"I hadn't heard anything from my agent, I hadn't heard anything from the club," Nguyen said.
"I got that call and my life changes," Nguyen said after Friday's practice, his second with LAFC. "After that I was up for the next three hours. I couldn't go to sleep."
But he wasn't the only one excited by the trade. Since his first appearance with a U.S. age-group national team as a teenager, Nguyen has inspired many in the Vietnamese community — both in the U.S. and in Vietnam, where he played for two years. So his arrival in Southern California received heavy coverage on Vietnamese-language radio and in the lively newspapers that circulate in central Orange County, home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam.