Fast: who’s main Main League Soccer’s Golden Boot race in 2025?
It is not Lionel Messi. It is not Luis Suarez. It is not Christian Benteke, final yr’s clear winner with 23 objectives to his title. It is little-known Belgian striker Hugo Cuypers of the resurgent Chicago Hearth.
Cuypers arrived in MLS in 2024 with a huge $12 million switch price and a questionable goal-scoring document. The 27-year-old scored simply six objectives for Belgian group Gent within the 2023-24 season and did not do significantly better in his first season in Chicago, netting simply 10 objectives in 31 video games within the Windy Metropolis in 2024.
2025, although? That is been a totally totally different story. Cuypers has eight objectives in twelve video games and he is pushing Chicago up the Jap Convention desk. He is outperforming all his MLS friends and he is earned each penny of his $12 million switch price. Cuypers credit new coach Gregg Berhalter, previously of the U. S. Males’s Nationwide Group, for a lot of his good kind.
“His method of enjoying is fairly clear for us as a group. It is what we would have liked after an absence of perhaps stability or identification final yr, that gamers may fall again into a transparent identification,” Cuypers stated.,, through Charles Boehm of the MLS web site. “After which it is as much as us to execute it on the pitch. However it certainly makes it simpler when the rules are clear.”
Many American soccer followers solely know Berhalter for his unlucky stint with the USMNT, and that is a disgrace. He is an clever coach with a robust document of success in MLS. Berhalter has many skills as a pacesetter, however none shine stronger than his potential to develop strikers like Cuypers. The Belgian is the third consecutive MLS scorer that Berhalter has became a league-leading expertise.
Berhalter’s first striker venture got here in 2015, when MLS legend Kei Kamara arrived on the Columbus Crew. Kamara was coming off two middling seasons in Kansas Metropolis (11 objectives in 2012, seven objectives in 2013) and a failed mortgage spell in England (4 objectives with Middlesbrough in 2014.) Berhalter thought a easy swap—shifting Kamara from a rangy vast position to an old-school down-the-middle placing place—would possibly unlock Kamara, and he was proper. Kamara scored 22 objectives in MLS in 2015.
Berhalter repeated the trick in 2018, when Gyasi Zardes arrived in Columbus from the L.A. Galaxy. As soon as hyped as the subsequent nice American striker, Zardes’s profession had stuttered to a halt inside the Galaxy system. He scored simply eight objectives throughout three seasons earlier than being shipped to Ohio.
Zardes wanted a confidence increase, and Berhalter gave it to him. He took the “subsequent massive factor” weight off Zardes’s shoulders and had him give attention to serving to the group as an alternative. The outcomes spoke for themselves: in his debut season with Columbus, Zardes scored 19 objectives and gained MLS’s coveted Comeback Participant of the 12 months award. He even earned himself a beginning spot within the entrance line of the USMNT.
With Cuypers, Berhalter is at it once more.
“Hugo is an attention-grabbing one. Actually is among the most centered gamers I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever been round,” he stated, through Boehm. “I am amazed watching him within the penalty field, how he finishes, how he is capable of put the ball heading in the right direction with no time, beneath quite a lot of strain. So to me, there’s simply quite a lot of upside with him.”
If Berhalter can do with Cuypers what he did with Kamara and Zardes, then the Chicago Hearth simply may need the oomph to make the MLS Playoffs for the primary time since 2017. The membership already beat league chief Vancouver and held Messi’s Inter Miami to a 0-0 draw. The sky is the restrict for Berhalter and his males.
The Chicago Hearth will return to MLS motion on Saturday, Might 17 towards Charlotte FC.
