Zlatan's MLS debut: nineteen minutes and two goals

On 23 March 2018 a full-page advertisement appeared in the Los Angeles Times. It was not selling anything. It said, more or less: Los Angeles, you're welcome. And it was signed by Zlatan Ibrahimović, who had just joined LA Galaxy.

Eight days later he played his first match. Nineteen minutes were enough.

How he got there

The context matters, because the persona hides the detail. Ibrahimović arrived in Los Angeles at thirty-six and on the way back from a ruptured cruciate ligament that had put his career in doubt. He and Manchester United had terminated his contract by mutual consent on 22 March, and the following day he was a Galaxy player.

Another detail usually skipped: in 2018 he did not arrive as a Designated Player, the mechanism that lets clubs pay above the salary cap. He signed within the allocation-money system, with a listed salary of 1.5 million dollars. He only became a Designated Player in 2019, on 7.2 million. The figures for the pay cut he took compared with England were press reports that nobody ever confirmed, but they all agree it was enormous.

The first Los Angeles derby

His debut landed in the perfect match: 31 March 2018, at the StubHub Center in Carson, against LAFC. It was the first derby between the city's two clubs, the fixture that would come to be called El Tráfico, and LAFC were in their expansion season. There were 27,068 in the ground, the Galaxy's best gate of the year.

And it went wrong quickly. Carlos Vela scored in the 5th minute and again in the 26th, and in the 48th Daniel Steres turned one into his own net. LAFC led 3-0 in their first derby.

Sebastian Lletget pulled one back in the 61st, and it was then, in the 71st minute with the score 3-1, that Zlatan came on. He replaced Lletget.

Nineteen minutes

Two minutes after he entered, Chris Pontius made it 3-2. And in the 77th the ball dropped to Ibrahimović near the centre circle.

He did not take a touch. He hit it first time on the volley, from a distance the match reports put at around forty yards — the figure moves depending on the source — and it curled over goalkeeper Tyler Miller and in. It was his first shot in a Galaxy shirt.

One detail makes it better. His assistant coach, Dominic Kinnear, said afterwards that Zlatan had spent time on the bench watching how high up the pitch Miller was standing. It was not an impulse: it was a player who had studied the goalkeeper before he came on.

In the first minute of stoppage time he headed in an Ashley Cole cross for 4-3. The Galaxy became only the second team in MLS history to come back from three goals down and win inside ninety minutes, and Zlatan the first player since 2014 to score twice on debut.

Worth noting what the scoreline meant for the fixture itself. El Tráfico has since become one of the loudest derbies in North America, and its very first edition ended with a 36-year-old substitute scoring from the halfway line and then heading a winner in stoppage time. LAFC had led it 3-0 inside forty-eight minutes and still lost.

That volley won MLS Goal of the Year in 2018, and years later fans voted it the greatest goal in the league's history.

What came after

It was not a one-off. In 2018 he managed 22 goals and 10 assists in 27 matches, something only two other players had done in the league's history, and he was named Newcomer of the Year. In 2019 he scored 30 league goals, a club record for a single season. In total: 53 goals in 58 appearances.

What did not arrive were trophies. In 2018 the Galaxy did not even make the playoffs. In 2019 they won one playoff match — 2-1 against Minnesota United on 20 October — and went out four days later to LAFC, 5-3, in what proved his last game for the club.

It is worth stating precisely, because it gets told wrongly in both directions: he neither won anything with the Galaxy nor left without a single knockout victory. He won exactly one, and never reached a conference final. His time in MLS was two seasons of enormous individual numbers in a team that could not match them.

He said goodbye on 13 November 2019 with a message on social media that finished by telling everyone to go back to watching baseball.

"He came on in the 71st minute with his team losing, scored with his first shot from forty yards, and won the match with a header in stoppage time."

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