2020 Season Preview: Los Angeles FC
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Point-above-replacement values are explained here. Non-penalty expected goals + expected assists are explained here, and you can see all players’ xG+xA in our interactive expected goals tables. Touch percent is the percentage of total team touches by that player while he is on the field, which can be found in our interactive expected passing tables.
By Mark Asher Goodman (@soccer_rabbi)
Although my wife’s constant eye-rolling strongly implies otherwise, I like to think that I am clever and funny. So I was quite amused with myself when I anointed LAFC as ‘Ricky Bobby / Ron Burgundy / More Cowbell United’ in my offseason outlook piece for ASA.
But as we head into the 2020 season, Los Angeles’ black and gold franchise could better be titled ‘Chip on their Shoulder FC’. This franchise will feel like it can and must do better. That will start with their coach.
Bob Bradley came in with something to prove in 2018, the franchise’s first year. In interview after interview, he reminded folks that he skippered Chicago Fire to the double in 1998, the club’s first year of existence, winning both MLS Cup and the US Open Cup. Bob had similar ambitions for LAFC, and his ownership built him a team - with Carlos Vela and Walker Zimmerman and Eduard Atuesta and Laurent Ciman - that got pretty close in both 2018 and 2019.
The inaugural team hit some bumps, but made the playoffs, only to experience a first-round knock-out. The second year of LAFC was a far greater success, as the team won the Supporters’ Shield with a record-setting 72 point season and Carlos Vela was league MVP with a record-setting 34 goals. They were presumptive favorites to win MLS Cup. And then… they experienced a second-round knockout at the hands of the Seattle Sounders.
Meanwhile, in the offseason, cross-town rivals LA Galaxy, who only recently parted with mega-star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, stole all the limelight once again by signing Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez, a player that has been courted and lusted for in MLS for almost a decade.
Put it all together, and you’ve got a team that feels like, anything short of winning MLS Cup, perhaps a second Supporters Shield, or becoming the first-ever MLS team to win the Scotiabank Concacaf Champions League, would be considered abject failure..
The standards here can be set no higher than by team owner Ricky Bobby himself:
Indeed, LAFC must do nothing less than piss excellence, all season long and into the playoffs.
2019 Year in Review
The short version:
The only marginally longer version:
Exposition Park’s finest won 21, lost four, and drew nine matches in the MLS regular season en route to topping the league. Like I said above, that’s insane. This team was scary good, almost all year long.
They didn’t take home MLS Cup, though, and the problems may have started well before the playoffs. After August 21st they went 2-1-5 (WLD), including their only home loss of the season, against Minnesota United.
Walker Zimmerman wasn’t as defensively sound in the second half of the season as he was in the first. There are some minor tactical questions, too, that were exposed in 2019, but we’ll save them for later, because they have the possibility of becoming major questions in 2020.
Mainly, this team will need some squad depth and some intelligent season-long rotation in order to avoid the end-of-season swoon they had in 2019, which caused them to get booted from the playoffs early. Six LAFC players - Atuesta, Vela, Eddie Segura, Diego Rossi, Latif Blessing, and Mark Anthony Kaye - had more than 2500 minutes in 2019. That’s more than any other team in Major League Soccer.
It makes sense for Bob Bradley to find ways to rest his top players a bit more throughout the season, and to find other players of nearly-equal caliber that can pick up the slack.
Offseason Changes
LAFC kept the front three of Rossi, Vela, Rodriguez and their dynamic midfield triangle of Kaye, Blessing, and Atuesta the same for 2020, because it ain’t broke. It’s fantastic.
But three of the four defenders and the goalkeeper will be new for 2020. As a result, LAFC will do two things with their backline in 2020: give playing time to some youngsters, and count up ridiculously gigantic piles of cash that they made from their moves. Steven Beitashour, who just turned 33 years old, was let go. Jordan Harvey was re-signed, but it looks pretty clear from the preseason that he won’t have the starting job at left back anymore. Tyler Miller was sold to Minnesota for $200K in GAM. Walker Zimmerman was sold to Nashville SC for the impressive sum of $1.25 million in GAM.
The kids playing at outside back in place of Harvey and Beitashour will likely be 20-year-old Ecuadorean Diego Palacios on the left and 23-year-old Tristan Blackmon on the right. Both are probably fine, but the sample size for both up till now has been small, so we’ll see. At center back, the excellent Eddie Segura will partner with the 34-year-old MLS (and NASL!) journeyman Dejan Jakovic for now. This tandem played in the team’s Concacaf Champions League opener against Club Leon on February 18; he was the ‘deep back’ while Segura did the sweeping in front of him. Jakovic was fine, but his mere 181 minutes in 2019 strongly imply that Bob Bradley is planning to spend every dime of that newly acquired GAM on someone better - and probably sooner than later. The MLS preseason window for incoming transfers closes on May 1.
Roster Changes
OUT
M - Lee Nguyen (11/19/19 - Expansion Draft)
GK - Phillip Ejimadu (11/21/19 - loan expired)
D - Lamar Batista (11/21/19 - option declined)
M - Javi Perez (11/21/19 - option declined)
M - Peter-Lee Vassell (11/21/19 - option declined)
D - Steven Beitashour (11/21/19 - out of contract)
F - Rodolfo Zelaya (1/7/20 - mutually agreed to part ways)
GK - Tyler Miller (12/31/19 - out of contract)
M - Josh Perez (2/7/20 - mutually agreed to part ways)
D - Walker Zimmerman (2/11/20 - traded to Nashville)
IN
F - Danny Musovski (12/10/19 - free)
M - Francisco Ginella (12/16/19 - transfer from Montevideo Wanderers)
M - Jose Cifuentes (1/13/20 - transfer from America de Quito)
GK - Kenneth Vermeer (1/16/20 - transfer from Feyenoord)
M - Bryce Duke (1/25/20 - Homegrown)
F - Bradley Wright-Phillips (2/14/20 - free)
Tactical Outlook
LAFC play probably the most beautiful attacking soccer of any team in MLS. Many MLS teams look pretty mechanical moving the ball upfield, Foosball style: the GK passes to the outside back, the outside back slides it up the wing, the winger attempts to penetrate into zone 14, and either succeeds or launches a cross.
LAFC don’t really do that. They can give it to Atuesta to slam a line-breaking pass up to the forwards. Or he can run a sort of drop off pass to Blessing, set a screen, and let Blessing run. Or sometimes LAFC will slide an outside back inside next to Atuesta like he was a d-mid, and the two will go on a short 30-yard tika-taka burst together until Vela picks up the play as the defense panics and over-rotates. Maybe the defenders are trying to deny the entry pass to Vela. That’s ok; Mark-Anthony Kaye or Blessing can give it to Rossi if he has space. Any attempt to close one door against LAFC results in another one being opened. It’s frikkin beautiful, the way this team can play its opponents like a fiddle when given the chance.
Kaye and Blessing were two exceedingly productive midfielders, and I don’t think it was just because of the fact the outlets they fed the ball to were such devastating finishers. They really were the engine room of LAFC’s creation.
Blessing’s chart shows that nobody in MLS put it on the ground and forced defenders to guard him as much as he did. As a result, he was among the top MLS midfielders in Expected Goals, with 6.79. Kaye, meanwhile, did more of the work of distributing and facilitating. And all for a total financial outlay of $281,000 in salary.
All that offense, though, has a downside. Bradley’s preferred 4-3-3 was prone to quick strikes on the counterattack. Opponents would snatch the ball and blister it through and past the midfield with little to no resistance, as long as deep midfielder Eduard Atuesta was a little out of joint.
It meant that a team like Minnesota in the regular season; Portland in US Open Cup; or Seattle in MLS playoffs could cede possession, get lucky on the counter, and emerge with a win. In those three games, LAFC’s opponents had, respectively, 23%, 39% and 31% possession, with each of them going on to win. One could argue that Minnesota (five shots vs. LA’s 23 shots) and Portland (game-winner in the 84th minute) both needed tremendous luck in order to pull out those victories.
Far be it for me to say LAFC is defensively weak. They aren’t. They conceded just 37 goals in 2019 - best in the league. Part of that was frequently playing with a lead. Part of that was having a midfield that, particularly with Atuesta, held the ball well. And part of that was having all three midfielders successfully press, harass, and win the ball back at a better clip than most teams in MLS. So why didn’t this juggernaut of a team win MLS Cup? Simply put, it looks very much like their little hiccups and errors happened at exactly the wrong moment. A 98% chance of winning still means LAFC has a 2% chance to fail. Those failures, unfortunately, happened at the wrong time. I don’t have a better explanation - and my explanation is essentially meant to convey to the reader that I really hope Bob Bradley doesn’t radically change anything about the tactics of this team.
Goalkeeper
New LAFC goalkeeper Kenneth Vermeer played for Dutch powerhouses Ajax and Feyenoord, and he has UEFA Champions League experience. The 34-year-old changes in for Tyler Miller, who LA sent off to Minnesota. I thought Vermeer looked pretty meh against Club Leon in LAFC’s CCL matchup - at times punching and parrying into not-ideal places. But we’ll see. Mexican international Pablo Sisniega will continue to wave his hand from the bench yelling ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ to no avail.
Defense
The defense is definitely something to watch. Tristan Blackmon looked good as the sometimes started in 2019, but shaky against Club Leon. There’s also a lot of hype around Diego Palacios that he’ll need to live up to. Mohamed El Munir and Jordan Harvey are veteran fullback depth, while 34-year-old Dejan Jakovic and 33-year-old Danilo Silva will vie for starting jobs alongside Eddie Segura at CB. Segura was widely regarded as one of the best center backs in MLS in 2019. He may not look as outstanding with Jakovic or Silva next to him, but I also think LAFC will find somebody better to stand next to Steady Eddie before long.
Midfield
In the tactics section, I said a lot about how amazing LAFC’s midfield is, so of course they’re actually changing things up for 2020 to possibly make it even better. Two-way middie Francisco Ginella comes from Uruguay and is just 21 years old, but Bob Bradley felt he was mature enough to play his debut against Club Leon in mid February. He will fight for minutes with the excellent Atuesta, who many believe will be sold on to Europe this summer, and 20-year-old Ecuadorean José Cifuentes. They also have former young Xolos de Tijuana d-mid Alejandro Guido and RSL academy product Bryce Duke. The midfielders for LAFC are a bunch of meme generating, Tik Tok watching, ‘ok boomer’-ing children, while the defenders spend their weekends antiquing and discussing long-term investment portfolios over brunch at the country club. Kinda weird.
Forwards
I’d like it if we called Brian Rodriguez, Carlos Vela, and Diego Rossi ‘RVR’, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Rodriguez only started at the end of 2019 and hasn’t really integrated into the pack yet. He’s supremely talented, but I had some concerns that he hasn’t been a big contributor yet. If he doesn’t pan out, the black and gold also have Bradley Wright-Phillips to plug in, and I think there’s still some tread on that tire. Adama Diomande has a broken foot and will be shut down for 2 to 3 months. So that’s a bummer.
Vela will probably ‘only’ score 25 goals and have 15 assists in 2020, and may or may not win MLS MVP this year. That’s the level that he’s at - if he’s good, he’ll be the best in the league again. If he’s only pretty good, he’ll ‘only’ be the second or third-best player in the league.
2020 Season Expectations
LAFC must win a trophy this year. Ideally, one they don’t already have, like the CCL trophy or MLS Cup. Winning the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup would be a suitable yet disappointing consolation prize.
It’s almost a foregone conclusion that a team this stacked will finish top three in the MLS Western Conference.
And if none of that happens? If they win no trophies; finish midtable; fail to get Carlos a second MVP?
