The LA Galaxy has been around for 21 seasons now, but it struck me today that never in that time had the soccer club had to fight for attention in its hometown with a local National Football League team.

The NFL abandoned the Los Angeles market after the 1994 season, when the Rams and Raiders declared they were moving to St. Louis and Oakland, respectively.

MLS and the Galaxy did not make their debut until 1996, and in terms of “an 11-man territorial game played on a large field” … well the Galaxy was the only professional outfit in town for a generation. (If you don’t count USC and UCLA as professional football.)

It was never like the MLS usurped the NFL anywhere in the U.S. … but in Los Angeles, the local soccer club never had to have its nose rubbed in the dirt in head-to-head competition for hearts and minds with the country’s most successful sports league.

Today, that happened. For the first time, but not the last.

The Galaxy played in Kansas City in a semi-important MLS game. Getting late in the season now, and the club of Landon Donovan, Robbie Keane and Steven Gerrard is jockeying for a favorable position in the playoffs — and perhaps also winning the Supporters’ Shield, which goes to the club with the best regular-season record.

(Which would be “the championship” in most of the rest of the world’s club soccer leagues.)

The Galaxy was obliterated in local media coverage by the Rams in their second coming as a Los Angeles NFL franchise.

If you did not see the Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the two clubs … you perhaps should have a look, because it was a landslide for the Rams.

The Galaxy played at 11 a.m. (Los Angeles time) at Kansas City, and in a fairly interesting match, televised nationally, the Galaxy secured one point from a 2-2 draw thanks to Donovan’s goal in the 76th minute.

The Times put up the wire-agency version of the game, perhaps 10 paragraphs, and called it a day. (And now I can’t even find that, on the latimes.com site.)

Because the major print media outlet in Los Angles was saving its attention for the Rams, ugly 28-0 losers in San Francisco the week before.

The Rams attracted 91,000 to the Coliseum in their home debut, a full house in the grand old stadium, with lots of hoopla and a variety of celebrities in the stands and former Rams greats — from when the club owned Los Angeles — roaming the sidelines.

Which led to this lengthy game story on the 9-3 Rams victory, and this columnist rhapsodizing about the club’s return and this sidebar on a Rams cornerback and this notebook … not to mention a minute-by-minute blog generated during the game in imitation of standard soccer practice by English newspapers for the biggest matches of the day.

The Rams-versus-Seattle matchup wasn’t even a good game. Neither team managed a touchdown, and the Rams don’t have a TD in 120 minutes of action covering two games this season. But they won, thanks to a stout defense, three field goals and a poor performance by the Seattle Seahawks, whose quarterback, Russell Wilson, was dealing with a balky ankle.

And they demonstrated which sport still has the overwhelming attention of the American sports consumer.

That would not be the little guys running around the soccer pitch. That would be the big guys slamming into each other on the football field.

We could make a case that the NFL might be doomed, given its massive and deepening issues with head injuries.

But for the immediate future, the league that gives us the Super Bowl is king of sports beasts. And MLS has, in the Los Angeles market, now slipped a rung down to sixth-most-followed professional club, at best — behind the Rams, baseball’s Dodgers and Angels, and the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers. Maybe seventh, or eighth, if we slot in the hockey Kings and Ducks ahead of the Galaxy, too.

Soccer is not going to dry up and blow away in Los Angeles. In the 20 years while the Galaxy was the only 11-man professional game in  town, it put down some deep roots.

The club has its own stadium, in Carson, and the Galaxy generally sells nearly all 27,000 seats. It has those five championships we mentioned. It has four or five players (Gerrard, Keane, Donovan, perhaps Giovani dos Santos and Ashley Cole) who, globally, are better known than anyone in the NFL.

But they have just been thrown in the shade in their hometown by the return of the Rams.

The clubs will continue to have their own fans, the Rams’s skewing older and more conservative, and the Galaxy’s younger and more worldly.

But in terms of the general market … it’s not even a competition. The Rams have showed up after 21 seasons … and re-taken ownership of Sunday afternoon in greater Los Angeles.

The Galaxy, meanwhile, if they like the idea of more prominent coverage in local media, or any coverage at all, might want to consider playing more matches on Saturdays.