When Landon Donovan walks out to play the final game of his career in what could be a record sixth MLS Cup win on Sunday afternoon, it will be the culmination of weeks of staged farewells, tributes, documentaries, commemorative presentations and ceremonies to honor him.

But Donovan’s legacy as a U.S. and Major League Soccer icon will not be celebrated unequivocally in some key quarters. For Donovan, the first U.S. star to elect to build his career in America rather than Europe, has become something of a lightning rod for an ideological battle between U.S. national team boss Jürgen Klinsmann (who is also the technical director for the U.S. Soccer Federation) and Don Garber, the commissioner of MLS, the country’s top domestic league.

Klinsmann’s persistent take on Donovan, one that reached its controversial conclusion with the coach dropping the player from the U.S. World Cup squad this summer, has been that in electing to return to MLS rather than challenge himself in Europe, Donovan has undersold his talent and not demonstrated the level of desire necessary to become a truly top international player and an example to others.

For his part, Garber believes that Klinsmann’s slighting of Donovan’s choices and the groundbreaking example they set for U.S. professionals of what a successful American soccer career could look like is undermining the league — particularly with Klinsmann extending his critique to other top players, such as Clint Dempsey and Michael Bradley, who have started to return to MLS from Europe in Donovan’s wake.

In October, Garber made an uncharacteristically confrontational statement at a press conference where he talked of his “personal disappointment” and issued a “demand” that Klinsmann stop denigrating the league and consider how he “conducts himself” in public. Garber cited Klinsmann’s “inexcusable” treatment of Donovan among the his concerns.

In some social media circles, the spat was treated as Garber inserting his opinion into a personality clash between the league’s golden boy and the head of the national team, but, entertaining as such soap opera narratives were, they tended to obscure deeper structural fissures and concerns for which Garber was only a mouthpiece.