WHIPPANY, NJ — New York Red Bulls forward Lewis Morgan’s meandering career has reached substantial heights this season — perhaps ones he has never attained before — but he is not ready to admit that this was his finest year in professional soccer until the final whistle blows at the 2024 MLS Cup Final on Saturday (4 p.m. ET) in Los Angeles.
“There’s a lot left to go,” Morgan said before his squad departed for California to meet the LA Galaxy in Major League Soccer’s championship game. “It’s all well and good being a finalist, but it really counts for nothing if you don’t win it.”
The 28-year-old Scotland native reasserted himself as one of the best forwards in all of MLS this year, leading the Red Bulls with 13 goals along with seven assists in his first year back from a hip injury that required surgery to fix after months of constant reaggravations and failed comeback attempts.
Once written off by his home nation’s two biggest domestic clubs, Rangers and Celtic, along with the national team, Morgan’s play at the start of the 2024 season was so good that he got the call from Scotland’s head coach Steve Clarke to join the Tartan Army for the time in five years.
He represented Scotland at the 2024 European Championships in France, which is considered the second-largest international soccer event in the world, behind only the World Cup.
Morgan’s efforts earned him the 2024 MLS Comeback Player of the Year Award, which he will hope is the second-largest piece of silverware he wins this season with the Red Bulls still searching for their first-ever league title.
“In terms of accomplishments, probably this would be the one that I will look back on really, really fondly,” Morgan said. “Of course, in terms of all the things I dealt with with the injuries and the comeback, everything that’s come this year, it’s something I think even myself, who has set lofty ambitions all the time, would have thought was a little bit of a stretch… I’m loving it, but a win this weekend would be the deciding factor as to where I’d rank it in my career.”
His return to full health and the acquisition of Swedish star midfielder Emil Forsberg are considered the lynchpins of New York’s success this season. Still, the team had to overcome a seventh-place finish in the Eastern Conference and pull off three consecutive upsets to reach this point as the lowest seed ever to reach the MLS Cup Final.
It is no surprise that, yet again, the Red Bulls are underdogs heading into Saturday against an LA Galaxy team that lost just once at home this season and finished No. 2 overall in the Western Conference.
“The guys have just been really switched on and focused the whole time,” Morgan said. “I think we’ve known what the task is at hand. We’ve known we’ve been underdogs going into the games. We’ve embraced that. We’ll embrace that again this weekend, knowing that we’re not expected to go there and run all over LA Galaxy. We’re expected to go there, make things difficult, and try to impose our style of football on them.
“We’ve never really gotten too far ahead of ourselves or thought we’d achieved anything. We’ve remained pretty grounded in terms of knowing that if we do want to win or achieve anything, it’s going to take a collective group effort.”
