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It’s a New Game With Donovan Now in Town

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On a surreal Thursday morning in Carson, highlights of great goals in San Jose Earthquake history flashed across the scoreboard inside the Galaxy’s home stadium while the U2 hit, “Vertigo,” blared overhead, appropriately enough.

Everybody seemed a little dizzy at the sight of Landon Donovan in a yellow and green Galaxy jersey, instead of the customary black hat he wore for four years every time he stepped onto the field against the Galaxy with the rival Earthquakes.

While Galaxy publicity literature trumpeted the team’s “Decade of Stars” and Galaxy staffers waxed about the club’s “unparalleled” success in Major League Soccer, there sat Donovan, owner of two league championships in his brief career -- or twice as many as the Galaxy has won in its nine-year existence.

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If you can’t beat him -- and Donovan’s Earthquakes twice eliminated the Galaxy from the MLS playoffs -- better get Bayer Leverkusen on the horn ASAP and work a deal to get him to join you.

“This is a great steppingstone towards where we want to be one day,” said Tim Leiweke, president and CEO of the Galaxy’s ownership group, AEG. And of course it is. If the Galaxy ever wanted to return to the MLS Cup, finding a way to avoid Donovan in the playoffs seemed a necessary strategy.

But then Leiweke added, where the Galaxy and MLS want to be one day is “one of the top two leagues in the United States.”

Hold on there.

That would be the NFL ... and ... MLS?

A whole lot of vertigo was going on around the Home Depot Center on the day Donovan joined the enemy, a.k.a. the Galaxy. Sure, there was reason for Galaxy officials to be excited by the acquisition -- Donovan is a local boy, born in Ontario and raised in Redlands, and he returns home as a three-time winner of the Honda player-of-the-year award, given annually to the top player in U.S. soccer.

But before setting out to help MLS conquer NASCAR, the NBA and Major League Baseball, the Galaxy had best focus its attention to smaller battles fought closer to home, such as the one brewing with its new cross-the-office-corridor rival, Chivas USA.

Make no mistake. The Donovan deal was made to make the Galaxy a better team, but it was also made to steal some of the thunder surrounding Chivas USA’s much-ballyhooed debut, including the new franchise’s nationally televised opener against defending MLS champion D.C. United on Saturday.

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“If [Chivas] weren’t here, I’d still go after Landon Donovan,” Galaxy General Manager Doug Hamilton said, before adding with a laugh, “The fact that it may take a few column inches away from their opener, I can’t control that.

“But a player of his quality, whenever you can get him, you go after him. I’m not naive to the fact we might get some press out of it. But the deal was done for technical reasons.”

Still, Hamilton acknowledged, the presence of Chivas in the Los Angeles market “has made us better. I’m not going to deny that. We’ve had to reevaluate every aspect of our [organization] and we had to get better at the things that we were doing. And I think, in the long term, it’s going to be very good for the Galaxy having them in this market.

“Because we will be better. Competition brings that out. So we welcome their entrance in our market.”

Hamilton paused and grinned.

“We still consider it our market,” he said. “And so I don’t envision or feel in any way, shape or form that we’re chasing anything that they’re doing. I think that we’ve set the standard, and they’ve got to come to us.”

Leiweke said the Galaxy’s acquisition of Donovan “adds to the rivalry here. You know, I had someone today say, ‘Well, does this mean that the Galaxy becomes the Anglo team [in Los Angeles]?’ And I said, ‘Well, the Galaxy just added four pretty good Hispanic players this off-season.’ So we’re not ceding [those] rights on the Galaxy side to Chivas....

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“Definitely, everyone in this town is talking. And it’s coming at a good time. Everyone’s talking about Landon, everyone’s talking about Chivas, everyone’s talking about the MLS season.

“Sometimes in life you just get fortunate, and what’s happening here, if you look at the demise of some of the other teams in town, and the lack of hockey, the Lakers and the Clippers probably not making the playoffs, this is a really good time for the Galaxy and Chivas to create this rivalry. Because I think there is an opportunity here to capture the spotlight and the emotion of the marketplace.

“So [getting Donovan is] not as much about a rivalry with Chivas as an opportunity suddenly now to take the sport to the next level in this marketplace and capture a little bit more attention and, hopefully, a lot more fans.”

As a public-relations maneuver, the Donovan deal does not come without risk. To complete the complicated transition, the Galaxy first sent star forward Carlos Ruiz, a popular figure among the team’s Latino fans, to FC Dallas.

During Thursday’s news conference, Leiweke was asked a pointed question about the Galaxy’s possibly alienating its Latino fan base by replacing Ruiz with Donovan as its marquee player.

Leiweke replied, “Two years ago, and this is a fond memory now, I was walking the championship parade route with the Lakers and I looked at that crowd. That crowd was mostly Hispanic and Latino. And I realized that they love L.A., and they like to win.

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“And the fact is, you can ask anybody that has watched the San Jose Earthquakes over the last [few] years -- Landon was a pain in the [neck] to play against, because he was really good.

“What the Hispanic and the Latino fans know is, he is the best player in the league, period. And so what we just did is, we brought in the best player in the league, the best player in the United States, and our team just got a lot better. That’s what the fans want to see.”

Leiweke said, “It’s not about where Landon was born. It’s about where he’s going to be, come this November.”

He was referring to the MLS Cup, scheduled to be played this year on Nov. 13. On a day of dizzying talk, the Galaxy took what it considers a big step toward that destination, along with winning the L.A. soccer market along the way.

The next move belongs to Chivas.

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