After he leaves Liverpool at the season’s end, Steven Gerrard will – it is widely tipped – join a Los Angeles Galaxy side that has been the dominant force in MLS over the past few years.

December’s unprecedented fifth MLS Cup was the Galaxy’s third in four seasons, and despite the unedifying nature of the final itself – a 2-1 win over the New England Revolution – it did, in glimpses, illustrate some of the strengths of the team.

It also illustrated some of the adjustments the team has gone through in recent seasons, as coach and general manager Bruce Arena has carried out a calibration within uniquely restrictive MLS rules.

The salary cap in MLS is stringent – though it is likely to be eased by 25% or so in the coming weeks, as players and league thrash out a new collective bargaining agreement. The exceptions are the “designated players” permitted under the so-called “Beckham rule”, where up to three players can be paid beyond the cap. Gerrard will be one of those players.

The subsequent mix of personnel, and the fact that designated players still represent a cap hit, means that the squad-building logic of top world club teams – ideally having two world-class players for every position – is an unimaginable luxury for MLS sides. Instead, teams have to be set up to take most advantage of their most potent weapons, in the hope that the inevitable compromises don’t prove too costly.

MLS coaches often economise on, for example, full backs, where modestly-paid hard runners often provide a serviceable solution that can free up resources for more creative talent elsewhere. Interestingly enough, one of Gerrard’s prospective new team-mates, Robbie Rogers, ended up thriving as a converted full-back this year, after injuries and a lack of depth prompted his conversion from his wide midfield role. His coach arguably got lucky with that development, but history suggests Arena’s success in setting up teams is way more design than luck.

Arena, who other than his stint as national coach (in which he took the US to the 2002 World Cup quarter-finals) has been with the league since the start and is a past master at negotiating these contingencies, sometimes mid-season. He is also a master of getting his side to peak at the right time – when the Galaxy won back-to-back titles in 2011 and 2012, they looked to have played themselves out of contention after a dreadful start to 2012. They ended up being the dominant team in the league from July and knocking out the regular-season champions, San Jose.

In the most recent MLS Cup run, they lost out on the regular season title to the Seattle Sounders in back-to-back games, only to beat them in the playoffs.

Crucial to those MLS Cup runs and the most recent win was one Robbie Keane, who, as Gerrard will, arrived in the summer (of 2011). The former Tottenham and Liverpool striker has been the designated player quickest to adapt to MLS, and while a lot of credit goes to his attitude and professionalism, part of it has deservedly gone to the way his coach set up the team’s attack around him, with Landon Donovan and latterly the speed and potential of Gyassi Zardes.

Donovan, of course, has gone, and Keane is in the last year of his contract, but Gerrard will still be joining a team that looks to be convincingly evolving rather than coming to the end of an era.

The roots of the LA team are in the configuration that Arena put together around David Beckham. When Arena inherited Ruud Gullit’s mess in 2008, the Galaxy looked more likely to be sunk by the weight of Beckham’s presence than inspired. Undeterred, the new coach, who also had the expanded recruitment role of general manager, began to exploit Beckham’s strengths, particularly his long passing, while compensating for his increasing loss of mobility by pairing him deep in midfield with the industrious, ball-winning Brazilian Juninho.

Ahead of them, intelligent runs and interplay between Donovan, Mike Magee and eventually Keane found all sorts of pockets to exploit, while at the back the young USA defender Omar Gonzalez was developed and eventually signed as a designated player to marshall the defense.

When Beckham left, Marcelo Sarvas came into the midfield and offered more ball-winning bite alongside Juninho. The Galaxy began to apply pressure further up the field, often winning the ball back inside their opponents’ half and attacking in a quick-breaking 4-2-3-1.

All that said, the winner in MLS Cup last month came from the under-rated Sarvas channeling his inner Beckham with a perfectly placed ball over the top of a stretched New England defence to free Keane to score in extra-time.

It will be interesting to see how Arena adjusts for Gerrard, who may have lost his pace at the top level of the game but who will most obviously thrive in MLS as a straight swap for Donovan, as a driving attacking midfielder.

Of course, if the reported 18-month contract were to turn into any sort of extended stay, you wouldd imagine some of the same conversations that have caused angst at Liverpool in recent years would eventually be revisited in Carson, at which point Gerrard might be moved deeper again into one of the two Juninho/Sarvas spots.

But for now the latter two should provide a buffer to allow Gerrard to play with the type of aggressive abandon he prefers, and to extend his career playing the way he instinctively wants to play. His new coach will quietly take care of the team admin to allow him to do so.

And as now-serial-champion Robbie Keane can cheerfully tell him, Gerrard might even win a league title now, too.