It’s New York vs. Los Angeles! The big game! The matchup everybody’s been waiting for! The true clash of giants at MLS Cup 2024 presented by Audi on Saturday (4 pm ET | Apple TV – Free; FOX, FOX Deportes; TSN, RDS)!
On Monday’s Extratime, we talked about how this matchup felt almost predestined at the start of the 2010s. One side had David Beckham, Robbie Keane and Landon Donovan, and the other had Thierry Henry, Tim Cahill and Wayne Rooney’s younger, much less talented brother. How could that not work out?
It took a dozen years since then, but we’re finally here. In LA we’ve got one of the highest-scoring, most ball-dominant teams in the league going for their record sixth title. In New York we’ve got high-pressing maniacs who’ve turned into Route 1 merchants looking, after nearly three decades, for their first cup of any sort.
They looked like the best attacking team in the world for three games. Then in the fourth, they went toe-to-toe with the league’s most disciplined and ruthless defense, and made the biggest play in the biggest moment.
How they did any/all of the above matters not at all because everything they were doing was oriented around and run through Riqui Puig. If you’re reading this, you know Riqui tore his ACL around the 64th minute of LA’s win over the Sounders – yet still hobbled along for the rest of the game before eventually threading Dejan Joveljić through in the 85th minute for the match-winner. It’s a play that will live forever in Galaxy lore.
Without him, it’ll be a different Galaxy team taking the field on Saturday because Riqui is one of one. Even if Marco Reus were healthy (he’s not; if he does play, I doubt it’ll be for more than 20 minutes) he wouldn’t play the role the same way Riqui does because literally no one plays the role the way Riqui does. Look at this data:
“It’s not exactly how I saw the position on paper,” head coach Greg Vanney said last week on the way Riqui plays.
“What we’ve learned with Riqui is how to give him the right spaces to allow him to move around because he’s unplayable when he’s on the move. And it’s so hard if you try to mark him and chase him around because he is so mobile and he’s so quick, and so a lot for us is how to not put him in the box, but for other guys who are playing with Riqui, to understand how to best be effective and to allow his movements to take place and to work off of those things.”
And so the five games the Galaxy played this year without Puig – in which they pretty famously went 3W-1L-1D – gives us a better idea, I think, of how much more structured and egalitarian Vanney would have his midfield be if he wasn’t possessed of maybe the second-best passer of the ball in the entire world.
To borrow the explanation from Seb Bush, who put these graphics together, “Puig missed five games this season, and in those games, the Galaxy’s final third pass distribution was way more spread out. Their Gini coefficient (equality of distribution where 1 is unequal, 0 is equal) is 0.43 with Puig on the pitch. Without him, it falls to 0.3. That’s a pretty big gap.”
The bottom line: with a midfield trio of Edwin Cerrillo at the back point, along with Mark Delgado and Diego Fagúndez as the free 8s, it’ll be much more structured with much less risk-taking off the ball. You lose Puig’s brilliance, but you also lose some of the shape-breaking movement and a lot of the “oh damn we’re entirely caught out” turnovers (it is essential to limit those vs. the Red Bulls) that have plagued the Galaxy at times this year.
TL;DR: Expect a bog-standard 4-3-3 that asks the wingers to win the match and the midfielders not to lose it.
In RBNY’s final game of the regular season, which they lost 3-2 to the Crew, the distance from their own goal line of their average defensive action was 45.83 meters.
In their two subsequent games vs. the Crew in Round One of the Audi 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, that number dropped to about 40.5 meters. And by the time they were done 1-0’ing Orlando City to death last weekend, it had slid to just 33.7 meters from their own goal. (Shouts to Seb for all these numbers, too – as soon as this kid’s old enough to drink I’ve got to buy him a beer).
Just bringing it back to the start of the playoffs doesn’t really tell the story of how this team’s evolved, though, because the change happened earlier. You have to go back to late September, when they got stuffed in a locker by New York City FC (5-1 final, and it wasn’t that close) in the Hudson River Derby. Here are some before/after numbers that explain a bit about what head coach Sandro Schwarz decided his team needed to become in the wake of that one:
Before: 599 touches per 90, 22nd in the league.
After: 476 touches per 90, dead last by nearly 17%.
Before: 79.4% passing accuracy, 26th in the league.
After: 73.6% passing accuracy, dead last by a mile.
Before: 3.48 switches attempted per 90, 14th in the league.
After: 1.43 switches attempted per 90, good for 27th.
Before: 35.9% of their passes were forward, which was fifth in MLS.
After: Fully 45% of their passes are forward. No one else even touches 40%.
And here’s the big one:
Before: 14.1% of their passes were long balls, fourth in MLS.
After: 21.1% of their passes are long balls. No one else is over 16.6%.
Schwarz saw what he saw, then decided to put three center backs out there. This isn’t energy drink soccer, this is proper footy, m8. Welcome to the Champo!
Has it been seamless? Absolutely not! Goalkeeper Carlos Coronel has had to stand on his head, making one huge save after another.
But the DPs are scoring just enough, and they’ve been murder on set pieces. And so for just the second time in their club’s existence, it’s the final game of the season and the Red Bulls are still standing.
Here’s a fun note from those five games the Galaxy played without Puig: without him, their passes allowed per defensive action (a rough measure of how high and hard teams press) craters from ninth in the league to 26th. I went back and watched most of those games, and I’m pretty sure that’s by design.
When Riqui’s out there they need to win the ball back ASAP, before he goes wandering and breaks their shape. When he’s in street clothes they’re more static, and the idea is to just let the opponents get on the ball and get confident enough to come upfield with it, then immediately attack into space with livewire wingers Gabriel Pec and Joseph Paintsil. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what Orlando City did to the Red Bulls in the first half this past weekend:
Yes, even this version of RBNY can be baited into leaving space in behind. They haven’t come upfield much, though when they have the Nealis brothers, Sean and Dylan, have been juuuuust good enough defending in the channels, as has Andrés Reyes in the middle of the backline. Still, it’s the guy behind them – Coronel – who has been the team’s best player since the postseason began.
Can it happen again? Of course. But if Pec and Paintsil get out on the break a few times, and get on the end of sequences like the one above, I like the Galaxy’s chances.
On the flip side… long-ball, second-ball, one pass and shoot. Or set pieces.
That’s been Plan A and Plan B for RBNY for the past six weeks. There’s been no Plan C. And again: they are still standing.
They’re in Carson, where they haven’t lost all year, and even without Puig (and potentially Reus as well) they’ve got more match-winners. That includes goalkeeper John McCarthy, who hasn’t had to be as good as Coronel this postseason, but who’s answered the bell every time he’s been asked, and who’s a former MLS Cup MVP.
It also needs to be said that this defense is at a different level since Emiro Garcés became the full-time starter with four games to go in the regular season. Since then (including playoffs), the Galaxy have allowed just 1.05 npxG per 90, which is a top-five mark in the league. Before Garcés won the job they were allowing 1.46 npxG per 90, which was 21st.
They’re a better team, and they’ve been playing like it. Ninety more minutes of what they’ve been doing and they’ll have the hardware to make it indisputable.