As they contemplate Dejan Joveljić’s potential impact in Seattle, Sounders faithful may find it interesting that their club’s newest signing has a soft spot for one particular figure in Rave Green: Preki, the veteran assistant coach who shares his Serbian heritage.
“I like to play against Seattle, always, because I know that I’m going to talk to him before the game,” Joveljić told me in an interview last year, a few months into his tenure with Sporting Kansas City. “So always we talk a little bit; when I go to warm up, I see him.”
The context in that conversation was Preki’s legacy in KC, where he’s a legend, the club’s all-time leader in both goals and assists and a two-time league MVP during their Wizards era. It’s notable that Joveljić knew as much as he did about his elder compatriot, even venturing to say that he would “give my best to be close to his numbers” after joining SKC from the LA Galaxy ahead of the 2025 season.
Deki, as many of his friends and teammates call him, does his homework and pays his dues.
That was evident across the striker’s three-and-a-half seasons in Los Angeles, too. Circumstances forced him to spend much of that time as the backup to Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez regardless of form, simply due to the Mexican superstar’s status and Designated Player contract. Despite his frustration at those limitations on his playing time, and his desire to stake out a bigger role with Serbia’s national team during the 2026 World Cup cycle, Joveljić did not seek an exit.
“There were a lot of other clubs in MLS that were reaching out and trying to trade for him or to buy him,” his friend and former Galaxy teammate Sacha Kljestan explained to me in 2024. “And he was saying, ‘No, I want to be a Galaxy legend. This is the club that brought me here, and I want to do really well here.’ So I think he loves it here in LA, and I hope that we'll see him here for a long time and he will become a legend like he wants to be.”
That did come to pass, in a manner of speaking. Joveljić wrote his name into LA lore with six goals and two assists in their run to the 2024 MLS Cup trophy, including the game-winner in the final, after bagging 15g/6a in the regular season. Doing so vindicated his commitment, showing that it was him, not Chicharito, who was LA’s best spearhead for the Riqui Puig-orchestrated attack which ranks as one of the most explosive in MLS postseason history.
Joveljić was gone just a few weeks later, though. He’d aged out of his U22 initiative status, and the Galaxy lacked the DP slot that would be required to keep him in their colors, prompting the Kansas City move which made him the subject of league’s first-ever cash-for-player trade.
So Seattle are Joveljić's third team in as many years. Yet in a business teeming with nomads and mercenaries, that reflects more on MLS roster rules – and in the case of SKC, the surging ambition of a new regime aggressively and ostentatiously eager to spend big – than the player himself.
