What we do know is that the 10-year era of Chivas USA in Major League Soccer is over.
It ended with a 1-0 victory over the San Jose Earthquakes at StubHub Center on Sunday afternoon, which nudged Chivas into 7th place in the Western Conference standings, which means no matter what the Goats went through this year, they finished ahead of former MLS Cup winners San Jose and Colorado.
What we don’t know is what will become of Chivas USA. The club’s lease with StubHub Center expires at the end of this year, basically the same time frame MLS outlined to have the club under new ownership. With a new stadium. With a new name. With an entirely new focus on the future of a two-team Los Angeles market.
A literal sign @StubHubCenter today is the last ever #ChivasUSA game. Meanwhile, there's cheesecake in the press box. pic.twitter.com/nyfkcJcMOK
— Nick Green (@LAsoccerblog) October 26, 2014
MLS has been tight-lipped on the subject and Chivas president Nelson Rodriguez, appointed by the league to run the franchise for the 2014 season, insists he can’t shed any new light on the state of the franchise.
He met the media at halftime of Sunday’s game against San Jose. He was engaging and on point. Trouble is, there apparently is no point.
“Do you expect to hear from the league when the club is sold?”
“Yes,” Rodriguez said.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
OK. Both Rodriguez and Coach Wilmer Cabrera said that they will continue to function as usual until told to do otherwise. The players, on the other hand, are left to wonder what their fate will be in any kind of dispersal draft. To a man, they acknowledge they’ve been auditioning for their MLS futures for a couple of months now.
Midfielder Eric Avila, by the way, has few concerns since he struck a deal with Santos Laguna in Mexico. Ecuadorian Felix Borja, who scored his third goal on Sunday, might be headed back to Quito. MLS holds the option rights to Erick “Cubo” Torres, who scored a club-record 15 goals this season and has earned some street cred in Mexico for scoring for El Tri in an exhibition game.
But what do you do with a cast of characters who have no idea what tomorrow, next week or next month will bring to do?
“It’s difficult, especially considering the circumstances, that it would almost be unfair to ask them to continue to train so we’ve developed off-season programs for each individual player,” Rodriguez said. “We’ll start with conducting what we call off-season meetings as early as (Monday).
“Wilmer and the coaching staff and I have been having discussions about our player pool here currently and other players that we might like to acquire. We still have the responsibility to prepare as if we’re playing next year.. We’ve had those discussions, we’ve formulated a plan, we haven’t finalized that plan because we wanted to see how the rest of the year played out.”
It’s played out. The rest is on MLS.
Now, what do you do if you’re a first-year head coach?
“Since the start of the season we were living like ‘Who’s the owner? What’s going to happen? It’s going to be no more franchise, no more team.’ That’s not easy to deal with,” Cabrera said. “When you have to deal with that every day, you get burned (out) and you have to come every day to motivate players.
“Soccer is not only running and kicking the ball, soccer is a mental game and when you have to say it’s going to be it’s fine, it’s going to be OK, let’s do our job, you have to be creative. In this case my coaching staff, I have to give every credit to them to keep all those players motivated that’s something fantastic and I really appreciate that. And obviously the president himself was unbelievable.”
At the same time, Cabrera wasn’t rushing to circle the wagons around whatever becomes of this club.
don’t know what’s going to happen with me, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be involved in this sport that I love and the things that I do best – soccer,” Cabrera said. “Today I’m more prepared than one year ago, or the beginning of the year, from this learning process that we had to go through.”
Whatever lessons were learned on that scale, it can only be hoped that MLS learned from it as well.
Wherever it leads.