The surest sign a college football program is in trouble is when the alumni grow restless.
The Galaxy, who take the field Tuesday for their first training session of the new season, have finally reached that point. Last week two of the biggest names from the franchise’ glory days — former captain Landon Donovan, who led it to four MLS titles, and Alexi Lalas, who played in the club’s first MLS Cup win, then went on to become its president — lamented the team’s long fall from grace and plotted its return to the top.
“It’s been frustrating to me,” Lalas said. “And a little sad.”
“It feels to me,” Donovan added, “like the Galaxy has lost its soul.”
For more than a decade, Donovan was a big part of that soul. He led the team to the playoffs eight times, to the MLS Cup final five times, broke the MLS scoring record and was so good, the league named its MVP award after him. But after the 2016 season, then Galaxy president Chris Klein declined to re-sign Donovan, his former roommate.
Read more: Galaxy part ways with veteran technical director Jovan Kirovski
The team hasn’t been back to an MLS Cup final since, losing more games than it has won during the longest title drought in franchise history.
You can call it a curse. Donovan calls it something else.
“The last three-quarters of a decade has been unacceptable,” he said. “Everyone realizes that. And those of us who care about the club deeply want to see it better.”
Donovan is literally and figuratively a giant part of the club’s history, as evidenced by the larger-than-life bronze sculpture outside the main entrance at Dignity Health Sports Park. His words, then, carry weight. And last Friday, while visiting the United Soccer Coaches Convention to hype Fox Sports’ coverage of Copa América and the European Championship this summer, Donovan used his words to call for change.
Last May, the Galaxy, under heavy pressure from an unhappy fan base, sacked Klein, the team’s president for more than a decade. Last week, it parted ways with Jovan Kirovski, another former Donovan teammate, who had been the team’s technical director even longer than Klein was president. They were the last major holdovers from a front office that failed to stop the club’s…