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The Last Big First

I didn’t see it happen, per se. I heard about it, second hand.

"Dude,” the story came with the disbelief it deserved. “He megged Bradley Wright-Phillips.”

Apparently it happened while the various members of the media had been wrangling camera equipment, talking shop, and scrolling their social feeds awaiting the moment where we’d be allowed back for LAFC’s third annual TRAINING DAY. Or at least, that’s what I’ve always called the first day of preseason in the Black & Gold universe.

I’d come to the Training Facility rather uninspired. Yes, there were new signings. Yes, CONCACAF Champions League — the club’s first ever international competition — was a little more than a month away (a Tuesday night fixture in León Mexico, I planned to travel for). Yes, there were more expansion teams coming into the league, big signings on the horizon for the rivalry, and those questions of whether a mostly intact LAFC team could break more records — all the other buzz that comes with a new season but there was a tinge of third season already getting, dare I say it — stale?

Perhaps it was my own burnout. I’d written more about the sport than I’d ever told myself I’d allow. It was a passion. After music, I knew what happened to passions when you wrote too much about them. The same thing that happens to your favorite restaurant when you go in the back and tour the kitchen a few too many times.

There were podcasts. There was the NBC Premier League show. There were the magazine articles. There was the regular beat writing gig.

But somewhere in there, there was a lot of disillusionment. If this is how it felt to cover the greatest season in MLS history, to write a show about the league you followed since you could get the sport on TV, to pen profiles attempting to decode the league’s enigmatic best player in local magazines, and to talk about it all twice a week in your backyard — then what was left of that passion?

But there I was all the same. No deadline. No outlet. No money — however meager — promised on the other side of the Training Day 2020. One page left in the reporters notebook as if to say something I couldn’t say to myself or my colleagues.

And almost all of it was worse than I expected.

Bob Bradley spoke in the usual non-committal way he will when there are too many reporters with too many boneheaded questions. Carlos Vela was charismatic and made some jokes but revealed little of anything of consequence. Jordan Harvey was earnest and genuinely glad to be into yet another season in his storied career in the league.

But between the routine questions and answers, I prodded at the one thing that did tug my heartstrings when the reporters were allowed around the corner to watch the 11v11 scrimmage going on – the first of the year.

There were six academy players scattered between the two sides. Players born in 2004 or 2005, some of the best of LAFC youth ranks. Todd Saldaña, the man pulling the strings since the academy was launched in 2016. People criticized them for wanting to start from scratch – but after more trophies than I care to list here, the academy was already establishing itself year-by-year as a force in the most player-rich part of the country.

And so I forgot to so much as greet most of the LAFC staffers I missed during the break. I could only ask about these kids. How many were there? Who was out there? Was this normal?

I recognized Dylan Presto — a Porter Ranch-hailing attacker who strung together passes in the middle of the park. I saw Anthony Leone — the young, bulky kid from Long Beach who fed Carlos through balls and fended off pressure from the former New York Red Bulls Attacker. There were four others, some I knew, others I didn’t.

And they were all I could think about as I watched the ball ping around training. They could hang. They could compete. These kids didn’t look good. They looked great.

It was then, right after training was over, and as I wrapped with whoever wanted to hear me rant about the prospect of seeing our first academy player take the field for LAFC in 2020 (I mean, there’s the US Open Cup, after all) that I heard that Leone — probably consistently considered the most mature/furthest along player in the academy pool — had megged BWP earlier.

That the high-profile trialist — the very player sitting 7th on the MLS all-time scoring list right behind the coach watching on the sideline, Ante Razov, who has the 6th spot in that history — was megged by a early teenage academy player in training isn’t the point. A reporter once told me I shouldn’t take anything that happens in training literally — it is training after all. But that he even is getting that shot to meg a player of that caliber is the point.

I don’t mean just from a footballing perspective. Or a development perspective. I mean in the perspective of Leone’s actual life.

I was his age once. I remember how it felt just to get a corner kick curving right during training. I remember how it felt when the new boots stopped giving me blisters every preseason. I remember how I would fly through my schoolwork, smiling all the while, knowing that I was about to torch the opposing kids in our first match, my budding crushes looking on from the bleachers.

Leone gets to go back to studying geometry, back to hanging with his friends, back to dreaming about this sport and his place in it knowing he just megged Bradley Wright Phillips.

Yes, I knew academy kids sometimes trained with the first team. Yes, I knew there were new signings yet to arrive, other players on national team duty. Yes, I knew Bob refused to consider that any of them might take the field for the first team this year when I asked him that question, bluntly.

But I couldn’t help, despite all the disillusionment, to be psyched for these kids. The gas it would put in their tank. Whatever happened in their careers, or their lives, or their days, or their afternoons – they had this. And this was real.

And that means something huge to me, as we edge toward the last big first — the first academy player who takes the field for the first team. There will be more trophies. More away days. More international competition.

But this is worth so much more.

Because when LAFC starts to change the way the football world spins, it will because of the hat, because of the support, because of the trophies, but also because of the exports — the kids who grew up here, loving this sport, this city, this club, and painting the world in its homegrown colors.

There is no illusion there to ever be disillusioned with — to wonder whether the best player in the world, someday, might come from Los Angeles.