How coach Greg Vanney got Galaxy back to MLS Cup final

When Mark Delgado made his MLS debut, he was just 17 and even he acknowledges his approach to soccer was unsophisticated.

“Just being a young kid and running around,” he said.

Fortunately for Delgado, his team, the now-defunct Chivas USA, had a rookie assistant coach named Greg Vanney. And while Vanney could do little for the unfocused teenager in their season together, he remembered Delgado and made him the first player he acquired after taking over as manager of Toronto FC in 2014.

Seven years later, after moving to the Galaxy, Vanney spent $500,000 on another reunion with Delgado, who this season notched career highs for games (32), starts (29) and assists (nine, including two in the playoffs). And with playmaker Riqui Puig sidelined because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament, Delgado figures to play an even bigger role in Saturday’s MLS Cup final with the New York Red Bulls at Dignity Health Sports Park.

And for that he has the coach to thank — not just for the faith in him, but also for the mentoring Vanney has done along the way, taking Delgado from a talented if wild teenager and molding him into a player and person so stable and disciplined that the coach called him “the great balancer.”

“To really talk things out with Greg and really study film, I became more of a thinker, right?” said Delgado, 29. “I guess you can say it’s gained his trust. Eventually things worked out.”

Delgado is not the only player who has benefited from a relationship with Vanney. In fact, for all the attention the coach’s technical and strategic acumen has received, those personal connections off the field have become an equally important factor in what has been one of the greatest turnarounds in MLS history.

After winning just eight games and finishing 13th in a 14-team conference a year ago, the Galaxy will play for their sixth MLS title. After winning just two playoff games in the last eight seasons, the Galaxy have won twice that many in the last six weeks. A franchise even its own fans had given up on 19 months ago is 90 minutes away from being the best in the world’s largest first-division league.

And Vanney is getting much of the credit for that.

“He is the reason why I came here,” said forward Dejan Joveljic, who joined the Galaxy halfway through Vanney’s first season in L.A. and leads the team with 20 MLS goals this year. “Of course he’s a good coach. But first of all, he’s a very real gentleman and I appreciate him.”

“He’s really like a father,” added winger Joseph Paintsil, who left Belgium for the Galaxy in January. “We don’t need a coach who shouts and makes you angry and mad. He always comes to you as his own son to discuss with you patiently and calmly. That has really given me confidence.”

Vanney said his mother, Jeanette, who taught kindergarten for four decades, instilled those traits in him.

“My mom was super nurturing. She was such a loving person,” Vanney said. “My dad was super intense. Hard-working athletic director, former college football player. He had a fiery personality. My mom was always just very calm.”

Yet despite their conflicting personalities, Bill and Jeanette were married for 53 years before Jeanette died at 69, eight months before her son won his first MLS Cup as a coach with Toronto in 2017.

“I feel like I have both sides of them,” Vanney said.

Which is to say he too can be fiery. But it’s not his first option, nor his most successful one.

“That my-way-or-the-highway [approach] is gone,” said Dan Calichman, a teammate of Vanney’s on the inaugural Galaxy roster in 1996 and his top assistant for the last decade in Toronto and Los Angeles. “We motivate and we get on these guys, but it’s just so much more respectful, it’s so much more valuing their knowledge.

“When a player feels like he’s listened to, you get the buy-in.”

Galaxy forward Dejan Joveljic, left, celebrates after scoring against Seattle in the Western Conference final on Nov. 30. Joveljic says Greg Vanney is the reason why he is playing for the Galaxy.

(Etienne Laurent / Associated Press)

For Vanney, it’s not about coaching players. It’s about coaching the holy trinity that makes up each player.

“Philosophically, the way I see it, every player is actually three parts,” he said, holding up both hands to tick through the traits he finds significant. “There’s the person, there’s the player and then there’s the competitor. If you can connect with a person, they will trust you and you can drive them as much as you need to get the best out of them. If they don’t think you’re doing it for the right reasons and for their best interest, at some point they cut you out.

“If you’re a good coach and your vision matters and you care about the person, you can teach them. But I believe the most important part of that is being genuine and connecting with the person. That establishes the trust you need to really coach.”

That approach has worked for Vanney, whose 141 victories in 9½ seasons tied him for fourth among active coaches at the end of this season. Saturday’s MLS Cup final will mark his fourth appearance in the championship game; in the last quarter-century, no coach has been there more often. His 69.6% winning percentage in 23 playoffs games in second to LAFC’s Steven Cherundolo, who has managed half as many games, and if the Galaxy win, Vanney will become the fourth coach in league history to win championships with two different teams.

But that success wasn’t the only thing that brought him back to the Galaxy.

After taking Toronto to the MLS Cup final three times in four seasons, winning the only treble in league history in 2017, Vanney started to feel the club, which had a new general manager and new president, had no clear vision for the future. So despite agreeing to a contract extension late in the 2020 season, he asked out of the deal.

Conversations quickly began with the Galaxy, who a month earlier had fired Guillermo Barros Schelotto, their fourth coach in as many seasons. For both sides it was a perfect fit: The rudderless Galaxy, once perennial contenders, had made just one playoff appearance in four seasons and needed stability and a proven winner while Vanney would be returning to a club whose culture he understood, having played on the first trophy-winning team in 1998.

“I always wanted to come back here,” said Vanney, who played three years at UCLA before signing with the Galaxy ahead of the club’s inaugural season. “This has always kind of been my club, the club [to which] I felt the most attached.”

But the team he returned to wasn’t the one he started with.

In his first six seasons with the Galaxy, the team finished first in the conference four times, won Supporters’ Shield, U.S. Open Cup and CONCACAF Champions League titles and played in three MLS Cup finals. In the four seasons before he came back, the Galaxy lost more games than they won, finished in the bottom half of the league table three times and made the playoffs just once.

“I personally have an expectation for what the Galaxy should look like,” Vanney said. “It’s hard to me to see the Galaxy struggling. That’s not where the Galaxy should be.”

Galaxy coach Greg Vanney watches from the sideline during a match against Atlanta in August.

(Maximilian Haupt / DPA / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

The rebuild, however, was not easy. When Vanney arrived he found the team didn’t have much of a sports science staff or scouting department and the academy program had been allowed to wither. Then, at the end of his first season, general manager Dennis te Kloese departed, leaving Vanney to assume his duties as well.

It proved to be too much. When Vanney took the job, he had outlined a three-year plan to return the Galaxy to prominence, yet his third season was one of the worst ever, with the team winning a franchise-low eight games and giving up a franchise-high 67 goals. Along the way there was a fan boycott, the team’s longtime president was fired and, for the first time, the Galaxy’s leading scorer finished with fewer than eight goals.

“It was embarrassing,” captain Maya Yoshida said.

And Yoshida was with the Galaxy for only the final three months of the turmoil.

Questions were raised about whether Vanney, who was entering the final year of his contract, was still the right man for the job. So after the season mercifully ended, the coach met with Dan Beckerman, the chief executive and president of AEG, the Galaxy’s parent company, and asked for help.

“I said I can’t do all of these things,” Vanney recounted of the conversation. “I really like working with a really good GM. It’s two completely different sports when you are signing players and working with agents and getting those players across the finish line and then working with those players and making them fit together on the field.

“I want a GM who’s challenging me to be better and asking the right questions and giving me ideas to think about. I don’t know everything.”

Beckerman agreed and Will Kuntz, whom Vanney had hired in April as the senior vice president of player personnel, was promoted to general manager in December. When the Galaxy took the field for the first time in February, nine of the 15 players Vanney used in a season-opening draw with Inter Miami had been signed by Kuntz.

Both men say the process has been a collaborative one that begins with Vanney settling on the profile of the players he wants and Kuntz and the scouting department Vanney developed scouring the globe to find them.

“The dialogue always has to be there, or else you end up with pieces that don’t fit,” Vanney said. “Will couldn’t coach the team. That’s not his strength. I couldn’t get anyone signed. That’s not my strength. The beauty is the collaboration of the different departments. That to me is what a club is.”

Galaxy players celebrate after defeating Seattle in the Western Conference final at Dignity Health Sports Park on Nov. 30.

(Etienne Laurent / Associated Press)

But even after providing Vanney with what he wanted — spending a club-record $20.7 million on transfer fees for Paintsil, Gabriel Pec and Miki Yamane in just seven weeks — Kuntz figured it would take time to turn those players into a team. Instead, the Galaxy matched modern-era club records with 19 wins and 69 goals this season, were unbeaten at Dignity Health Sports Park and became the first team since 2008 to go from eight victories to the MLS Cup final in one season.

“I didn’t see this coming this soon. And that’s all Greg,” Kuntz said. “The more pieces you add to a team, the harder it is. The fact that you can do a complete squad transformation and get everyone to jell, it’s very rare.”

Rarer still is the way Vanney had been able to use the nurturing skills his kindergarten-teacher mother taught him to get the most out of those new players. Like Pec, 23, who came to MLS from Brazil’s Vasco da Gama, where he played as a wide winger in a rigid system that left little room for improvisation.

With the Galaxy, Vanney encouraged him to move closer to the penalty area, take chances and play with the freedom he did on the playground. The result? Sixteen goals and 14 assists, making him the youngest players in club history to record 30 goal contributions in one season.

“Everyone was really trusting, believing that I could do it,” Pec said through a translator. “That gave me so much joy that I could show who I was. What we are seeing, it’s Gabriel when I was a kid. It was inside me but it was asleep. [Vanney] has brought this back and suddenly I’m awake.”

And so, after seven seasons in hibernation, are the Galaxy.