The clock had ticked past 84 minutes at Dignity Health Sports Park, and the Seattle Sounders were five minutes away from forcing extra time with a trip to MLS Cup on the line.

Then, in an instant, the season was over.

A Seattle turnover found its way to Riqui Puig, who collected the ball and immediately drove at the backline. Famously playing on what would later be revealed as a torn ACL, Puig slipped a pass into the path of Dejan Joveljić at the top of the penalty area.

It was a connection that had become familiar throughout the Galaxy's championship season.

One touch. Low finish. Perfect placement beyond Stefan Frei.

Galaxy 1, Sounders 0.

The score wouldn't change. LA were Western Conference champions, Seattle were going home and the Galaxy were on their way to winning MLS Cup.

Less than two years later, the man who ended the Sounders' 2024 season is their new No. 9, with Tuesday's official announcement that Seattle have acquired Joveljić from Sporting Kansas City in a blockbuster cash-for-player trade for a reported $6 million fee.

Running riot in Hollywood

To understand the player Seattle is getting, there's no better place to start than the 2024 LA Galaxy, one of my favorite MLS attacks in modern times.

That Galaxy team has a special place in Lobbing Scorchers lore. We spent so much of that season raving about their absurdly entertaining attack that listeners started joking we were, in fact, a Galaxy podcast.

At the center was one of the most devastating attacking groups MLS has seen in recent years: Riqui Puig pulling the strings under Joveljić, with Joseph Paintsil (aka Joey Paints) and Gabriel Pec flying down the wings.

When those four got rolling, the Galaxy felt inevitable.

At times, it was chaos ball in its purest form. Defense could feel optional. The Galaxy were perfectly willing to trade chances and plenty of their games turned into track meets and shootouts. The haters and nerds briefly questioned whether a team that played so wide-open could actually win a championship that way. As it turned out, the answer was yes, because when the game opened up, almost nobody in MLS could keep up with them.

Puig was the engine, turning routine changes of possession into freight-train counterattacks that were terrifying to watch unfold while Paintsil and Pec took off on either side of him, stretching defenses to their breaking point.

And while all that chaos unfolded around him, Joveljić had a simpler job: find the right spot and finish the chance.

Joveljić was almost the quiet member of the group. Puig demanded the ball, while Paintsil and Pec demanded your attention every time they took off down the flanks. Joveljić could almost disappear into the background, lurking in the shadows and waiting for the moment to strike. Then he'd pop up in exactly the right spot.

Combine that chance-generation machine with a finisher as ruthless as Joveljić, and the Galaxy had something close to an unstoppable force.

The numbers were absurd. Puig, Pec, Paintsil and Joveljić became the first quartet of teammates in MLS history to each score at least 10 regular-season goals, powering a Galaxy attack that scored 69 times.

Joveljić finished the regular season with 15g/6a, then became even more lethal in the playoffs. He scored six more times during LA's run to MLS Cup, including that aforementioned 85th-minute winner against Seattle in the Western Conference Final.

By the end of it, the Galaxy had scored 18 goals in five playoff games and lifted their record sixth MLS Cup.

This much was proven: Surround Joveljić with elite playmakers and he will pile up the goals.

The ecosystem test

Evaluating strikers can be tricky because they're inherently dependent on the ecosystem around them.

Put a good finisher on a great attacking team and the goals can pile up. Put that same player on a dysfunctional team that struggles to create chances, and suddenly it becomes much harder to separate the striker from his surroundings.

With Joveljić, we have the rare benefit of seeing both extremes.

The 2024 Galaxy were about as favorable an ecosystem as a No. 9 could ask for. Joveljić played with the demonic trio of Puig, Paintsil, and Pec flying around, laying waste to defenders all around him, on a team that could manufacture high-quality chances seemingly at will.

Then, one year later, he went to Sporting Kansas City after the Galaxy couldn't keep his price tag on the books.

If the Galaxy were the perfect laboratory for showing what Joveljić could do when everything around him was working, the Club of Professional Wrestling Enthusiasts provided almost the exact opposite experiment.

They were a disaster. We got to see what Joveljić could produce in a situation that went completely off the rails. Peter Vermes was gone six games into the 2025 MLS season. The organization was headed for a full-scale reset. Sporting finished dead last in the Western Conference at 7-20-7 and allowed 70 goals.

Joveljić scored 18 goals anyway. He accounted for nearly 40 percent of Sporting's league goals and was named the club's MVP, Offensive Player of the Year and Golden Boot winner.

Change virtually everything about the environment, and the goals remained.

Real pedigree

When the Galaxy acquired him from Eintracht Frankfurt in 2021, MLS insider Tom Bogert immediately noted his unusual profile.

“That's not a typical MLS acquisition,” Bogert wrote at the time.

Joveljić was just 21, still under contract with a Bundesliga club, and coming off a 20-goal season on loan in Austria. Two years earlier, he'd made the final 20-player shortlist for the Golden Boy award, alongside names like Erling Haaland, Phil Foden, Vinícius Júnior, Rodrygo, Jadon Sancho and eventual winner João Félix.

As noted by Tommy Scoops, that's the type of résumé you'd normally associate with a young player continuing to climb the ladder in Europe. Instead, the Galaxy paid around $4 million to bring him to MLS as one of the league's early U22 Initiative signings.

U22 spots have produced plenty of misses around MLS, to the point that some teams have treated them almost like lottery tickets. Joveljić became one of the clearest examples of what can happen when you actually nail one: acquire a legitimately high-level young player earlier in his career than MLS historically would have had access to him, then watch him develop into one of the best players at his position in the league.

Four years later, Joveljić had an MLS Cup, more than 50 league goals and a reputation as one of the most reliable No. 9s in MLS.

Now Seattle gets him at 27, right in the middle of his prime.

That distinction is probably easiest to understand by comparing Joveljić to the player he’ll ostensibly be replacing in Seattle's first-choice XI. Danny Musovski has been a useful, at times excellent player for the Sounders, and when Seattle are functioning well enough to consistently supply him with chances around the penalty area, he’s shown he can finish them.

But Moose is also largely dependent on those chances finding him. Joveljić’s track record suggests something different. One defining trait of his game is his ability to find shots, repeatedly putting himself in positions where goals become possible.

That feels particularly relevant for this version of the Sounders. Seattle haven’t exactly been an attacking juggernaut lately, and simply dropping a better finisher into the same circumstances isn’t necessarily enough to fix that. Joveljić theoretically offers something more valuable: a striker who has repeatedly shown he can find goals even when the surrounding environment isn’t perfect. His 18-goal season with a struggling Kansas City team is the strongest evidence of that.

None of this guarantees that Joveljić will immediately solve everything that has gone wrong for Seattle. But the Sounders have spent much of the last couple of years trying to squeeze enough goals out of an attack without a high-end MLS No. 9. Now, suddenly, they appear to have one. Given everything that led them to this point, that alone makes this one of the most fascinating moves they’ve made in years.