When LAFC takes on Vancouver or Portland in Game 1 of its Audi MLS Cup Playoffs Round One Best-of-3 Series on Sunday, the match will mark the Black & Gold’s 100th since the start of the 2023 season, more than any other MLS team in that span.
That workload has exacted a toll on players, coaches, and everyone else associated with the team, but those 100 games are also a trophy in and of themselves.
Head coach Steve Cherundolo explained it well when he was asked prior to LAFC’s unforgettable Decision Day—when the Black & Gold earned the necessary goal differential in the final moments of its win over San Jose, then watched the Galaxy lose at the death in Houston to give LAFC the top seed in the West—about the burden of playing so many games.
“I can only just applaud the mentality of the group and the players of always trying to maximize our situation. It's not easy,” Cherundolo replied. “Everybody at LAFC is working towards kind of the common goal of maximizing the team's potential and trying to win everything we partake in. And that only happens when everybody is willing to sacrifice and put their own interests aside. And that's the feeling that I have at LAFC the last couple of years and it's very gratifying. It's wonderful to see and it's great to take part in. But there are times where it's very difficult. Yeah, the schedule continues to be more congested and more complicated … But these are all good problems. So I welcome those problems.”
The fact that LAFC has won more than twice as many games as it has lost in the last two years (54 wins, 26 losses, 19 draws)—represents a nearly impossible feat in a salary-cap league designed not to create superteams, but parity.
Also difficult: making it to a third straight MLS Cup Final. That’s the task that lies ahead of this current iteration of LAFC. It’s a task the players expect to achieve, even though it’s only been done twice before in the league’s 28-year history, and under much easier circumstances.
D.C. United made it to the first three MLS Cup Finals (1996, ’97, and ’98), and the New England Revolution got there in ’05, ’06, and ’07. MLS had only 10 to 13 teams in those days though – less than half the number it has today (29), which makes LAFC’s successive runs to the Final in ’22 and ’23 even more impressive.
These 2024 playoffs, and this month’s celebration of the decade that has passed since LAFC was founded in 2014, present the perfect opportunity to reflect on LAFC’s recent run of success, and the belief that, in captain Ilie Sánchez’s words, “the best is yet to come.”
THE STANDARD
In 2023 LAFC appeared in three different finals (Concacaf Champions Cup, Campeones Cup, and MLS Cup), traveling more than 63,000 miles in the process. Both were league highs.
Two-thirds of those games were played on either two or three days’ rest. And still the Black & Gold made it to the MLS Cup Final in Columbus last December, where it succumbed to a Crew side that had played eight fewer games. The 2023 Black & Gold wore its workload proudly, a sentiment that Sánchez repeated last week following his late matchwinner in Vancouver, which made Saturday night’s Decision Day miracle possible.
“Winning teams, in the biggest moments, step up,” said the captain, who joined LAFC nine days after Cherundolo was named its head coach in January 2022. “We proved that these past two seasons. We just do it consistently when these moments come. Again, we have the opportunity in this third season—personally but also with Steve and this coaching staff—to fight for big things at the end of the season.”
Homegrown LAFC forward Nathan Ordaz made clear that LAFC plans to add to the U.S. Open Cup trophy it won in September by extending its current six-game win streak in all competitions through the MLS Cup Final on December 7:
“Just so everybody knows, we're not here to play and we're going for it all again this year.”
COLLECTIVE OVER THE INDIVIDUAL
Though he finished tied for second place in the MLS Golden Boot race (with Miami’s Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, and behind DC’s Christian Benteke (23)), Denis Bouanga scored his 20th regular-season goal Saturday night against the Quakes. It was the second straight season in which Bouanga has hit the 20-goal mark, making him the fourth player in MLS history with 20 or more goals in consecutive seasons, and one of just five players to record 20 or more goals multiple times.
This month Bouanga became the third player in LAFC history to record 40 or more regular-season goals in his career, joining Carlos Vela and Diego Rossi. (Vela, by the way, who re-joined the club in September, appears physically ready to take the field this postseason, having made his first appearance on the bench against San Jose. “If Carlos is on the bench, it's always my intention to get him on the field,” Cherundolo said.)
Bouanga also tied Vela’s team mark by recording an MLS-best nine game-winning goals in 2024. That’s tied for the third-most in MLS history.
Perhaps most impressively, only two MLS players recorded 20 goals and 10 assists in the regular season this year: Bouanga and Messi.
“I'm super happy to reach the 20-goals mark,” Bouanga said after the San Jose match. “It's always an objective. [But I would] definitely rather win the MLS Cup than win the Golden Boot. That's something that matters for the team and that matters for me more than the individual trophy.”
EN CASA
Add in the plot twist that the team’s top rival is right on its heels with the number-two seed, with a potential playoff collision on LAFC’s home turf, and the script being written for these playoffs is a hard one to put down. LAFC, you’ll recall, had to make it past the Galaxy the last time it lifted the Cup back in ’22. The location of that playoff rematch would be the same this year should a rematch come to pass.
BMO Stadium’s atmosphere, Cherundolo said Saturday night, “really has the ability to make our players better. And in choice moments—we recall the MLS Cup Final or tonight—those are the moments that I think people really, really remember in this stadium … That's what we're doing. We’re trying to make memories and the fans are an integral part of that here at BMO. And for us to able to make another long run in the playoffs or a deep run in the playoffs, we need them.”
Wherever they play, “our expectations are to show up and make it very difficult for any team to beat us,” Sánchez said.
That was the mindset in 2022, the last time LAFC entered the playoffs as the top seed in the Western Conference. And we know how that movie ended.
