Here’s how LA Galaxy won MLS Cup – and why it brings a warning to their rivals

Throughout nearly three decades of operation, the LA Galaxy has adopted a star-spangled approach.

There is no defining the Galaxy’s identity without reciting a litany. Cobi Jones. Mauricio Cienfuegos. Carlos Ruiz. Landon Donovan. David Beckham. Robbie Keane. Giovanni and Jonathan Dos Santos. Steven Gerrard. Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Javier Hernandez. To think of MLS’s winningest franchise is to walk down a memory lane illuminated by spotlights.

The modern iteration is no exception. Since Riqui Puig joined joined LA in August 2022, the Galaxy’s on-field approach and national relevance has been carried on the small but mighty shoulders of the playmaker from Barcelona’s storied La Masia academy, who has brought the kind of free-flowing and jaw-dropping play better associated with Magic Johnson’s Showtime Lakers than the often rough-and-tumble nature of Major League Soccer.

Over two and a half years later, Puig did what Ibrahimovic and others before him had failed to do: he’d brought the club with more MLS Cups than any other back to the title game. In the process, he unfortunately made a hero’s sacrifice, tearing his ACL in the second half of the Western Conference final and muscling through the remaining thirty minutes, a gutsy shift that included the match-winning assist. It was the stuff of legend, but wouldn’t change the fact that he’d miss the ultimate test of this side’s mettle.

At most points of the past decade, losing their main man would have represented an insurmountable blow for the Galaxy. While the team oscillated above and below the postseason cutoff line throughout their ten-year sojourn, any season without a Best XI-caliber talisman was doomed from the start. Here, the Galaxy would be missing arguably MLS’s best midfielder.

Instead of going down in a blaze of glory, this Galaxy side kept its shine thanks to a newly adopted approach from the past two years: a coherent squad build beyond its headliners.

Without Puig, head coach Greg Vanney — who, during his Galaxy playing days, was part of three MLS Cup defeats — knew he couldn’t recreate the nimble Spaniard’s skillset. Instead, he opted for Gaston Brugman. The 32-year-old Uruguayan often started alongside Puig in 2023 before a torn meniscus brought that season to an early end. This year, he’s been more rotational as Vanney opted for Mark Delgado and Edwin Cerrillo beneath Puig.

On Saturday, Brugman was viewed as a necessary defensive option to clamp down on the New York Red Bulls’ own star attraction, Emil Forsberg. Instead, he played a ball early in the match that would’ve made Puig proud.

After a testy opening eight minutes, the Galaxy have found themselves in a sustained moment of possession. The ball circulates back to the defensive line; in most games, it’s a scenario where Puig would scamper into the defensive half, get on the ball, and use a series of carries and give-and-go interactions with teammates to lurch into friendlier territory. Without the Spaniard, the Galaxy must take an alternative approach. Almost certainly, it needs to be direct.

Brugman collects the ball in the heart of the center circle, playing a lateral ball through two converging Red Bulls to Cerillo. The Waco, Texas native sees Brugman scamper past both and rewards his run. 

The New York midfield has fully committed to the press, allowing the Galaxy to break lines with a simple one-two sequence. Brugman regains possession with a heavy touch, but the Red Bulls defense is backtracking rather than converging on the loose ball. It provides Brugman a rare moment of zen in a high-stakes match to determine his next move.

Rather than see what his midfield partners are up to, he does what Galaxy fans expect from Puig in those spots. He plays a perfectly weighted 29-yard pass beyond the backline and into the stride of winger Joseph Paintsil.

It carries an expected assist value of 0.367 – which, using historical data, implies a 36.7% likelihood of resulting in a goal for his teammate. Given how effortlessly he’s played it to the Ghanaian, even an estimation that sizable feels conservative.

Paintsil’s finish lacked precise placement, but his first-time shot came with enough fizz to force goalkeeper Carlos Coronel into a fumble that sent the ball into the net.

In just six seconds, the Galaxy rushed from the center of the park straight into the driver’s seat of MLS Cup 2024 on the game’s first shot. They doubled their lead just four minutes later, as it was Delgado’s turn to play the assist — though, to be fair, that goal had more to do with Dejan Joveljic’s run and outer-foot finish than the distribution.

Nevertheless, it was a five-minute sequence that set the tone. In the time it took the Galaxy to score two goals, Forsberg didn’t manage to touch the ball even once. It was mission accomplished for the hosting favorite; while the ensuing 75 minutes weren’t comfortable, they’d already done enough.

The LA Galaxy are back at the top of the podium. MLS, be warned.

As the most plugged-in of MLS fans know, reciting the list of Galaxy greats at the top of this piece is far from telling the full story. The Athletic’s Pablo Maurer did that leg work in the lead-up to Saturday’s final, chronicling the franchise’s fruitless decade after that 2014 title.

To summarize, the Galaxy won its third title in four years by seeing an ambitious and expensive project under Bruce Arena to its natural conclusion. When Donovan retired (for the first time) after that final, Keane carried on to join forces with Gerrard and Dos Santos. The new leading men didn’t integrate seamlessly, and the league passed by its glamor club with haste.

Their headline-grabbing presence, and that of successors Ibrahimovic and Hernandez, obscured why the Galaxy fell off a cliff. Simply, they lost sight of what truly made those early-decade sides a class above the rest of MLS.

While those teams are known as Beckham’s, Donovan’s and Keane’s, the Galaxy had a second decisive advantage over MLS. They had a squad teeming with capable veterans and rising up-and-comers that was unmatched by the 17 other clubs among MLS’s ranks when they last won the title. It wasn’t just having the best trio of designated players to date (save, possibly, for Vanney’s Toronto trio of Jozy Altidore, Michael Bradley and Sebastian Giovinco circa 2017). It was the defensive mettle of Omar Gonzalez, Todd Dunivant and Gregg Berhalter. The midfield prowess of Juninho and Baggio Hušidić. The lesser-heralded goal contributions of Mike Magee, Gyasi Zardes and Alan Gordon.

Once Donovan retired (briefly) in 2014, the Galaxy’s decision-makers seemed to take the wrong lessons. Rather than building a cohesive squad behind a leading man, they were hellbent to find “the next Beckham.” Gerrard openly bemoaned the level and rigor of MLS in his brief stay. Dos Santos seemed to revel in the status without doing the hard yards on the pitch. Ibrahimovic found the balance, but was left to carry a downright middling squad by league standards.

The definitive story of the decade between the Galaxy’s most recent titles is one of expansion. When San Diego FC kicks off next season as MLS’s 30th active member, they’ll partake in a league involving a full dozen more teams than it had in 2014. With more clubs comes more examples of how to (and how not to) run a club, and more competition for the Philip F. Anschutz trophy.

As Atlanta United (which debuted in 2017), Los Angeles FC (2018) and Inter Miami (2020) showed that MLS’s superstar pull extended beyond the Galaxy’s realm, LA struggled to keep pace.

At their best, the Galaxy were often outsized beneficiaries of the league’s evolution. Their pursuit of Beckham led to the fortune-changing designated player rule. Their inability to sign Gonzalez to a market-value deal having used all three DP slots led to the advent of allocation money. Suddenly, however, league-level changes weren’t playing into the Galaxy’s hand.

Ultimately, the addition that moved the needle most came not on the pitch, but in the boardroom. In April 2023, the Galaxy hired Will Kuntz after he’d spent six seasons with rival LAFC, installing him as general manager in December. The former MLS director of player relations didn’t just know the league’s best practice, but had experience at a club with lofty ambition. He acted swiftly, flanking Puig with Paintsil and fellow winger Gabriel Pec. Suddenly, the Galaxy was no longer a one-man band — and boy, did their music benefit from that reinforcement.

Kuntz also helped round out what became a necessarily deep squad. At least one of Saturday’s starting midfield trio (Brugman, who won MLS Cup MVP, as well as Cerillo and Delgado) was on the bench for most of the regular season. Ecuadorian defender Carlos Emiro Garcés joined this spring and put in a vital defensive shift on Saturday. Even Joveljic, who scored the ultimate match-winner in the 14th minute, had long been a benched alternative to Hernandez when the Mexico legend was healthy.

Dejan Joveljic gave LA a crucial two-goal lead (Harry How / Getty Images)

In short, it was a squad that could stand up to the more curated approaches of more recent champions. Throughout much of MLS’s expansion boom, there has been an open question about how the league’s legacy clubs could keep stride with the upstarts. Ahead of MLS Cup, New York head of sport Jochen Schneider suggested the magic touch was to simply forget the past and look around.

“I mean, life is always changing,” Schneider said. “Soccer is changing. The league is changing. New teams, new influences; you need to adapt to that. You need to always analyze: what are others doing, what are the good ones doing? Is there anything we can learn from them?”

By bringing in a key architect from one of the newest MLS superclubs, the Galaxy came into their own. Other stagnating founders of this league should sit up and take note. Simply launching before the boom is no longer an excuse — ask LA, New York and the Columbus Crew.

Granted, this Galaxy side may not be the best MLS Cup-winning side in franchise history. For all their ability on the ball, defending was always their bugaboo. They lost the Western Conference regular season title in the final minutes of Decision Day on a 101st minute header, and they allowed New York to pull a goal back before halftime of MLS Cup on a corner kick.

At the end of the day, however, it was a momentary sacrifice — one last test to ensure that the Galaxy were, once and for all, back to being MLS’s best. And besides, the DP rule encourages teams to spend big on their attacks, not on parking a lavish bus.

MLS, like the Galaxy, is “predictably unpredictable.” A circuit with this many teams is bound to spring surprises with regularity. Entering the playoffs, it seemed certain that the champion would come from the East: namely, either Lionel Messi’s Miami soccer machine or defending champion Columbus. And yet here we are, singing the praises of the West’s historical standard bearer.

As much as things change, that old staple of MLS resurfaced. Thanks to starring men and some fortunate bounces, both in and beyond the league’s control, the LA Galaxy are champions.

(Top photo: Harry How/Getty Images)