Armchair Analyst: With Giovani Dos Santos on board, LA Galaxy face tough choices

Welcome back to the Thursday Q&A series, where we focus on one particular topic – today's being LA's glut of attackers – and ask you to react, share, and discuss in the comments section. However, feel free to ask about anything game-related (MLS, USL, NASL, USMNT, CanMNT, etc.) over the next several hours.

Here is what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the LA Galaxy:

The unpredictable part was just how it all played out for LA. Bruce Arena has a nice problem on his hands now with the ascent of Sebastian Lletget and Jose Villarreal. Add them to Robbie Keane, Gyasi Zardes and Steven Gerrard (eventually), and suddenly it's "fearsome" to the Nth power.

Since then they've added Giovani Dos Santos (you may have heard). And I'm going to borrow this graphic from Sean Steffen to show how I think they'll line up:

That team is built to score goals. It looks very nice.

There are, however, two big problems with this lineup. First is that it doesn't include Jose Villarreal, who has been the team's best chance creator and most well-rounded attacker this year on both sides of the ball:

And the second is that I think Dos Santos has never really loved playing on the wing. He'll be asked to track back a ton from that spot on defense (an issue he'll have to figure out, since LA are at their best when Robbie Rogers is bombing forward from left back), while being unsure of where he's supposed to operate in attack since both he and Keane are naturally "underneath" forwards – there's a reason they both wear No. 10 for their country. They tend to want the ball on their foot in the same spots, with combinations to play on all sides.

One of them will have to do more of the "dirty" running that Villarreal happily committed to when he's been played at left wing.

However it works out, signing Dos Santos was probably a great move. But the puzzle Bruce Arena's putting together just became an order of magnitude more complex, and I'm not sure how all the pieces fit.

Five Finals. Five Stories.

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