Top of mind for Hucles Mangano was the one-of-a-kind gameday experience in LA, and the team's ability to perform well in that high-pressure environment. Most players in women's soccer have little experience with the kind of crowd that filled the stadium throughout the season, and the intensity of that space can be a double-edged sword.
'That is a very unique environment for a player, to have that many in attendance consistently,' says Hucles Mangano. 'I think our team thrived off of that energy. The way our community and our fans showed up game after game really did positively impact our players and their performance on the field.'
Another big one, for both Hucles Mangano and Coombe: the way the team adapted to the myriad challenges fate threw their way in season one. “There were a lot of moving pieces and parts, not just not on game days but going through adjustments on the field due to injuries and roster changes,' says Hucles Mangano. “I think the management of the changes throughout the season was a success.'
Having to adapt to those challenges provided opportunities for a number of players with less experience playing key roles at the highest level.
One example is Megan Reid, who, at age 25, hadn’t played at an elite level in almost five years and had never played professionally. “What an awesome story,” says Hucles Mangano. “Going from being a firefighter, to getting waived by San Diego, then coming to Angel City and figuring out that she did want to play again, to being our iron woman and rookie of the year.”
Coombe adds Cari Roccaro to that list, noting that the midfielder scored her first NWSL goal—and second and third—after six seasons in the league. Roccaro had 20 starts in 21 games, after starting just 11 in the previous two full seasons.
Another is goalkeeper DiDi Haračić. “She hasn't been the number one in her other clubs before, and coming in and killing it and being our team MVP and our Supporters' Player of the Year, is another success story,” says Hucles Mangano. Before coming to Angel City, Haračić had just 23 total starts in seven NWSL seasons. In 2022, she started all but the last game of the season (when the team was already eliminated from the playoffs).
Hucles Mangano also praises Savannah McCaskill, who had an excellent season in a pivotal role for the club. “I think Sav was able to shine in this environment perhaps even more than she has before her previous professional clubs,” she says.
McCaskill, Angel City’s golden boot winner, played a key role for Racing Louisville in 2021, but stepped up in a new way in 2022. With seven goals on the season, she scored more in one season in LA than she had in her previous four NWSL seasons combined. And as a No.10, one of the pivotal positions on the field, McCaskill's success is significant not just individually, but for the outlook of the team as a whole.
Finally, Coombe highlights the major career milestones players like Jasmyne Spencer and Dani Weatherholt—who made their 150th and 100th NWSL appearances, respectively—reached in ACFC's first season.
Those successes came in spite of some major stumbling blocks Angel City faced in their inaugural season.
Coming in as an expansion team is never easy, and any reflection on season one should be viewed through that lens. 'Just bringing together so many different personalities and players that have never played together before is a challenge,' Hucles Mangano says.
Not only does it take time for players to get to know each other, but building everything from scratch—not just the roster, but 'finding a game model that's going to work for the style that the club wants to play, so you can fit those people in,' as Coombe puts it—is a difficult undertaking, especially within the NWSL, whose rules limit things like salaries and international slots.
Compared with past expansion teams, Angel City had an excellent first year. They missed the playoffs with an eighth-place finish, but sat just four points out of playoff position at the end of a season that came down to the final two weeks.
Historically speaking, that’s an impressive showing for an expansion team. Three such teams—Houston, Orlando, and Louisville—joined the NWSL before 2022 (North Carolina, the Kansas City Current, and the short-lived Utah Royals were not original members of the league, but they all started as existing teams that relocated and rebranded). In their inaugural seasons, all three finished in last or second-to-last place, and all averaged fewer than one point per game (PPG).
Angel City, meanwhile, finished 2022 with an 8–5–9 (W–L–D) record and 29 points in 22 games, working out to a 1.32 PPG—the second-best PPG ever for an expansion team (after San Diego), and a significant improvement over the team with the next-best PPG, Louisville, who averaged .912 in 2021.
Every team has to contend with injuries to some extent, but Angel City got hit especially hard in their first year. “It's always a challenge for any team when you have injuries,” says Hucles Mangano. “But I think given that we had so many, that was even a greater impact for us.”
Before the season even started, defender Sarah Gorden tore her ACL. Losing Gorden—a top defender in the league who played every minute for Chicago in 2021—was a major blow to the defensive depth chart. “With Sarah coming into the season injured,” says Hucles Mangano, “that's a Best XI defender that is not able to play for us.”
On the first day of preseason, the defense took another hit when defender Paige Nielsen, a 2021 NWSL champion with the Washington Spirit, learned she'd have to undergo surgery to treat a condition that caused blood to clot in one arm. Just like that, two starting-quality center backs were out—Gorden for the season, Nielsen for a then-unknown length of time.
The defense's woes didn't stop. Vanessa Gilles—a gold medalist with Canada and Angel City’s first regular-season goal scorer—got injured on international duty midseason. M.A. Vignola sat out injured almost the entire season. Even Spencer, a natural forward who was moved to outside back due to other absences, spent time dealing with a nagging injury.
That much turnover is especially impactful to a defense. “The defensive line is one of the places that you want to be the most consistent from game to game in terms of how that group gels,” says Hucles Mangano. “They need to understand what one another is thinking before they're even doing it, so consistency is critical.”
In total, 18 out of 28 players were unavailable for some amount of time, whether due to injuries or international duty; the elephant in the room is Christen Press, a key piece of the offense, who tore her ACL against Racing Louisville in June. With Press out for the season, the club signed Sydney Leroux—who played just three games before landing on the injury report. Simone Charley was also in and out of the 18 over the season.
“When you have someone like Christen who becomes injured, and then we're able to bring Syd into that environment and then she gets injured,” says Hucles Mangano, “it's just challenging because you're planning, you're trying to better the situation, and then that plan doesn’t turn out how you envisioned it.”
Due in part to those challenges, Hucles Mangano and Coombe agree that there are areas the team needs to grow in. Let’s start with the obvious: Angel City missed the playoffs. Simply put, the team needs to earn more consistent results in future seasons; shortcomings on both sides of the ball contributed to the results the team dropped.
On offense, ACFC tied with Racing Louisville for the third-fewest goals in the league. With the playoffs coming down to the last two weeks of the season, even a few more goals in pivotal games could have put LA over the line: a goal against Houston on June 7, a game the team largely dominated, plus another against Portland on July 1, would have had the team level with Chicago on points.
'If you look at offensive record, that's the hardest piece to come in,' says Coombe. 'Losing Christen for most of the season, and then Syd—we signed Syd and she got injured—that plays a massive role. Simone, same thing, she often wasn't able to participate.'
Defensively, although Angel City tied with Houston for fourth-fewest goals conceded with 27, another noteworthy stat is expected goals allowed, or xGA. That's a metric used to evaluate the quality of shots opposing teams took against ACFC—there, the club was eighth in the league, with 31. Both xG and xGA can be controversial, and not every model measures them in the same way, but in broad strokes, xGA measures how well a defense shut down opposing offenses.
One thing the discrepancy between those two numbers indicates? Haračić was lights-out. The 29-year-old keeper made 70 saves in 21 matches, the second most in the league.
Finally, Hucles Mangano highlighted a need for improvement late in games. “I think how we're closing out games is a big thing that we can do better at,” she says. 'Those are some of the moments where we get those points that push us into the playoffs, and we're not creating a situation in which our fate is out of our hands, but we control our destiny.'
'It's about elevating everything,' Hucles Mangano concludes. I think we had a good foundation this year and being able to see how close we were to the playoffs is one of those things that our players and our staff will be able to bring into next season. Those are the things that you take with you as a competitor that shape what this next season's going to look like.”
As we look ahead to 2023, little is set in stone, but the club will be making moves to keep building a world-class team.
ACFC made a point of not trading any players in 2022. That promise brought much-needed stability to players’ lives, but, says Hucles Mangano, “I don't think it's realistic [going forward]. I think that limits us, especially the structure that we have within our league, which is much different than other football leagues in the world.”
In addition to being a necessary tool for building a roster, trades aren’t necessarily a bad thing from the players’ perspective. “Even in my conversations with players, saying that's not going to be our standard moving forward, I think they actually welcome it and have been very positive about it,” she says. “That just shows the competitive nature of the league and how much these players want the best that they can possibly have in this environment.”
Beyond improving on the field, diversity is an important consideration for the club when it comes to roster movement. “If we want to be a team that is more reflective of our community and Los Angeles,” says Hucles Mangano, “we have to be very intentional with what that looks like to identify new talent to bring into our environment.”
That starts with looking outside the traditional development pathways in this country, which tend to skew whiter and wealthier than the population as a whole. “We've got a great talent pool here within our community of Los Angeles,” says Hucles Mangano. “So part of it is just doing the work” to recruit locally.
In addition, the club has longer-term plans to hire dedicated scouts, which is uncommon in the women’s game. “Traditionally in women’s soccer, the coaches are heavily involved in the scouting process,” she says. ”Having people who are dedicated to just scouting, where that is what they live and breathe, and having dedicated resources applied to it, I think that's step one.”
Finally, she emphasizes the importance of scouting and recruiting “not just domestically, but looking abroad to markets that have not really been tapped into.”
For fans, players, and staff alike, Angel City's 2022 season will always be special—but it's also just the beginning.