On this side of the Atlantic, they have a tired, trite expression for perennially successful soccer teams. Those that dominate their league, pay the best salaries and seem to suck up the best players, as they become available.

“Giants”, they inevitably are called.

“Juventus, the Serie A giants … Bayern Munich, the German giants … Galatasaray, the Turkish giants …”

Major League Soccer may be about to generate its own “giant”.

The LA Galaxy.

Consider.

–The club has won three of the past four Major League Soccer championships. That’s a “giant” success rate.

–Despite the league’s centralized structure, which suggests all teams share equally in talent, the Galaxy seem to have many of the best players available. A few years ago, it was David Beckham and Landon Donovan. Now, it’s England’s Steven Gerrard, Ireland’s Robbie Keane and Mexico’s Giovani dos Santos.

–They have one of the best coaches in the league, in Bruce Arena. He was leading the U.S. national team when it became a regular in the top 20 of the Fifa rankings, 1999-2006, and took them to the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002. He gets the best out of internationals, as well as Americans.

–They are scalding hot, at the moment. They have scored 13 goals in their past four matches and have won eight of their past 10 league matches to surge from the fringe of the playoffs picture to the top of the league, in points won, and have a league-leading goal differential of 17 (49-32).

–They have scored 10 more goals than any other MLS team, and their attacking six are imposing, in the context of this league: Keane (one MVP award, and pushing for another) and Dos Santos up top, rising American players Gyasi Zardes and Sebastian Lletget on the wings and Gerrard and Juninho in midfield.

This season has been important, too, in assessing the strength of the franchise now that Donovan has left, a year after Beckham bid adieu. And the side, this past month or more, seems better than ever, especially as Gerrard and Dos Santos have settled in.

I asked a couple of journalists who cover the Galaxy if it deserves to be placed on the edge of “super team/MLS version”.

Wrote one: “I think that’s fair, and you can echo back to last summer/early fall, when the Galaxy played their best soccer ever — akin to Barcelona or Spain — from about mid-July until early October. All ball movement and interchange, with Donovan and Keane the key elements and Marcelo Sarvas, so underrated, as the force in midfield. Now they’ve got better talent and soon could be surpassing the standard of last year.”

The other suggested the Galaxy could be the best attacking team assembled in North America — or north of the Rio Grande, anyway.

“There was talk about this team being the most talented MLS roster ever before Gio was brought in,” he wrote. “I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to assert that Keane/Gio/Gerrard/Juninho/Zardes/Lletget is best attack in history of U.S. club soccer.”

And that would include Pele’s New York Cosmos, from the North American Soccer League, still spoken about with reverence by European soccer journalists of a certain age.

(And was the Galaxy created, back in 1996, with the notion of the “Cosmos” in mind? That same interstellar thing going on. And maybe they were aware of the tendency of Spanish journalists, in particular, to refer to great teams as being made up of “galacticos”.)

The Galaxy in the back is nothing special, but competent, and it may not matter much if the club is going to score three goals a game.

And, for what it’s worth, the Galaxy is the most recent American team to win the continental championship now known as the Concacaf Champions League, in 2000.

New York City FC was the Galaxy’s most recent victim, 5-1 over the weekend, and afterward David Villa of NYC referred to a gulf between the two sides.

“In the first 20 we played the way we prepared for this game. We were playing well and almost scored a goal but them we stopped doing what we were doing,” Villa said. “We you play against a great team, let’s acknowledge that they are a great team, they are a better team than us, they are the defending champions. When you play against a team better that you the only thing you can do is stay 100 percent focused and after the 20th minute we didn’t do that.”

The Galaxy is good. As usual. It has history, it has players, it has name recognition in Europe because Beckham played there. And now Gerrard.

This may not be America’s first “giant” club, but it’s much closer to that target than anyone else.