And here it is, the first weekend of the 30th MLS regular season, which also happens to be the first MLS season to feature 30 teams. Yay, symmetry!
This season not only introduces us to a new team – welcome aboard, San Diego FC – but also brings us a featured Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire game every matchday. That'll allow us to zero in on two clubs for 90 minutes and get to know their personnel, tactics and overall philosophy. To that end, my colleague Andrew Wiebe will be traveling hither and yon for the next eight months, filing dispatches and interviews from around the league both on MLS Season Pass and in this column. You'll get a blurb from him down below.
And so it makes sense that on Matchday 1, San Diego – that brand new, 30th team – are in the spotlight. They'll travel up I-5 to Carson, home of defending MLS Cup champions LA Galaxy, for their first-ever MLS game this Sunday night (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).
LA Galaxy
- Veteran Marco Reus will likely be the No. 10 for most of this year with Riqui Puig recovering from a torn ACL.
- Livewire winger Gabriel Pec, who’s reportedly got some of the biggest clubs in the world watching him.
- D-mid Edwin Cerrillo is one of the best in the league at that spot – and one of the most underrated.
San Diego FC
- DP left winger Chucky Lozano, the Mexican legend who’s still in his prime and has MVP-type talent.
- DP right winger Anders Dreyer, a 26-year-old Danish international who was one of the best players in Belgium last year.
- Luca de la Torre, a high-level ball-progressor who’s going to be asked to provide more creativity (while trying to work his way back into the USMNT picture).
Nobody in MLS history has unfurled more banners in front of home fans than the Galaxy. Last year’s somewhat surprising run to their sixth MLS Cup triumph – remember, LA had outright missed the Audi 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs and head coach Greg Vanney’s seat was widely understood to be warmish – marks their 13th major trophy in their 30 years of existence. That either ties them with or moves them one ahead of D.C. United (depending on how you rate the 1998 Copa Interamericana).
This particular trophy might be the most special moment since their first MLS Cup win, back in 2002, because it came after a decade in the wilderness. The Galaxy, in the TAM era, had been bad – even when they had Steven Gerrard, even when they had Zlatan, even when they spent on the Dos Santos brothers. They had some spectacular moments for sure, but mostly just bad soccer. And nothing close to a trophy.
To new fans of the league, the Galaxy were a punchline, a faded memory of pre-modern MLS days.
That time in the wilderness is over. New general manager Will Kuntz built a winner over three transfer windows, and they officially have the silverware to prove it. Now, in front of fans who’ve had one year after another ruined by their noisy neighbors just to the north, everybody gets to take a victory lap.
They’ll hang a banner this weekend. The Galaxy are back.
Well, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Remember LAFC winning their first two games back in 2018, including a 1-0 opener over the defending West champs in Seattle? Or what about 2019, when FC Cincinnati set the tone for their next three seasons with a completely disjointed 4-1 loss to that same Sounders side?
What happens on Matchday 1 of your debut season doesn’t necessarily set the tone for what’s to come – I am not going to read too much into this, from San Diego’s perspective, if the Galaxy register a thumping, 3-0 win. The Galaxy are good. San Diego are new. Beatings happen.
But in recent memory, the first outing of the year has been strangely predictive for expansion teams. Remember this, St. Louis?
An inexplicably magical year followed.
Beyond what happens on the field, there’s just the vibe of a rivalry sort of waiting to happen. San Diego fans will travel, and San Diego fans will sing. They will bring the energy of a group that wants this to be a derby, and the players on the field need to match that intensity.
LA: What should we expect from Marco Reus?
First off, and quite obviously so, quality. Oodles of it. But what about minutes? Like, how many can he realistically eat up and keep that unquestioned quality where the Galaxy need it? I’m talking both per game and throughout the season.
Yes, Reus was adapting to the club and league and playing second fiddle to Riqui during the second half of 2024… but he still only played more than 70 minutes three times in 11 appearances (six starts) and 90 just once. Without Puig for most of the season, LA will need more minutes and production (1g/4a) this go-round from last year’s summer splash to reach their goals.
The offseason surely did the 35-year-old German legend a world of good, but he’s been slow to pick up preseason minutes so far. Something to keep an eye on in Matchday 1 and beyond.
San Diego: Is CJ dos Santos ready to be a starter?
Hurry up and wait. Such is the life of a goalkeeper. Dos Santos, 24, waited… and waited… and kept waiting for first-team opportunities during three seasons in Miami. He got three starts, a pair of losses – with five goals allowed – in MLS play and a shutout win against Puebla in last year’s Leagues Cup opener, but showed enough promise with Inter Miami II and during his time with Benfica B and the US youth national teams to be acquired by San Diego ahead of their expansion season.
Drake Callender told me this week that, had the timing and breaks been a bit different in Miami, dos Santos might have won that job back in 2022. Instead, the two spent three years training together and supporting each other, as first-choice and understudy, into the Messi era. Callender said dos Santos has all the tools needed – athleticism, size and decision-making ability – to be a top-level goalkeeper in MLS. Now it’s time for the 24-year-old to seize the opportunity that’s been years in the making and build the confidence and rhythm to make the job his.
Puig’s injury colors everything about how the Galaxy will approach this season. The short version is they will still be a possession team, but one that spreads the wealth (spreads the touches) more than they have in the Riqui era. He had the highest usage rate in the league by a mile, and would go any and everywhere in search of the ball. Reus does not play that way, and neither does Diego Fagúndez when he plays as a 10. Those guys stay connected to the front line and let the deeper-lying central midfielders do most of the work.
So expect it to be a little more structured and predictable. Fewer spectacular moments, but fewer turnovers. Just more… solid.
“We said this when Marco came: Riqui wants the game to be fast all the time. He wants the game to go forward and he wants to build speed and he wants to go attack. Bringing Marco in, we thought, ‘Okay, Marco will be the little bit of the balance for Riqui,’” Vanney said to Joe Lowery of Backheeled.com last week, in an excellent look at the Galaxy’s busy offseason.
“He’s just not going to drop low, pick up the ball, zip through two or three guys, play a pass wide, and end up in the box. Riqui is super dynamic in that way. Marco is going to be more strategic, if you will, in terms of his positioning.”
Still, though, the Galaxy remain Vanney’s team, and that means they will go out there with the intent to use the ball. Hold possession deep, shift San Diego to one side, then play across the game channel (the term of art Vanney and his staff have always employed) either into direct runs behind the defense, or into wide/half-space overloads.
I’m gonna put my hand up and say I blew it, at least a little bit, with the analysis of this goal from MLS Cup:
While patient possession is pure Vanney, the rest of it really wasn’t. It wasn’t particularly across the game channel; it was much more direct. Usually he wants his team to absorb pressure along the near sideline; this, obviously, was very central.
But it’s instructive nonetheless because it shows something of how they will need to adjust over the course of this year without Puig (volume up to hear Taylor Twellman on the call talking about exactly that). It is a more egalitarian sort of central midfield balance, with Cerrillo and the now-departed Gastón Brugman (likely it’ll be new guy Lucas Sanabria in that spot) combining to rip the Red Bulls apart.
They will, in short, attempt to replace Riqui in the aggregate. And they will have to do the same without the other MLS Cup goalscorer, Dejan Joveljić, who was sold to Sporting Kansas City this winter.
As such the Galaxy signed two new strikers: veteran Christian Ramírez via a trade with the Columbus Crew and 20-year-old Matheus Nascimento (like Sanabria, a U22 Initiative signing) on loan from Brazil's Botafogo.
“Can you replace [Joveljić's production] with one player? It’s difficult. Can you replace it in the aggregate?” Kuntz said to Lowery in that Backheeled piece.
My guess is the answer is yes. I’m betting the Galaxy will be very good this year.
One other note: DP forward Joseph Paintsil, scoring that goal in the clip above, is also out injured. The hope is that he’ll be back before April.
San Diego FC
When I was in San Diego two months ago to help host their Expansion Draft, I got time with sporting director Tyler Heaps and head coach Mikey Varas. And I asked them straight-up, are you going to be a team that plays with the ball, or against it?
Heaps smiled. Varas extended his right arm and, with his left hand, pointed at his veins.
“It’s in our blood. It’s in our DNA. We want the ball; we’re going to be a team that has the ball,” Varas said as Heaps nodded along.
Last week it was Lowery’s turn, again with Backheeled (go subscribe!), to have a chat with Heaps. He broke it down even further.
“We want to avoid 50/50s. We want to avoid [aerial] duels at all costs,” Heaps said. “So that's where you won't see us play long out of a goal kick because that's a 50/50 ball. We want to obviously win second balls and be very good at it, but we want the play to be close so that we can be closer distances to win that ball.”
As such, there are a ton of technical players on this team, which is built around them. It starts with Lozano and Dreyer on the wings. Lozano is a 1v1 wizard while Dreyer is more of a playmaker with good box arrival. Both are inverted, but expect Lozano to play as more of a true winger while Dreyer spends more time coming inside to create from the right half-space.
The midfield – they’ll play a 4-3-3 – is built to support that. De la Torre is, as mentioned above, an excellent ball-progressor who also covers a ton of ground defensively. I think Aníbal Godoy will be the other free 8, and his ability to switch the field of play into wide overloads is his defining skill, so I’d expect a bunch of that.
Here is the thing: How free will those free 8s be to take risks with their movement? Varas is from the Gregg Berhalter coaching tree (at least a bit), where the 8s were often very conservative. Vertical movement like this wasn’t typical:
The reason is that turnovers when the 8s release like that tend to turn into five-alarm fires in the other direction. How far towards “attack” will Varas set his risk sliders?
I look forward to finding out.
