Don't let the LA Galaxy's misery erase the truly awful 1999 MetroStars | OneFootball

The LA Galaxy lost again on Wednesday night 1-0 at the San Jose Earthquakes on a late goal from substitute Ousseni Bouda, to tie an MLS record for the longest winless run in league history.

Or at least that's what MLS Season Pass broadcasts have been saying for the last couple of weeks.

According to the MLS Wrap-Up program following the Matchday 16 midweek slate, the loss tied the 2021 Houston Dynamo for the longest MLS winless run in one season of all time.

But of course, as is the case an oddly large portion of the league's historical data keeping, that's only true because, in the early days of MLS, someone thought it was a good idea to break every regular-season tie with a 35-yard shootout.

Between 1996 and 1999, MLS games were not allowed to finish as ties. Instead, if the score was even after 90 minutes, the game would be decided by five players from each team playing 1-on-1 with a goalkeeper charging off his line. The winning team would be declared the official "winner" of the match, but would also be rewarded with only one point instead of the three awarded for a 90-minute victory. The losing team got nothing.

This is against pretty much every convention in the soccer world. The overwhelming majority of domestic leagues don't have any problems with draws. And even in knockout tournament matches, when shootouts are used to decide matches, they are officially recorded as ties in the record books.

But this was MLS and it was the 1990s, so fixing this glitch was relatively small potatoes when compared with playing on 60-yard-wide pitches in 100,000-seat college football stadiums, not to mention trying to take team names like "Clash" and "Burn" seriously.

Hey nineteen

The point is that if MLS were in any other country on earth, the actual record holder for the longest single-season winless run would be the 1999 New York/New Jersey MetroStars.

Between May 22 and Sept. 5, the MetroStars played 19 matches. They lost 15 of those in 90 minutes, while the other four finished tied and went to a shootout. They were even bad in those shootouts, losing three out of four. But because they won one, beating the Tampa Bay Mutiny 3-2 following a 1-1 draw over 90 minutes, the MetroStars technically "won" the match, according to the keepers of MLS history.

Yes, the Tampa Bay Mutiny was an MLS team.

Who knows if this insight makes Galaxy fans feel any better? Maybe it shouldn't. But the point is this: Whenever you hear about an obscure MLS record, even from an official source, take it with a little bit of caution, and remember that MLS 1.0 was a far weirder and less sensical place than even those of us who lived through it would like to admit.

And more importantly, remember that the 1999 MetroStars deserve their title as the holders of the longest streak without a 90-minute victory. At least for a few more weeks.