First time in Spain. Camp Nou is under construction, so the CL semifinal game was at the Olympic Stadium. And, while I visited the stadium, I didn't attend the game.
For Osaze De Rosario , returning home to Canada meant stepping into full view of the legacy of his father, Dwayne De Rosario, a four-time MLS champion in the 2000s and a seven-time MLS All-Star. The younger De Rosario does not try to shy away from his father’s history in Canadian soccer as he strives to build his own reputation.
NYRB 7 - Gals 0, shoot it into my veins. Can Vanney survive this? I think this is the worst start in MLS history in terms of games w/o a win to start the season.
Will Kuntz built the LAG to win the cup last year knowing the key parts of the team would be gutted due to salary gap after that. The replacements he brought in didn't work. Reus is a bust and waste of resources. No backup for Puig as he is the single point of failure. He may be better than Leitch. Hindsight suggests he is also part of the problem on top of Vanney's coaching.
Maybe LA are just goldbricking so they can have a glorious worst-to-first season to coincide with hosting a world cup venue next year.
50 goals A 50 goal Matchday!! 😃🎟️: https://t.co/wpUIa3cIUH pic.twitter.com/yRvUaB5cAr— Major League Soccer (@MLS) May 12, 2025
A good year to tank https://tacticsfreezone.substack.com/p/power-rankings-1-30-matchday-12 30. LA Galaxy: That was as complete a capitulation as I’ve ever seen in this league, and I’ve been around from the start. Their underlying numbers on American Soccer Analysis have them as one of the 10 worst teams in their database, which goes back to 2013.7 Their xG differential is the worst in FBRef’s MLS database, which goes back to 2018. This is, at least, a good year to tank since no expansion team means the Wooden Spoon “winner” gets the No. 1 pick in the SuperDraft.
I listened to Landon and Tim Howard's podcast - their interview with Will Kuntz, Gals GM. Didn't know that he was a baseball (Yankees) guy originallly. Anyway, of course he whined madly about MLS salary rules and blamed the Gal's historic bad start on that. Come on man, you won a championship - take the credit for that, but also own the failures. You can't have it both ways. He complains that when Riqui Puig went down he didn't have another Riqui Puig to take his place, and that Jovelic aged out of his U22 discount. My man, you signed a broken down Marco Reus and a 34-year old slow as molasses Christian Ramirez. No one made you sign those guys. Those are your decisions. Own them.
I heard Kuntz on a podcast before last season and came away impressed - despite coming from outside soccer, the guy clearly knows his stuff and made a bunch of shrewd signings to bring the cup to LA. I do agree with him in the sense that the MLS CBA forces clubs to break up successful teams to the point that it's rather counterproductive to the league's goals overall, which is not unique to MLS (the NFL and the NBA's most recent CBA have similar issues). I do feel a bit of smug schadenfreude though, after all they are an LA team and I was pissed they nabbed some of my favorite players (Reus and Yamane).
Well he deserves credit for last year, but he fell into one of the most favorable set of circumstances possibly in the history of the league. He had Riqui Puig to build around (not his signing), as well as Jovelic, and something like $17M of dead weight coming off the books for players like Chicharito and Costa. He made some good signings, big and smaller, and yes he had to clear a little cap space this year but his additions since have been poor. Reus was a great player but being held together with duct tape at this point. Christian Ramirez was a good player in the league once, but is 34 yo and is barely faster than actually moving backwards. He complained that Jovelic fell out of his U22 designation, well you can sign new U22's for big money and it's almost cap-free! The point is, everyone's playing the same cap game. You don't get to use it as an excuse when you do poorly. If you take the W for 2024 you also have to take the L for 2025. No excuses.
Columbus has lost 2 superstars in the last few years - Zelarayan and Cucho, and they’re barely mid-table in spending and they just keep right on rolling, winning what 3 championships in the last few years? So I’m not ready to buy Kuntz’s argument that the cap makes it impossible to win consistently in MLS. I guess it make sense. This guy cut his teeth with the NY Yankees. If you can’t win with spending, then you just can’t win!
I guess Will Kuntz is doing the rounds, cuz before the RBNY game, he sat down with the Cooligans. I thought it was a great interview. He probably said a lot of the same stuff he told LD and Timmie. Kuntz said he and other GMs want to be able to spend more money and think it is better for the league to have several Super-teams, that MLS is one of the few (the only??) leagues that don’t have super-teams who battle it out at the top every year. He says fans prefer to have super-teams. And the playoffs are a way of balancing out the super-teams, giving smaller clubs a chance to win the league. I thought Kuntz was very interesting. I also think he might be the reason the Galaxy are losing so much, because he flies with the team almost every game. Imagine having your boss’ boss on every charter flight. He also seems to be concerned about players’ lives, which is nice, but I think that interferes with the relationship between players and coaching staff.
I don't think it's weird for the GM to be flying with the team to every game - it's pretty standard in pro sports. Are you saying he should be sitting at home watching on Apple TV? Of course it can get weird when players get traded/waived but there's no way around that aspect, it doesn't mean that the coaching staff can't be given space to do their jobs. There can be a balance between (American-style) parity and allowing great teams to emerge naturally as a result of ownership resources, market size, management skill, luck, and brand equity. It does kind of suck when teams are forced to break up because of hard spending caps, some allowances for the sake of team continuity (not strictly equal to promoting "super teams") like the soft salary caps in the NBA might be a good idea. I'm sure Kuntz is well aware that he comes off as a whining excuse-maker, obviously he was fully aware that MLS is not the (uncapped) MLB and he always knew that the Cup team would be dismantled.
I don't agree that the league "needs super teams". He says the league "needs super teams" because he thinks LAG should be one, and that they should be ordained to win every year. Suck it up, Will! You gotta earn it like the rest of the league. The league has a few teams that are generally good every year anyway, or at least for good multi-year runs. Take some lessons from Columbus, and Seattle for that matter. Miami is probably the first super team, but there are teams that stay close to the top for several years w/o having to have a swarm of global superstars on the team.
Ricky Puig joined LA in 2022, in 2023 with Puig they finished 13th in the west ahead of only Colorado.. they won MLS Cup last year after Kuntz brought in Pantsil and Pec as the other two DPs.