One of Major League Soccer’s selling points is its unpredictability, but the L.A. Galaxy are taking that point to new extremes, writes Nick Green. Not only does it feature the league’s most potent attack and its most porous defense, but it’s impossible to tell if a player performing well one minute will even bother showing up the next. For example, after a promising start to Sunday’s game against D.C. United, David Beckham “vanished quicker than the cast of ‘Lost,’ a mystifying performance for a player of his class (and wage packet) in a league like MLS.”
It’s as if, Green says, the Galaxy embody all that is good and awful about MLS. “You’ve got your expensive, yet skillful players (Donovan, Beckham) who can be a treat to watch. Yet with little money left over under the tight salary cap, what remains is a supporting cast of low-paid, young, raw players (Steve Cronin, Sean Franklin), old veterans past their prime (Abel Xavier, Greg Vanney) or some you suspect are incapable of playing at this level at all (names withheld to protect the pathetic).”
All leagues have their share of poor games, he says, but with the Galaxy “the highs and the lows are magnified, wrapped as they are in a single package. Inconsistency might be an MLS selling point, but that doesn’t mean the Galaxy should personify it.”