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 and commenced doing what it does so well—hold meetings.”8 The week culminated with the 1994 World Cup draw on December 19 (involving singer James Brown, President Bill Clinton, actor Robin Williams, and other assorted American luminaries), but also included Rothenberg’s December 17 announcement of a twelve-team, single-entity professional league that would operate under the name Major League Soccer.9
The coupling of the official MLS announcement with the World Cup draw made sense strategically: what better time, with the eyes of literally hundreds of millions of soccer fans on Las Vegas, to announce the beginning of a new, ambitious American league? And yet, Abbott notes that potential investors and sponsors were “holding off on committing until they saw how the World Cup went, because even in the spring of 1994, there was a lot of skepticism about it. There were polls coming out saying people weren’t caring about it, all sorts of things.”
The exhibition games leading up to the 1994 World Cup were as much about test-driving potential cities willing to host franchises as they were about enticing potential investors and fans. The games also helped raise the profile of national team players, which Rothenberg noted were being called into meetings with potential investors and sponsors to help the organizers seal deals. Rothenberg describes another early ally during this period, Lamar Hunt, as “really wonderful in joining us and talking to some potential investors.”
Kevin Payne, who was then overseeing the U.S. Soccer Partners group responsible for putting on USMNT exhibition games between 1990 and 1994, notes that the games, billed as the “World Series of Soccer,” were averaging close to 30,000 fans a game in the year leading up to the World Cup, which led him to consider assembling an ownership group for a team. He met with Rothenberg and Abbott in March 1994 to express his interest in assembling such a group, shortly after Hunt had given indications that he’d go in for at least one team. After the World Cup, when Payne learned that Stuart Subotnick and John Kluge from New York–based Metromedia were looking to create a New York team, he looked to Washington, DC, which had drawn particularly well for the exhibition games it hosted, as a potential site for the team. “We were pretty convinced that, presented properly, the sport would succeed,” he says. “We really liked the DC market. At the time, of all the various stadiums that were available, RFK was actually a pretty good soccer venue … and we knew the Redskins were going to be moving out in ’97. So [a DC MLS team] would have relative control of the stadium.”
Payne worked for a British company, API, which “believed in the sport in the U.S.” and was committed to being part of the ownership group. It took him about a year to put the original ownership group together, which hinged on the involvement of George Soros and the managers who worked at his Quantum Group of Funds. As Payne recalls, “They had an internal private equity deal. Basically, anything that his managers wanted to invest in, George would match their investment. So they would have done 100 percent of the team, but our company was going to put in 20 percent, and I already had some other investors lined up, so the Soros group ended up putting in about 55 percent.”
But MLS was already establishing expectations before deals were finalized. Two days prior to the start of the World Cup, MLS announced that seven initial markets would receive a franchise, including Boston, Los Angeles, New York and northern New Jersey, San Jose, Washington, DC, and—in a seemingly puzzling choice to casual observers—Columbus, Ohio.10 (Columbus, by gathering nearly 11,500 deposits for season tickets, showed a level of fan support that allowed it to vault more traditional core cities for American sports leagues, and Rothenberg was quoted in the Columbus Dispatch on the franchise announcement saying that “‘everything’ was favorable about the bid from Columbus.”11)
At the time, the official party line was that MLS would still be a twelve-team league, starting in the spring of 1995. According to a Seattle Times article analyzing the announcement—at a time when Seattle still considered itself to be a contender for one of the inaugural franchises—the league was already concerned with which venues would be sufficiently “soccer-ready,” as well as how the projected audience for soccer, in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 people, would exist inside stadiums geared toward baseball and football crowds three to four times that size:
Reflecting the scarcity of soccer-ready venues, the list of 22 bidding cities shows that most of them plan to use stadiums where college or NFL teams are primary tenants.
MLS officials prefer that teams play in 20,000- to 30,000- seat stadiums with grass fields, but few of the proposed interim facilities meet that criteria.
Of the 22 bidding cities, 10 want to drape off sections of large stadiums used by pro football teams to make the stadiums seem smaller.
Stadiums on college campuses accompany at least seven of the bids, including Phoenix (Sun Devil Stadium) and Columbus, Ohio (Ohio Stadium).
Of the cities proposing to use interim facilities, only two cities, New York and Columbus, have firm plans to build permanent stadiums specifically for soccer.12
As it so happened, the size and scale of American football stadiums worked to make the 1994 World Cup the best-attended edition of the tournament in history—a record that has still not been broken. FIFA’s official website lists 1994’s average attendance at 68,991 per match, with the most recent World Cup, Brazil in 2014, coming in a distant second at 53,592 per match (despite the best efforts of the nearly 80,000-person capacity Maracanã Stadium to skew that).13
The Rose Bowl, then hosting nearly 92,000 for soccer, was home to several group stage matches as well as the final; a number of other large stadiums primarily used for NFL football were utilized for the tournament, including Chicago’s Soldier Field, New Jersey’s Giants Stadium, Washington, DC’s RFK Stadium and, perhaps inadvisably, Pontiac, Michigan’s Silverdome, which was made acceptable to FIFA and the soccer world by overlaying its artificial turf surface, for the duration of the tournament, with grass grown in large trays. In an SB Nation article on the 1994 World Cup, American midfielder Thomas Dooley, recalling the USA–Switzerland match that opened the squad’s group stage campaign, called the Silverdome “the worst place I have ever played,”14 in large part because grass doesn’t grow well at all in a domed stadium.
In a 2014 retrospective for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Baxter chronicled how some of the most recognized names on the USMNT were personally inspired by the 1994 World Cup: then six-year-old Michael Bradley watched Norwegian and Italian players train in their New Jersey camps; eleven-year-old Chris Wondolowski watched Brazil train at Santa Clara, California’s Buck Shaw Stadium; seven-year-old Graham Zusi ran around the Soldier Field grounds with an inflatable soccer ball as Diana Ross sang as part of the tournament’s opening ceremony, and five-year-old Omar Gonzalez, a participant in the pregame festivities at the Cotton Bowl, determined then and there that he would one day play for the national team. Baxter’s summation is succinct yet superlative: “Twenty years later it remains the most transformative event in U.S. soccer history, one that rescued the national federation from bankruptcy, gave birth to a top-tier professional league and proved to doubting sponsors and a skeptical public that the sport could make it here.”15
As Alexi Lalas—the 1994 World Cup hero whose roles in the league have included player, general manager for three teams under the Anschutz Entertainment Group banner, and commentator for ESPN and now Fox Sports—recalls,
It was a wonderful introduction … for people who hadn’t in person seen what it could be.
Two weeks before the World Cup, I got on a plane, in a middle seat on coach, as was the norm back then. I sat down next to an older lady, and we struck up a conversation, and she asked, “What do you do?” And I said, “I play soccer.” And she said, “Oh, that’s nice, but what’s your job?” And I said, “I play soccer.” And she goes, “But what do you do for money?” And two weeks later, I was playing in front of a billion people.
That summer, the culture changed in relation to soccer. The soccer people came aboveground … because it was their thing that was finally here. And the nonsoccer people, some of it was patriotic because it was our country and we love an event, and to be able to chant “USA!” and wear the colors, that’s something Americans love to do, and that was evident all summer.
The success of the World Cup—fueled in part by the patriotism Lalas described—allowed MLS to more effectively put its plans in motion. Abbott notes that once all the interested but concerned parties saw how well the World Cup had gone, “We had a series of meetings with potential investors that got really serious in terms about how this could really work, in the late summer and fall of ’94. Then we started the process of really almost doing an RFP [request for proposal] with cities who had an interest. We really started to put together all the pieces we would need.”
And yet the organizers sprung a surprise on those eager for the league to start up: they announced it wouldn’t debut in 1995, as expected, but in 1996. “With the prior unsuccessful league, we couldn’t make a mistake coming out of the starting blocks,” Rothenberg explains. “If we tripped and fell, nobody would pick us up. It was better to do it right than on a particular time schedule. At the end of the day, we felt we need really substantial finances. While we had a core number of investors, we felt that we were on the margin, and taking that extra year enabled us to add a couple of investors to give us that much more financial comfort.”
There was an additional reason to delay the launch. As Rothenberg points out, “Frankly, we wanted to dampen enthusiasm. It sounds crazy, but you’d just come off of this summer in ’94—the most exciting soccer, full stadiums—and we knew, starting a new league, that it wouldn’t look like that. If we started a new league and there were suddenly only 15,000 to 20,000 people in the stands, we knew that was a great number to hit, but the media and the public would say, ‘Oh my God. This thing is a failure.’ So, it was to calm everyone down between the euphoria and the launch of the league.”
As Payne recalls, “The early conversations were mostly about what levels of support did we need to actually launch the league. We spent a lot of time talking about some really basic structural elements of the league, talking about how the single entity would work. And there was also quite a bit of discussion about who else could be recruited to the league.”
There was also discussion about the buy-in required to be an investor-operator; Payne recalls they settled on $5 million per team. There was also an additional call option for $3 million, committing the owners to make that payment if the league needed additional funding in the beginning. The league would eventually attract Phil Anschutz—who would later prove integral to the league’s survival—as the investor-operator for the team slated to go to Denver. When the league was stuck on just eight investor-operators, at what Payne characterized as a critical meeting for the nascent league’s future, Subotnick pledged an additional $5 million option for a second team in New York, and Anschutz also pledged $5 million for a second team (though he wasn’t even present at the meeting) to get the league to its $50 million goal. And yet, MLS would start its inaugural season with two teams—Dallas and Tampa—operated by the league.
Though cities and investors were key, the league also needed players, and felt it was important to draw from the cast who had starred in the World Cup. “There was a lot of interest in terms of U.S. national team players and international players—some of the greats came, like [Carlos] Valderrama and [Jorge] Campos,” Abbott says. “There was a focused effort on that. And there were some early successes—Tab Ramos in early ’95, he was the first commit. And then [John] Harkes, and [Alexi] Lalas, the names that people had learned coming out of the World Cup, and it felt very important for us to have that.”
Ramos was recruited by MLS Deputy Commissioner Sunil Gulati to become MLS’s first player; as he recalls, “I was in the middle of a contract with Real Betis in Spain. I was having some difficulties there after my injury in World Cup ’94. I had an opportunity to come to Tigres in Mexico. Sunil came in and said, ‘How about if we buy you and loan you out to Mexico, and then you sign with us?’ And I said, ‘But there’s no league.’ And he said, ‘We think if you sign with the league, it’ll encourage other Americans to sign.’”
So Ramos signed before any teams were announced, but at least knew there would be a team in New York/New Jersey and one in Washington, DC. As a condition of signing first, he was able to choose where he’d be slotted. In large part because his parents and other family members were in Jersey, he chose to play for what would become the MetroStars.
Once he signed, other American players recruited by MLS contacted him to ask about his commitment, and once Valderrama and Campos came on board, Ramos felt a little bit better about his decision.
MLS held its inaugural draft on February 6–7, 1996, to allow teams to claim players. Notable names included Brian McBride, who went to the Columbus Crew with the first overall pick, and a trio of players who would, upon concluding their playing careers, distinguish themselves as MLS head coaches: Peter Vermes, a third-rounder for the MetroStars who would be at his most impactful in Kansas City; Jason Kreis, a fifth-rounder for the Dallas Burn who would net his first of four double-digit goal seasons his first year; and Frank Yallop, who would round out an England-centric playing career with the Tampa Bay Mutiny.16
But the league’s initial marquee players were slotted into teams in preparation for the MLS Unveiled launch on October 17, 1995. Ramos was the first MetroStar, Harkes was the first member of D.C. United, Lalas was the first member of the New England Revolution, and flamboyantly attired Mexican goalkeeper Campos was the first member of the Los Angeles Galaxy.
MLS Unveiled was held at New York City’s Palladium nightclub and geared to generate excitement around the league and finally give fans an idea of what they’d specifically be rooting for—which Nike’s creative team, in particular, had a not-so-subtle hand in.
Rothenberg notes that Nike wanted to be MLS’s exclusive uniform sponsor during its negotiations with the league—certainly appreciated, as Rothenberg recalls, but not necessarily desired:
We loved the fact that Nike wanted in like that, but we felt not to have the others—Adidas, Reebok at the time, Puma, Mitre—that it would be a mistake. We cut them back to half the teams. We went out and got a different ball sponsor, other teams had Adidas, we included all of them. We even had a referee’s uniform sponsor, which was kind of unheard of. But the idea was to have anyone of any consequence in that industry to be involved with us. It’s pretty gutsy to tell Nike, “Thanks, but you can only have half.”
In the end, Nike did indeed end up with the rights to half the teams’ jerseys, creating the identity and multicolored looks for the Dallas Burn, Los Angeles Galaxy, New York/New Jersey MetroStars, San Jose Clash, and Tampa Bay Mutiny. Los Angeles Times coverage of the event dutifully reported that the Galaxy’s home colors were “black, chili red, Kenyan gold and juniper,” while the Clash would be playing in “celery green, forest green, red, light teal and black,” with a scorpion for a mascot.17
Adidas took a relatively more sober approach with D.C. United and Columbus Crew’s jerseys, but then unleashed its palette for the Kansas City Wiz’s six-color achievement. Reebok made the New England Revolution’s red, white, and blue jerseys as crazy as a tricolor jersey could be, and Puma created a billowy forest-green-and-white look for the Colorado Rapids. The ten team uniforms, taken together, showed a definite departure from the more traditional American sports leagues, with design elements that borrowed more from skater culture than traditional soccer culture, and color schemes that helped fix the uniforms firmly in the mid-1990s.
While Abbott stops short of the notion that Nike had free rein over the branding process for its teams, noting that investor-operators (or the league, for teams without investor-operators) had to sign off on team names and other branding elements, he adds, “Nike played a significant role in terms of some of the thinking of team names and branding at that point.”
Randy Bernstein, MLS’s chief marketing officer from 1995 to 1999, remembers the process being a collaborative one in which Nike worked closely with the league in creating brands, tailoring names and colors to the specific markets where the teams would play, and choosing what he judiciously describes as “what colors were interesting to people during that time.”
“We were operating on a shoestring budget compared to what the league has now,” Bernstein comments. “When we had the opportunity to use the expertise of global powerhouses like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, we were so thrilled to be able to have them as resources. At the time, we could have never afforded to hire those people independently.”
As the San Jose Mercury-News noted in its article on the Clash’s branding, there was at least public agreement between ownership and Nike’s marketers as to the identity: “Nike spokeswoman Judy Campbell noted that Clash constitutes an image and attitude, the scorpion illustrates ‘an attacker that is quick and mean,’ and the logos and colors ‘reflect the diverse ethnic make-up and heritage of the Bay Area.’” The article also noted that owner Peter Bridgewater “added that the scorpion represents the attacking style of soccer he expects the Clash to play. ‘I want us winning 4–3, not 1–0.’”18
“It was fun,” Abbott now says of MLS Unveiled. “It was a real milestone for us in terms of another step in showing we were on a path to launching a league. We were trying to demonstrate progress toward the ultimate goal of launching a league, and MLS Unveiled was one of the steps toward that.”
Yet some were baffled and even perturbed by the branding decisions. Payne, in particular, observed that the uniform designs, at best, were taking their lead from the anime-inspired uniforms of the just-launched J-League in Japan.
“That worked very well in Japan,” Payne comments. “That was very culturally relevant there. It wasn’t here. And the suppliers thought the reason this is going to succeed is because it’ll be looked at as sort of a disruptive sport. The kids like it because their parents don’t know anything about it. It’s generational, and it’s going to have the same kind of look and feel as skateboarding or surf culture. Which just couldn’t have been more off-base. You look at those original uniforms and logos and team names, and you compare them with D.C. United and you know, really, everybody else got it completely wrong. It set the league back years.”
D.C. United fans witnessing the unveiling seemed to express relief that its team had the most normal of the ten uniform styles. As Paul Sotoudeh, a longtime member of the Screaming Eagles supporters’ group observes, “Harkes is standing there in the D.C. United jersey and with everyone else—it looks like you took peyote! All these colors all around you!”
Ramos was a bit wary; looking back today, he notes, “Compared to the rest of the world, they seemed a little bit flashy. They seemed almost too American.”
Lalas is more forgiving of the looks that MLS Unveiled brought to the league—perhaps because in the mid-1990s he was an embodiment of not just soccer fashion but the decade itself:
It was still very much an underground, niche type of sport in the U.S. I think that a lot of that is in the way we went about positioning it, the aesthetic of it—and on the field, it was wild as well. But I think it was needed, and even necessary, as painful as it might have been. We needed to go through that to get to where we are now, twenty years out. I think it’s revisionist to a certain extent to say you’re against it from the start. A lot of it looks dated only because it happened in the ’90s and it’s relative to the ’90s.
Some were upset with MLS Unveiled for other reasons—namely, that not every team was granted players by the league. Columnist Ann Killion, writing in the Mercury-News, groused:
Fifteen months after its momentum peaked, Major League Soccer was launched Tuesday.
Smoke, disco lights and adorable children were brought in to announce that San Jose is the proud home of an exciting, hardnosed, competitive … logo.
That was the gist of a 75-minute, over-choreographed media event for the newest addition to the San Jose sports scene. The local site was connected to New York via satellite hookup for the nationwide unveiling of MLS, the new professional outdoor soccer league, a league that was a requirement for the United States to host the World Cup, a league that originally was expected to have its debut last spring but instead will get started almost two years after soccer’s finest hour on American soil.
Some of the 10 MLS teams left Tuesday’s gala with an actual player. Alas, your San Jose Clash was not one of them.19
But the names and logos were, to those covering them, the most puzzling aspects of the event. The Tampa Tribune, noting that the Mutiny name wasn’t a surprise due to its having been leaked earlier in the month, observed, “What was surprising is that the Mutiny have nothing to do with a pirate walking the plank. This Mutiny, conjured up by artists at Nike, is a video-game inspired, high-tech creature resembling a bat. Another version of the logo mutates into something resembling a thorny-legged bug from outer space.”20
And in a story headlined “Wiz GM Adjusts to Name,” the Kansas City Star reported that “radio talk-show lines buzzed with criticism of the name Wiz” following the announcement, but Wiz general manager Tim Latta claimed that once people saw the name in context with the logo, they better understood the concept (or, at least, weren’t so alarmed). As he put it, “We’re probably now selling eight to 10 tickets for every knee-jerk reaction we received.”21
Perhaps the best naming and branding story in the league involved the Columbus Crew. Had Columbus-based fast food chain White Castle had its way, the would have been named the Slyders after their signature hamburger, and had team organizers gone with their initial inclination, central Ohioans might have rallied behind the Eclipse.22 Thankfully, the team allowed its pool of potential fans to contribute ideas for team names, and Colombian-born student Luis Orozco was one of thousands of Ohioans who contributed to the naming contest. Orozco was the sole person to come up with the Crew as a name; as he told Eight by Eight magazine, his vision played off Columbus sharing a name with Christopher Columbus, with the “crew” here being the sailors who helped the explorer sail the ocean blue in 1492. Orozco had even conceived a motto in line with the league’s desire to help Americans seek out and find the world’s game at home: “Christopher Columbus discovered America; come and discover us.”
On October 17, 1995—the same day as MLS Unveiled—Orozco was announced as the winner of the contest, but the “crew” the team came up with was a far different crew than the one he’d imagined. To his disappointment—and, as it would turn out, the bewilderment and amusement of many—the team adopted a construction crew interpretation of the nickname, culminating in a shield-shaped logo in which “The Crew” topped a rendering of three alleged construction workers in very broad-brimmed hard hats.23
Even more remarkably, given that a number of teams made wholesale branding changes before the league reached ten years of age, the Crew retained its original logo until October 2014, when the team officially rebranded itself as Columbus Crew SC and replaced the hunky trio with a simple black-and-yellow circular logo made complex by a checkerboard, diagonal lines, and a shield with the number 96 inside it.
D.C. United, like the Crew, polled its potential fan base for a name, but ended up naming itself. As Payne recalls, he was having lunch with other US Soccer Partner team members, and he was talking about wanting a traditional name for the team. Someone in their employ not involved with the team efforts cracked, “Well, why don’t you just call it United? That’s what all the soccer teams are called.” They ended up gravitating toward the name, even though other names were under consideration.
Payne recalls,
It’s not like we immediately adopted the name. There have been a few writers who took this story out of context and decided there was no thought put into it, that it was just blurted out in a meeting and that was that. We did spend time talking about it, but the more we said it, the more we liked it. It did answer those two elements. It spoke to the soccer community, and we also thought it could speak to the DC community. Obviously, we needed to appeal to both. We didn’t necessarily think that we could survive with just the soccer community in DC. We needed to get other people in DC interested in the team, and this seemed to be a name that would do that.
Like the uniforms, the ten team names taken together, even with D.C. United’s European traditionalism factored in, represented a departure from traditional American sports and its predominantly plural animal team names. A FIFA feature on the league’s impending debut in February 1996 made the departure seem especially extreme. The article aimed to highlight the “bright and distinctive” team names of the ten franchises, but with language that so clearly and fancifully departed from what Americans would expect a league to say about its teams, into something wonderfully pan-European and twinkly and sounding as if it were translated into English, that it demands a full cutting and pasting:
SAN JOSE CLASH
“Clash” is a favorite media word for an intense confrontation between close rivals, and the new Clash team hopes to play like a scorpion: quick and lethal, defending by attacking.
LOS ANGELES GALAXY
LA has long had its galaxy of stars in Hollywood and no doubt hopes the new MLS team will also sparkle; the energetic spinning logo should convey the pace of the city and of the game.
COLORADO RAPIDS
Colorado is a mountain State of rushing rivers in the Rockies, fast and free as no doubt the fans in Denver hope their team’s football will be.
DALLAS BURN
The fire-breathing mustang shows raw horsepower and speed in the high-combustion Texan oilfield; “Burn” is a reference not only to Texas’s most famous export but also to the effects of the summer sun.
No real local connections, it seems, but instead a play on the name of the popular musical The Wizard of Oz—the rainbow strips coming from the musical’s most famous song, Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
TAMPA BAY MUTINY
Despite Tampa Bay’s ocean location and the nautical overtones of the new club name, the logo contains instead what its creators call a “cyber-mutant from the dark blue depths of space … soccer reaching the fourth dimension.”
COLUMBUS CREW
Columbus Ohio has the image of a hard-working Middle American city and the name Crew, together with the three workers in hard-hats, reflect these demographics; the Crew aims to be the hardest working team in the new league.
D.C. UNITED
The only traditional football team name in the MLS, as the team from the federal capital aims for international and community appeal not least through the eagle, a symbol of freedom and strength and of the United States itself.
NEW YORK METROSTARS
The logo aims to project the non-stop activity of a big city that never sleeps, the skyscraper metropolis stretching from home-town New York out to New Jersey and the site of the Giants Stadium.
NEW ENGLAND REVOLUTION
A tribute to the crucial role played in the American Revolutionary War, 220 years ago, by this patriotic part of the United States.24
Ultimately the branding appeared rooted in a desire to appeal to youth, or at the very least, what Nike and its competitors imagined young soccer fans were looking for in team names and jerseys. Abbott judiciously observes, “I think there was a debate about it at the time that has now been clarified. I think at that point in time, a lot of people believed that the primary opportunity were youth opportunities. People said that for a long time about soccer, and that was a lot of the thinking about the branding at that particular time. What we’ve seen over time is that really a change, where while youth market support is always going to be important, the depth of the soccer market in the United States goes way beyond that.”
The perceptions of the U.S. soccer market, and how MLS would reach it, extended beyond uniforms and into how the game would be played on the field. The league adopted two significant changes from soccer as the rest of the world played it. First, game clocks in stadiums would count down from forty-five minutes to zero, opposite to the customary count up from zero, with referees monitoring the time and determining when each half ends. Second, if a game was tied after ninety minutes, MLS would use a penalty shootout system to decide a winner. For a while, there was even serious discussion of widening the goals to provide for more daring shot attempts, more acrobatic goalkeeping, and (probably) more scoring.
Even with its imperfections, its jerseys accented in celery green and Kenyan gold, its countdown clock and other assorted variances bordering on jingoism, and its inception borne of a condition for the United States to host a World Cup, Rothenberg, Abbott, the sponsors, the investor-owners, and in no small part, the fans both old and new who found something rekindled within them via the World Cup all worked tirelessly to bring a new professional soccer league from a promise to reality. So it came to be that a spring day in a college football stadium in Northern California in 1996, professional soccer returned to a nation that, if it didn’t necessarily want it or need it, was at least promised it.