Ryan Hollingshead isn’t supposed to be here, providing Los Angeles FC a unique weapon on the right flank — pouring in goals while starring on one of Major League Soccer’s best backlines — as it prepares to play for the prize it has most coveted since kicking off its inaugural season nearly five years ago.
The 31-year-old veteran right back, picked up in a trade with FC Dallas as part a brilliant offseason rebuild that has led LAFC into Saturday afternoon’s MLS Cup final at its Banc of California Stadium home against the Philadelphia Union, was done with soccer 10 years ago, as his final campaign at UCLA was coming to an end.
He’d been a fine player for the Bruins, a two-time all-conference selection but not a top pro prospect, before a breakout senior season brought him Pacific-12 Conference player-of-the-year and second-team NSCAA All-America acclaim. MLS clubs suddenly were clamoring for his services, admiring his 6-foot-2 build, unique skill set and buoyant personality.
Hollingshead had other plans. Bigger plans.
He and his older brother, Scott, also a former UCLA soccer player, had been talking for a few years about creating a church — a “Bible-preaching, Jesus-loving” church — in Sacramento, where they’d grown up. He had a true passion, and it wasn’t soccer.
And so Hollingshead spurned MLS, declined FC Dallas’ entreaties after the club had, to his great astonishment, selected him with the 20th pick in the 2013 SuperDraft — after he’d informed everyone who’d asked that doing so would be a waste. He wasn’t going to play.
Now he’s here, one of the deadliest fullbacks in MLS annals and a critical cog in LAFC’s Supporters’ Shield triumph and run to the biggest encounter in the club’s brief but rich history.
“When I said no to [FC Dallas’] contract,” he said, “I was, like, done.”
He wasn’t, and that, he knows, is “by God’s grace.”
He and Scott and their significant others built that church — Doxa Church in Rocklin, just north of California’s capital — from the ground up, growing a congregation that now stands near 1,500. That’s his greatest achievement and will remain so if LAFC becomes just the second team since 2011 to win MLS’s Shield/Cup double.
That Hollingshead has a chance for a ring is credit to FC Dallas, which was teetering a tad three years after reaching its lone MLS Cup title game and saw him as a piece as it sought its way back among the league elite. They kept their offer on the table, and he arrived a year late, worked his way into the starting lineup by his sophomore campaign, and was a key contributor as the Hoops won back-to-back Western Conference regular-season titles, reached the conference final in 2015, and won the Shield and U.S. Open Cup in 2016.
He’s been among MLS’s best fullbacks ever since, and his arrival last February — on the heels of LAFC’s acquisitions of defender Franco Escobar from Atlanta United, midfielders Ilie Sanchez from Sporting Kansas City and Kellyn Acosta from the Colorado Rapids, and goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau from Vancouver Whitecaps FC — helped propel the club, which missed the postseason in 2021, to a second Shield in four years and a chance to claim the trophy it didn’t win then.
Hollingshead is having a blast.
“I’ve said it before, but this is the most fun I’ve had playing football in a long time …,” he told Soccer America. “It’s fun, of course, to win games. So that helps. It’s fun to win trophies. That helps. But I think that they’ve put together a squad here that just really enjoys each other on and off the field. We have so much fun scoring goals together. We have so much fun playing ping pong [in the players’ lounge] together and training together and being in the locker room together. It’s just a team that enjoys being around each other.
“You don’t want to understate how hard that actually is to produce. It’s hard to produce a locker room that gels in the way that we do. There’s usually just some dynamic to a locker room. There’s some difficulty to a locker room. And we don’t have any of that here.”
The soccer they’ve produced under first-year head coach Steve Cherundolo has been very good all season — they led the West all but one week, back in early March — and Hollingshead, who split time with Escobar before injuries slowed the Argentine defender. has been a vital figure. He has netted seven goals this season — six in MLS play, all victories; another in the U.S. Open Cup loss to the LA Galaxy — and been consistently strong at right back, where he’s seen most of his time, and occasionally on the left.
Cherundolo calls him “one of the most underrated American defenders.”
“His football IQ is very high, he picks fantastic moments to go forward, his timing is good, his combination play is good, and he has a nose to score as well, a nose for the goal,” Cherundolo said. “On top of that, his defensive work as been solid, and he’s figured out spacing, timing and when to close down [in LAFC’s system], and his physical capabilities — as a larger [6-foot-2] player — he’s a threat on set pieces moving forward but helps us out in the back as well. He’s a very complete outside back.”
‘Smells where the ball is going to pop’
Hollingshead’s goals include some real beauties: a half-volley from the top of the box, his second strike of the night, to finish a 3-1 win over Vancouver in March; a volley from a teammate’s header off a corner kick to provide a late lead in a 2-0 victory over Minnesota United in early May; a precise blast from a cross-box pass for an early two-goal lead in a 3-2 win over San Jose in late May; and a splendid finish in a 3-1 mid-September win over Houston that ended the club’s rough late-summer stretch, in which he took a deflected shot, beat a defender toward the right post, then fired into the net’s ceiling.
Hollingshead had an assist on Denis Bouanga‘s second goal in the 3-2 thriller with the Galaxy in the Western semifinals, then last week helped put away the second goal in the 3-0 Western-final romp over Austin FC, getting a piece of Carlos Vela’s corner kick that went off Maxi Urruti for an own goal — “I was trying to play it off Urruti’s shoulder or head or whatever it hit,” he quipped afterward — and forcing one of Verde goalkeeper Brad Stuver‘s best saves on a foray into the Austin box.
“He just smells where the ball is going to pop,” said Sanchez, LAFC’s midfield general, “and once he has it, he can play one-touch, two touches. He can collect the ball and put his head up and decide what to do with the ball, or he can just hit it one time and it’s already dangerous going into goal. … He knows where he is, where the ball is going to pop, and where the opponents and his teammates are. He controls the situation better than anyone else.”
Hollingshead had been an attacking player in his youth, a goalscoring winger and playmaker.
“I love it,” he said after the strike against the Dynamo. “I’m coming from an attacking position [in my past], so it’s something I’m comfortable with. I also know on this club we have so much firepower up top that if I can get myself into a good spot … I’m just ready for the ball to bounce to me, and it has been. It’s all about getting yourself in good spots, taking risks at the right time as a defender, making sure when you’re getting forward that it’s the right time, so you can recover and you’ve got guys covering for you and you’re not just exposing the backline.
“Once I get there and I get the ball at my feet, I feel really comfortable to score and like my chances. It’s been a ton of fun being able to get in these spots and put them away.”
Almost everything has been “a ton of fun” this year, and much of that has to do with those around him. LAFC’s is a supremely talented side with great depth on every line, one of the most capable rosters in MLS’s 27 seasons, and it has flourished with great help from uncommon chemistry. It’s a club with a lot of stars without massive egos, a collection of delightful personalities, and his might be the most joyful of the lot.
“He’s a top guy,” Sanchez said. “He comes early in the morning, he sits there, having breakfast, having a conversation. He’s involved in all the groups. He can be with the Americans, come to the Latinos’ table, he can be part of the fantasy league that we have, or he can be with the staff. That’s very important in a group, having guys like him, because it creates connections between the rest of the group.”
Sanchez, who signed as a free agent a month before Hollingshead arrived, was so excited when he heard about the trade that “I started talking about him to my teammates. I played many times against him when he was in Dallas [and I was in Kansas City], and he always looked like this dangerous player no matter where he was on the field, no matter if he was playing as a starter or coming from the bench, and he really surprised me as an opponent. Now as my teammate, I could see everyday what he made me feel when we played against Dallas, but on my side.”
Hollingshead figures to play a key role against the Union, whose willingness to cede possession plays into LAFC’s game model and whose ability to counterattack, with speed and precision, offers great challenges for the backline and especially the outside backs.
“Philadelphia plays such a weird style,” Hollingshead said. “I admire that they are pragmatic, that they just go and play to win games and they don’t care how it looks. They don’t care what people say about them, and they don’t care like what the style is. They’re just like, ‘What’s our record? How many goals have we scored? How many goals have we conceded?’ And that’s all they care about.
“There’s been this big push [in MLS], especially the last fiveish years, for beautiful-looking football — possession style, build out of the back, play in really tight spaces — and Philly’s like, ‘Screw all of that stuff. We’re going long. We’re putting a diamond in the midfield. We’re going to win second balls and just attack.’ It’s not my style. It’s not the style I want to play, but it’s a style that they’ve perfected, and that they do better than anybody in this league.”
That comes with “a lot of chaos,” and the prime challenge “for us as outside backs, and just the team in general, is to calm the chaos. Like any time the ball comes to our feet — especially because they’re a diamond, they’re tighter, so we’ll have more space out wide — we need to calm it down, get the ball under control, not fall into their kind of chaotic style of just launch ball forward, win second ball, go back forward.”
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