Fast: who’s main Main League Soccer’s Golden Boot race in 2025?
It isn’t Lionel Messi. It isn’t Luis Suarez. It isn’t Christian Benteke, final 12 months’s clear winner with 23 objectives to his title. It is little-known Belgian striker Hugo Cuypers of the resurgent Chicago Fire.
Cuypers arrived in MLS in 2024 with a massive $12 million transfer fee and a questionable goal-scoring document. The 27-year-old scored simply six objectives for Belgian staff Gent within the 2023-24 season and did not do a lot 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 Japanese Convention desk. He is outperforming all his MLS friends and he is earned each penny of his $12 million switch charge. Cuypers credit new coach Gregg Berhalter, previously of the U. S. Males’s Nationwide Staff, for a lot of his good kind.
“His approach of taking part in is fairly clear for us as a staff. It is what we wanted after an absence of perhaps stability or identification final 12 months, that gamers might fall again into a transparent identification,” Cuypers said.,, through Charles Boehm of the MLS web site. “After which it is as much as us to execute it on the pitch. However it absolutely 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 abilities as a frontrunner, however none shine stronger than his skill to develop strikers like Cuypers. The Belgian is the third consecutive MLS scorer that Berhalter has changed into a league-leading expertise.
Berhalter’s first striker undertaking 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 huge function to an old-school down-the-middle placing place—may 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 following 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 concentrate on serving to the staff 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 Yr 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 likely one of the most centered gamers I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever been round,” he said, through Boehm. “I am amazed watching him within the penalty field, how he finishes, how he is in a position to put the ball on track with no time, underneath numerous stress. So to me, there’s simply numerous upside with him.”
If Berhalter can do with Cuypers what he did with Kamara and Zardes, then the Chicago Hearth simply might 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 in opposition to Charlotte FC.
