After promising season goes awry, Galaxy’s Bruce Arena promises changes
Galaxy forward Robbie Keane talks with referee’s assistant Corey Rockwell during a season-ending 3-2 loss to the Sounders on Wednesday night in Seattle.
Bruce Arena thought he had one of the best teams in Major League Soccer history.
His Galaxy had a deep bench and a deeper payroll. Three of its four starting defenders were former or current national team players and its offense was built around a constellation of big-name players, including Robbie Keane, Steven Gerrard and Giovani dos Santos.
That proved to be subtraction by addition, though, because the Galaxy’s cluster of stars never really meshed, leading to the earliest playoff exit in franchise history Wednesday after a 3-2 loss to the Seattle Sounders.
“It’s disappointing when you’re the champions and you know what it feels like to lift that trophy. And now for it to be taken away from you, it’s difficult,” said Keane, the league’s reigning MVP who scored a career-high 20 goals this season. “We can sit here all day and say ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ but we just weren’t good enough, certainly in the last five or six weeks.”
And that brought a premature end to a streak that had seen the Galaxy win three of the last four MLS titles.
The Galaxy also reached the Western Conference semifinals in each of Arena’s six previous full seasons as coach. That’s the most successful run in league history.
This year, Arena’s season was over before Halloween.
The end officially came during a chilly, rain-soaked 90 minutes in Seattle, where defensive errors contributed to all three Sounders goals. But the foundation for the Galaxy’s demise was laid weeks earlier when the team began a spiral that saw it win just one of its final eight games.
After leading the MLS standings in early October, the Galaxy tumbled to fifth place in the Western Conference by season’s end. So rather than a first-round playoff bye and home-field advantage for the postseason, the Galaxy had to play a knockout-round game on the road, where it had won just twice all season.
Blame that on a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
In midsummer the Galaxy added Gerrard, Liverpool’s former captain, and Dos Santos, the Mexican international, to an attack that already included Keane and U.S. national team midfielder Gyasi Zardes.
Those signings inflated the Galaxy payroll to $19.5 million, the second-largest in MLS history. But after winning its first three games with Dos Santos and Gerrard, scoring 10 goals in the process, the Galaxy won just once more. And it was shut out three times.
“I knew it wasn’t perfect the way we went about doing this. It was, at time, a little bit awkward,” said Arena, who said the signings were part of a long-term plan.
“I don’t think you do anything in the very short term. When you make those investments, it should be over a couple of years not a couple of months.”
Now Arena has plenty of time to perfect that plan, something he’ll get started on after meeting with his team one final time Friday morning.
“There are going to be changes,” he promised.
