LOS ANGELES — Among the more intimate moments emerging from the new ESPN+ documentary series “We Are LAFC" features the club’s daily hydration test routine.
Every day, LAFC’s performance director, Gavin Benjafield, posts up, spreadsheet open, on a desk at the front of the locker room and waits for players to deliver their urine sample.
“Green’s good,” Steve Beitashour explained. “You want to be in [the] green.”
During Episode 4, “New Blood,” Lee Nguyen and Diego Rossi deliver their filled cups, waiting for Benjafield to tell them their colored score.
“They all call me Aquaman because I’m always blue, which [means] you’re over hydrated, so that’s the running joke with these guys,” said Beitashour after training Tuesday of his personal experience of the routine.
In the show’s hydration scene, Carlos Vela — fearful of falling further down on the scale because of his coffee intake — makes a feeble attempt to trick Benjafield, but to no avail.
“I do know who typically gets red, orange,” Beitashour said with a grin.
Lighthearted locker room moments like these are one part of the recipe the 10-part series employs to offer viewers a glimpse into the 2018 expansion club’s inaugural season.
“It is a look backstage, but it’s just a peek,” said GM John Thorrington. “It gives you a little snapshot of what it’s like. I think it’d be very difficult to show everything about what makes us, us — the good and the bad — in a condensed 10 episodes.”
Thorrington, who provides a sneak peek of his own for viewers during Episode 7 — a rooftop viewing area at Banc of California Stadium where he takes in the game day action — was also part of the vetting process during production and was familiar with the footage before the episodes were released earlier this week.
“It’s an interesting conversation internally because we know everything, so everybody had different opinions about what should have been in, what shouldn’t have been in,” Thorrington said.
Now that the episodes are out, the reactions have begun pouring in and so far, Thorrington said, it has been overwhelmingly positive.
“What was interesting for me was that [the feedback] didn’t come from the normal channels, it came from friends, people who are normally not up to speed on all things LAFC or football, just personal friends who happened to see it on ESPN,” he said. “It has a lot of crossover appeal.”
Though its audience may be wide, this first-of-its-kind glimpse into an MLS club — Being: Liverpool, First Team: Juventus, Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Boca Juniors Confidential lift the curtain in a similar fashion for teams in other leagues — the series also provides something for players.
“When I watch Man City [All or Nothing], I want to see what they’re talking about,” Beitashour said. “What Pep’s talking about? How the guys are taking it? That stuff is interesting to me.”
And part of what’s been interesting to the public — who’ve been chiming in from Atlanta to Cincinnati — so far has been Bob Bradley.
“My favorite moment was when Bob kicks the water bottle,” said Beitashour, referring to an intense scene after losing a late-season away match in Chicago.
Thorrington said the production crew was given “unbelievable access” and credits Bradley with being open to showing the rawer moments during LAFC’s first season.
“[Bradley] got more comfortable with it than I would have,” he said.
As the public and players continue to stream episodes in the run up to the 2019 season, the LAFC GM hopes it helps answer a question he was asked all of last season — “How did this happen?” — but Thorrington also knows there is only so much ground that can be covered in the series’ approximate 190-minute running time.
“One thing that’s not in it that I think is a huge part of who we are is the job our academy has done,” he said, giving an example of the format’s limits. “It’s impossible to give everybody the credit they deserve.”
