LAFC went to St. Louis City SC on Wednesday night carrying a problem it had not faced in nearly a year: back-to-back defeats. The slump was already on the board after a 4-1 home loss to the Houston Dynamo in MLS Week 12, and the timing was awkward for a team that had spent much of the season near the top of the Western Conference.
That defeat left LAFC in third place with a 6-3-3 record through 12 MLS matches, but the broader picture looked less steady. The club had played 19 matches across all competitions, and the volume was starting to show. LAFC also had recently been knocked out of the Concacaf Champions Cup by Deportivo Toluca, adding another hit to a run that had turned a strong opening into a more fragile stretch.
Nathan Ordaz did not try to dress it up. “Yeah, I think the last few games haven’t been good for us,” he said, then added that the group was trying to shake off a couple of bad results, stay positive and get back to winning. He pointed to the table, saying LAFC was still near the top and not in trouble, but the message was plain enough: the standard inside the club is higher than simply avoiding panic after one poor week.
That standard matters because LAFC had not lost two straight games since June 2025, when it went through the FIFA Club World Cup. Before the Wednesday match at Energizer Park, the club was already dealing with a rare losing streak and the kind of questions that follow it. A third straight defeat would only deepen them, especially around Marc Dos Santos, who is in his first season as LAFC head coach.
Ordaz leaned into that expectation when he explained why two losses can feel bigger in Los Angeles than they do elsewhere. “When we lose two games, it becomes a big deal, but a lot of teams lose two games,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world. We just hold ourselves to a higher standard. We’re going to try to improve and get back on track.”
He also described the way the locker room tends to process defeats. “We always see ourselves as the best team,” Ordaz said. “Even when we lose, we know it was probably something we did wrong, not something the other team did better. It just wasn’t our day, and we have to be better next time.”
That kind of self-critique fits a team that has spent much of the season thinking of itself as a title contender, and it is also why this brief wobble has landed with force. LAFC had beaten or at least handled St. Louis City SC in every previous meeting, going 5 wins and 2 draws all time, so the matchup offered a clear chance to steady the season. Instead, it arrived with the club trying to reset after a run that included the Toluca elimination and the home defeat to Houston.
The next result will not settle everything, but it will shape the conversation around whether this is a short skid for a tired team or the first real crack in a first season that had looked much smoother a few weeks ago.
