There’s an episode midway through the first season of “Ted Lasso” in which the team, feeling cursed, decides to remove the spell by gathering in the locker room at night to burn personal items in a flaming trash barrel.
It may be time for the Galaxy to consider a similar exorcism because it seems clear someone has put a spell on them too.
The team dominated Sporting Kansas City on Sunday but lost despite not allowing a shot. Not a shot on goal. A shot of any kind. That had never happened before in MLS.
Last December, the Galaxy won a record sixth league title. They haven’t won a game since, with their 11-game winless streak matching the longest to start a season in league history. With just three points through 11 games — the Galaxy are 0-8-3 — it’s also the worst start in franchise history and also the worst start by a reigning MLS champion.
The team has suddenly become the best at worsts.
Will Kuntz, the team’s general manager, refuses to blame the paranormal for the historically poor start. He really doesn’t have a much better explanation though.
“Cursed would be too strong,” he said Monday. “But the bounces have definitely been going against us.”
That’s probably an understatement. In Sunday’s loss, the Galaxy outshot SKC 11-0, had the ball for nearly 60 of the 90 minutes, completed nearly three times as many passes and, for the first time in franchise history, didn’t allow a shot. Yet they lost when captain Maya Yoshida deflected an SKC cross into his own net in the 13th minute.
The season isn’t quite a third of the way gone and the Galaxy are already 23 points out of first place and 13 points out of a playoff berth.
Kuntz, who signed 10 of the 14 players that played in the MLS Cup final, is widely — and deservedly — credited with building the roster that won the title last year, taking a team that matched a full-season franchise-low with eight wins to 24 victories (including playoffs) and a championship in less 18 months.
Now he’s taking some of the blame for the team’s woeful start.
The Galaxy lost midfielder Riqui Puig, its most irreplaceable player, to an ACL tear in November’s Western Conference final, a loss the GM likens to the Golden State Warriors losing Steph Curry. But Kuntz knew in December he’d be without Puig until at least August; that was an absence he could have planned for.
He also knew MLS salary rules would force him to remake parts of a roster that didn’t need remaking. He did that by trading midfielders Gastón Brugman and Mark Delgado and striker Dejan Joveljic, the team’s leading scorer in 2024.
However eight of the 11 MLS Cup starters returned. So what went wrong?
It would probably be easier to list what didn’t go wrong since the season has been a perfect storm of injuries, poor performance and simple bad luck.
Marco Reus, a three-time Bundesliga player of the year, was being counted on to pick some of the slack left by Puig’s absence, but he’s played just 322 MLS minutes because of injury problems that nearly led the Galaxy to shut him down for the year.
At least nine other starters have missed time to injuries already this season with wingers Joseph Paintsil and Gabriel Pec both forced out of Sunday’s game in Kansas City after hard fouls. If neither is able to play Saturday in the team’s MLS Cup rematch with the Red Bulls, it would leave the Galaxy without all three of their designated players.
“It’s been kind of a daisy chain of correlated injury stuff,” Kuntz said.
In retrospect would Kuntz have been better off keeping Delgado, who is having a solid season as a playmaker in the middle of LAFC’s midfield? Should they have kept Joveljic, whose five goals for Sporting Kansas City would have made a difference for a Galaxy team has scored just eight times in 11 games? (The Galaxy have conceded 21 times, leaving them with a league-worst -13 goal differential.)
Probably not, especially since the Joveljic deal brought the cash-strapped team $4 million in return.
So if the problem isn’t related to who left, it has to be related to who stayed.
Last season the Galaxy were the first team in MLS history to have four players score 10 or more goals. This season just one player has scored more than once. Pec, who had 16 goals in 2024, has one this year. Paintsil, who had 10 goals a year ago, has yet to score this season.
A year after leading the conference with 69 goals — an average of 2.02 a game — the Galaxy have just eight this season. They’ve been shut out five times in 11 games — one more than all of last year — are averaging less than a goal a game and have led just once, for 64 minutes, all season.
About the only thing coach Greg Vanney hasn’t tried is suiting up and trying to score himself. He’s had 11 different lineup combinations but the Galaxy remain too rigid, too predictable, using a style of play that was well-suited to last year’s team but doesn’t fit this season’s personnel.
As a result the team ranks 26th in the 30-team league in shots on target despite ranking in the top three in passes and passing percentage and sixth in time of possession.
Vanney earned a one-year contract extension when he qualified for the playoffs last year, but that extension expires this season. Sources say the team and Vanney’s agent, Ron Waxman, are making no progress on a new deal and the longer the team struggles, the less leverage Vanney has and the easier it becomes for the Galaxy to move on.
Waxman did not respond to messages seeking comment. Vanney, however, called Sunday’s loss “a solid game and a pretty complete game.” Which raises a question: if a game without a goal, without a win and without a point qualifies as solid and complete, has the bar been set too low?
Maybe it is time for Vanney to fire up a Lasso-like barbecue sacrifice of his own. On one hand it couldn’t hurt. Yet given the way things have gone so far this season, whose to say the Galaxy wouldn’t wind up burning down the stadium.
You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
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