If you were on the East coast and fell asleep early on in Friday night’s California Clasico, you might have thought things would end up going the Galaxy’s way. You’d be very wrong. In fact, you’d have missed out on the complete opposite result: a dominant performance from Matías Almeyda’s San Jose Earthquakes. After giving up an early goal off of a corner kick, the Quakes used their man-marking defensive scheme to smother the Galaxy in a 3-1 win; San Jose had 16 shots on target and held their opponents to just one over the course of the game.



Ushered in by Almeyda at the beginning of the 2019 Major League Soccer season, the San Jose Earthquakes’ man-marking defensive system is one of the most frenetic yet structured tactics in the league’s history. Some MLS managers use a variation of zonal-marking scheme that asks outfield players to defend a single area of the field; doing this compressed space and optimizes their...