Chivas Usa

For an executive generally short on time under the best of circumstances, this winter must seem painfully compact for Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber. The longest season in the league's 17-year history stretched into December this year before giving way to its shortest off-season, with most 2013 training camps scheduled to open three weeks before the Super Bowl. What hasn't changed, however, is the pressure on Garber to keep MLS moving forward. By most measures Garber, commissioner since 1999, has done a phenomenal job, and in many ways 2012 was his league's most successful season.

It's been less than three weeks since the Galaxy won its second consecutive Major League Soccer title, but the team's front office has taken little time off to celebrate. Thursday it announced its second deal with a homegrown player in 10 days, signing forward Gyasi Zardes of Hawthorne and Cal State Bakersfield. The team, which has already worked out two trades this offseason, is said to be close to a transfer deal with Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League for goalkeeper Carlo Cudicini.

The Galaxy will open defense of its second consecutive Major Soccer League title on March 3 when it opens the season against the Chicago Fire at the Home Depot Center. It will be the earliest regular-season opener in franchise history. The Fire also made the playoffs last season, finishing fourth in the Eastern Conference with 17 wins. But it lost its postseason opener to the Houston Dynamo, the Galaxy's eventual opponent in the MLS Cup final earlier this month. Chivas USA, the Galaxy's roommate at the Home Depot Center, will also open its 34-game regular season that weekend, playing host to the Columbus Crew on March 2. The Crew missed the postseason by a single point last season while Chivas suffered through a disastrous seven-win season that concluded with a franchise-record 14-game winless streak.  That led to the dismissal of Coach Robin Fraser, much of his staff and the entire front office.

The NFL is not the only kind of football that has been proposed for the Dodger Stadium parking lot.  In April, within days of the announcement that Guggenheim Baseball would buy the Dodgers, Lorenzo and Antonio Cue approached one of the new owners, Todd Boehly. The Cue brothers, then the operators and half-owners of Chivas USA, pitched a marketing partnership between Chivas and the Dodgers, and a new soccer stadium adjacent to Dodger Stadium. The Guggenheim purchase had not yet closed.

The Galaxy lost a veteran forward Friday when it traded Edson Buddle to the Colorado Rapids. But it also gained a veteran midfielder and a solid goalkeeper, selecting Houston's Colin Clark and Columbus' Will Hesmer with its first two picks in Major League Soccer's reentry draft. Under the rules of the reentry draft teams are allowed to select players who are out-of-contract or have had their options declined by their current teams. Teams pick in reverse order of their finish in the most recent season.

We now know the name of the next Chivas USA coach to be fired. That's because Wednesday the Major League Soccer team announced the name of the most recent one to be hired: Jose Luis Sanchez Sola, who formerly ran the youth program and the first-division Mexican League team in Puebla. "Very honored, very grateful and committed to fulfill the goals of the institution," Sanchez Sola said of his latest opportunity. "I know that with the support of the staff currently in place, my transition to MLS will be that much easier.

The latest round of NHL labor talks ended with the two sides in different rooms. The players' association and league negotiators met separately Wednesday with federal mediators in suburban New Jersey, holding discussions that didn't appear to have moved the sides any closer to a deal to save the hockey season. There was hope going into Wednesday that negotiations could get back on track to the point they were last Thursday before talks fell apart. When the NHL agreed last week to increase its make-whole offer of deferred payments from $211 million to $300 million, it was part of a proposed package that required the union to agree on three non-negotiable points.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for Chivas USA, it did. Less than four months into the reign of the famously impetuous Jorge Vergara, Chivas USA finds itself without a coach and without a front office. And now the man tasked with filling some of the holes has himself been fired. Vergara, who has gone through more than a coach a year with his Mexican league team, Chivas de Guadalara, announced last month former Barcelona coach Johan Cruyff would be in charge of remaking his MLS team.

Jose Domene, until a month ago the general manager of Chivas USA, was officially let go by the Major League Soccer team's new ownership Tuesday, a team official confirmed. "Jose is no longer a Chivas USA employee. Effective today," Rodrigo Ochoa, the team's communications director wrote in response to an email question. Domene, who was appointed interim general manager during the team's last front-office shakeup in December 2010, was among the last members of this season's administrative staff to be  fired by Mexican businessman Jorge Vergara who, along with wife Angelica Fuentes, took full ownership of the franchise three months ago after buying out partners Lorenzo and Antonio Cue. Domene, 32, among the youngest general managers in U.S. professional sports, was an aggressive GM, making midseason acquisitions that brought Juan Agudelo, Jose Erick Correa and Shalrie Joseph to Chivas.

Galaxy Coach Bruce Arena has repeatedly said striker Robbie Keane was Major League Soccer's best player for much of the season. But apparently he's not among the most valuable. MLS released a list of finalists for its major postseason awards Thursday, and Keane's name was nowhere to found despite the fact he finished fourth in the league in scoring with 16 goals. Keane also finished first in something called the Castrol Index, a mathematical formula similar to the NFL's quarterback rating that measures everything a player does during a game.