2018 could prove to be a pivotal year in LA Galaxy’s history. The one-time unquestioned glamour club of Major League Soccer has experienced a turbulent year on and off the field and faces a battle to even be the glamour team of Los Angeles.

Not that you’d know that if you were at the LA Live entertainment complex on a recent Sunday evening in pre-season. In a nightclub adjacent to the Staples Center, the Galaxy were launching their new kit, among an array of visual reminders that they’re not new to this. One wall was devoted to a timeline of the team, with prominent displays of the team’s five MLS Cups (the last one was won in 2014), and slogans such as “Lifting trophies since 96” emblazoned across the walls.

In any other year, this would be the familiar swagger of the league’s most recognizable franchise of the last decade — a club that David Beckham catapulted to global recognition before he and the likes of Robbie Keane and Landon Donovan cemented the team as the competitive force in US soccer.

But this year, there’s a touch of defiance to the event, or at least a sense that everything the organization does will now be inflected differently by the arrival of the new LAFC team. The venue at LA Live was built by AEG – the sports and entertainment giant whose founder Phil Anschutz at one point owned over half the teams in MLS. It’s a natural place to host the launch, but in this particular moment it also feels like a rebuke to the newcomers, whose claim to the territorial heart of LA has been spelled out with a brand new stadium, one corner of which literally frames the downtown LA skyline close to where the LA Live complex stands.

Indeed, right down to the Black and Gold branding, evoking the Black and Silver branding of the Raiders, FC have moved to position themselves as the new team for LA street cred, with the barely concealed implication that the Galaxy, located 13 miles from downtown in Carson, may now become a suburban afterthought. Looking at another wall slogan in the event space, “Unrivaled since 96”, it’s clear the Galaxy are not letting that one slide.

The LA Galaxy president, and former player, Chris Klein, sounds relaxed about the new challenge as he greets players and Galaxy alumni in a corridor backstage. “I don’t know that it’s the case that LAFC’s arrival throws our own identity into relief. It doesn’t change us. We’ve always been a club that looks towards the landscape and figured out how we can change it and redefine it.”

And as Klein sees it, looking at that timeline of LA Galaxy history there’s plenty to suggest that the team will respond to what he agrees is “a battle for hearts and minds in LA.”

“When you look back to when we launched our league [in 1996] we had Jorge Campos and we had Cobi [Jones] and we had something special on the field. When Columbus Crew built the first soccer specific stadium, which was nice, we decided to build a $200m facility. When we questioned whether our league could be recognized around the world we signed the world’s biggest star [Beckham]. When teams were fighting for their first championships we got our fifth and are fighting for more. Right now, we’re taking the next step into the next era of the Galaxy. We’ve talked a lot about how we’ve always walked through valleys and then been to the mountaintop, so right now we’re taking our first steps back and we’re heading back to the mountaintop.”

The reference to walking out of the valley turns out to be less a reference to the impending rivalry with LAFC, and more about the uncharacteristic slump the team endured on the field last season.

At the end of the 2016 campaign the Galaxy lost their long-time, hugely successful coach, Bruce Arena, to the US national team, and then finished bottom of the Western Conference in 2017. Sigi Schmid, their coach in what now seems like a long lost era (from 1999-2004) and who’d gone on to become virtually synonymous with the Seattle Sounders, returned to the club in mid-season to replace the ill-fated Curt Onalfo, but could do little more than help staunch the bleeding as the team slid to its worst ever finish at the bottom of the league.

In truth Onalfo had inherited a team already overdue for an overhaul when Arena left. Despite the advantage of one of the most fertile areas of the country for recruiting players, in Southern California, Arena never seemed to fully trust the pipeline from the team’s vaunted academy to the first team, and by the time he left the team looked long on name-recognition and short on legs.



I remind Klein of watching Beckham and Thierry Henry duelling in games between the Galaxy and New York Red Bulls that would have been considered the undeniable glamour games of the league just a few years ago, and of the dynamics of the Red Bulls’ reinvention as a more frugal, systems-based recruiter since that time – prompted at least in part by the changing ground game of NYC FC arriving in New York in 2015. Will the image-conscious Galaxy really want to trade punches with the similarly concerned LAFC?

Klein is insistent the Galaxy will continue to lead on that front: “We look at that as being important in driving our league forward. Whether it’s bigger name players or players in their prime. Our league went through an evolution where everybody did it one way and now teams are finding their own way. For us it’s important to be a winning team and to do so with a certain style, and doing it in this city that means excitement – we have to do it with players that fans get excited about and I feel we have that now. We don’t compare ourselves to the Red Bulls or New York City or Atlanta or other teams. We try to drive that narrative forward from ourselves.”

And for all the froth of LAFC’s imminent arrival and the splash they’ve made with the signing of Carlos Vela, for example, Klein can be quietly confident about the deals his own organization has put together in this off-season.

Still, it has to be proved on the field, and the Galaxy only have to look at their companions at the bottom of the 2017 standings to know nobody has an eternal right to stay on top. DC United, under Bruce Arena, beat the Galaxy in the first ever MLS Cup in 1996 and went on to become the league’s first powerhouse team. They’ll finally open their new stadium this summer, but only after a long period of virtual irrelevance playing a scrappy version of Moneyball under coach Ben Olsen. Time will tell if they ever regain momentum, let alone pre-eminence.

Not that Klein and the Galaxy appear concerned. They’ve been in the valley before, and to the mountaintop in every phase of MLS. And they’re not conceding any territory in their home city: “We are downtown, we’re in Carson, we’re in the South Bay, we’re in the Inland Empire. LA is a big place and we’re very proud to be able to represent it.”