The Vancouver Whitecaps will look to strengthen their place atop the MLS standings on Sunday once they welcome a Los Angeles FC facet that’s making an attempt to play its method again into competition following a sluggish begin.
The Whitecaps (8-1-2, 26 factors) have been the story of MLS in 2025.
Vancouver earned its first-ever look within the 2025 CONCACAF Champions Cup closing with its semifinal sequence win over Lionel Messi and Inter Miami late final month. And remarkably, the Whitecaps additionally performed to the perfect document within the league whereas balancing each competitions.
Supervisor Jesper Sorensen’s facet has received back-to-back league matches and is unbeaten in its final six in MLS play.
The Whitecaps dispatched Actual Salt Lake 2-1 at dwelling final Saturday on targets from Jayden Nelson and Tristan Blackmon. That got here solely three days after finishing their CONCACAF semifinal triumph in South Florida.
Now Sorensen’s group hits the sphere following one thing uncommon: eight days between matches.
“You at all times welcome slightly break,” Sorensen mentioned. “We’ve performed 19 video games already. So possibly it is a good event to get one thing finished on the coaching floor as effectively. However alternatively … yeah now we have momentum. And you do not wish to break that up if you happen to can keep away from it.”
LAFC (5-4-2, 17 factors) was thought-about among the many early MLS Cup favorites when the season started, and supervisor Steve Cherundolo’s facet could but attain that standing.
However their early league kind was inconsistent as they performed by to the CONCACAF Champions Cup quarterfinals, the place they misplaced to Miami.
The response to that exit has been a four-match unbeaten run, with the newest efficiency — a 2-0 dwelling win over the Houston Dynamo on targets from Nathan Ordaz and Jeremy Ebobisse — arguably essentially the most full Cherundolo has seen this season. It adopted attracts at Portland and residential to St. Louis.
“We began enjoying higher with the ball and creating extra possibilities in Portland. Made some defensive errors. St. Louis was extra of the identical,” Cherundolo mentioned after the Houston win. “After which tonight I noticed a extra full efficiency on either side of the ball and was very pleased with the best way we performed tonight.”
–Subject Stage Media
