LA Galaxy vs. St. Louis CITY: Keys to Sunday Night Soccer | OneFootball

By Matthew Doyle

I don’t think it’s fair to say the reigning MLS Cup champions, the LA Galaxy, have hit crisis mode entering Matchday 3. We’re just two league games into the year, and they’re battling through injuries – more than what was expected before the season – while managing a double-handful of roster changes, so growing pains were probably to be expected.

Still, it hasn’t been great. A lackluster first kick performance was followed by a gut punch of a late loss on Matchday 2. They’re already swimming upstream.

It feels a little bit of the same for St. Louis CITY SC, who came into the season with high hopes and a promising roster but have struggled to generate any sort of consistent attack through 180 minutes under new manager Olof Mellberg.

So what we’ve got is a little bit of desperation on both sides. And desperation makes for good TV when these teams meet at Dignity Health Sports Park for Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).

Players in focus

LA Galaxy

St. Louis CITY SC

What's at stake for LA Galaxy?

The Galaxy started the year by hanging a banner celebrating their sixth MLS Cup triumph. And that’s been just about the only highlight so far.

LA are the most successful team in MLS history and are supposed to be building back to dominance this season. I think everyone would have understood a little “one step back to take two steps forward” since they had to unwind so many bad deals over the past few years, and since they are only just starting to use their academy in the way they should (18-year-old academy product Ruben Ramos was something of a silver lining in the opener; I hope we see more of him). It’s difficult to keep a successful team together in MLS, and that gets exponentially more true if you’re not getting contributions from down-roster players.

Know what Inter Miami’s secret sauce is this year? It’s not Messi & Friends (ok, it’s not just Messi & Friends). It’s Yannick Bright, Benja Cremaschi and Telasco Segovia, kids they’ve developed to one extent or another, who they can plug and play to keep the floor high.

LA mostly don’t have guys like that.

Anyway, that’s more of a long-term plan than an immediate “what’s at stake” bit. That piece is simple: Galaxy fans will absolutely start to grumble if they watch their team drop a second result of the season in Carson. The vibes could start to get objectively bad.

What's at stake for St. Louis CITY SC?

Any time you change managers you’re looking for the new-manager bounce, and I guess you could argue St. Louis have found it on the defensive side of the ball. Two shutouts in two games, and they’ve allowed just 1.1 expected goals. It’s legitimate improvement.

Yet it’s been hard, for St. Louis fans in certain corners of the internet, to see what their old coach, Bradley Carnell, is doing in Philadelphia:

There has been almost none of this from St. Louis so far in 2025, and that’s especially confusing given how much instant chemistry Eduard Löwen had down the stretch last year with summer window additions Marcel Hartel, Cedric Teuchert and Simon Becher.

I don’t think there will or should be any panic. But if they start the year goalless through three games, there will be some understandable grumbling.

On Wiebe's radar

How do the Galaxy … “progress” from here?

Small sample size, I know, but here’s where the Galaxy stand after two games in 2025 vs. the heady days of 2024. All stats are per-90 via FBRef…

Progressive Carries

Progressive Passes

Progressive Passes Received

Of course, Riqui Puig accounts for a huge chunk of the drop off – the Galaxy's No. 10 led MLS in progressive passes (15.1 per 90, three more than Carles Gil in second) and was fourth in progressive carries among players with more than 650 minutes played (think Denis Bouanga levels) in 2024 – but the problem is bigger than just the former Barça man. Mark Delgado mostly got applause for doing the dirty work and running, but he was a volume ball progressor too via the pass. Same for Gastón Brugman, in far fewer minutes.

The trickle-down effect is that the Galaxy wingers aren’t running downhill nearly as often. Gabriel Pec went from first in Progressive Carries AND Progressive Passes Received in 2024 among players with more than 1,100 minutes played to way down both leaderboards in 2025. No Joseph Paintsil, who ran onto a ton of the Galaxy’s progressive passes in space last year, means backlines only have to be concerned about imminent danger on one side of the field.

Meanwhile, Marco Reus is much more of a “I’ll sit in the pocket and wait for the ball to get to me in good spots” rather than a “drop in and drive the team up the field” type of No. 10. But who gets Reus the ball? And Pec? And Diego Fagúndez? And whoever plays up top?

That remains an open question, now and until (and perhaps even after) Puig returns.

LA Galaxy: Is it panic time for MLS Cup champs?

Can St. Louis clean things up on the ball?

There’s no way that drop-off was a tactical choice from Olof Mellberg. Rather, St. Louis were sloppy and wasteful when they had the ball (more on that in a second from Doyle).

You could very nearly count St. Louis’ final third touches in San Diego on two hands. It’s no surprise that they created just two shooting opportunities. More of the same on Sunday and it could be three scoreless games to open the season, and nobody (most certainly not the neutrals) wants that.

Tactical breakdown

LA Galaxy

At this point, I’m not even sure.

They’ve got so many guys ruled out, or at least ruled as questionable via injury, and are coming off a 1-0 defeat midweek in the Concacaf Champions Cup at Costa Rican side Herediano. It feels like there is a non-zero chance this team will be too short-handed and too gassed to do anything except put numbers behind the ball and try to counter through Pec and one of the center forwards (it would not shock me at all to see Miguel Berry get the start over Christian Ramírez).

Here’s the problem with that: the Galaxy have not looked particularly good when they’ve sat in with numbers behind the ball:

This isn’t a “young guy makes a basic error” thing, either. The center backs in this moment are Maya Yoshida – the 36-year-old captain, who’s got more than 300 appearances combined between the Premier League, Serie A, Bundesliga and Eredivisie – and the 34-year-old Zanka, a Danish international with more than 100 Prem appearances and more than 50 appearances in European continental competitions.

When you have guys on the field with C.V.s like that, you’re not supposed to concede late, simple goals. It’s the whole point of putting veterans out there.

So, I don’t know. LA haven’t figured out how to create danger with the ball this year – I’ll refer you to that Reus blurb above; if he shows up, a lot of these questions probably get answered in a way that would please Galaxy fans – but they have looked vulnerable when playing against it.

Oh, and they’re without two of their DPs (Puig and Paintsil), likely two of their U22s (Lucas Sanabria and Matheus Nascimento) and maybe their track-star, one-man counter-killer of a center back (Emiro Garcés), too.

Greg Vanney’s got some problem-solving to do.

St. Louis CITY SC

They need to do the opposite of this:

According to folks who follow the team closely and Mellberg himself, the new coach spent a ton of time this winter rebuilding the defensive structure, which makes sense for a team that has relied waaaaaay too much on Bürki through two years. As such, they’ve transitioned away from the Energy Drink Soccer-inflected 4-2-2-2 that became a 4-2-3-1 once Hartel and Teuchert arrived last summer (which coincided with John Hackworth taking over as interim head coach), and now play out of a 3-4-2-1.

Through two games, their line of confrontation has been much deeper. Look at this graphic, courtesy of MLS Analytics on BlueSky, from last week’s 0-0 draw in San Diego:

That defensive action height is insanely low (fourth-lowest of any team’s recorded all season, and two of the ones below them were logged by 10-man teams just going complete bunker). And look, it’s perfectly okay to be a low-block-and-counter team, especially when you’ve got a center back playing as well as Kessler has been. It’s not a bad game model.

But it’s a game model that requires aggressive and immediate verticality when the opportunity presents itself, and requires guys like Löwen and Hartel to get on the ball and open the game up in those moments. There was some of that on Matchday 1 against the Rapids, but it was completely missing last week.

One other note: right wingback Tomas Totland had just three final-third touches in San Diego; Conrad Wallem, on the left, had four. It’s hard to create attacking dynamism if you don’t create attacking width.

“Run faster and at goal” is more of a philosophical adjustment than a tactical one, but still. If St. Louis add that on top of what they’ve done through the first two games, I think they’ll be in pretty good shape.

Projected lineups

4-2-3-1 that they might call a 4-3-3, but don’t believe it.

The 3-4-2-1 Mellberg is implementing.