The news that Nigel de Jong is headed to Galatasaray ends a brief but eventful chapter in the LA Galaxy's existence rather abruptly.
As it turns out, De Jong is only one of a handful of key players who will suddenly be missing for the Galaxy at a key part of the year. What started the season as what was supposed to be, on paper, the strongest MLS roster ever assembled, is going to be ending the regular season with that paper looking distinctly tattered at the edges.
In the short term, Galaxy manager Bruce Arena has been handed a real headache. There's a cartoon-ish image of De Jong as a brute enforcer, but that's an image that sells short the player's distribution and organizational abilities. And despite the name recognition and quality sprinkled throughout the LA roster, this is in many ways a transitional Galaxy team, that needed those De Jong qualities as a stable fulcrum, while they worked out the best balance for all their moving parts.
With the Dutchman leaving, the importance of other absences seems magnified. The team could have coped easier with the absence of the injured Jelle van Damme, for example, had his replacement been protected by the reassurance of De Jong playing in front of him. As his teammates noted this week, De Jong's presence in the middle made teams think twice about playing through the center, but with those two absent, opponents might see that particular attacking lane as ripe to exploit.
And De Jong's a distributor, too, winning the ball and pushing it back into dangerous positions. Whoever replaces him not only has big shoes to fill, but one less potential outlet, now that Gyasi Zardes' season is over through injury.
CONFIRMED: Galatasaray have signed Nigel De Jong on a two-year contract from @LAGalaxy | https://t.co/W8VJnRdhEX pic.twitter.com/bOH4CjBB7K
- Galatasaray EN (@Galatasaray) August 31, 2016
It's been that kind of year for the Galaxy. Injuries, suspensions and international absences have meant that it's been rare for a full-strength side to see the field. Robbie Rogers is just coming back from injury after nearly three months out, Robbie Keane has been a restricted presence and while Steven Gerrard has settled and Gio Dos Santos has found his niche, the team as a whole has had a provisional feel about them compared to relentless Galaxy teams of yore.
On the surface, Arena is not ruffled by the latest developments; "s--- happens" is how he put it this week, with characteristic bluntness. And the party line coming out of the Galaxy is that this is the moment their quality in depth will become apparent. But this is not the time of year to be testing that proposition. From here on out, the season is about momentum.
September is when the various "phony war" segments of the MLS season, with their early front-runners, summer slumberers etc., come definitively to an end. A team might start to play its way into winning alchemy around now, as Portland did last year, but they'll generally do so through existing strategies starting to finally click, rather than through shuffling the pack through necessity. On that basis, De Jong is a big loss.
There's another part of the picture of course, which is that De Jong's absence actually saves Arena some offseason headaches on how to deal with his spiking wages after the first year of his contract, or on making awkward decisions about which Designated Players to retain. Right now, however, that looks like a dubious luxury.
As for De Jong's legacy in MLS, well, in typical fashion for this player, he made a polarizing impression in his five minutes here. The red-card-waiting-to-happen brigade didn't have to wait long for the Dutchman to send them into gleeful outrage, but he was about way more than just the impression created by the three-game suspension that he picked up soon after his arrival.
That suspension, for a bad tackle on Darlington Nagbe, created a ministorm at the time, as much for the symbolism of it being the creative darling Nagbe who got tackled, and the reputation of the man who tackled him, as for the severity of the tackle. It determined how many will remember him, but the closer you get to Carson, the impressions get much fonder.
It's certainly true that just as at every club he's played for, De Jong did not help himself at times, but if we're going to scrutinize his tackling we need to apply the same level of consideration to every aspect of his game. By those metrics he'd quickly become a key player for the Galaxy, who will sorely miss his leadership qualities.
Earlier this year, ESPN FC had speculated about whether the quiet start for LA was going to coalesce into another championship run at the right time, and took the position that it would depend on it consistently getting all of its top players on the field at once. That hasn't happened, and now, with De Jong's departure, a big element of its campaign has gone. It's always hard to bet against LA timing its run at just the right time, but it looks like its margin for error just got cut to nil.