Kei Kamara: Major League Soccer's rolling stone
There are 29 teams in MLS. Kei Kamara has scored for 11 of them.
I’ll keep this bit quick this week because I want to acknowledge the existence of this superior article about the subject of this week’s newsletter.
Of course that comes out the day after I decide to write about a specific player on the other side of the world. Of course it does.
Gutting.
Anyway, here’s my version. Enjoy.
Kei Kamara: Major League Soccer's rolling stone
26th April 2010. My love of football in North America is blossoming and its second full season has begun. I’m happily embracing my niche as a Major League Soccer fan in England, gobbling up hundreds of hours of podcasts and watching matches that kick off in the early hours of the morning.
It’s Monday morning. I drag myself off the District Line and up through Bayswater station on the way to the many questionable pleasures of an unwanted job in public relations. There are some football supporters here but MLS might as well not exist. Yet throughout the day, on Twitter as well as around me in the office, something strange is happening.
People are talking about Kei Kamara.
During the preceding weekend, Kamara missed a sitter. That it was being spoken about in London and moving through social media with increasing virality tells you everything you think you need to know about it. You need to think bigger.
With the ball rolling along the line of an unguarded goal, Kamara followed in. He got there, too, but only after failing to make contact with his foot. He inadvertently knocked the ball into the net with his hand as he fell. It was a moment of ignominy: the miss seen around the world.
But when the definitive history of the first thirty years of Major League Soccer is written, Kamara will stand tall among the giants.
MLS is still a relatively young and growing league. The players who take root, who break records, who walk uncharted paths, warrant pioneer status. 2024 is Kamara’s nineteenth season in the league. His longevity alone is legendary. What he's done with those two decades puts him close to Major League Soccer's Mount Rushmore.
In 2024, he passed Landon Donovan to become the second highest scorer since the league's inauguration in 1996. His goals per game ratio is lower not only than that of leading marksman Chris Wondolowski; it's lower than the seven players below him too. That's not really the point. At the time of writing, Kamara has scored 147 MLS goals at a rate of one every three games. That in itself is quite the achievement.
Kamara has scored for eleven of Majors League Soccer’s 29 clubs. He scored 32 times for Columbus Crew; twice for San Jose Earthquakes; seven times for Houston Dynamo; 38 times for Kansas City Wizards and Sporting Kansas City; 19 times for New England Revolution; 14 times for Vancouver Whitecaps; 17 times for Colorado Rapids; just once for Minnesota United; nine times for CF Montréal; five times for Chicago Fire. Now he’s a scorer for Los Angeles FC too.
Even getting into the position to score those goals was extraordinary. Kamara is from Kenema, a city badly affected by Sierra Leone’s harrowing civil war. It drove Kamara’s family to Freetown, the capital, and later to the Gambia. His mother had left Kenema for the United States of America years earlier and Kamara followed, aged 16, having been granted asylum as part of a refugee programme in 2000.
Football is trivial one moment and the most important thing in the world the next. Kamara, whose experiences at home put the very idea of sport into perspective, was obsessed nonetheless. He attended California State University at Dominguez Hills in Carson, playing his college football for the Toros between 2004 and 2005.
Kamara chose Dominguez Hills quite deliberately. The college campus is the location of what was then the Home Depot Center, the home of the Galaxy, against whom that infamous miss would happen. Kamara worked at the stadium and got to know head coach Sigi Schmid. In the 2006 draft, Schmid selected Kamara for the Crew. The kid from Kenema was a professional footballer.
He developed into a very good footballer in a league where very good is good enough. Very good players are ten a penny in MLS but delivering consistently for nineteen years is worth celebrating.
It’s no wonder Kamara remains in demand. He is the archetypal MLS striker – nearly prolific, a nuisance for defenders and more capable of the essential mundane than the needlessly spectacular. He’s handy with his back to goal and decent in the air. He’s physically strong but mobile, and moves smartly off the ball. You don’t play for two decades without learning a thing or two.
Kamara cut his teeth at Columbus before a brief move to San Jose Earthquakes followed in short order by a trade to Houston Dynamo in 2008. He played out wide more than a few times in his first years as a professional but it was as a centre forward that he really made his name.
The move that built his reputation came in 2009. Kamara was traded to Kansas City Wizards, soon to be rebranded as Sporting Kansas City, and continued his steady scoring record as the MLS appearances piled up. His 38 goals in Kansas City should have been 39, of course. It hardly seems to matter.
Kamara was approaching his peak just as English football acquired a taste for MLS players. He naturally attracted interest, first from Stoke City and then from Norwich City, where he agreed a loan spell in 2013.
He scored once for the Canaries but is remembered with a degree of fondness. Nevertheless, a permanent transfer wasn’t forthcoming. He headed instead for Middlesbrough, where a modest return of four EFL Championship goals resulted in the mutual termination of his contract. He won over Wolverhampton Wanderers on trial but the move fell through and Kamara crossed the Atlantic once more.
His destination was Columbus. There, in 2015, he turned in the season of his career. He was Major League Soccer’s joint top scorer with Sebastian Giovinco, scoring 22 regular season goals and earning not only his first All-Star nomination but a place in the league’s Best XI.
He added four more goals in the post-season as the Crew reached the MLS Cup showpiece. They conceded twice in the first seven minutes. Kamara’s goal ten minutes after that was all they had to show for a home final against Portland Timbers.
Kamara signed a designated player contract to keep him in Ohio in 2016 but a public dispute with the team’s more established designated player, Federico Higuain, brought his second spell to a premature end.
With two goals already to his name against Montreal Impact and seduced by the idea of a first MLS hat-trick, Kamara argued with Higuain about who should take a penalty kick. It was the kind of incident that happens all the time but Kamara’s comments after the fact revealed a more substantial problem between the pair. He was suspended by the club and traded away within a week.
With the Crew in his rear-view mirror for a second time, Kamara entered the veteran phase of his MLS career. Having been traded to New England Revolution, he spent two seasons in Foxborough and scored, predictably, a little more than once every three games. He was more prolific for Vancouver Whitecaps and Colorado Rapids between 2018 and 2020 but scored only once – from the penalty spot – in seven appearances for Minnesota United in 2020.
In the summer of 2021, Kamara moved abroad again. His scoring record for HIFK in Finland? A little better than one in three.
Kamara returned to North America in 2022 to begin what we must assume is his final phase in professional football, though you wouldn’t put it past him to push well into his forties. He played for Montreal in 2022 and for Chicago Fire in 2023, chipping in with useful goals and his customary hustle and bustle.
Eight years on from his goal in the Crew’s MLS Cup defeat, he switched from Chicago to LAFC. Kamara has never played for the Galaxy but his return to Southern California at the ripe old age of 39 was a noteworthy homecoming for one of Major League Soccer’s most significant sons.
In a week or two, Kamara will pass Jeff Larentowicz to become the league’s fourth most capped player. Only former Miami Fusion, DC United and Real Salt Lake goalkeeper Nick Rimando has made more than 500 appearances. Dax McCarty, the only player above Kamara still active, will probably follow. Kamara, in all likelihood, will not. Crew captain Darlington Nagbe, at 34, will only knock him back into fifth place if he follows his late career blueprint.
Kamara’s role as a senior member of Steve Cherundolo’s squad is perfectly ill-defined. He’s there when he’s needed to play a little or a lot, an alternative and understudy to an attacking corps boasting the lethal Denis Bouanga and, soon, World Cup winner Olivier Giroud.
Seven starts and eleven substitute appearances into his 2024 season, Kamara has scored three MLS goals – numbers 145, 146 and 147. They all came in the span of four matches in one of the most effective months of his career.
It’s impossible to begrudge him times like these. Kamara comes across as an affable, likeable man as well as a self-aware football player who knows his strengths, his limitations and the implications – positive and negative – of playing on the precipice of forty.
He’s a realist who’s lived a dream. Yet it’s come at a considerable cost. Adversity is relative but missing a penalty in the Africa Cup of Nations and requiring police protection on one’s property is enough to make anyone resentful.
That debacle two and a half years ago was a highly unsatisfactory conclusion to Kamara’s international career with Sierra Leone but wholly in keeping with a tumultuous relationship between an accomplished professional player and a federation with hypersensitivity to criticism from within.
In football, no two legends are alike. Kamara’s is now undeniable, not only because he’s gradually climbed the Major League Soccer’s record rankings but because he’s stuck it out for so long, and with such consistency.
He works hard on and off the pitch. He made his own luck in the biggest, baddest way. What’s not to love?
If you enjoyed the main piece, please share this week’s newsletter using the button below.
“As a proud Englishman, it has been the honour of my life to play for England and to manage England. It has meant everything to me, and I have given it my all. But it’s time for change, and for a new chapter. Sunday’s final in Berlin against Spain was my final game as England manager.”
Gareth Southgate announces the end of his time as England manager.
Salty beef extracts
Dead bodies in the rubble: Gaza’s lost generation of footballers (i)
Football transformed my daughters’ lives, but the girls’ game is being forgotten (i)
Gareth Southgate changed English football forever – and ultimately paid the price (i)
Through thick and thin Gareth Southgate was England’s perfect ambassador (The Guardian)
After Germany’s football fest, rocky road lies ahead for European game (The Guardian)
Gareth Southgate: our part in his downfall (Unexpected Delirium)
Go Woking or Go Broke (Unexpected Delirium)
The Business (The Football Fan)
Iconic Football Shirts: Clapton Community Football Club (away) (Outside Write)
Dessert
While we’re on the subject of Major League Soccer for no apparent reason, and indeed of iconic football shirts, here’s the outstanding item from the MLS Archive Collection.
The collection includes five third jerseys, and while one might question the authenticity of Kei Kamara’s LAFC and Inter Miami appearing in pretty generic homage shirts, the Portland Timbers jersey has its roots in NASL. Both Los Angeles Galaxy and Sporting Kansas City – formerly Kansas City Wiz and Kansas City Wizards, as you can see – ooze MLS.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing the newsletter. If I can get a decent handful of subscribers I can sack off Twitter and isn’t that the dream for all of us?
Have a week.