The stars align for Galaxy
David Beckham won his first silverware (ignoring various Mickey Mouse cups that are given out willy nilly) last night as LA Galaxy beat Houston Dynamo 1-0 to win the MLS Cup. In fact it was Beckham who started the move for the goal, flicking the ball to Robbie Keane who laid on a nice pass for Landon Donovan to finish with a rare piece of quality.
The game was scrappy but Galaxy had so much room to move the ball around Houston’s final third it was incredible it took until the 71st minute for them to score. Dynamo were on a hiding to nothing and it looked to me like they were just waiting for the inevitable.
What the game did highlight though is that due to the salary caps in place, Galaxy actually have a couple of players (Adam Cristman was one) that would find it hard to play in League Two in England.
However for the sake of the game and MLS’s global profile (a Google search shows 1,694 related artices today) it was a huge win for American soccer and it’s most famous frontiersman, David Beckham.
is this like the fa cup? or the league?
That’s a good question. It is the league play-offs with the winner being declared the League champion, even though they might not have finished the league season with the most points!
Their FA Cup is called the Open Cup and has actually been held since 1914.
CA, I agree it’s definitely not like the FA Cup, which has a direct analog in the Open Cup (Chicago Fire were the runners-up this year, by the way). The team that finishes the regular season with the most points wins the Supporters’ Shield, but nobody cares about that. The MLS Cup format (and US sports league championship formats in general) is really more like the Champions League/Europa League, where the MLS regular season works like the qualifying and groups stages to weed out the worst teams and seed the best teams, and then the MLS playoffs are like the knock-out rounds. You have to do it this way for kind of the same reason that the Euro cups do it — the number of teams and sheer distances make it difficult for each team to play every other team home and away, and only home and away. If you can’t do that, then the team with the most points at the end of the regular season might just happen to be the one that had the easiest schedule. This season actually might have been the first one in MLS when they played a home-away format like they do in English leagues, and it’s probably no coincidence that Becks’ team won both the Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup. But they’re adding a new team in Montreal, so that screws up everything and they’ll go back to a more typical US-style conference schedule next year. More than you wanted to know.