highly-paid star like Reus, whose budget charge is at max TAM levels, is deadly in MLS. MLS roster rules are designed to top-load the roster. When high-paid players are injured or not producing, it can often spell disaster. It has this season for the Galaxy.
It’s been a season full of long faces for Marco Reus and the Galaxy. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Galaxy general manager Will Kuntz, who built the roster that won MLS Cup but now must figure a way to strengthen a group that is floundering, said the injuries and absences can’t be seen as an excuse.
“We knew what we were doing, we pushed our chips into the middle of the table last year to try to make it happen,” Kuntz said. “We took a little bit of an aggressive stance because we thought we had a chance to win. The league rules stuff is a crutch. It’s a reality, but it’s not unique to us.”
MLS rules are essentially set up so that it’s difficult for any one team to build a dynasty. There have been exceptions with teams who have had a level of sustained success. Most recently, the Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC stand out.
Vanney coached the Toronto teams that went to MLS Cup three times in four years from 2016-19, winning once. He pointed out this week that TFC also missed the playoffs in 2018, then rebuilt and got back to MLS Cup in 2019 and challenged for a Supporters’ Shield in 2020.
“Every single year that you’re successful, you’ve got to be able to sell one or two players to try to generate money back into your cap so you can pay off the things that help you to become a champion,” Vanney said. “And so we’re going through those stresses ourselves.”
The Galaxy, one of the more dynamic attacking teams last season, has sputtered on the offensive end.
Paintsil missed the first seven games of the season, but his return didn’t seem to lift LA as one would have expected. The Ghanaian winger had 10 goals and 10 assists last season, but he has no goals in five starts this year. Pec had 16 goals and 14 assists in 2024, but he has just one goal and two assists in 10 starts.
The Galaxy has also been poor defensively, especially at the start of the season. They are tied with a league-worst 21 goals conceded and have a league-worst minus-13 goal differential.
But Vanney sees improvement on both ends of the pitch. He noted that the team has had improved chance creation and better movement on the attacking end, while also limiting some of the defensive mistakes that have plagued them this season.
There are some indications that’s true. The Galaxy has allowed one or fewer goals in three of the last four games — a 4-2 loss to Portland is the exception there — after giving up two goals or more in six of their first seven games. And while the goals haven’t come, Vanney said he clipped together 14 “highly-positive” attacking moments against Sporting KC to show the team that the goals will start to come.
According to data pulled from TruMedia via StatsPerform (Opta), 19.5 percent of the Galaxy’s chances over the last five games were “big” chances, a slight uptick from the 15.8 percent of the first six games of the season. The Galaxy still just aren’t generating enough chances. Last year, they ranked fourth in MLS with 11.2 chances created per game. That has dropped this year to 8.9, tied with the Chicago Fire for 15th.
Joseph Paintsil’s return from injury has not provided the spark the Galaxy anticipated. (Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images)
The focus, Vanney said, has to be on the process rather than simply on the results – especially when those results have been so poor. He pointed to the fact that the Galaxy didn’t give up a shot against Kansas City as evidence of the process even if the result was a historic loss.
“There’s positive things inside of a sh—y result that we try to stay focused on so that we can utilize those things that are advantages going into the next game and not just sitting back and going, ‘S—, we lost, and let’s all feel terrible.’ Because that doesn’t help us in the next game either to try to create the margin we need for winning,” Vanney said.
The key now is to find a way to create some momentum, because the season is quickly slipping away from LA.
“I do think that the results build confidence, right, it builds that positivity and that energy that you want to use to build momentum,” Vanney said. “So I think those are key. Nobody has played us to a way that we feel like we were overwhelmed or we were really behind it in a game. And that’s why I think the margins are thin for us to turn this thing into positive results.
“It’s not big things, it’s little things.”
(Top photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)