LAFC unravels in loss to Earthquakes

LOS ANGELES — Major League Soccer’s lone contest Sunday brought together the stingiest defenses in the league through seven matchdays.

For almost an hour at BMO Stadium, the defensive efforts of the Los Angeles Football Club and San Jose Earthquakes held up.

Then the Earthquakes, second place in the Western Conference, added to their club-best start to a season by exposing a fatigued Black & Gold team that was third in the west coming into the contest.

Dominating the second half, the Earthquakes finished a 4-1 winner against a rival that had been 9-1-1 at home against them since 2018.

“It wasn’t good enough today,” head coach Marc Dos Santos said. “It wasn’t LAFC. It wasn’t us. We were late to everything. We lost a lot of balls. And we have to be real with ourselves.

“We all have (expletive) days. Today was (expletive).”

Carrying a 9-1-3 record this year in all competitions while outscoring opponents 29-6, LAFC had been perfect in its four previous MLS home matches in 2026, shutting out each opponent to set a league record scoreless streak.

After conceding twice in a losing effort last weekend at Portland, LAFC (5-2-1, 16 points) met an Earthquakes (7-1-0, 21 points) team that was flying high under sporting director and head coach Bruce Arena, who stepped into both roles last year.

Unlike last weekend’s defeat, LAFC did not start a rotated lineup against San Jose.

Instead, Dos Santos went with the same XI that played Tuesday in Puebla, Mexico, where they drew Cruz Azul 1-1 to reach the semifinal round of the CONCACAF Champions Cup by an aggregate score of 4-1.

“The guys give an indication that they were ready, that they were fresh, but there are things to evaluate to see were they really?” Dos Santos said. “So you have to trust.

“The numbers physically in their body were good, but maybe mentally there was more fatigue than we expected, to be honest.”

Said LAFC defender Ryan Hollingshead, who entered the match at the hour mark: “You try as hard as you can to compete in both (CONCACAF and MLS). I don’t want to say there’s an excuse for why this game happened. I don’t think it was us tonight. I think even with all that we’ve gone through for the beginning part of the season, I don’t think that’s how we would be playing football.

“I don’t want to sound the alarms yet. It’s a really long season.

A few days after outlasting Cruz Azul, LAFC faced the first of four games in 11 days, including hosting the opening semifinal leg of the CONCACAF Champions Cup on April 29 against Deportivo Toluca FC.

Acknowledging the difficulty of traveling abroad for emotionally charged games like the second leg at Cruz Azul, Arena surmised that maybe his group caught LAFC “on a good day … or a bad day,” depending on who’s doing the talking.

Regardless of LAFC’s physical and mental capacity on Sunday afternoon, San Jose showed up with its own story to write, as Dos Santos’s group was tasked with denying the visitors a 4-0-0 road record for the first time in MLS. Two seasons ago, San Jose tallied 21 points total. Through eight league contests, Arena’s second season at the helm has already produced one more victory than all of 2024, producing its best start to a season dating back to the club’s inception in 1974.

Starting German star Timo Werner for the first time since mid-March, San Jose played compact, intense man-to-man defense before the halftime break, squabbling over the middle of the park with LAFC as both teams fell short in the final third.

In the 53rd minute, LAFC defenders became too stretched to overcome, and Werner, operating on the left, struck a cross that found Ousseni Bouda for the first of the Burkina Faso native’s two goals on the day.

That ended a 593-minute run from LAFC goalkeeper Hugo Lloris without conceding, the fourth longest in league history.

San Jose doubled the lead three minutes later when a scrambling LAFC back line failed to stop Werner after he picked up the ball near midfield and dribbled into the box, avoided a slide tackle from Nkosi Tafari and finished his first goal for the Earthquakes.

In the 59th minute, the visitors tacked on a third from an own-goal by center back Ryan Porteous.

LAFC got on the board in the 74th minute with an own-goal at the other end when Denis Bouanga’s cross was redirected past Brazilian goalkeeper Daniel, who trails Lloris for the league lead in shutouts by one.

Bouanga and Son Heung-min were on the field through the final whistle. The Frenchman had no shots while the South Korean connected on two shots towards the visitor’s goal.

San Jose added a cherry on top in the 80th minute when Bouda’s brace came on a rocket inside the far post, giving him four goals on the season.

“It was our worst game in my opinion this season defensively because when we pressed, we were disjointed,” Dos Santos said. “We were not close to each other. We spoke about that at half. If we cannot go out together and keep the block together, it’s better to drop and stay compact, when maybe in moments that you’re late, and you could look at maybe physically, well, you have one player going then another arriving late. I felt that San Jose today was fresher than us. When they played 1-2s, they kept running. We didn’t follow the 1-2s. If the player played around us, we let him go. All these micro situations hurt you in the macro. Today, again, we were late to everything. But we were also very sloppy on the ball. So it was really, of all the games this year, the most sloppy game we had.”

LAFC returns midweek for an MLS match at BMO Stadium against Colorado.

“I’ve been here a lot of times praising us, but right now, today, it wasn’t good and you have to take this game as a lesson to move forward,” Dos Santos said. “If I’m just talking about fatigue, no, it’s an excuse. It wasn’t good. We have to see why. And try to be better on Wednesday.”