Pick your poison.
After playing alongside the dangerous duo of Denis Bouanga and Son Heung-min last weekend in Chicago, young Nathan Ordaz suspects this will be the conundrum opponents cope with when facing the Los Angeles Football Club over the final third of the Major League Soccer season.
“I think all defenses should be worried,” said Ordaz, the 21-year-old homegrown talent from Van Nuys who is in the midst of a breakthrough campaign in 2025, scoring seven times in all competitions prior to Son’s arrival.
Ordaz’s perfectly weighted through ball to Son in the last half hour of a 2-2 draw with the Fire helped the superstar South Korean draw a penalty that Bouanga converted for his team-leading 14th goal of the regular season. It was just the kind of moment LAFC wants Son to produce as he enmeshes himself into the attacking trio.
“I look forward to creating some chaos in the backlines of our opponents moving forward,” LAFC head coach Steve Cherundolo said.
For the five years Cherundolo has been affiliated with the Black & Gold, first as the head coach of the second-team Las Vegas Lights followed by his ascension to LAFC, Son was quite literally the prototype profile the club referenced for a forward fitting its game model.
“What he is as a player is exactly how we envision our attackers to be,” Cherundolo said. “Somebody who is constantly moving, attacking spaces, can combine but also hurt teams on the counterattack, can break teams down in a deep block. So he is a complete package for the way we interpret attackers.”
Despite not participating in a proper practice session with the team, Son has proved a seamless addition during the half hour he played last weekend.
“He already showed how dangerous he is in his debut,” Ordaz said, “and hopefully he can do it even more.”
With Son having time to train heading into LAFC’s next match Saturday at Gillette Stadium against the struggling New England Revolution (7-11-7, 28 points), which has won twice in 15 league matches since early May, expectations surrounding the 33-year-old English Premier League icon only increased.
“Sonny’s sprint distances in training dwarfs some of our other players and I think that is something we will definitely share with the group,” Cherundolo said. “If you want to play at his level, then there is no sugarcoating it, you need to run and run at the right moments into the right spaces.”
Son’s initial connections with young players like Ordaz and David Martínez, who scored a motivated brace against Club Tigres as the Korean watched from the stands at BMO Stadium, also surpassed the coaching staff’s lofty expectations.
Talking up Son’s intensity, Ordaz hasn’t seen the South Korean captain take a lighter day since joining LAFC (10-6-7, 37 points).
“He’s always just on top of it,” Ordaz said. “I just have to kind of follow that, respect it, and take what I can from his experience.”
With 10 of their 11 remaining regular-season matches versus teams in the bottom half of the Supporters’ Shield standings, “bringing a high-profile player in like Sonny has definitely put some wind in our sails and gives us some motivation for sure as a group,” Cherundolo said. “If I were a player on LAFC and had a player like Sonny coming in, I’d be very happy. I can tell you by the reaction from the players that is the case.
“The chemistry couldn’t be better.”
LAFC AT NEW ENGLAND REVOLUTION
When: 4:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Mass.
TV/radio: Apple TV + (MLS Season Pass)/710 AM, 980 AM