It was January 2022 and the club was at a crossroads.
LAFC had recently announced that its first and only head coach, Bob Bradley, would not be returning for the upcoming season. After an extensive six-week search, LAFC revealed that it had hired as Bradley’s replacement a man with no head coaching experience at the first-division level, a relative unknown in coaching circles other than for his decorated playing career with the U.S. Men’s National team and in the German Bundesliga—a coach whose Las Vegas Lights team had won just six of 29 games in the 2021 USL Championship season.
Anyone who doubted LAFC's choice of Steve Cherundolo was soon silenced. In the three years and eleven months between Cherundolo’s hiring and his final game, the Black & Gold won more regular-season games and more playoff games than any other club in Major League Soccer. Cherundolo’s LAFC teams won three major trophies and reached six finals in all, not counting the back-to-back Western Conference Finals that LAFC won in 2022 and 2023.
The list of LAFC’s on-field accomplishments in the Cherundolo era—he would insist that “the collective” accomplished them, not him specifically—is impressive by any measure. Some of those successes are unprecedented. Most were neither predictable nor probable when Cherundolo was handed LAFC’s managerial reins nearly four years ago.
Cherundolo, 42 at the time, inherited a team that had missed the MLS Playoffs for the first time in its four-year history. He was tasked with blending the holdovers from that 2021 roster with an incoming crop of MLS veterans including Ilie Sánchez, Ryan Hollingshead, Kellyn Acosta, and Maxime Crépeau, and shaping that group into something competitive. He did more than that, of course, first by breaking the record for most wins as a first-year head coach in Major League Soccer history, then by becoming the first and still the only coach in league history to win the Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup in his first season in charge.
The summertime additions of European legends Giorgio Chiellini and Gareth Bale helped LAFC reach those heights in 2022, despite Chiellini and Bale missing several games due to injury. Cherundolo adjusted, and by season’s end had used 32 different starting lineups. Still, the team that had shot out of the gate and to the top of the table back in February hit a rough patch, winning just one of its last six games as the season drew to a close. LAFC secured the Supporters’ Shield in its last road match of the season thanks to a stoppage-time goal from another new addition, Denis Bouanga. The Black & Gold’s first-place finish earned the club a first-round bye in the MLS Cup Playoffs and catapulted the team toward its first MLS Cup Final, when Cherundolo’s insertion of Bale in the waning minutes of extra time made all the difference.
It was no accident that the young club had chosen a manager with deep roots in southern California. Raised in San Diego, where he was a star at the youth, club, and high school levels, Cherundolo’s affinity for and familiarity with Los Angeles proved to be a key factor in his success, allowing him to welcome international icons to the region he had called home since he was a kid, and to authentically shepherd local prospects into the LAFC Academy and the Black & Gold family. His SoCal pedigree gave him instant credibility within LAFC’s supporter base.
Cherundolo shared his teams’ glory with the LAFC community throughout a remarkable 2023 campaign comprised of 53 total games, a league record at the time. That season he became the first MLS coach to reach the Concacaf Champions Cup Final and the MLS Cup Final in the same calendar year – and just the third coach to lead a team to the MLS Cup Final in his first two seasons. Cherundolo followed that up by leading the Black & Gold to its first U.S. Open Cup title in 2024, and by finishing first in the Western Conference standings for the second time in three years.
He did all this during a period of remarkable transition in which LAFC’s first and most beloved player, Carlos Vela, reached the end of his contract and stepped away from the game to prioritize time with his family—a choice not unlike the one Cherundolo has now made.
To cap it off, in Cherundolo’s final season he became LAFC’s winningest coach all-time, and crossed the 100-victory threshold in all competitions. Under Cherundolo, LAFC became the only MLS club to finish in the top four and reach the conference semifinals in each of the last four seasons (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) – a period that will from here forward be known as the Cherundolo Era.
Hollingshead, the veteran defender who joined LAFC the same month Cherundolo joined, relished playing under the former Bundesliga fullback. "As an outside back, getting to [learn] under a guy as an outside back that had done it as a player at the highest level and consistently for the longest time, oftentimes fighting in a relegation battle and just defending for his life, he taught me things defensively that I'll forever appreciate. I'll have a friendship with Steve forever. I’m so grateful for his time, the way that he poured it into me and poured it into the guys. It's hard to put it all into words, but he's definitely left this club in a better place than he found it. I think that's the goal of any coach that comes into a club, is leaving it in a better place.”
There are banners hanging in BMO Stadium that were not there when Cherundolo arrived four years ago. Did he win them himself? He would be the first to say no. What Cherundolo has done is act as faithful steward of a club that has insisted on success since it first took the field in 2018. He has raised the standard established by Bradley and in doing so he has made the job of whoever replaces him a challenging one. “It's a winning culture,” Cherundolo said of the environment he stepped into in 2022 and that he has built upon since. “It's a culture of growth as well, meaning we have high expectations and we are quite critical with the work we put in as coaches, and we expect the same of the players.
“To just go through the motions and win an odd game here and there isn't what we stand for. It's not why we're here. We want to maximize our time together and make sure that every single player's potential is being put to the test and optimized. That is the coaching staff's objective, and the players have understood that.
“We’re here to win.”
