LOS ANGELES – LAFC has the delivery down. That much is evident.

Major League Soccer’s next expansion club has a downtown headquarters best described as tech startup meets timeshare presentation.

The interior has high, wood-paneled ceilings, natural lighting and an open floor plan. Almost all visible employees are young, chatty and buoyantly enthusiastic.

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Prospective season-ticket holders, of which there were more than 14,000 as of early February, can sit in rows of mocked-up stadium seating and get a virtual view of their prospective sections inside the under-construction Banc of California Stadium. It’s all very immersive and impressively slick.

How all of this translates into the on-field product that will make its MLS debut next March remains anybody’s guess.

Los Angeles Football Club still does not have a coach – not that that’s particularly uncommon at this stage of the expansion process – and though it recently announced an on-loan signing via its minor-league affiliate, no big-name players have yet to be unveiled.

In an interview last week at LAFC HQ, general manager John Thorrington stuck mostly to core values and organizational culture and how the club will come to reflect the city its name represents.

Along the way, he dropped some more tangible hints about what that’s going to look like in practice.

Thorrington laid out his vision for a team that echoes the Showtime Lakers of his youth with a steeliness that balances the “glamour side with the grittiness that is the majority of people’s reality of L.A.; the idea that if you come to L.A., there is this opportunity that, if I work, I will make it.”

Pressed on what that might actually look like on a soccer field, he is more insightful.

“We do need to be fun and exciting to watch,” said Thorrington, the appropriately tanned face of the franchise who attended high school in southwest Los Angeles County. “We want to be creative, dynamic, ambitious – all those things we think of when we think of L.A. We want that represented in our team. We want to be diverse, youthful, exuberant, expressive. We want a coach that fits that.”

So no pressure, hypothetical coach.

Former U.S. men’s national team and Swansea City boss Bob Bradley and longtime Seattle Sounders coach Sigi Schmid, who lives in Los Angeles, have both been mooted for the gig. And while both Bradley and Schmid remain available, the GM’s comments on the coaching search shed some light on his thought process.

“We would look to be making some movement this summer on the player front,” said Thorrington, who is pushing ahead without a full-time coach in place. “The coach one, and this isn’t a dodge of the question, we don’t want the best coach at X date. We want the best coach. If that means it’s a month later or two months later, we’re looking at this as a long-term, really impactful decision rather than making sure that month goes a little bit smoother.”

View photos Fans are starting to choose their seats at LAFC’s downtown stadium. (AP Photo) More

There is an awareness of an ever-dwindling countdown clock. Thorrington started to become cognizant of it at the beginning of this calendar year, a sensation driven home by the fact that Los Angeles played host to the MLS SuperDraft in January. He’d attended the league combine and draft in 2016, too, just after he was hired.

“This year was very different,” Thorrington said. “It was, ‘That’s you next year. That’s your No. 1 pick.’ You’re not just scouting for the future, you’re scouting for that No. 1 pick. The pace, the dynamic of every single conversation has picked up speed.”

One perk in being the 23rd franchise in a league that started with 10 teams and folded one of the originals is that there are plenty of colleagues who know exactly what you’re going through. Gavin Wilkinson, technical director of the Portland Timbers, swung by for a few hours prior to the Timbers’ match at the Galaxy last month. Atlanta United brass, in town for the draft, was also receptive to a brainstorming session about the nuts and bolts of building a team from scratch.

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