CARSON, Calif. -- The idea of the LA Galaxy fielding a USL team in the near future have been bandied around by club President Chris Klein and Technical Director Jovan Kirovski and on Wednesday, LA head coach Bruce Arena told reporters that the club is hoping to field one in the "next year."
When asked about current NASL loanees Bryan Gaul and Kenney Walker and the issues that come with loaning players to other teams, Arena noted that the possibility of a Galaxy team playing in USL PRO may be happening sooner rather than later.
"We're going to try to do [this] ourselves next year and have our own USL team. We think that a number of our players this year could be benefit like Villarreal, McBean, Sorto, Gaul, Walker, Cochrane, Hoffman. Those type of players when they're not getting consistent minutes, if we have our own USL team then we have the advantage of them going there on a full time basis or moving them back and forth," said Arena, who noted that it would be a separate team from LA's current USL Pro club, the Los Angeles Blues. "The Reserve League still isn't the right mechanism and it's very difficult to do with the schedules and everything else. I think that a separate team, separate league, with more players is the way to go."
Arena stated that programs like this will "be the way that MLS teams go in the future" while also admitting that the logistics were far from sorted out as the yet to be formed team currently has no location and is unlikely to ever play double matches at Galaxy home games.
As previously noted, Klein and Kirovski have both mentioned the idea of the Galaxy fielding such a team with the Galaxy Technical Director hinting during an interview with LA Galaxy Insider back in July that it may be in conjunction with the club's new Galaxy Under-23 team.
“We’re looking for a place we can evaluate where our Homegrown college kids and have a training environment for them in the offseason,” Kirovski told LA Galaxy Insider. “It’s something where we’re looking for the possibilities of being a USL team. That means that we could sign kids earlier, it should serve as a stepping stone to our first team.
“We can also have our young academy kids go through there,” Kirovski added. “We had some of our U-18’s who played last year play [on Tuesday] as well as some of the U-16’s, we also had college kids, so it’s a chance to for us to keep track of them. It’s great for these young kids to have a place to play and maybe, one day, play in our first team.”
Kirovski also reiterated this point during his Galaxy All-Access Podcast with Joe Tutino last week.
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