First kick is just over three weeks away, which means teams around the league are starting to scramble to fill some holes (or in some cases, to create new holes that will subsequently need to be filled).
Western Conference today, Eastern Conference was yesterday.
Here are a few of the teams I’m keeping an eye on at the moment, and the questions that need answering:
Does Marco Reus solve for Riqui Puig’s knee injury?
There is simply no replacing Riqui 1-for-1 because nobody in the world – other than maybe Pedri if he’s gone on a full YOLO diet – plays like he does. Riqui goes everywhere in search of the ball, and it’s often brilliant:
Marco Reus isn’t going to create sequences like that. Reus is a pure attacker and always has been – true 10, left wing, right wing, false 9, he’s played them all. And that means teams he’s on are more structured than the Galaxy were last year (or the year before that) when they were built around Riqui.
I think this ends up being just fine for the Galaxy, provided Reus stays mostly healthy until Puig’s return (I’m hoping for sometime in August, but we’ll see). And for what it’s worth, even if Reus does miss a game or two between now and then, LA have Diego Fagúndez on hand as a backup playmaker. Remember last year when Riqui missed time, Fagúndez filled in for the most part and put together some truly excellent performances as a true No. 10 in what was clearly more of a 4-2-3-1 than the sort of lopsided 4-3-3 they play when Riqui’s on the field.
So yeah, I do think Reus (and Fagúndez) mostly solve for Riqui’s injury, as long as Greg Vanney’s willing to adjust the equation a little bit.
There are other moves to factor into that as well – note that it’s Mark Delgado providing the final ball above, and he’s clocking in for the other LA side now. Will Sean Davis make that play? What about new signing Elijah Wynder? And 2024 MLS Cup presented by Audi MVP Gastón Brugman is now in Nashville, which means Edwin Cerrillo is going to have to test his limits in distribution and progressive passing (I am bullish) week-in, week-out.
Jalen Neal is gone as well, though I am less concerned about that. And as for the Dejan Joveljić reports… we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Which, to be clear, I think we will.
Anyway, general manager Will Kuntz had a lot more surgery to do on this roster over the past six weeks than I’d realized. Because of the moves he’d made in the previous three windows, they’re in good shape to not just survive, but actually thrive in the season to come.
What are LAFC doing in tearing apart their midfield?
Timothy Tillman was first among LAFC midfielders in minutes across all competitions last year with 3,202. Eduard Atuesta was second with 3,007. Ilie Sánchez was third with 2,862. Lewis O’Brien was fourth with 1,452. Mateusz Bogusz played most of his 3,851 minutes (what a workhorse) up top, but some of those were in central midfield as well.
All those guys except Tillman are gone. For a team that won one trophy and came close to a half-dozen more over the past two years, that is a TON of turnover in the engine room.
And it’s not limited to that: between the departure of Jesús Murillo and the sale of Omar Campos, they lost about 4,000 minutes off the backline. If Cristian Olivera is sold, that’s 2,500 winger minutes gone which, on top of the Bogusz sale, and on top of Kei Kamara’s departure (he played about 1,500 minutes as a center forward), means the front line’s been remade as well.
I have had my gripes with LAFC’s game model over the past several years, and I’ve written directly at that multiple times, but I’ve never felt like the roster needed a makeover. Yet here we are.
Here is the glass-more-than-half-full take: Delgado, with his smarts and endless stamina, is a better fit in head coach Steve Cherundolo’s 5-2-3 than Ilie or Atuesta were. I love the Nkosi Tafari acquisition – it’s maybe the best under-the-radar acquisition of the winter by anyone. He has Best XI potential. Yaw Yeboah was also a shrewd pick-up with real upside backing up Ryan Hollingshead at left wingback. So was Jeremy Ebobisse, who signed as a free agent at center forward.
John Thorrington has always been masterful at making these intra-league moves. I think he’s done some great work again.
Beyond that, they’ll get $3 million in General Allocation Money (GAM) from the Bogusz sale this year, which makes roster building easier. If they loan Olivera and have a purchase trigger that activates on January 1, 2026 (something insanely low, like “one appearance activates the purchase trigger at X million dollars”), they’ll get another $3 million GAM for next season. Oh, and they’ll also open playing time for David Martínez (at least until Antoine Griezmann gets here), who’s probably the most talented of that group. Sell him in 2027, and that’s another $3 million GAM, and suddenly you’ve made it VERY easy to keep making these kinds of floor-raising builds.
So I get the theory of it. But man, it’s a lot of changes for a team that won a lot for the past several years and has often looked good doing it.
Will FC Dallas sign a new DP 10 or are they hunting in the league?
One of the things I was most looking forward to this year was watching Alan Velasco develop into a true No. 10 under new manager Eric Quill. Velasco’s best MLS moments – including a legendary performance against Leo Messi and Inter Miami back in Leagues Cup 2023 that was so good it got the kid into the full Argentina national team – came the few times he was used as “go wherever you want, get on the ball and make the game” No. 10 in a 4-2-3-1 rather than as a winger or a free 8 in a more structured, positional play-heavy 4-3-3.
Which is to say that while his potential was great, his performances in MLS had mostly been meh. And if Boca Juniors offer you eight figures for a guy who’s mostly been meh, and is coming off an ACL tear, you probably have to take it.
So Velasco is gone. So is Jesús Ferreira, who looked pretty miserable last year. Paul Arriola was never a 10 (though I always wanted to see him in a pressing 10 role, a la Latif Blessing back in the day), but he was a productive attacker, and he’s gone, too.
Dallas are sitting on a mother lode of GAM. They’re also about $25 million in the black in the transfer market since the winter of 2019-20, which blows virtually every other MLS team away.
What I’m saying is that if guys like Evander or Lucho Acosta are available (spoiler alert: they are), Dallas have multiple ways of going after them. If, in turn, they’d rather go shopping down in South America again – where they’ve obviously had a ton of success, at least from a “develop and sell” perspective – they should have the freedom to do that, too.
Can Houston keep their game model without Héctor and Coco?
Possession, passes per possession, passes from the midfield, passes within the midfield, passes by midfielders, field tilt… all of it, added together, made the Dynamo absolutely distinct over the past two years. It led to the 2023 US Open Cup title, plus going toe-to-toe with the likes of Columbus in Concacaf Champions Cup, Toluca in Leagues Cup and LAFC in the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs.
They played beautiful soccer, and when it was working its best, it ran through Héctor Herrera and Coco Carrasquilla. The former is one of the best Concacaf midfielders of all time; the latter is one of the best Concacaf midfielders currently.
It’s a lot to replace. Lemme show you something though:
Houston intend to use their open DP slot on a new No. 10, with plans to shift Amine Bassi into that secondary attacking midfield role Coco played. That’s the right call.
But as I’ve pointed out before, Atuesta is very gettable on a non-DP deal (which was the case for him with LAFC last year), and he’s a Herrera clone in so many ways. His slightly lower pass attempts and completion percentage in the chart above are more indicative of the differences between Houston’s and LAFC’s game models rather than a difference in talent between the two players. Slot him into Herrera’s role, put the ball on his foot 100 times a game, and let him cook.
Atuesta is currently surplus to requirements on a stacked Palmeiras side. Someone in MLS needs to go get him, and I honestly can’t think of a better fit than the Dynamo – provided they intend to keep being the team they have been the past two seasons.
Will RSL go shopping for a new No. 9 or is it Elias Manoel’s job to lose?
RSL set a single-season team record for points last year. Did you know that? It sounds kind of impossible given how great this team was from 2009-14, but it’s true. And they did it despite selling Andrés Gómez, who was on course to be Best XI and Young Player of the Year mid-season, and subsequently seeing Chicho Arango, who was producing at an MVP clip, go into the toilet.
RSL used the money from the Gómez sale to bring in a pair of young wingers, Dominik Marczuk and Lachlan Brook, last summer. Those guys, along with Diogo Gonçalves (also brought in last summer) and Diego Luna, will play the vast majority of the team’s minutes across the “3” line of Pablo Mastroeni’s 4-2-3-1.
They have yet to make a substantial move to replace Chicho, who was sent to San Jose for $1.4 million in GAM earlier this winter. Right now the only center forward on the roster with substantial first-team experience is 23-year-old Brazilian Elias Manoel, who had 8g/4a in about 1,600 regular-season minutes last year.
Pro-rate that to a full season’s worth of playing time, and you’re looking at a starting caliber No. 9 – especially when you consider the fact that Manoel’s underlying numbers were even better (he was 91st percentile among forwards in non-penalty xG as per FBRef, and 89th percentile in npxG+xA combined). Yes, he has underperformed those numbers (10 non-penalty goals on 14 non-penalty xG the past two years), but these things tend to even out over time.
RSL have an open DP slot and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they used it on a more obvious Chicho replacement. But I don’t know… there’s something Brian White-ish about Manoel – he’s the type of guy a shrewd front office would take a chance on, and the type of talent who could blossom into a 15-goal scorer if he’s surrounded by the right teammates.
We’re still pretty far from the start of the season, so don’t write this in pen. But if I was picking an out-of-the-blue breakout player for 2025, pretty sure Elias would be it.
