Carlos Vela is a magician and MLS is his stage

Last Wednesday, Carlos Vela scored one of the best goals of the season and his career against the San Jose Earthquakes. It was one of those breathtaking goals that is often described as magical:

The morning after the goal I read an old profile on Ricky Jay, one of the greatest sleight-of-hand magicians to ever live, if not the greatest. At the beginning of the profile, Jay does a trick for the interviewer, in which he manipulates the results of a poker game. In the process, he points out every part of the trick where the interviewer is allowing himself to be fooled:

“When I said it looked fair, he dealt two hands of five-card draw and told me to lay down my cards. Two pair. Then he laid down his. A straight.

‘Was that fair?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. Let’s discuss the reason why that wasn’t fair. Even though I shuffled openly and honestly, I didn’t let you cut the cards. So let’s do it again, and this time I’ll let you cut the cards.’

He shuffled again, I cut the cards, he dealt, and this time I had three tens.

‘Ready to turn them over?’

My three-of-a-kind compared unfavorably with his diamond flush.”

Jay repeated this process until the actual playing of cards, when he was able to get the better hand each time. Then he allowed the interviewer to shuffle, deal, and even pick out the hands for both of them. Jay still ended up with four aces.

As I read the profile, a bunch of my friends sent me that Vela goal. I have a personal adoration for Vela, and consider myself the leader of his fan club, made up of all of us who believed in his talent and the prospect of his success even through his attempts at self-sabotage — from forgetting his passport before a Champions League game against Barcelona, to his infamous suspension and subsequent split with the Mexican national team.

As an Arsenal fan, I fell in love with him the first minute that I saw him chip a goalkeeper instead of going for a more sensible finish. And even as he left Arsenal, went on loan to five different clubs, and seemed destined to become another case of unfulfilled talent, I irrationally believed that his time to shine would come. At Real Sociedad, he reached a mature age at which his discipline matched his talent, and showed the world what he was truly capable of.

When Vela moved to MLS, and became the big-name signing for Los Angeles Football Club, I had mixed emotions. As always, I believed that he would do well, but I also had desperately wanted him to succeed in the biggest leagues in the world.

There were doubts over Vela’s capabilities, his work ethic, and commitment to the game, all of which centered on his own admission that soccer isn’t his passion. In an interview with Canal+ years ago, Vela said:

“The truth is that I’ve never been so passionate about football as to say ‘I’m a fan of Real Madrid or of this team and I’ll stand with them to the death.’ I enjoy playing, but once the match ends the football is finished for me and you can talk to me about anything that isn’t football, because I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so or like doing so.”

But in his short time at LAFC, Vela hasn’t just done well. To my personal satisfaction, he’s inarguably the best player in the league. And while Vela says doesn’t enjoy soccer all that much, he has created a rich collection of highlights embarrassing defenders who do dedicate their every waking moment to the sport.

The goal against the Earthquakes exemplifies Vela’s strengths so well. He’s not fast, tall, or strong. He doesn’t have any discernible physical advantage over any defender. But he’s very good on the ball, as both a dribbler and passer. More than anything, he’s creative and entertaining.

In the same way it is reductive to say that Jay does “magic,” it’s reductive to say that Vela is “a good dribbler.” Vela is a sleight-of-foot artist. He misdirects all of his opponents in the build-up to the goal. The dummy after the initial pass fools his defender and allows him to curl around for the return ball. Then he shows the ball just enough for the last defender to feel confident in winning it — calling out the trick, essentially — and then cuts past him. He does the same show-and-fool to the goalkeeper. And then again to the recovering defender who slid into the net in anticipation for a shot at the near-post.

Then Vela finishes with the wonderful cruelty of giving that defender hope of remedying his earlier mistake by covering the middle, then puts the ball in the near-post where the defender had initially committed. Of course, even from two yards out, the goal had to be a chip.

How Vela dribbles isn’t a secret, and every defender knows that as a lefty, he’s most likely cutting to the left. They know what the trick is. But there’s a big difference between knowing and stopping something. Even something expected can look and feel like magic when done so well.

What I love about Vela is that he’s a showman. He might not be as devoted to soccer as Jay is to magic, but they both understand that being technically good at something is not enough. In order or to explore an art to its fullest, one has to knack for entertainment. And where Jay’s showmanship stemmed from supreme confidence in his ability and commitment to his craft, Vela’s comes from the opposite place, caring so little about the sport that he’s unafraid to try the ridiculous.

Not that Vela doesn’t care about results or being the best player in the league, but because the sport isn’t an essential part of his identity, Vela feels free to enjoy it, and have fun. Even if the initial dummy had been stopped, he still would have smiled at the attempt, and how close he came to pulling it off. He can try to chip the keeper when a simpler finish would do, because chipping the keeper is just more fun.

Watching Vela play now is the same as watching him play for Arsenal when he was a young boy. He comes onto the field and tries to embarrass defenders and goalkeepers as if that’s the entire point. He has never lost that child-like approach to the game. Back then, many people saw him as an immature kid who needed to see soccer as something more than tricks. Thankfully, he never listened.