LA Galaxy back in MLS Cup, a decade on from the glory days

The scene inside the locker room after the LA Galaxy’s 2014 MLS Cup victory felt distinctly bacchanalian, a touch wilder than the reverie surrounding the club’s previous four championship celebrations.

Players had torn plastic sheeting off of the walls and lockers and crafted an impromptu slip-n-slide, hurtling themselves down the beer-soaked course with reckless abandon. Music blared from a stereo in one corner as teammates exchanged embraces, doused in sweat and champagne spray. The screaming and shrieking was constant, the sense of exhilaration palpable.

At some point, a voice cut through the madness. It was Omar Gonzalez, the club’s star defender. He gathered all of his teammates in front of him, ostensibly for a bit of a team talk. Then, without warning, he whipped his bathrobe open. Wide-eyed and shocked, the entire team fell over laughing.

In the middle of all this stood the club’s head coach, 63-year-old Bruce Arena, calmly uncorking a bottle of Dom Perignon. The wry smile he sported did a good enough job of telling his story: this was Arena’s fifth MLS Cup, and these celebrations were old hat to him. He was by then the league’s greatest-ever coach and he was flanked by its greatest-ever player, Landon Donovan. The two exchanged their own embrace.

It was a quiet moment among the madness, and it carried a sense of finality.

The Galaxy were MLS originals and by 2014 they were arguably the most successful franchise in league history. Galaxy had given MLS its first taste of real, mainstream relevance in 2007 when they landed English megastar David Beckham, and in the years that followed they’d solidified their place in the sporting zeitgeist on and off the field. To many fans of soccer across the globe, the Galaxy were quite simply the only MLS team they’d ever heard of.

But by the end of 2016, just two years after the Galaxy hoisted their fifth MLS Cup — still an MLS record — Arena, Donovan and a handful of other formative figures in club history were gone. And there were changes afoot across the league, too: just two years later, Los Angeles Football Club would debut, the Galaxy’s first in-market competition since the league’s failed Chivas USA experiment.

LAFC were joined by a handful of other new clubs: well-run, high-spending franchises that helped complete the work the Galaxy started in the mid-2000s, finally modernizing the league as a whole. In the meantime, the Galaxy tried, with varying degrees of success, to stay relevant. They clung to the image they’d formed during the Beckham era by luring other high-profile names — Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez and the like — but that rarely translated into success on the pitch.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Galaxy as an organization got complacent,” Donovan tells The Athletic, a decade later. “There is no guarantee that you’re ever getting back to (success.) You don’t have any God-given right to it, you have to earn it all the time. There was just this complacency.”

It took 10 years to get back to the league’s championship game, where they’ll face the New York Red Bulls on Saturday. And in that intervening decade, the Galaxy’s star has faded a bit. They are no longer the league’s flagship franchise, having been drowned out by LAFC, Atlanta United and, most recently, Inter Miami, who arguably became the most popular club in league history overnight by acquiring Argentine legend Lionel Messi.

The Galaxy, though, are starting to show flashes of their former glory, even if the club is no longer the preferred destination of global football’s highest-profile players in the twilight of their careers. They are something else now: a well-coached, exciting and relatively young team that plays some of the most attractive soccer in MLS.

It’s enough to make you wonder: can the Galaxy recapture the imagination of the American soccer fan?

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To longtime fans of MLS, it’s likely that no player is more closely associated with the Galaxy than Donovan is, more than even Beckham. For a decade, he was the club’s most essential player while simultaneously becoming the face of the U.S. men’s national team. The 42-year-old, most recently the interim head coach of the NWSL’s San Diego Wave, remembers the Galaxy’s halcyon days well.

“There was an excitement everywhere we went,” says Donovan. “Especially after David showed up, that you only get with a player like David or Messi. We felt like rock stars as we traveled and went different places — always to a sold-out stadium. It was an important time for the league, and we were an important team for the league.”

“From the year I arrived in the league in 2003 until David arrived, there really was no MLS, not publicly at least,” adds Mike Magee, who also featured for the Galaxy during their glory days. “Then he came and all of a sudden we were known around the world … We built an incredible culture, and were a team the league could be really proud of. The fans were amazing, the stadium was amazing and we did a hell of a job introducing the world to MLS.”

The arrival of Beckham had pushed the Galaxy to global prominence but the franchise had always been among the league’s best-run and most perennially competitive.

By the time Beckham arrived in 2007, the club was already a mainstay in MLS, having advanced to the MLS Cup five times in the league’s 11-year history and won it twice. They played in the league’s nicest stadium, were well-supported locally and were funded by billionaire businessman Philip Anschutz, a name now emblazoned on the MLS Cup trophy itself.

“It was unheard of, the level of class we were treated with at the Galaxy,” says Magee. “It was so first-class. Every time you walked into the building, everybody you saw was doing their best to make sure we could succeed. They made us feel like kings, truly.”

Infamously, Beckham was not an instant success at the Galaxy, something well-documented in the late Grant Wahl’s best-selling book, The Beckham Experiment. But the Galaxy did eventually get things dialed in. They brought in Arena, the winningest coach in American professional soccer history, to steer the wayward ship and they overhauled their roster, populating it with a mix of proven American and international talent. By 2009, the Galaxy were finally the well-oiled machine the league badly needed them to be.

They set out on arguably the most prolific run in league history, making the Cup final in 2009 and winning the Supporters’ Shield in 2010. They won the Shield again in 2011 and did the double, winning the league championship for the first time in six years. They did so again in 2012, sending Beckham into the sunset as an MLS Champion, and nearly won another title in 2013, crashing out in the conference finals.

By the time Gonzalez, Arena and Donovan were spraying each other with champagne in 2014, it felt unthinkable that the Galaxy — the league’s premier franchise, the club that lured Beckham to Hollywood — would drift into any sort of irrelevance. But things change. Magee, who departed the Galaxy in 2013, saw it from afar.

“During my time there, the club really did a great job of showing the blueprint on how to succeed and get the right combination of great players and great human beings who showed up every day to work towards a common goal to win,” he says. “And somehow, one of those years in the last decade, it just felt like the blueprint was thrown out the window and they decided to go a different way. For a lot of us who loved the club, it was confusing. It was just like they threw it away.”

The mystique of the Galaxy, the perception that they were an elite club, disappeared along with the blueprint.

“What the Galaxy had that some other clubs didn’t is that the club had a history, and just as importantly it had an aura about it,” says Donovan. “That aura was special. That felt like it got lost, for the most part. There was not enough continuity, and not enough players who knew what the Galaxy meant.”

The Galaxy were guided by club president Chris Klein, a former teammate of Beckham’s and a man intimately familiar with the Galaxy’s rise back to glory. After Arena’s departure to helm the U.S. men’s national team in 2016, the club were often mediocre and sometimes downright bad. When LAFC debuted in 2018, a bit of panic set in.

The Galaxy had long been the face of MLS and they’d long been among the small handful of teams capable of landing — and affording — the biggest names in global football. LAFC, playing in a gleaming spaceship of a stadium plopped right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, turned the Galaxy’s reality on its head a bit, and attempts to course correct felt desperate at times.

In 2018, the same year LAFC entered the fray, the Galaxy signed Ibrahimovic, among the greatest attacking players soccer has ever seen. It was a move that was wildly successful from a public relations perspective but did very little for the Galaxy otherwise. Ibrahimovic scored goals at a prolific pace, but the club’s failure to build a roster around him holistically — by then a recurring theme at the Galaxy — kept his presence from translating into a championship.

The Galaxy missed the playoffs in 2018 and were eliminated by LAFC in 2019. Ibrahimovic’s final act? Grabbing his crotch at an LAFC fan while storming off the field in disgust.

The Galaxy took other swings: Mexican internationals and brothers Giovanni and Jonathan Dos Santos, and Chicharito — long the white whale of MLS. None of them did much to change the Galaxy’s fortunes.

“LAFC absolutely hurt the Galaxy,” says Magee. “I think the Galaxy were trying so hard to catch back up with them so fast that they forgot about how hard that process (of building a holistic roster) is. I bet it hurt them for a number of years, just trying to desperately sign players and trying to get good overnight, to catch up with them.”

All the while, Klein remained, as did Jovan Kirovski, the club’s technical director. The two had formed a close bond, and Klein was hesitant to move on from his former teammate, often at the expense of results.

Across the league, the Galaxy’s sporting department became a topic of discussion… for all the wrong reasons. The club was disorganized, insiders would say, with too many cooks in the kitchen. Klein and Kirovski brought in a parade of help, from head coaches Sigi Schmid and Guillermo Barros Schelotto to former players turned administrator Curt Onalfo to executive Dennis te Kloese — none of whom had any cohesive vision or way forward.

“From an outside perspective, the club was sort of chasing that next championship one year at a time instead of building (any) infrastructure,” current Galaxy head coach and former Galaxy player Greg Vanney told The Athletic in 2023.

As an example: for a full two years, the Galaxy were lacking a full-time academy director, an essential position in a league that’s constantly touted the importance of developing young players. In 2019, the Galaxy were fined $1million ($787,000) by the league for violating roster rules, a deeply embarrassing mark on the club’s reputation.

Even among former players, the club’s reputation became a sore spot. Donovan, at one point the face of the franchise, largely stopped attending games, even after retiring from soccer in 2019.

“I only live an hour and a half away,” he says. “But I didn’t make my way to many games. Every time I tried to reach out, or tried to be a part of it I was either ignored or told: ‘Thanks but no thanks.’ It was frustrating. I wanted to be connected to the club. I spent 10 years there. I love the club, I love the fans, I love the stadium and I wanted to feel connected to it.”

By 2023 — with the Galaxy in last place — long-time fans had seen enough. They began actively calling for Klein’s head, threatening a boycott. Klein was dismissed. Kirovski was next to go, fired in early 2024.

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This incarnation of the Galaxy looks very little like the Galaxy of old — and that’s a good thing.

Riqui Puig, Gabriel Pec and Joseph Paintsil don’t resonate with casual fans in the way names Beckham and Zlatan still do, but the club are more enjoyable to watch. There’s none of the guilt, either, that comes along with watching an aging megastar ply his trade and the accompanying feeling that the club, or league, is doing little to move forward.

The Galaxy is led by Vanney, who has been on board since 2021. The club’s front office is rowing in the same direction these days — Vanney likes to use the phrase “shared vision” — in no small part because of the appointment of the club’s general manager, Will Kuntz, in 2023. Notably, Kuntz was lured away from LAFC — a massive coup for the Galaxy. It has not taken him long to make his mark.

“The Galaxy were the drivers in early MLS and they found a lot of success,” Vanney said on Tuesday. “Pushing the (designated player) narrative and getting those players here. But now MLS has genuinely become a league that’s not just about big-name players. It’s about having a team that really fits together, about having a scouting department that finds players who fit the vision of the way the club and coaches want to play and it’s having a support system around and underneath (those things).”

In Vanney’s own words, the club has done well in recent years to build the infrastructure that it’s lacked in the past decade. Former players, such as Donovan and Magee, have noticed.

“Seeing this group now,” says Magee, “and what Will did, what Vanney has done, to see them have a bunch of guys and have those guys stepping onto the field to work their ass off and play for the club and the fans — it was a lost art at the Galaxy. And they found it. That’s why they’re having so much success.”

Donovan goes to more games these days, he says, as the club has made an effort in recent years to mend fences with former players. He’ll be at the game on Saturday, as will Magee.

“What Greg has been building is special,” says Donovan. “And there’s a deeper connection to the (club’s) history now. Over the years, they brought in a bunch of big names, but they weren’t guys who actually felt any attachment to the club. And that’s gone away. You see it everywhere in world soccer: there is value in having continuity, in people who have a genuine connection to things instead of having it just be the next stop along the way.”

There is likely no return to the glory days of the Galaxy, in no small part because the league has changed so much. MLS is no longer a backwater league featuring 12 teams, and there’s simply more competition for the spotlight.

To Vanney, though, who witnessed the rise — and fall, for now — of a club some might call the league’s greatest, MLS’s success is still tied to the Galaxy’s.

“It’s important for our league that the LA Galaxy is in some sort of pole position and is some type of leader in this league. Because of the legacy, the history and the name it has around the world. Because of its success, yes, but also because of players like David Beckham, who came and expanded that fanbase well beyond just the United States. It is important that we’re here, in this game.

“We have one more game to do it, but this has to be sustainable,” concludes Vanney. “This can’t just be about one year.”

To Galaxy fans, that last bit is likely a nice change of pace.

(Top photo: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)