Official: 2019 Rumor and Roster Moves Thread

If I were building a team from our roster to win this season I would want the following players, in roughly this order:

Five good starters (Zlatan, Alessandrini, Jona, Polenta, Lletget) , three average starters (Bingham, Romney, Steres) and three part time players ranging from good (Pontius), to average (Boateng), to weak (Carrasco). And there are two unknowns: Antuna and Juninho

So that's basically 8 starters, 3 subs and 2 unknowns. Not enough to make a strong MLS team.

The rest of the team shouldn't be on the roster. They will either hurt you with their inconsistent effort and play: Gio, Skjouk, Feltscher or else they are "high USL level" players: Araujo, Arellano, THA, Carrasco, Alvarez, and Cuello. It would be fine to carry a couple of these USL type players for development purposes, but some of those spots need to be filled with MLS starter level players for position depth.)

Sp barring some miracle signings I predict 2019 is going to be another rough season for us.

 

I'm hearing tomorrow around 10am

 

Sounds like Gio is saying he wants a chance to prove himself and win back the fans and like DTK wants to give him that chance. But exact mechanism to work that out within league rules hasn't been solved yet.

 

Am I reading this situation correctly? It looks like a big game of 'chicken', with the Galaxy saying to Gio, take a pay cut and save your career and play hear this year, or we buy you out and you are basically done as a player.

Why else would we be waiting until the last possible moment to make this decision? There has to be some brinkmanship going on here...

 

I think we are going to see 3-5 new players on this team by the summer. The Ola money freed up is big, so potentially is the Gio TAM money if we cut him.

Listening to GBS he is openly saying they will bring more people in. I am ok waiting a few months if it means avoiding the crappy, knee jerk, decision making process that brought us Ciani et al.

 

That’s how I read it too.

 

Honestly, I'm exhausted with the situation.

It's caused so much unnecessary drama over a player we ought to be rid of, that my excitement for the season is all but gone.

The guy has been paid a lot of money and had ample time to prove himself. We shouldn't be negotiating. He should have been gone 3 months ago.

 

I would agree. This team does not seem particularly strong. Unless the unknowns surprise. With all players available, we should do OK, but we lack depth, and seem to have lots of injury prone guys.

 

Seriously, if I'm Gio, I take that deal in a heartbeat. Grab the $6M, take a few months off, then get back into training for the fall 2019 and there will be a team out there (probably even one we've heard of) that offers him a contract. maybe for $500K or $1M or $2M, but the offer(s) will come.

 

What a revelation. A month ago, these guys were oozing confidence about how they expected this to be wrapped up in a few days. I wonder what fell through.

 

Fireworks are bullshit, just like Gio.

 

I'd say he should never have been signed, but, yeah.

 

You neglected to mentioned a new, more capable manager and coach. I'm not sure how to quantify how much of a difference that will make, but it has to be worth something.

 

An Ola replacement in town?

👑 King Keano is home 👑 pic.twitter.com/eqtIbBWoQo

— LA Galaxy (@LAGalaxy) March 1, 2019

 

Yeah, there was event with Keane tonight at the SM pier I believe, which is really awesome. Would be great to see King Keano again.

 

Oh cool, glad to see the Galaxy has fans from Ireland too! They are global.

 

DTK and GBS will by default be better evaluators of talent and will almost certainly improve our roster - over time. But this season it looks like a wash, at best (add Polenta, subtract Kamara). Maybe they can find a last minute valuable roster addition but not much to pick from this time of year. And the summer window is pretty far away.

As far as coaching - GBS is definitely more exciting than Kinnear and it’s always possible that he is a master motivator/tactician. But its equally likely that he won’t be better than Kinnear — Dom had a pretty strong record in MLS. And it will take GBS to figure our team out - like realizing Romney> Skjgfdk for example or that Kitchen isn’t as good as he looks.

I believe most coaches win at this level mainly because of the talent they assemble. See Coach K for example. Bruce likewise always built the most talented rosters, whether it was at VA, DCU, LAG or 2002 WC team. And we need at least 3 or 4 really good roster additions (including another proven goal scorer) to get close to the talent of the better Galaxy teams.

But we are undefeated so far this season so who knows? Let’s play some soccer!

 

We have until 5pm to announce our decision and be compliant.

Only reasonable thing to do is buy him out. End of story, but it looks, based on the narrative around twitter about the Galaxy being cheaters, that Gio stays on as a TAM player.

Weeks later, I have no idea how that’s cheating. If we play by that logic, We essentially played with 4 DPs last year. Zlatan is now a DP and Gio is now TAM. Why all the crying now? Don’t get it! Whatever!

 

Why not? He and Zlatan can fill in for each other when they need to recover from old age ailments.

 

I'm cautiously optimistic. I have a feeling we dragged this out to make it look like we were doing everything we can to keep Gio for Jonathan's sake. The plan was always to buy him out, but we wanted to keep Jonathan happy.

Here's to hoping that was the plan.

I'd sign Zubak to a homegrown contract and loan him back to G2. Pull him up as needed until we can bring in reinforcements in the summer.

Not sure it was mentioned here but according to the interview with Romain's agent, Romain might be in the process of getting his green card.

 

Thankfully this will be resolved today. The more I think about this the more I think that the Galaxy have always had believed that they have two options available to them that are within the rules. Both are bad in different ways and both offer different potential positives.

Option 1 - buyout

BAD - Cost AEG $6m plus whatever loss marketing value that Gio has. Maybe JDS mad.
GOOD - provides new roster flexibility that should improve the team.

Option 2 restructure contract of Gio

BAD - we keep Gio for sure this year and lose the ability to improve the roster based on his departure
GOOD - we could still buy him out next year and that would cost $4.5m or whatever is left on his contract (meaning the buyout hit gets smaller with time and maybe less likely to happen as he could maybe be moved easier) Cost is less (let's assume a $1.5m contract).

Possibly he proves he's a good player again and everyone has more options at that point.

So as long as option 2 is legal (and I want to believe that AEG has already confirmed this option is legal) I would think that this is the preferred option for the company as it potentially costs it the least (winning not a consideration). However, it obviously required Gio's blessing.

Hence the game of chicken going on right now.

So to me, AEG can pull either of these triggers whenever it wants so why not wait until last minute to pressure Gio (since option 2 is the preferred option to the company)?

 

We just acquired the #1 waiver spot. We're going to waive and re-sign him. The worst of both f***ing worlds.

 

I've never been so happy to be wrong.