After tonight I don’t know if they have patience to keep Vanney. One thing to lose 1-0. If the 4+ games start stacking up….it looks awfully putrid.
Yeah, he’s gotta go after this one. That had many of the hallmarks of a team quitting on the manager.
There are good coaches out there - you just have to be smart to find them. Vancouver’s new coach quickly made them into a winner using the same personnel. They earned 1.38 ppg in 2024 (14th league-wide), this season they’ve bumped that enormously to 2.36 ppg (1st in MLS). The coach had a resume of building great defenses, he did same when he came to MLS.
There are probably plenty of coaches who can fix things with an offseason to transition the team to their plan even if they don't make any major new signings. Who is a version of a pragmatic available experienced MLS coach who could stabilize things and give us a chance in the second half of the season to be reasonably competitive? This would be like one of those retread Premier League coaches brought in to help stave off relegation. Are there similar coaches available in MLS? It's basically someone who can shake things up while still generating the faith of the players, identify players on the squad that are useful, and provide a simplified system that gets the most out of those players. I don't think that's Curtain. It might have been Arena if he was available, although I actually think he is better at the quick rebuild by bringing in certain players (which maybe you could do in the summer window). Maybe Peter Vermes, but he has no experience diving into a situation since he was with SKC so long and I don't think he has a simple system necessarily.
This is from Reddit, credit goes there. This season is like watching a car crash, hard to look away... So I wanted to compile a list of records that could be feasible for this 2025 Galaxy team to become the sole owners of Achievement Unlocked Already: - First and only team to lose a match without conceding a single shot on goal or off goal. - Record for Worst start to a campaign. - Biggest Losing margin, 7-0 NY Redbull vs LA Galaxy Achievements that Galaxy May achieve in 2025: - Fewest Goals Scored in a campaign. current holder: DC United 21 goals scored (2010) - Record Number of Games without scoring, current holder: DC United, 17 scoreless matches (2015) - Most Losses in a campaign, current holder: NY MetroStars/SJ Earthquakes, 25 losses (1999, 2015) - Most Goals Allowed in a campaign, current holder: SJ Earthquakes, 78 goals conceded (2024) - Least Points Per Game in a campaign, current holder: Tampa Bay Mutiny, .67ppg (2001) - Worst Differential in a campaign, current holder: FC Cincinnati, -44 (2019) - Fewest Points in a campaign, current holder: Tampa Bay Mutiny, 14 (2001) Anything else we might 'achieve' this year?
Matt Doyle ranks Galaxy last in his power rankings and has this to say about their performance against the NYRB and puts their overall performance in context (it's bad, very bad). The consolation - we get the top pick in the SuperDraft!
Is the SuperDraft still viable? I get the sense it produces a lot fewer starters and almost no immediate starters than back when the SuperDraft would have the likes of Omar Gonzalez and AJ in the same draft. Looking back at the past 5 years, the two most notable players selected by LA were Preston Judd and Tucker Lepley. Most of the rest are no longer with LA.
Fun fact. It’s been 5 months and 5 days since we beat an MLS team. If we fail to beat: Philly, LAFC, San Diego, San Jose and RSL will pass the 6 month marker. It will also mark the halfway point of the season. RSL is … beatable, but whether we can beat them is a different story. The rest of that run of games could get ugly.
This thread needs a little glass half full perspective (from someone who has been a fan of a lot of not so good teams): We can watch games without the stress of how it affects our place in the standings, home field advantage or anything else. Because of that - We can watch and assess games in smaller chunks - e.g., "we won the first 10 minutes," "we kept them off the board that half," "we didn't concede right before halftime." We can enjoy little things, like a great passing sequence, a beautiful GK distribution, a great recovery run etc. We can track our younger players and celebrate their progress, sort of like in baseball where they allow rosters to expand in September and the fans of losing teams get a chance to be given hope for the future. We can generally look for improvement and measure it in small ways - corners defended successfully, goals scored, goals conceded etc We can watch more VCFC games since they are in 1st place in the MLSNP Western Conference standings after defeating LAFC2 and play special attention to possible future Galaxy players (Ramos, Jr., Miller, possibly Magana etc). We can easily move on after the game ends, rather than allowing it to spoil our week. (Who am I kidding. Everyone will stew over it and it will get ugly before fans simply stop showing up)
Kevin Baxter thinks that Vanney would have been fired had they not stayed on the east coast for another game mid-week. Those that don't want Vanney should be cheering for another loss on Wednesday. It might get the team an interim coach for El Traffico.
Anyone here think that any of the assistant coaches would bring anything worthwhile? I don’t think the staff has done much —defense, attacking, midfield control?
They are all long-time Vanney coaches, coming over with him from Toronto. Calichman and Theslof are the only ones with any sort of head coaching experience separate from Vanney. Calichman was a DIII college head coach at Claremont-McKenna and Theslof was a head coach for the Orange County Blue Star, a PDL team (basically semi-pro league for college kids during the summer), and the Orange County Waves, which was part of the USL A-League, but he also spent time assistant coaching in Europe, including under Klinsmann with Bayern and the German National Team (but mostly as a video scout type). Kevin Hartman would be a sentimental choice, but hardly any experience and I can't imagine anyone on the team being happy with him for more than a game or two like Cobi Jones did back in the day.
I think any coach that teaches team defense would help us make it through this season. To be clear, I’m not saying we should settle for such a coach. I’m just saying it won’t take a special super-coach to improve our results. We just need someone who can take our existing personnel and quit yielding a massive 2.4 g/gm. Shouldn’t be hard. Offense is a different animal. That is a much more difficult nut to crack.
If they know who they want, which if Will Kuntz is good at his job he and his team have already been preparing to replace Vanney for awhile now, then I am ready for them to pull the trigger and let literally anyone be the interim manager until they have the new permanent manager take over the squad. It's honestly kind of shocking to me we didn't get a "Thank you Greg" post on social media on Monday and that he is presumably going to still be managing the team tomorrow. Twelve game winless streak punctuated by a historic 7-0 demolition? This team is a shadow of what it was last year, but what it was last year was a team that won the title in style. Missing the playoffs was always a possibility, but something is going wrong in training or in that locker room generally for it to be this awful. Either way Vanney has had fully a third of the season now to get it under control and it only gets worse with every passing week. We have seen this movie three seasons now and we know how it ends. With us missing the playoffs in miserable fashion. I will always be grateful for what he helped bring us in 2024, but he needs to be sacked. I will lose my mind if he is still here for El Trafico, somehow gets a win, and the inevitable is prolonged.
I'm really hoping the Galaxy put in a dominating performance tomorrow just to see what kind of chaos it would bring to Galaxy fans. then the Galaxy can go back to whatever they're doing this year. at this point in a lost season, I've become a bit apathetic and really don't care if Vanney stays or go's, this season is done and I like the team will just go through the motions for the next 6 months.
Bogert with some info on the Galaxy, including Vanney's contract situation, the GK position The LA Galaxy are off to an historically bad start to 2025. How they got here is well-discussed— But where do they go now?On Greg Vanney's contract situation, the squad and more https://t.co/PkjdRAtse8— Tom Bogert (@tombogert) May 14, 2025 McCarthy seems like he has been a team leader, but he's not having much effect on the defense and he has had a bunch of mistakes, including against RBNY. Might as well see if Micovic can do better the second time around. It wouldn't be surprising if they already intended to make the switch for the Union game because it's a 3 game week, but from a broader perspective it might be time to see if we can raise his value in advance of the summer window.
Just a rant.....It really sucks that this season is 'over'. Listening to COG and other podcasts, talking about next year already.....there are a lot of STHs who paid for this season and it's BS to write off the experience of fans this year. I love that Kuntz is going on podcasts, explaining about the salary cap - but what he is doing to salvage something from this season? What is he doing to give fans some value for going to the stadium? As we have all seen, it's really easy to lose fans and much harder to get them to come back. If we get blown out by LAFC Sunday, they will struggle to give tickets away the rest of the season. We need reasons to go to games.
Watching that interview just reinforced my belief that Kuntz is a damn smart fellow. He’s also a hard worker. I think he will right the ship, hopefully by next year. For me (and I understand many of you don’t agree) the big question is whether he has the gumption to fire his buddy Greg. Not only bc I think Greg needs to be replaced but also so Kuntz can finally have HIS hire in there. There is something messy and awkward about having your old boss from the previous administration in such a big role for the club.
Watching that reinforced my notion that he knew this season was gonna be tough and was positioning for 2026. Of course he didn’t know it was gonna be “worst of all time” tough.
JPAR, thanks for posting this. These days there are many I worry about getting abused, neglected, or forgotten by malevolent forces well beyond their control, so being a STH doesn’t rate anywhere on this list, but still it does suck. I can’t say the Galaxy have done much to make me feel like money spent on season tickets isn’t a big fat waste. I no longer can exchange tickets reasonably (that’s limited this year), STH entrance is now gone (limited to only the priciest seats now). I can’t see how a STH discount on 20 more games that no one, especially the players, want to attend is much consolation. But at least I feel understood, anyway, by my BigSoccer compadres, anyway.