‘From star-taking to star-making’: How LA Galaxy returned to the top of MLS by shunning big names

Around four years before the LA Galaxy surged back to the top of MLS — before title No. 6, before the beer showers and fluttering confetti — the juxtaposition, in January 2021, was stark. When Greg Vanney returned to Major League Soccer’s winningest franchise as head coach, he’d walk past statues and stocked trophy cases, into a club that seemed stuck in the past.

“There wasn’t really a scouting department,” Vanney told Yahoo Sports. The “sports science department … was one guy’s computer.” And the result was that the kings of MLS 2.0 were getting left behind.

The Galaxy once ruled this fledgling league. They transformed it with celebrity. They elevated it with spending. They became its most recognizable brand.

And they won. A lot. They reached nine of the first 19 MLS Cup finals. They won five.

They were the envy of the league, a destination for marketable stars, until MLS began to evolve. As its soccer got more sophisticated; and as its operations professionalized; and as club owners and sporting directors alike realized that the way to attract fans was with on-field quality more so than big-name stars, the Galaxy, for years, failed to evolve with it. And so, for nearly a decade, the Galaxy fell from their throne. In the nine years after their 2014 championship, they did not advance past the MLS quarterfinals; they missed the playoffs five times in seven years; they did not lift a trophy of any kind.

They also violated roster rules. Their transfer business often felt unscientific or chaotic. By 2023, their most loyal fans were fed up. Prominent supporters groups began boycotting home games. Attendance dipped. Losses accumulated. The external discontent, Vanney admitted in an October interview, began affecting the humans inside the club.

That, in a nutshell, was the environment that Will Kuntz walked into last spring. His task, as senior vice president of player personnel and now general manager, was to revive this stumbling giant.

And a “major” part of his plan — the plan that pushed the Galaxy back to MLS Cup, to a 2-1 win over the New York Red Bulls on Saturday — was to shed the club’s superficial identity, to “care less about who a player is, in terms of pedigree.”

“We wanted to shift away from star-taking,” Kuntz told Yahoo Sports in October, “to star-making.”

Rebuilding the Galaxy: From star power to strategic scouting

The 29-year history of Los Angeles’ lone MLS original is littered with names you probably know. First, there were domestic stars, such as Cobi Jones and Landon Donovan. Then, there was David Beckham — and Robbie Keane, Steven Gerrard, Ashley Cole, Giovani dos Santos, Jonathan dos Santos, Chicharito and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. One would leave, another would arrive, because, well, why not? The Designated Player rule allows clubs to spend limitlessly on three stars. Who wouldn’t want well-known ones with experience at the tippy-top of the sport?

Somewhere along the way, though, the why seemed to drift out of front-office equations. Or, perhaps, the equations strayed too far away from soccer.

“There was a belief that, like, getting these big European stars was part of our ethos, and part of our culture, part of who we are,” Kuntz said.

He saw it differently: “I think that’s a byproduct of who we are, and why we won, but it’s not really what is core to the Galaxy. What the Galaxy are really about is winning, being the flagship franchise of MLS, and representing the city of Los Angeles with a dynamic, fun-to-watch team.

“And you can do that with really high-end international players at the end of their career,” he clarifies. “But that’s not the most important thing.”

This was his pitch to ownership as he took the job last spring, jumping from crosstown rival LAFC. This was the pitch as he approached his first offseason with two DP slots vacant. To fill them, he’d ask a single question: “How good is the player? What is he gonna bring to the group?”

“It’s really liberating,” Kuntz said, to be focused on only that one thing.

And to answer the question, he relied on a scouting system and recruitment process that he, Vanney and others had been building and refining for years.

When the head coach arrived in 2021, “a lot of scouting was done through relationships, connections,” and the occasional road trip. “It wasn’t a robust system,” Vanney said. It lagged behind most other MLS clubs, who’ve been integrating data, full-time scouts stationed on other continents, and video.

“So,” Vanney said, “our initial rebuild of the team wasn’t done in a lot of advanced scouting. … It was like, ‘We need some players with speed, we need certain qualities to add to this team … What’s out there, and what can we get? What can we afford? Who’s ready to move?’”

Simultaneously, though, the club began to construct a scouting department. They crafted player profiles. They built and maintained shortlists of targets, position by position. “We started to get more proactive,” Vanney said. They stopped chasing big names or quick fixes, and instead developed a longer-term plan — which they stuck to last year, despite a rash of injuries and a 26th-place finish.

Then, last winter, they dipped into the shortlists. And rather than look to soccer celebrities, they looked to Belgium, where they’d identified Ghanaian winger Joseph Paintsil; they looked to Brazil, where they’d found 23-year-old winger Gabriel Pec. They added American goalkeeper John McCarthy and Japanese defender Miki Yamane. They signed Spanish forward Miguel Barry, but stuck with Serbian striker Dejan Joveljić as their No. 9.

“We didn’t necessarily go look for guys with big names and huge careers,” Vanney explained Saturday. “We went for guys that are hungry and super talented and athletic and fit our style of play.”

They didn’t actively shy away from stars — and, in the summer, signed German attacker Marco Reus as a free agent — but applied the same criteria to each target: “How good is he?”

And they quickly realized that the collective answer was: Very.

Galaxy win without the glitz

They realized their improvement, in many ways, before they’d even won a game. On opening weekend, they hosted the league’s newest glamor club, Inter Miami. They welcomed Lionel Messi and friends, but not with open arms. They outshot Miami 24-11; they out-created the eventual Supporters Shield winners, 3.4 Expected Goals (xG) to 0.6. “We played them up head to head, and we felt like we were the better team on the day,” Vanney said. “We were every bit as good as them.”

At the final whistle, they were heated and somewhat deflated. Sergio Busquets had simulated a foul to get LA’s Mark Delgado sent off. Messi equalized in stoppage time. The match ended 1-1.

But in the locker room later, and in the stands all evening, everyone realized: “This team could be really good.”

Week after week, players fed off that energy, the polar opposite of what they’d encountered last season. They sprinted to the top of the Western Conference, going unbeaten at home, and stayed there for much of the season. On Decision Day, they coughed up the conference lead to LAFC, but then stormed through the playoffs. Riqui Puig, perhaps the league’s top showman west of Florida, orchestrated a first-round rout of Colorado. Pec, Joveljić and Paintsil each scored twice in a second-round thrashing of Minnesota.

In the semis, Puig tore his ACL — but stayed in, and served up a game-winning assist to beat Seattle.

In Saturday’s final, Paintsil and Joveljić blitzed the New York Red Bulls — and rather than be weighed down by Galaxy lore, they leant into it. Joveljić paid homage to Keane with his celebration. At the final whistle, Donovan joined current players on the field. Both club legends took part in the trophy presentation.

To some, the legacy they left, and the club’s history, could be a “burden,” Vanney mentioned earlier this week. But “this group has attacked it from Day 1 this season, and hasn’t been afraid of it or in awe of it.”

They were, instead, just a really good, well-built soccer squad.

And so, 10 years to the day since their fifth title — but one year after finishing lower than ever before — this new collection of “made” stars embraced as 25,000 hungry fans roared.

Amid the euphoria, speaking to those fans, Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz summed up this latest chapter for his storied franchise: “What a great turnaround.”