LAFC Fires Marc dos Santos — Too Late to Matter | OneFootball

LAFC fired head coach Marc dos Santos on Sunday, September 27, one day after a 1-0 loss to FC Dallas. It was surprising and overdue at the same time, depending on who you ask.

Dos Santos lasted just nine months in the job, replacing MLS Cup champion Steve Cherundolo. LAFC sits sixth in the West at 11-9-8. Since July though, after the World Cup, the club has managed one win, four losses and five draws. General Manager John Thorrington has not named an interim coach, and LAFC's next match isn't until October 10 against Vancouver.

The results never came

The Dallas loss was the final straw, but the warning signs had been there for months. Erik Hultstrom, my co-host on our weekly LAFC podcast, has been calling for this change since summer. "Soccer is a results business, and the results haven't come," we discussed yesterday, a day after the news broke. Hard to argue. One win in the last nine games isn't good enough for a team featuring Son Heung-min and Denis Bouanga, and some of those losses coming against the worst teams in the league this season didn't help Marc's cause late, despite his unwavering positivity that the team could turn things around when healthy. Regardless, no project survives that stretch, no matter the intentions behind it.

Too kind for the job

Nothing about this is personal. Dos Santos was polite, approachable and genuinely respectful toward fans and media. He'd joke with me in Portuguese, knew the rivalries in São Paulo inside out, and spoke fondly of coming up through Palmeiras' academy. Good resume, good person.

That may have been the problem. He kept a positive tone even through the worst stretches and rarely called out the roster publicly when accountability was overdue. In soccer, optimism has a ceiling. When a coach won't name what's broken, the locker room assumes nothing is. It clearly was.

The wrong timing

The front office likely made the right call. They just made it far too late. This should have happened during the World Cup break, as plenty argued at the time and despite the team's standings at the time (2nd in the West), the real mistake goes back much further: Steve Cherundolo told the club he was leaving nearly six months before the 2025 season ended. That was the moment to hand Dos Santos the job for the stretch run, not wait until 2026 without truly knowing how an inexperienced head coach would handle big names in the locker room.

Steve Cherundolo answers questions after LAFC's game in 2025 (Celso Oliveira / Pitchside US)

A World Cup break switch would have given a new staff weeks to install a system. Instead, whoever takes over inherits a season that's already mostly decided — and there's no clear succession plan. Promoting from within resets the clock just nine months after the last hire. Assistant Andy Rose currently looks like the frontrunner for interim duties.

Six games to save LAFC's season

Six matches remain in regular season. By my math, 52 points locks a playoff spot, meaning LAFC needs at least four more points to get there. Doable for a roster built with this level of investment. Much harder for a team that's won once in nine games and still doesn't have anyone officially in charge.

A deep playoff run looks unlikely from here. In fact, dos Santos dismissal validates what I said when the team made the decision to sell David Martinez for under market value to a Danish team in what's considered an inferior league to MLS. With David leaving, plus a sequence of underwhelming Summer transfer moves, it seemed like this 2026 LAFC team had chosen to "crawl into a corner, turn belly up and wait for a slow and painful death." Sunday night, with half of the roster on International Break, that feeling was mostly validated, even though there's always a chance a team can find a real new light under an interim; just ask Philadelphia.

But this week's decisions carry weight beyond 2026 — they'll say whether LAFC still knows where it's headed, and whether a club that piled up titles inside a decade can stay competitive. The real question now: who takes over?