LAFC has never started an MLS season without Carlos Vela on its roster.
That could change Saturday afternoon when the reigning Western Conference champions face the Seattle Sounders at BMO Stadium since Vela, the team’s longtime captain and all-time leader in goals and assists, remains unsigned.
But there’s still hope. Because not only has Vela failed to move on, he hasn’t even moved out.
“He still has his locker there with all his stuff,” defender Aaron Long said Thursday at the team’s training site. “Maybe there’s something that can get worked out.”
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For the time being, Vela is a victim of an MLS salary structure that punishes teams for being successful — and no MLS team has been more successful than LAFC since it entered the league with Vela in 2018.
Many players have bonus packages that become quite lucrative if teams make long playoff runs, and LAFC has made the MLS Cup final the last two seasons. The team also made the finals of the CONCACAF Champions League and Campeones Cup last year, triggering other bonuses — all of which count against the league’s salary cap of $5.7 million.
So the better LAFC does on the field, the harder it becomes for general manager John Thorrington to keep the team together.
“The last two years the value of our players has risen because of their success here,” Thorrington said. “Managing a salary cap gets incredibly tight. So you combine the value of those players going up [and] money shrinking, in effect, and it makes it really difficult for us to compete for free agents.”
Vela made nearly $4.4 million in the final year of his contract last season, although as a designated player just a portion of that salary counted against the cap. And he wasn’t the only one affected. Midfielder Kellyn Acosta and goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau, who played key roles in LAFC’s success, also left as free agents, part of an exodus that saw 14 players depart.
The year before that the team lost 10 players from its league championship team, among them leading scorer Cristian Arango and MLS Cup hero Gareth Bale, who were both sacrificed to the salary cap.
“Those are the rules,” LAFC coach Steve Cherundolo said. “We know the rules and we try to proceed even though those…