"LAFC"...LA2...whatever

Horta flopping as the anti-Zlatan is a detail that shall not be forgotten when the songs of these games are sung.

 

ESPN FC awards assist of the mid-year to Andres Horta [emoji23]

 

Another loss for LolFC.

Comical goalkeeping by Miller (again) on the first goal and terrible high slow defensive line beaten on second.

They’re not as good as they think they are.

 

If I was an LAFC fan, I’d just turn every game off around the 80th minute mark

— Littler (@LBBeaumont) August 5, 2018

 

They would have to be Barca to be that good.

 

Your last sentence may be true for a lot of their fans. But I watched the game and they aren't weren't bad in this game. NYRB is a very tough team to beat at home. They press hard and constantly. Plus they have excellent speed and finishing up front and both speed and size on the back line. The mistake by Miller was in part because the shot was slightly deflected at the last second, something that wasn't evident until the replay. I don't think Miller is great but its hard to perfectly collect the ball in that situation.

 

I saw the deflection. I still think it was far enough away, slow enough coming in and right in his wheelhouse that most keepers would have done significantly better.

 

Not sure I understand that move. Why do they need another attacking option?

Unless he's renowned for knowing how to close out games I'm not sure he fits a need for Chivas. Am I missing something obvious?

TRANSACTION: Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) acquires forward Christian Ramirez from Minnesota United FC in exchange for $250,000 in General Allocation Money (GAM) in 2018 and 2019, $100,000 in Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) in 2018, $200,000 in Targeted Allocation Money (TAM) in 2019, and up to $200,000 in future Allocation Money based on the player’s performance with the Club.

$550k-$750k is a good chunk. Hopefully this hamstrings them in future periods.

 

I believe the 2018 money goes away at the end of the season. If they don't have another candidate (on defense) for the money adding depth for the future may not be a bad deal especially for 2019 Concacaf (if they make it).

 

Anyone feel like expansion teams are given too many advantages? They used to be jokes but now I feel like they have gone too far in the other direction. Atlanta, LAFC,Vegas Golden Nights all doing very well right out of the gate.

 

I don't know. If you are paying $70 million dollars for a Franchise, I expect that you would want more that a team of rejects for that money. I also think its better for the league that the new teams do well.

On the other hand, I agree that existing teams are handicapped. Personally, I would think that teams that don't make the playoffs, get some of the expansion team benefits but no more often than once every 5 to 10 years. Otherwise some body like Bob Kraft would have his team perennially in the toilet.

 

Agreed.

Disagree. MLS already has many parity measures in place - far more than the vast majority of soccer leagues around the world.

If an MLS owner can't field a team that's relatively competitive a reasonable amount of the time, that's on them.

 

I don't know that ATL and LAFC were given more advantages than expansion teams like SEA, TOR. MIN, ORL etc, none of whom had success early on. I just thing ATL and LAFC were smart in their roster building. Both teams built their teams around young, athletic, technically gifted Latino (right word?) players, spending DP money on Vela (Mex), Almiron (Paraguay), Gonzales (Argentina), and Rossi (Uruguay). They filled out their rosters intelligently and hired really good coaches.

Still we had the foundation to be better than all of them. We had a great team, a great stadium in a great location, an identity and a winning tradition envied across the league. But then starting around 2015, after the retirement of Donovan, we went off the rails with a long series of utterly daft player moves. We jettisoned our own skilled Latino heritage players like Juninho, AJ, Sarvas, Omar, and Pinedo. We valued reputation over performance and passion, replacing them with the likes of Gerrard, Kennedy and Cole. We added expensive short-term spot fillers like JJ, JVD, and de Jong. We selected Gio as our DP centerpiece for years to come and we are still trying to build a team around him and his brother. Hell for a season we even tried relying on GII players. When that didn't work we added the likes of Pedro, Ciani, Skjelvik and Kitchen since apparently if you play in Europe you are good enough for the Galaxy - even if you aren't good on the pitch. Now we are stuck with a bunch of defenders who aren't good enough to carry the cleats of most of the Galaxy defenders who preceded them.

We aren't behind Atlanta and LAFC because they were given unfair advantages. We are behind them because we've squandered ours.

 

Agreed but this is only because the rest of the world is in this particular case behind the times. Typically, there is only a change in the various leagues internal pecking order when a big monied owner buys in. How can teams like Fulham (when they were in the EPL) compete with teams like ManU for revenue?

Except for MNUFC, this is clearly wrong. First the expansion draft was cut in half after the 2016 addition of Orlando and NYFC. It was my understanding that to compensate the expansion teams for this, they were granted an unknown but significant amount of allocation money (whether gam tam or something else) beyond what the other teams in the league got in GAM and TAM.

In part, I agree, but once a team has gone into the toilet its very difficult because of those parity measures to build back up and its certainly easier to build from scratch without being tied up in multi-year contracts. The extra TAM and GAM funds that recent expansion teams get (which may be multiple years in duration) also helps.​

 

Is this strictly true though?

I see many teams going worst-to-first (or at least lower reaches of the table to strong seasons) and vice-versa in MLS and that's without the benefit of the type of significant draft pool that the NFL and NBA enjoy.

I mean, the Galaxy were actually able to build this season and could be in Supporters Shield contention, had they actually spent those copious volumes of cash on good players.

 

IMO, it is.

First there is a huge difference in GAM. Teams that didn't make the playoffs got $500k. LAFC and presumably ATUFC and MNUFC got $1.3mm. There were also differences in TAM (which are hard to figure out). ATUFC and MNUFC got an unspent $1.2mm base plus all an additional $300k. All teams got to pull their 2019 $1.2mm TAM forward into this year plus $2.8mm in team funded TAM.

Second, expansion teams don't have the burden of existing contracts that existing teams have nor the opportunity to dip into TAM. For example the Galaxy signing Jelle using TAM reduced the amount available in 2017 and this year. Another example, was the decision to trade Gyasi and $400K of TAM for Ola. Ola was already a TAM player whose contract cost the Galaxy at least $320 in GAM or TAM:. Third they still were tied to Gio, Jona, Romaine as DPs which meant that any new player like Zlatan could not to be signed for more than a total of $1.5mm any Transfer fee. They also had Ciani coming back. Under League rules they could get rid of only 1 player in the off-season at the cost of eating their salary. The others needed to be traded or transferred. Of those only Jona and Romaine had/have real trade value.

All in all existing poor teams have less flexibility and less money to rebuild/recover from bad previous decisions.

 

To my best of my knowledge the Galaxy have never used it. I have always attributed this to AEG management as opposed to the Galaxy FO because of some comments made once upon a time about adhering to a budget and cutting a player while still paying for him causes havoc with budgets.

FWIW, I believe only a few DPs have been cut in league history.

 

LAFC lose to Houston in PKs after scoring a 90th minute game tying goal.

I’d laugh, but it’s further than we’ve gone in a decade, so …

 

We’ve won that cup what 2-3 times? I’m fine with how we prioritize it.

LAFC has a pk to win it in the shootout.

Lots of energy expended to tie it, then extra time, all with starters. Now travel home to hopefully another loss on saturday.

 

I'll laugh because we've barely made an effort in that time. LAFC wanted this and didn't get it.

 

There are probably more years that we didn’t, but 2008 we made the final. Then there was that year our B team got beat by Rochester and when we drew them the following year Bruce sent out Keane and Dononvan and a bunch of other first team players and we still got beat. And we for sure wanted to win this year, Sigi said as much since it gets you in the CCL.