The United States of Soccer: MLS and the Rise of American Soccer Fandom

The definitive history of Major League Soccer in America, The United States of Soccer gives the spirited in-depth account of the first 20 years of MLS, capturing the story of the visionaries who believed Americans would finally embrace the sport and the loyal fans who fulfilled that vision. Soccer journalist Phil West follows the rocky ups and downs of MLS’s history, tracking its bootstrap origins prior to its 1996 launch, its near-demise in the early 2000s, its surprising resilience and growth in the following years, and its formidable rise in respectability and recognition from soccer fans around the world.

Rounding out the story are animated explorations of the origin of MLS’s best-known supporters groups—the dedicated superfans responsible for setting the tone within MLS stadiums and defining what it is to be a North American soccer fan. The United States of Soccer gives a glimpse into how MLS helped develop the massive American audiences for the most recent men’s and women’s World Cups—peaking at 27 million viewers for the 2015 Women’s World Cup finals—even as it looks to expand its number of franchises and grow its audience in a sports-saturated world.

In this comprehensive account, West expertly merges the voices of former players and coaches, league officials, fans, and journalists to create a full picture of MLS’s remarkable journey, perfect for those new to the United States’ top-tier league as well as for those who previously thought they knew the full story.

Copyright

This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

NEW YORK

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com,

or write us at the above address.

Copyright © 2016 by Phil West

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-4683-1413-7

To everyone working to grow soccer

in the United States and Canada

CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

Chapter 1

THE PROMISE

Chapter 2

THE KICKOFF

Chapter 3

THE FIRE AND THE FUSION

Chapter 4

THE TRADITIONAL

Chapter 5

THE BRINK

Chapter 6

THE UNDERDOGS

Chapter 7

THE EXPANSION

Chapter 8

THE FIRST DESIGNATED PLAYER

Chapter 9

THE SONS OF BEN

Chapter 10

THE RIVALS

Chapter 11

THE BELIEVERS

Chapter 12

THE ANNIVERSARY

Epilogue

THE FUTURE

SOURCES

INTERVIEWS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THOUGH I’M INCREDIBLY PROUD OF THIS BOOK, IT STARTED LIFE AS A COMPLETELY different book. In the summer of 2014, I set out to chronicle how American soccer fans experienced the World Cup, by driving to a different American city every day to experience the World Cup with American fans, no matter how long the distance between cities. (I would log 11,000 miles in a Honda Eclipse that performed valiantly throughout the journey, which would then succumb to a rainstorm-induced flood in my driveway a week after I returned home, bringing me safely from a friend’s birthday party before capitulating to the deluge. Such is life.) That trip was funded in large part through an Indiegogo and a Kickstarter campaign, and I’m thankful for everyone who contributed, allowing me to traverse the nation and embark on a life-changing journey. The names of the contributors are proudly displayed at philwest.us/supporters, if you’re curious to know more about the village it took to create that book. My dad and stepmother, Larry and Lisa West, deserve a special thanks for their generosity and support.

Also greatly deserving of thanks at the book’s inception: Lauren Abramo of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, who saw enough in my initial vision to shop my idea for a book, and then to bring the mission of telling MLS’s story to me, via Peter Mayer and the entire Overlook crew.

I’m appreciative of all those who spoke to me in order to make the book possible, as well as the publicists and gatekeepers behind the scenes who helped connect me to them. Three in particular stand out: Rick Lawes, whose insight and encyclopedic knowledge of MLS history was essential at the project’s outset; Dan Wiersema, a friend here in Austin whose important work with American Outlaws galvanized my fandom and fed my curiosity about supporters’ culture; and Becky Chabot, a soccer advocate with a penchant for getting things right, who graciously stepped in to read the manuscript at a crucial juncture. (I’d also like to thank Paul DeBruler for reading early versions of the book’s first chapters between visits to Providence Park.)

I am especially appreciative of two of the most important people in my life, my sons, Noah and Lucas. Apologies that Thanksgiving 2015 was the day that Dad emerged from his writing hovel to periodically baste a turkey, and that the rest of the weekend was more of that minus the basting. You’ve shown that you understand my love of soccer and that it’s not going anywhere. Thanks for all you’ve given me throughout our journey together in life, particularly this part of it.

To my wife Katie: Thank you for your boundless support, your love, your willingness to provide balance and guidance and wisdom, as well as playful snark when it’s called for. I knew, when we awoke far too early the day after our wedding, to successfully make the opening of the North London Derby viewing party at Finn McCool’s, that I’d chosen wisely in choosing you.

I have one especially important thank you to offer, for an opportunity that came about as I was moving into the editing phase of the book. My interest in MLS led to my writing for MLSSoccer.com, and I’m grateful for the opportunity that the website’s given me to document the league I’ve fallen in love with. In particular, I’d like to thank Arielle Castillo, Andrew Wiebe, and Simon Borg for their guidance and insight. I’ve been thrilled to draw on the knowledge I’ve gained from writing this book and feel lucky to be adding to it all the time.

Of course, this book or this league wouldn’t exist without the fans who have made this iteration of an American soccer league work. If you’re holding this book, you’ve likely either attended an MLS match or you’re pondering attending your first. You, therefore, deserve a thank you for the role you’ve played—or are about to play—in making this story possible.

PREFACE

MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER’S HEADQUARTERS ARE HOUSED ON TWO FLOORS of a Midtown Manhattan office building, three blocks north of the Empire State Building. Exit the elevator to the office’s reception area and you’ll see white-on-white signage with a gleaming silver MLS Cup (officially, the Philip F. Anschutz Trophy) in a clear glass case. The halls are white, but augmented with affirming bursts of solid color—from the current generation of MLS uniforms, logo-embossed shovels from multiple stadium groundbreakings, and photos capturing twenty years of history. It’s a league aiming for the enduring inevitability of its more established siblings, such as the National Football League counting its Super Bowls in increasingly unwieldy Roman numerals or the National Basketball Association’s logo featuring the silhouette of a player who was a star a half century ago. MLS headquarters is just blocks from the headquarters of the other four major American sports leagues, but there’s an approachability and even an accessibility to the league that places it in a whole different neighborhood from its sterner older brothers.

The league commissioner is unfailingly affable in his public appearances, going on halftime shows for the major marquee events in his sport—All-Star Games, finals, and conference championships—to answer questions with candor, even with gratitude to be having the conversation about soccer.

The deputy commissioner—the league’s first employee and someone who has been with it since before it was even a league, orchestrating the careful choreography of cities, investors, and TV partners to get MLS off the ground—keeps articles about how the league wouldn’t make it (which his wife had framed for him) in his study. Among his fondest memories of the league’s early ascendancy: going into a bar called Froggy’s in Playa del Ray, California, and asking them to find the satellite signal for a market-specific broadcast of an MLS match.

When the league launched in 1996, Americans were most likely to associate soccer with soccer mom, a demographic crucial to that year’s presidential election. They didn’t necessarily hear soccer and recall the World Cup that had blown through the nation just two years prior, in which American players wore a star-spangled monstrosity which has since lovingly, nostalgically, become known as the Denim Kit.

There were fans of soccer, but there was almost a secret-society quality to them. They’d watch a PBS weekly show called Soccer Made in Germany with highlights from Bundesliga games and Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) competitions. They’d congregate at English- and Irish-themed pubs to watch top-flight English teams. They’d go to newsstands and bookstores to purchase publications on football (for that’s how most of the countries, then as now, refer to soccer) that had wended their way across the Atlantic. Before the league launched in 1996, professional soccer was hard to find: there wasn’t an Internet to speak of, though it would soon come, albeit in the Pleistocene form of listservs and crudely designed websites and message boards.

Twenty years after the league’s inception, of course, that’s all changed. For instance, I can watch my beloved Arsenal (I’ve never been to London, but I love them all the same) on TV and via highlight videos; I can read and talk about them online; I can write about them for a fan-run website where Arsenal fans communicate; and, thanks to the team’s first American trip in twenty-five years, in 2014 I was able to be in the same stadium with some of them.

But it’s not the same as being in a stadium on a regular basis and having an ongoing relationship with a team. And if you choose the level of dedication that is part and parcel of being a supporters’ group member, you have a relationship not only with a team but also with people who feel as irrationally passionate about that team as you do. You might invest time, money, and energy into proclaiming your love for your team in the enemy’s stadium. You might paint a giant sheet over the course of several days, to unfurl it for only a mere thirty seconds before the start of a match, knowing that it will in all likelihood be captured by TV cameras—because, after all, that giant sheet is helping to set a fan-generated narrative for the match. You might scream yourself hoarse during ninety minutes of action. And at the end of the match, the players you’ve been screaming for, about, and very occasionally at will come over and clap for you, acknowledge you as the fans who are unabashed about your dedication.

If this sounds like the kind of experience you wish existed in American sports, then you should keep reading, because it exists in MLS.

This is a book about MLS and its first twenty years—but not everything about it. Creating a full history of MLS, even at this stage in its young life, would be staggeringly large and even encyclopedic in its scope. My intent in the following pages is to give you a sense of the arc of the league’s competitive, year-to-year action. MLS has a competitive balance (the term the commissioner prefers to parity) that has allowed thirteen teams in the league’s first twenty years to play in MLS Cup finals, which is impressive considering that the league hovered between ten and twelve teams until 2007. And to understand the league, it’s important to know at the very least who’s worn its crown at any given time.

But the league’s importance transcends scores, individual feats of brilliance, and even victors. Soccer in the United States is—as hokey as it might sound to the uninitiated, or even the initiated—a movement. Though soccer is a sport, and though it’s a decidedly American inclination to win at every sport, the movement attached to American soccer is more about learning, about belonging, about syncing our steps with others’ around the world. In the international game, the Americans are not favorites, our victories are continental rather than global, and our discernibly American guile and gumption makes us likable underdogs rather than a respected-yet-feared superpower. To draw from the movie The Karate Kid, we’re more Daniel LaRusso than Cobra Kai, and given how we’ve fared in the last few World Cups, we’re really more Daniel LaRusso before he learned how to crane kick.

MLS doesn’t have the longest traditions, the best players in the world, or the most money. But it’s a lot further along than it was in 1996, and there’s a strong sense among many that as it grows and develops it will get to a place among the world’s elite leagues, even if it continues to be slightly out of step with the rest of the world—operating without a promotion and relegation system, and on a different calendar, blithely continuing its regular season through the summer months when the rest of the world is quadrennially, exclusively fixed on the World Cup.

MLS also has a supporters’ culture that deserves to be known in greater depth by greater numbers, and that was an impetus for this book from the outset. On its surface, a supporters’ group is merely a self-declared group of dedicated fans who like to be loud and boisterous while wearing the colors of a hometown team. But it’s clearly more than that. A supporters’ group is a self-selecting community that is sometimes coarse in its language and brash in its countenance, yet ultimately an ambassador for soccer—loving the sport with an unparalleled dedication and trying to inspire that in others through example.

Supporters’ groups, when they’re their best selves, foster camaraderie and enable a sense of humor that is vital to following a soccer team. Even in high-scoring games, goals are events, and most fans’ reactions to the majority of game action are exasperated responses to a series of moments of almost. Soccer’s a sport that demands community, and supporters’ groups are the most dramatic expression of that.

And yet, in 2016, community can be found digitally and instantaneously. With a Twitter account and a hashtag, you can participate in an ongoing game discussion that is constantly moving and continually providing opportunities for commentary. Soccer is best enjoyed when it can be talked about, exulted about, or laughed about. Soccer has humor, personality, anecdotes worth sharing with others, and narrative.

This book has history, to be sure, but it also has stories and voices that go beyond who scored when and which team won. The interview transcriptions that became part of this book—the voices of people who have helped shaped the game, the famous and the not so famous—were periodically punctuated by my own laughter.

The writing of this book has been a personal journey in which I set out to learn more about the sport I love in the country I love. And it all starts on a particularly important July 4.

(No, not that one.)

Chapter 1

THE PROMISE

In which FIFA makes the United States pledge to create a league that everyone hopes will be more successful than the NASL was.

IT’S PERHAPS FITTING THAT THE LATEST ATTEMPT TO CREATE A FIRST-DIVISION American professional soccer league—the one that’s stuck, the one that’s just reached a significant twenty-year milestone, and the one that is definitively and happily alive—began on July 4. Specifically, it was July 4, 1988, when the powers that be at the Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA) awarded the United States the 1994 World Cup. Despite a member of the Brazilian contingent telling the media, Taking the World Cup to the United States is like taking the World Series to Brazil, another Brazilian representative noted that if the World Cup came to the States, There is a great potential for economic power, and a lot of people can make a lot of money if the games take off, and that’s ultimately what helped the United States win out over Brazil and Morocco in the final vote.¹

It was a bold decision for FIFA to make, in response to what arguably was an even bolder request from the Americans in the first place. While the United States undoubtedly had the stadiums and the infrastructure to host a World Cup, there were certainly questions and doubts that a nation besotted with baseball and football would turn out for soccer. For Americans in the late 1980s, soccer was the metric system of sports: workable for the rest of the world, perhaps, but too unfamiliar to be officially adopted or embraced by the American masses.

There was one key stipulation in FIFA’s decision to grant the United States the World Cup that made it all the more daunting: FIFA wanted the Americans to create a top-tier professional soccer league, preferably before the World Cup commenced. And this was a problem, because just thirty-nine months prior to FIFA’s announcement, the prior American top-flight organization, the North American Soccer League (NASL), suspended the 1985 season when only two of the nine teams who played in 1984—the Minnesota Strikers and Toronto Blizzard—expressed interest in resuming play.² Despite a promise from the league that there would merely be a year’s hiatus and it would return with its eighteenth season in 1986, it did not. The league ultimately best known for its flagship team—the star-studded New York Cosmos of the mid-to-late 1970s, featuring Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, and Pelé—ended, to borrow from T. S. Eliot, not with a bang but a whimper. (The actual Cosmos franchise, lasting through the NASL’s doomed final season, actually called it quits midway through participation in the 1984–85 season of the Major Indoor Soccer League, which is a whimper even Eliot couldn’t have imagined.)

The 1994 World Cup announcement spurred then United States Soccer Federation (USSF) head Werner Fricker to promise a national soccer league—the vision, as the New York Times reported, was for one that will encompass in some way teams from existing semiprofessional indoor and outdoor leagues.³ But it was two years later, when a Los Angeles–based lawyer named Alan Rothenberg replaced Fricker as the head of the USSF, that the origin story of Major League Soccer began in earnest.

Rothenberg’s involvement in soccer began with serving as general counsel to the Los Angeles Wolves (of the United Soccer Association and the NASL’s first season) in the late 1960s, and ownership of the NASL’s Los Angeles Aztecs in the late 1970s.⁴ In his assessment, the USSF he inherited basically had no money, and was still being run as a grassroots organization, with a lot of good people, but without the professional or business background needed to make a World Cup happen in four years’ time.

One of the first things I did was to go back to FIFA and indicate to them that their expectation that there would be a pro league created before the World Cup was not going to work, Rothenberg explains. Laughing, he adds, There was not yet enough enthusiasm or interest that would cause people to invest millions of dollars to create a league. I thought we should do that afterward, in the hope that we would build up an interest, and that would be the catalyst for the launch of a new professional league. They didn’t have much of a choice, but they did agree to that.

Rothenberg notes that as early as 1991 he and his organizing team, at a retreat to carve out a mission statement, had the audacity to say we were going to put on the best World Cup in history. But Rothenberg wanted more; he told the group he wanted to leave a legacy for the sport of soccer that went beyond just hosting the World Cup. He notes, We didn’t want to be the circus, where everyone had a good time and when the elephants leave, the only thing to do is to clean up what they left behind.

For Rothenberg this meant creating pre–World Cup buzz through a series of exhibition matches featuring the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT), and making sure that cities hosting the events had their own legacy plans in place—perhaps involving franchises for the yet-to-be-planned league. One of the showcase events, the 1993 U.S. Cup, featured the American team hosting Brazil, England, and Germany in a tournament that brought the three world powerhouses (and the Americans) to four stadiums that would serve as World Cup venues—Chicago’s Soldier Field, Washington, DC’s RFK Stadium, the Boston-adjacent Foxboro Stadium and, for indoor stadium fans, Greater Detroit’s Silverdome—along with New Haven’s Yale Bowl, which was in contention as a World Cup host site prior to the late-1992 announcements.⁵

That was a spectacularly successful tournament, and it also got people excited about the sport, Rothenberg says. It was the precursor to the Confederations Cup, because after that, FIFA said, ‘That’s a great idea, the year before, we’ll have a major cup [in the World Cup host nation], and it’ll get the teams acclimated and it’ll obviously be a test run for the organizers.’ FIFA’s website does point to the Saudi Arabia–hosted International Champions Cup in 1992 and 1995 as the first editions of the actual Confederations Cup, but there’s something to Rothenberg’s claim about his group inspiring the test-driving of the host nation’s stadiums the year before the World Cup—Korea and Japan’s cohosting of the 2001 Confederations Cup, prior to their hosting of the 2002 World Cup, started the trend that has now become part of the FIFA World Cup blueprint.⁶

It also helped that the United States fared well—including a 2–0 upset of England (invoking the famous 1–0 World Cup victory in 1950 that invariably comes up whenever the United States faces its former colonial masters in international soccer) and a valiant 4–3 loss, in a comeback that just fell short, to eventual tournament winners Germany (led by Jürgen Klinsmann’s four goals in three games).

Despite the good feelings, debatable Confederations Cup inspiration, and clear progress toward delivering FIFA a worthy World Cup, FIFA officials expressed concerns to Rothenberg that the professional league still didn’t seem to be happening. When I took the USSF position, I didn’t expect to be the one organizing a league, Rothenberg explains. I assumed that if we built sufficient excitement and interest, that some sports entrepreneurs would step up and say, hey, the time’s right to start a league. Nobody had, and FIFA started breathing down our neck, saying you had this promise. So that’s when I brought a team together. That’s when I recruited Mark Abbott from my law firm to help out with the writing of the plan.

Abbott did a lot more than that. He became MLS’s first employee even before it was officially MLS, rounding up the support that would manifest into sponsors as well as investor-operators, the term created for the people who would be running individual or multiple teams within what came to be known as the single-entity system. Abbott grew up with the NASL—at one point in his childhood, he was a ball boy with his hometown Minnesota Kicks—and in his assessment of what it would take for a new league to succeed, he turned to the NASL for lessons in what not to do, for, as he puts it, We knew one of the first questions we were going to be asked is, ‘Hasn’t this been tried before? What’s different now?’

What they didn’t want was a league in which there were too few haves and too many have-nots. Abbott notes, The modern business of professional sports is one where team owners are competitors on the field and business partners off the field. And if you take a look at the NASL, you have moments of great success in certain markets, but they’re not all operating on the same business plan at that time. The Cosmos in 1975 and ’76 and ’77 are not even playing the same game, not the game on the field, but the business game, as the San Antonio Thunder or whatever other team. Referencing his beloved NASL team, he adds,

The Kicks had basically gotten into a million-dollar-a-year business, whereas the Cosmos were in a ten-million-dollar-a-year business, and there was such financial inequity, and such a weak set of common business principles, that ultimately when the weak teams failed, the strong teams had nobody left to play, so the league collapsed.

We needed to have successful teams, but we needed to have a strong league, because even strong teams need to be part of a common enterprise. And that was the idea. The simple idea is that we were business partners, while competitors on the field, and that as a business partnership, we had the active business environment that you see at any given time.

We did not think there was a market for people who wanted to own teams or fans who wanted to follow teams that had absolutely no chance of being successful. That didn’t mean there weren’t going to be teams that wouldn’t be more successful than others. But we did not believe that an old NASL-style league, with one or two dominant teams, would allow us to grow.

Regarding getting interested parties on board, Abbott explains how you had to get different people attached to it, and when people saw enough of a critical mass only then would serious investors pledge their support.

We had some early wins, he says of the nascent league’s efforts to garner support. ESPN and ABC had been involved with the World Cup, and even before the World Cup came had expressed interest in getting involved with the league. A number of potential sponsors who were involved in the World Cup or around it said, ‘Hey, when you launch a league, we’re interested in that.’

The new league was also seeking a level of commitment that would extend beyond the inaugural season. We were gutsy, I guess, says Rothenberg. There were probably a lot of sponsors that would have given us a one-year deal, to see if this works and if so, we’ll commit to something longer. But our experience was that if a sponsor only commits to a short time, they don’t spend a lot of money or time giving you the promotion you want. Whereas if they’ve made a longer commitment, they’ll actually get behind and make promotions. So we refused to do short-term deals—we refused to do a deal of less than three years. But that’s a bigger sell, so it’s more time-consuming.

Of course, the league also had to be sanctioned by the USSF; clearly, the Rothenberg-Abbott plan had the inside track with its Major Professional Soccer League, but there were other suitors who went before the USSF in early December 1993 in Chicago—most notably the American Professional Soccer League, which had been in operation since 1990 (and would ultimately be granted Division II status by the USSF), and League One America, proposed by Chicago marketing executive Jim Paglia, with rules that were decidedly divergent from conventional soccer. (As Beau Dure wrote in his book Long-Range Goals covering the early history of MLS, Paglia proposed dividing the field into zones marked with chevrons and limiting players to specific zones for an entire period.⁷)

The USSF awarded Division I status to the Rothenberg-Abbott plan just in time for a five-day soccer convention in Las Vegas involving FIFA and USSF officials; as Los Angeles Times reporter Julie Cart cynically assessed, "Soccer’s international brain trust has come here, ensconced itself in sumptuous hotels