The LAFC of right now is a headless ghost shuffling through the purgatory of professional soccer. It exists, but only by the loosest of definitions.

On its nascent site, LAFC begs future fans, which it calls “Originals,” to sign up for news currently dribbling out of the faucet at a trickle. The site directs all press inquiries through Karen Demarco, a “brand marketing and communications” VP with PMK-BNC, an independent Los Angeles ad agency. Even its earliest hiring attempts have been riddled with balky foresight. In a January ad for “club supporter relations” with the club, LAFC listed the screening of supporters group leaders as one of the job descriptions. They also listed something about hosting raves. The job ad was later amended for unclear language, and then amended again for intimating playing experience was required.

LAFC will not begin play until 2017, a fact that has been allowed to dictate its public persona in a way that has wrenched the discussion of its own brand out of its hands. What is LAFC? For one, its Twitter timeline is riddled with the bizarre and nebulously unexplainable. Like a tortuous serious of tweets about Nicklas Bendtner during his hat trick against the USMNT last week. Where… did this even come from?

According to our quick twitter poll, most LAFC fans think Nicklas Bendtner should be a future LAFC DP. 2nd Half underway now on ESPN! — LAFC (@LAFC) March 25, 2015

Our fans must be celebrating that one! Bendtner is now on a hat trick and #DENvUSA is 2-2. Seven minutes for US to find a winner on ESPN. — LAFC (@LAFC) March 25, 2015

Or how about a casually random Messi pull?

And a follow-up for good measure. You know, to respond to the haters.

Chatter from folks for touting #Messi via @LAFC. Here’s the deal: We’re fans of soccer. MLS, USMNT, EPL even beach soccer. We love it all. — LAFC (@LAFC) November 19, 2014

It’s not just that all of this is unnecessary and borderline juvenile. You already knew that. But it’s robbed LAFC of a level of professionalism as it seeks to organize itself into a defined shape. Any shape. In the same way a child’s behavioral patterns are set by the example pushed forward by its parents, so too is a club’s ethos branded by the tone it sets in its early days. And it’s fair to say LAFC is being run, socially anyway, like there’s an excitable college kid at the controls throwing darts at a board.

Let’s step back a minute and examine the world LAFC is soon to inhabit. For the next two seasons, the LA Galaxy own the largest Homegrown monopoly in MLS history. The crumbling of Chivas USA means the Galaxy ostensibly own all of MLS’s developmental stake in Southern California. The league is slow to update and release its Homegrown ownership tracts, but there won’t be another playing MLS club within 350 miles of the Galaxy for two full years. There are plenty of top notch Development Academy programs in the LA area, but they’re not MLS clubs. If a player wants to stick with Real So Cal or Arsenal FC, they’ll still be privy to a quality soccer education, but let’s not pretend the Galaxy don’t have a unique niche to offer top prospects, either.

The last embers of the dying Chivas USA brand are about to lose their final hard flecks of light. The Chivas USA youth sides are alive until the end of the Development Academy season. An uncertain dispersal awaits each of them. When that light goes dark, the Galaxy will stand astride the city like a professional colossus, unchallenged in their hegemony as the city’s only operating single youth-to-professional pipeline. In a professional capacity, the league’s most successful club will have the run of the league’s most fertile development grounds. It’s hard to understate this.

From LAFC’s perspective, there is very literally no time to squander. The club needs to exhaust every tangible option in creating a Development Academy arm well in advance of its first senior team match. Keeping in mind the league’s nebulous and constantly evolving youth rule kit, the club’s young ownership group can make a compelling case to the league office that it should at least have the option to inherit Chivas USA’s academy system. At the very least, the option should be placed in Chivas USA’s hands. Unlike the senior team’s chaotic lifespan, the Chivas USA academy is and remains one of the nation’s best.

There’s absolutely no reason why an LAFC-branded academy shouldn’t be playing at the U16 and U18 level in time for the 2015-16 season. Unfortunately, it may already be too late. An opportunity gone.

Nevertheless, there’s no better way to inculcate a sense of belonging with the community than to incorporate its children into your youth setup. To this end, Tom Penn said this to SI’s Liviu Bird.

“It’s difficult for me to speak to the specific plans with the Chivas academy that’s being operated by MLS, because we did not acquire that franchise. The league terminated that parent franchise; they’re operating the academy,” team president and part-owner Tom Penn tells SI.com. “What I can tell you is that our commitment to a robust academy worthy of this marketplace – in the right place, at the right time, with the right resources – is integral to our plan.” Penn says meetings with those across the youth landscape in the Los Angeles area leave him with the impression that LAFC will have no trouble attracting top young players. “In this market, there’s just so much opportunity and so much talent,” he says.

In the right place. At the right time. With the right resources. LAFC was announced more than five months ago. With a cadre of 22 owners, the club still has no tangible youth setup. With the Galaxy drilling ever deeper into the city’s well of talent with unchecked MLS power, the right time was yesterday.

The trouble with LAFC is that it appears to be an entity without mooring. The club still has no colors, no badge. That it exists for even one day without either of those things is almost unfathomable. They’ll almost assuredly go the NYCFC route and farm out badge suggestions to local artists to “invite fan and community interactivity.” But at least in this instance, the club needed to move on those items immediately. If its plan is to promote itself through its own social channels, it needs something to promote.

The longer it takes for the club to plant any semblance of identity into the ground, the harder it becomes to generate self-sustaining momentum. LAFC is not NYCFC. What it has in money, it lacks in foundational, longstanding technical-side support. NYCFC could afford to sit back on its haunches until its launch year because City Football Group, which owns 80 percent of the franchise, has resources from which it can draw already in the ground. Even then, its decision to delay opening its own academy until 2 1/2 years after its founding announcement was puzzling. Quite literally, LAFC is building from nothing in a market with a 20-year-old club that’s come as close to perfecting MLS’s knotted system as any club has. Time is not a luxury it can afford to burn.

So while the club launches exploratory commissions and tests for favorable fan communities and vets its supporters groups and routes the press through an independent organization and has momentary seizures on Twitter, an expectant public waits. With NYCFC, we knew its background, its identity, even if we didn’t always have its exact nomenclature. With LAFC, we still know nothing. And yet the headless ghost with dozens of legs still marches into the mist, a confused public following its mazy path.