Mandatory photo credit for all photos in this article: Aaron Morgan, Quakes Epicenter staff photographer
Eduardo “La Chofis” Lopez was the marquee signing of the San Jose Earthquakes’ 2021 offseason and the team MVP with a 12g/3a campaign. The 2021 season, however, was the most moribund in the Bay since the Mikael Stahre era: Los Quakes ended with 41 points, the worst in the Western Conference save for the Texas trio of Dallas, Austin, and Houston.
This is, I think, not a coincidence. In order for Chofis to fit, they have to organize their entire attack around a streaky finisher and mercurial personality who doesn’t create much. Also, he’s a player very much tied at the hip to head coach Matias Almeyda, who has been very clear that this is his last season in San Jose.
La Chofis is extremely talented. He’s also on a bizarre contract where his originating team, Chivas, does not want him back due to breaking Covid regulations (and how he broke Covid regulations) back in 2020, so his future is in flux to put it mildly. Chivas wants him out, and San Jose does not want to take on the huge salary cap hit to sign him permanently. However, Chivas does not want him elsewhere in Liga MX, and San Jose feels the same about MLS.
If he stays in San Jose, the Earthquakes have to build their entire team around a guy who does not have a wide skillset, who follows a coach in the last year of his contract, and who doesn’t appear to mesh with the existing team and the GM who just took the helm. That’s a huge risk for a moderate reward, and one I can’t see working out in San Jose.
El Elefante Blanco
Chofis does three things extremely well:
- Shoot from cutbacks to the top of the 18
- Dribble cutting in from the right wing
- Hit set pieces
He is calm in the box and an absolute baby-faced assassin. That said, the list of things he doesn’t do is pretty darn long and starts with things like “defend” and “jump.”
But you can get why people watch what he can do well and get excited. Everybody loves an inverted winger, but the problem with Chofis is that he’s on a team that already has two extremely talented “pure” right wing players, in Cristian Espinoza and Cade Cowell, as well as two attacking right fullbacks in Tommy Thompson and Paul Marie. Originally, I thought this was an asset:
The hope with Chofis is that he’ll take pressure off Espinoza by moving inside while Tommy makes an endline run, giving Espinoza the run of the offense. The absolute best-case scenario is that Lopez plays like a mix of Vako and Eriksson, serving as a midfield outlet out of pressure, dribbling through challenges, and hitting progressive passes in stride.
That bluntly didn’t happen in 2021. Instead, we saw Chofis take up Espinoza’s space or otherwise sit in the 18-yard-box like a second forward. Espinoza had his worst year in MLS (.15 xA/96min, after posting .25 xA/96 in 2020 and .36 xA/96 in 2019), and Chofis didn’t make up for it as a tempo-dictating Magnus Eriksson clone. In fact, save for one supernova 10-day period in September, Chofis had Benji Kikanovic-esque production:
| Timeframe | Games | Goals | Assists |
| April 17-Sept. 12; Sept. 30-Nov. 8 | 29 | 6 | 2 |
| Sept. 16-26 | 3 | 6 | 1 |
With the caveat that cherry-picking is the death of all statistical analysis (i.e., if I remove Kikanovic’s best games then all of the sudden he has Asher Kohn-esque production), it’s hard to see how Chofis makes this team better. He dominated three very bad teams: Real Salt Lake, Austin, and LAFC. For the rest of the time, he was fine.
Which makes me think of Chofis as a white elephant: he has tremendous gifts as a player that simply don’t match what the rest of the team is trying to do. A team with Chofis getting 70-90 minutes can’t press, because he won’t step into it. They can’t build through the middle, because he doesn’t take up defenders in the center of the pitch. They can only attack through transitions, as they did successfully in the beginning of the year against DC United and FC Dallas.
Chofis can’t play a modern 10 and do dirty work like Eriksson did, and if he’s inverted from the wing, he’s not letting Espinoza get to the endline. There’s a lot of talk of San Jose setting up in a 3-5-2 or 3-4-3 with Espinoza as a right wingback, and I get it because Espinoza helps a ton defensively and can send in a great cross.
The primary issue with that is it takes Espinoza away from the endline, where he’s one of the best cutback passers in MLS. The secondary issue is that while Espinoza is a great defender for a winger, he’s only okay compared to other fullbacks. If you squint at Chofis and see Leo Messi, you’re also looking at Espinoza as Paul Arriola.
So by forcing Chofis into Espinoza’s spot, you’re turning the team’s best attacking piece over the past three seasons into an above-average defender. And at the same time, forcing midfielders like Eric Remedi and Judson higher up the pitch to defend in his absence, taking them away from their comfort zones.
It’s a lot of moving pieces around to make up for merely average production. The 3-4-3 may look great on paper, but it’s a bunch of mediocrity in effect: recall the long, low-scoring, tie streak the Quakes were on when they tried it out.
Chofis and Almeyda
Another issue with inverted wingers is that they really haven’t won trophies in MLS. I’m not really sure why that is, but the great teams in recent MLS history are built centrally. Even brilliant wide players like Sebastian Giovinco and Nico Lodiero win by floating touchline to touchline rather than playing on one side.
There are two notable exceptions here: Ignacio Piatti for Montreal and Carlos Vela in LA. Both of these teams saw success through structured patterns of defense. In Montreal, Piatti was the head of maybe the only fun counter-and-set-piece team in league history. For Bob Bradley’s LAFC, they simply locked opponents in their own half and passed through Zone 14.
Structure and discipline allow an inverted winger the freedom to roam in MLS. Structure and discipline are…not what Matias Almeyda is selling.
In addition to that, it’s unclear how much longer Matias Almeyda will be coaching the San Jose Earthquakes. Most folks who follow these things believe he has no interest in extending his contract past 2022, and it seems much more likely he’ll be out at midseason after the Liga MX 2022 Clausura and CONMEBOL qualifying wrap up. Conveniently, Chofis’ loan period (though it can be extended) wraps up then as well.
Almeyda was crucial to Chofis coming to San Jose, and it’s extremely unclear how much interest Chofis would have in playing for a different coach he didn’t grow up with. Chofis seems to have taken to San Jose pretty well, judging by his Instagram and outward statements. But “how will Chofis take to a new coach” is a more open question than it is for players with less mercurial a history: other cornerstone players on the Earthquakes, like Jackson Yueill, Cristian Espinoza, and Nathan have played for different teams and thrived in different systems. You can’t say that for Chofis, and that is worrying for a team about to embark on a transition.
The New Guard
That transition, of course, is already underway. Chris Leitch was officially named General Manager in the offseason after being crucial to the front office for years. It’s worth taking a look at the profiles of Leitch’s big acquisitions:
- Nathan: young, aerially-dominant, front-foot defender who enjoys winning the ball near midfield.
- Jeremy Ebobissie: young, aerially-dominant striker with a sweet left foot who can play back-to-goal.
- Jan Gregus: older central midfielder who can deliver line-breaking passes and shoot outside the box. Interested in playing defense, but not terribly mobile. Arguably aerially-dominant as well.
If I were trying to figure out how these players fit into a scheme, I’d say that Leitch wants the Earthquakes to press from a midfield line of confrontation, use a Yueill/Gregus/Ebobissie triangle to move the ball to the wings and find Jebo, Kikanovic, and Cowell on cutbacks.
Whether that’s from a “3-4-3” or “4-1-4-1” is kind of academic: that Judson sweeper role could be nominally a midfielder or a centerback without changing the principles of play. What it looks like, to me, is a team that plays like the 2019 Earthquakes but with a much stronger defense (Nathan and Beason are an enormous upgrade, particularly on set pieces, from Florian Jungwirth and Oswaldo Alanis) and an established left side. That’s a pretty good team on paper!
It’s also not a team that Chofis seems to fit in. He’s not comfortable enough in central midfield, or plugged-in enough defensively, to take Magnus Eriksson’s role. An underrated part of defending high is being able to keep the opposing #6 from making progressive passes. That’s a huge part of why Andy Rios and Jackson Yueill saw time as a #10 this past season, much to Quakes’ fans chagrin. It’s part of the role that Chofis doesn’t bring.
There are definitely players available this summer who could do it better than Chofis (to say nothing of Yueill and Rios). My personal favorite is 19-year-old Slovakian international Tomas Suslov, who plays for Gronigen (where Danny Hoesen and Albert Rusnak, among others, came from). I’d also accept Xherdan Shaqiri, who is rumored to have links to MLS.
Looking at all the players acquired over the past 12 months (Kikanovic and new draftees Ousseni Bouda and Oskar Agren are all great assets but none are “build your team around this guy”-type players, at least not yet!), it’s clear that there are a few brought in to build a system…and then one guy on loan to help out with ongoing relationships. In that situation, it’s not clear to me why you would build your attack around the latter.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Chofis’ problem is that he’s more “cool” than “good.” It is really fun to watch him loft sweet shots into top binz, drop defenders on their backsides, and Olimpico a flailing David Ochoa. But those instances are counterweighed by busted presses, unmarked pivot midfielders, and switches-of-field not made because they involve a right-footed pass. All these little things aren’t as visible, but, man, do they stress out the team.
As much joy as the Chofis comp with Vela or Messi might bring Earthquakes fans, it’s more likely he is similar to Vako or Houston’s Darwin Quintero: they can be a bright spot on a bad team, but not really much more than that. Once you start building your team around a mercurial attacker, you lose your ability to make a team more than the sum of its parts, unless that guy is truly world-class.
The counter-argument, of course, is that Chofis is just scratching the surface, and that his world-class bonafides will be made soon. But….eh. He is 27 years old and has been in the footballing wilderness since 2019. It might be worth seeing what he can bring to the first half of 2022, and if he can indeed build on that wonderful September and bring it to the better teams in MLS on a weekly basis.
But it’s also not worth shaping the season around that discovery. There have been great moments for Chofis in San Jose, but they have been few and mostly far-between. As the team moves on from the Almeyda era, it’s time to find players who will fit what comes next and not reminisce about what came before.
