Gareth Bale: Does he dominate MLS or remain a glorified water carrier?

MLS as a retirement league? That’s a claim that hasn’t been true for some time. Multiple Champions League winner Gareth Bale found out during his first six months in America’s premier football competition. Let’s take a look back at his involvement with LAFC so far.

The start of the new year is approaching and with it a new season in America’s top football competition, MLS. Los Angeles FC is the 2022 championship holder. They won the trophy for the first time in their history, beating Philadelphia Union in a penalty shootout in the playoff final.

The match offered a dramatic conclusion. LAFC scored the go-ahead goal in the 83rd minute, only to concede in the 85th and the match went into extra time. Jack Elliott scored his second goal of the match in stoppage time to send Philadelphia into the lead. Gareth Bale converted the penalty shootout in the 128th minute.

He made MLS history, but he also distorted the perception of how he was doing overseas shortly before the World Cup. However, one key goal can hardly mask Bale’s absence during the season.

After all, he played only 8% of the minutes in the play-offs, the final of which he made such a significant impact. He was similarly absent for the entire six months he spent in California.

Across the entire year, he played 24% of the available minutes, which is obviously affected by his arrival on July 7, about halfway through the year. Still, it’s impossible to argue that his contribution was appreciable in any way.

Especially when across the 12 games he’s been involved in during the regular season, during which he’s played just 346 minutes, he’s scored just two goals. Only twice did he start in the starting lineup and each time he was substituted after an hour of play. Even when coming off the bench, he played more than half an hour in only two games.

Even overseas, the Welsh striker has not escaped injury. During the fall, he missed two of his team’s games with an unspecified leg injury that sidelined him for just over two weeks.

Slightly unusually for MLS, Gareth Bale is only under contract until June 2023, a date well known in European football where it marks the end of the season, but in MLS it is halfway through the season.

Still, transfers of players from Europe to overseas in the summer are not unusual, and Bale himself is an example of this.

And if his contribution continues to be comparatively insignificant, LAFC can replace him at the end of his contract with another player who has just finished a season with a European club and who can actually sell his qualities in America and not just go there to finish out his soccer retirement.

It may be to the five Champions League trophy winner’s credit that he is not registered as a Designated Player and thus does not take up one of the three much-valued spots for players outside the salary cap. Thus, LAFC can keep him in the lineup without costing more than they might be willing to sacrifice.

Sources