LA Galaxy’s Dennis Te Kloese not optimistic about full 2020 MLS season

With growing concern the coronavirus shutdown will last many months, not merely weeks, LA Galaxy technical director Dennis te Kloese is not optimistic MLS can play a full season this year.

“The idea to keep alive that there’s going to be a full season, I think, is an idea that everybody is given,” Te Kloese told Kevin Baxter in the LA Times on Saturday. “Obviously the motivation and hope is to get everybody done.”

“That’s going to be very challenging.”

But even with hope being a powerful motivation, Te Kloese doesn’t think it’s likely.

“Being realistic, within the country there’s different issues,” he said. “For a league that’s so spread out, there’s a lot of travel involved. There’s a lot of restrictions in different parts of the country.

“It makes it a challenge to generalize things and it makes it a challenge to come to a conclusion that you can put everybody together and just play as normal.”

Of course, Te Kloese isn’t the first person to express something along those lines, however he’s the first in MLS to publicly admit it. Previously, policymakers, from California Governor Gavin Newsom (as of last weekend, not optimistic sports will resume before the fall) and Santa Clara County Executive Officer Jeff Smith (said earlier this week he thinks sports are unlikely to return before Thanksgiving at the earliest) don’t seem to think normal life will resume in a matter of weeks, either.

Of course, things can change in the coming weeks, for better or worse, and upend these projections altogether. I think it sounds increasingly unlikely we’ll see sports (or the rest of our everyday lives) return in the summer, but we’ll have to continue to take the measures to stop the spread of coronavirus and work together to get back on track as soon as we can.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.