Major League Soccer stars go on loan in off-season

The Galaxy's David Beckham paved the way by arranging to spend a couple of months with AC Milan in Italy in order to stay in the running for the England national team.

Now, Galaxy teammate Landon Donovan and Chicago Fire and former Mexico national team icon Cuauhtemoc Blanco have followed suit.

Donovan has been training with Bayern Munich and on Thursday the German club and MLS reached an agreement that would allow the league's top goal scorer in 2008 to join the reigning Bundesliga champions for two to three months, starting Jan. 1, when the international transfer window reopens.

"Landon has a verbal agreement with MLS to play in Europe for 2 1/2 months, like Beckham's," Bayern Coach Juergen Klinsmann said on the club's website.

"It's a fantastic situation for me," Klinsmann said. "It gives me the chance to start the second half of the season with four strikers."

Donovan would join Bayern's winter training camp on Jan. 2.

"He's unbelievably quick, and always looks to take on his man," Klinsmann said. "He's a completely different type of striker to the ones we already have. He's a proven top player now and a big name in the American game with more than 100 caps."

Klnsmann said he hoped the talks with MLS "will come to a positive conclusion" and that Donovan would be available to Bayern. "Then it will be up to him to show us what he can do from January onwards."

The Galaxy is unlikely to allow Donovan to miss the first two months or more of the 2009 MLS season, so the loan deal seems more of a prelude to a full-fledged transfer.

Bayern will take a look at how well Donovan, 26, can complement its current trio of international strikers, Germany's Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski and Italy's Luca Toni, before deciding whether it wants to make an offer for the U.S. national team's all-time leading scorer.

The record sale for an American player was set this year when MLS and the New York Red Bulls accepted $10 million from Villarreal of Spain for teenage forward Jozy Altidore. Donovan would surely command at least as much, if not more.

But the financing of such a deal would not trouble Bayern Munich, which could easily cover the cost by shedding, say, Podolski, who is unhappy at his off-the-bench role and wants to leave.