#KleinOut

The Alien franchise, Metallica, the Walking Dead & the Los Angeles Galaxy: all things that used to be far better than are now. With some of these, there is debate as to where things went wrong. “Alien3” or “Resurrection”? “The Black Album”, “Load” or did things truly start to falter with “…Justice”? Did TWD jump the shark when Sheriff whatshisface left, or was it the fiftieth time they found a happy, peaceful enclave, only for it to end up being secretly run by a group of psychotic maniacs?

Where LA Galaxy are concerned, there is no such debate. Nobody asks if it was the abrupt departure of Bruce Arena to take on an ill-fated rescue-mission with the US men’s National Team, or the signing of Gio Dos Santos. Nobody ponders whether we could have been doing better in the “war for relevance” with LAFC, if only we’d properly capitalized on our status as the flagship and powerhouse of Major League Soccer. All of these things impacted our decline, of course but ask any Galaxy fan where the buck stops, and the answer comes quickly and naturally, we have become so used to saying it: LA Galaxy President, Chris Klein.

Look, I’ve nothing personal against Klein. His reputation preceding his tenure as LA Galaxy President was that of a good man. A nice man. A person so lovely in spirit, that Grant Wahl, in his book “The Beckham Experiment”, actually presented Klein’s passive non-comments on the English star as tantamount to an unbridled rant. Sure, that was probably hyperbolic on Wahl’s part, which isn’t surprising, given his books assessment of the Experiment as a failure (released as it was, before David Beckham’s presumed inevitable, permanent departure to AC Milan was staunchly blocked and the Galaxy went on to win two MLS Cups with the player) but it does underscore that Klein seems to be a fairly decent bloke.

With all that said, our record under this presidency speaks for itself. While Klein took up the reigns in 2013, a season before our last MLS Cup under Bruce Arena, his handling of the club after the legendary coach moved on, saw the fortunes plummet at an alarming rate. Curt Onalfo was immediately promoted from heading up the USL developmemt team, LA Galaxy II, to the position of head coach, with Pete Vagenas taking the reigns as GM. I believe this is also when Jovan Kirovski took the mantle of “technical director”.

Many a wary eye was cast in the direction of Onalfo’s previous tenures at Kansas City Wizbang, or whatever they were called then, and DC United. His time at KC was middling and his DC performance was unambiguously horrific. Three wins, three draws, twelve losses, all told. On that evidence, putting the biggest club in MLS in his hands was like asking Norman Bates to help out in the kitchen of your bed & breakfast while dressed up as his mother. The only thing to slightly alay our fears was his reasonable performance with LA Galaxy II. The hope was that his intimate knowledge of the roster and familiarity with the team’s mission and approach, as well as having been previously mentored by Arena, might help with the transitional process.

Oh, how it makes me chuckle to think we ever credited Klein with such foresight!

No, in hindsight, Curt was woefully out of his depth. The team finished dead last. Nothing looked good from the start. I say “in hindsight” but in truth, this wasn’t remotely unexpected. The only place that hindsight applies here is with regard to the patience afforded the Front Office at that time. This was their first managerial appointment and in theory, promoting from within made at least some sense. It didn’t help that Vagenas also proved as GM, to be not so much a dumpster fire, as a dumpster fire, inside a bonfire, on the sun. Rumors surfaced over his tenure of arrogance, hubris and a capacity to rub people the wrong way. When Onalfo departed within the year, Vagenas was reassigned to a lesser role.

Next up came the late Sigi Schmid, already a fixture in Galaxy & MLS folklore, having overseen LA Galaxy’s first MLS Cup in 2002, Columbus’s title in 2008 & routinely taking the Seattle Sounders close in his tenure there, with the pinnacle being the 2014 Supporters Shield. In fairness to Klein, he ceded a fair amount of control to Schmid, allowing him to function as a GM & if anything, the obligatory superstar DP that he thrust onto him, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, would actually be the main reason the team got what positive results they did. At one point the Galaxy even managed a 9 game unbeaten streak. It’s just a shame that the performances either side of the streak were shambolic. By September, the Galaxy were spiraling and Schmid resigned. Dominic Kinnear helped right the ship to a point but a decision day 3-2 capitulation to Houston Dynamo, after being 2 goals ahead at half time, saw the playoffs missed for a second season.

In 2019 it was time for Guillermo Barros Schelotto to take the helm, with Dennis te Kloese as GM and I believe it was at this point, I noticed a pattern. Curt Onalfo was a Galaxy employee promoted from within. Sigi Schmid was a prominent manager in MLS with Gs history. GBS was a former MLS star player with the Columbus Crew and Dennis te Kloese was once the sporting director from the erstwhile bovidae that once shared the Galaxy’s stadium, Chivas USA. Even Vagenas and Kirovski had played alongside Klein for the club. How extensive were these appointment processes, if most of them could feasibly be on the Klein family Christmas card list, with the rest being people he could have physically encountered at some point, without ever leaving Carson?

GBS would finally deliver a post-season, though the chronic inconsistency of the prior season prevailed and it was essentially Zlatan carrying the whole team, his witty comments morphing from cocky to disdainful as the season progressed. An elimination at the hands LAFC put a fork in both that campaign and the Ibra era and without him, form collapsed in the pandemic-impacted 2020 season. Despite 18 of the 26 clubs qualifying for the postseason, the Gs once again missed out and GBS was let go.

In terms of roster building, while it wasn’t the chronological start of the Gs sacrificing a competent team at the altar of Big Name DPs (I’m looking at you, Galaxy 2007 & 2008 squads), Klein’s presidency has seen this turn from a bug to a feature. He and Kirovski would probably hurl a virgin into a volcano or crawl over hot coals, if it meant signing someone who’s been on the front cover of a FIFA videogame.

In 2015, much of the team that had won the MLS Cup with a level of style and panache that inspired the term “tiki taco”, was gutted. Players were shuffled out the door or shunted to the bench to make way for Gio Dos Santos & Steven Gerrard. Gio had the chops and was in his prime but would he have the right attitude? He would not. Gerrard had the pedigree and the career but was his aging body still in the right shape to facilitate his penchant to cover every blade of grass and singlehandedly control games? It was not.

I will offer a small defence here: the fondness for named players was such that even certain quarters of the press and fans of other MLS teams had them decrying the Galaxy’s capacity to create a roster list that, on paper at least, felt stacked. When Gerrard & GDS, along with the already-present Robbie Keane, were supplemented with names like Jermaine Jones and Nigel De Jong, some cried foul, suggesting that MLS was bending the existing rules to the Galaxy’s whims, if not inventing new ones entirely.

As an aside on De Jong, who I never felt fully deserved the vitriol he received upon joining MLS and whose treatment by the league upon departure was grossly inappropriate, I find myself pondering how the FO came to sign him. I can almost see Klein and Kirovski hearing the name & thinking “Wasn’t that guy somehow associated with a World Cup final? And I recall some vague connection to the US national team…”. Then, a few months later “Oh, he’s the guy did that during the WC final!” and “Oooh! He’s the dude who ended Stu Holden’s career! I knew he sounded familiar! Awk-waaaard!”.

Anyhoo, the conspiracy theorists needn’t have worried. That squad achieved virtually nothing and seemed to be beset by in-fighting and division (though in fairness, it sometimes feels like if you put Jermaine Jones on an uninhabited planet, he’d find a way to clone himself so he could have someone to disagree with).

Generally speaking, the recent DPs have tended towards failure. Those that have had spells of strong form, such as Chicharito, Romain Alessandrini, Jonatahn Dos Santos and Cristian Pavon, have seen that form punctuated by inconsistent production, be it in the form of cold streaks, injury or just simply struggling to bring it ever game. Meanwhile, you’ve got head-scratchers like Kevin Cabral and Douglas Costa. At least they were headscratchers until a couple of days ago.

Y’see, Kevin Baxter of the LA Times just published this quote from Greg Vanney, regarding the Gs approach to roster-building when he first arrived:

“It was a recommendation-based scouting plan… Agents would recommend players who were available and if they fit a position, they were brought in.”

So Klein and Kirovski’s strategy has been to field calls from player agents and if they think the player they’re pushing might fit a need, they’re bringing them in?

Erm, Chris… agents aren’t scouts. They’re agents. The players are their clients. Do you think Brendan Frasier’s agent tells film producers that they should look into getting Tom Hanks instead? When a scout “recommends” a player, they are hoping to get him a deal with your team, not flesh out your roster. They’re not interested in you beyond what you can do for them and their client. So if say, a former Brazilian international is coasting to retirement at Gremio, putting forth minimal effort and they don’t want him anymore and they catch wind of the idea that someone might be willing to pay a seven-figure sum for his services, do you think they’re going to tell you that their client isn’t especially engaged these days? Or perhaps they have a young European forward with a measure of natural talent, who can’t get a gig within UEFA because given enough time to overthink it, he could bugger up tying his own shoelaces. Are they doing themselves or the client that they rely on for their livelihood, if they let slip that his confidence is built on a foundation of mud?

With that said, it would actually explain a lot!

“Okay Barrold”, I hear you say, “but while all that sounds absolutely, colossally shambolic, there’s more to being club president than putting a vaguely passable team on the pitch. What of his other attributes? Perhaps he’s good at community outreach, fostering a supporter culture, building a rapport with the season ticket holders”.

Ahahahahahahaha!!! Hahahahahahahahaha!!!!! Hahahaaaaahahahaha!!!!!… Ahem.

Sadly, no. He doesn’t seem to be very good at that either. Exhbit A: Los Angeles Football Club.

I hate to say it but the residents of the new, flashy, if slightly poo-tainted stadium in Exposition Park, have shone not just a flashlight on this LA Galaxy failing, they’ve held up a 50,000-mile-wide magnifying glass between us and the sun.

They have a waiting list for season ticket holders. A waiting list, Chris. They have more demand for season tickets than they can fill! That means, we should have been filling the Victoria Street venue every week for most of the past quarter of a century. We’re the most storied team in League history. The most successful. If somebody so much as sneezes in the direction of MLS, news outlets throughout the world assume it’ll be us that passes the tissues. I don’t buy the location excuse either. I mean, for reasons not well-understood, LAFC supporters seem to turn up at our place regularly. You guys didn’t do enough.

It can all be summed-up in a terse message we heard from the Galaxy FO regarding Season Ticket Member benefits: “your seat is your benefit.”

Look, I’m the kind of person who really does buy the ticket just because I plan to attend every game. I don’t necessarily need much else. However, it’s generally an idea on par with say, signing a well-known Mexican ex-wonderkid with a reputation for phoning it in and making him a designated player, while never questioning why he’d come to MLS in his prime; when you essentially tell your supporters to STFU about benefits because you aren’t obligated to provide more than a ticket.

Then there’s the Supporters Groups. LA Galaxy has two supporters sections. The V-Block at the north of the stadium, populated by Angel City Brigade, the Galaxians and a variety of other groups (apology for not being familiar with you all). To the southeast, we have the LA Riot Squad. First off, the FO wanted to merge the sections, poo-pooing the claims that both had different (very valid) approaches and cultures and both preferred to stay separate. So eager was Klein to combine the sections, he even got Zlatan to ask, making things awkward between him and LARS forever more when they declined the request.

When there was vandalism at an LAFC game in the Galaxy section, without any indication of a proper investigation or effort to find the culprits, the SGs were sanctioned. Including those of us who weren’t there, which was most of us as LAFC only allocated 100 seats to us that year. The FO complied, showing no interest in fighting the claims. When their fans caused issues at our ground, this wasn’t reciprocated, not so much because LAFC went to bat for their fans, as because our front office didn’t even seem interested in pursuing it.

As it stands, we’ve got a host of loyal supporters being viewed as inferior to fans of a club that just moved to their doorstep, when in truth, a 5-time champion with a 20+ year head start, should have had a lock on this market.

The Galaxy have made the playoff once in five years. We’re looking set to struggle again. The flagship of MLS has become a banner of ineptitude. Our supporters are made to feel like a joke for doing what a supporter is supposed to do and stick with their team, whatever comes.

Chris Klein’s response? To raise ticket prices.

Mr Klein, I love my club and I have to think that given your history, on some level you do to. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not working. It’s been almost a decade and it shows no sign of improvement. The Los Angeles Galaxy is a ghost of its former self. In fact, it’s starting to verge on a parody of it’s former self.

It’s not good enough and it’s how it’s been for a long time. #KleinOut

Update: It appears that I misread Baxter's quote about agents & scouting, mistakenly attributing it to Klein, when this was actually a quote from Vanney, regarding strategies he is endeavoring to change. Therefore, the speculation that Klein misused the term "agent" has been removed.