NOT A SCORELESS TIE. ANYTHING BUT THAT.
That’s what pretty much everyone invested in the future of Major League Soccer was thinking when the league finally launched on April 6, 1996, for its first-ever game between the San Jose Clash and D.C. United in Spartan Stadium. Plenty had gone well leading up to the kickoff—the game had sold out the nearly 32,000 seats available, and it was being nationally televised on ESPN. Though the game didn’t feature the best soccer ever played, it was anyone’s game heading into the second half. But then, it just kept being anyone’s game, right up the point where it seemed that the game wouldn’t have a winner at the end of regulation.
Of course, had the match gone to 0:00—for the countdown clock was part of the MLS universe in 1996—the spectacle of the shootout would have added to the opening-day pomp. Starting from thirty-five yards out, a player would have five seconds to dribble and attempt to place a ball past the goalie. Five players per team would take turns doing this; it was a twist on the conventional penalty kick shootout that international soccer utilized when it was absolutely necessary to break a deadlock. Thanks to enough of a critical mass in the MLS offices concerning the degree to which Americans abhorred ties, breaking them was considered an absolute necessity.
But, in the eighty-eighth minute, a miracle occurred. The Clash’s Eric Wynalda—a 1994 World Cup hero allocated to the Clash to become one of the team’s marquee players—dribbled through three United defenders and curled a wicked shot from just inside the left corner of the eighteen-yard line for a beautiful goal that was later named—for its historical significance as much as it aesthetic glory—the season’s goal of the year.
Or, as the Associated Press’s lead paragraph on the match cynically had it, “The latest effort to create a major outdoor pro soccer league in the United States kicked off with fireworks and balloons tonight, and, after 87 frustrating minutes, there was even a goal.”1
As Wynalda remembers,
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it during the game, what a disaster it would be if it went to 0–0 and we had to do that shootout thing. The reality was, I had two really good chances during the game. One was on a free kick that the goalie had an amazing save on, I thought it was in, and on another … I had a great pass in and was all alone and just pushed it wide. I was thinking I’m not gonna get another chance. I was hoping for it—but I think it served me well, because in the end, when I did get the ball the way the scenario played out, I was locked in and focus, because I knew this was my last shot at scoring. It worked out perfectly.
While Wynalda expresses some regret for beating U.S. national teammate Jeff Agoos on the play, he also notes that because he played against him in practice, he knew his tendencies, which he was able to use in his favor.
Media roundups of the match were mixed: some found aspects to be critical of, now matter how tangential, and others legitimately looked to assess how MLS’s brand of soccer—albeit only one game old—fared in comparison to that of the rest of the world.
Contra Costa Times writer Gary Peterson called attention to the pregame “obligatory skydiver,” who stumbled and wrestled with his chute as he made a hard landing on the field, and who then appeared confused as he looked for a dignitary to accept the commemorative soccer ball he was holding, eventually wandering over to “a group of very self-important people conducting the 3- or 4,000th pregame ceremony of the evening.” Peterson then asked, “Could there have been a more tidy or symbolic portrait of Major League Soccer?”2
Mark Ziegler, in a San Diego Union-Tribune article that generally skewed positive, noted that the game had featured “a first half of uneventful and unimaginative soccer, and a second half of blown chances—the residue of new players and new teams and new coaches, all squeezed by a painfully narrow field (63 yards instead of the usual 70) and the tension of a momentous occasion.” He also was impressed enough by the sale of English bangers at the concession stand to mention it twice.3
Grahame L. Jones, in his postmatch wrap-up in the Los Angeles Times, asked, “Will the quality of play in MLS live up to all the hype?” He answered himself by saying “yes and no,” and despite lauding several San Jose players, added, “There was also ample evidence that MLS has signed several players who do not belong at this level. Too many late tackles, too many crude fouls and sloppy passing kept the game from rising to any great height. But despite the lack of goals, there was drama and tension, and most important, enough entertaining soccer played to probably bring the crowds back. At least, that’s what MLS is counting on.”4
The American mainstream media was predictably guarded about how the new league might fare given the NASL’s demise a decade prior. Ross Atkin’s Christian Science Monitor article, published the day before the season opener, provided a series of concerns about the league’s chances for success, using soccer commentator Seamus Malin as the primary yea-sayer to counter the criticism. Atkin brought up the end of the NASL, then countered that notion with Malin’s observation that “the NASL enjoyed ‘tremendous success’ before it flamed out, attracting large crowds in a number of cities.”
Atkin also noted that when the league delayed its launch to 1996, “[a]nxiety grew about the failure to capitalize on World Cup momentum and diminished interest in major league baseball” before noting that that “the delays have been advantageous,” as, according to Malin, “they distanced the U.S. public from the euphoria and excitement that surrounded the month-long World Cup.”5 Which was, of course, exactly how MLS chairman Alan Rothenberg had wanted it.
Rothenberg and other league officials were publicly buoyed by the first match—especially its ending. “I don’t think we could have written a script with a better ending,” he told the media after the game. “To end up with a dramatic goal by the leading goal-scorer in American soccer history before a home crowd—what else could you ask for? I wouldn’t have dared to write a script that had that kind of a corny ending.”6
“I don’t think if it had been a zero-zero tie that anybody would have believed that it was an exciting game and a great (inaugural) weekend,” Sunil Gulati told the media. “What they would have written was that it was zero-zero (at the World Cup final between Italy and Brazil) in 1994, and two years later, it was zero-zero again, and that nothing has changed.”7
Mark Abbott also felt a certain satisfaction, given the work he’d been doing for three years prior to get the league to this point. “There was a sense of collective excitement that here we’d been working on this for a long time and it had arrived,” he notes. “And it arrived in a way that was really successful—it had sold out, it had a good television rating. It was just a really joyous occasion where we realized we really had something here.”
The opening Clash–United match was a stand-alone game on the schedule, with the league’s other eight teams debuting the following weekend. That same weekend also featured the very scenario league officials and proponents had been dreading in the opener: a game went to a shootout. The Clash traveled to Dallas, and their scoreless tie switched to a win, 2–1, by the Burn. Wynalda, the first player up in the shootout, wasn’t even able to get his shot off before the requisite five seconds.
“I didn’t particularly like it—it was odd,” Wynalda recalls of the shootout system, which he notes was only familiar to those in the league who’d been around the NASL, which used shootouts to finish games. “We practiced them, and I tried to get as much feedback as I could from goalkeepers as to what they thought about it and what their plan was. It really came down to hitting it hard, slotting it to one side or the other, or chipping it. It really just came down to those three options.”
The first full weekend also placed into motion something Gulati had said in the Atkin article on how to create the energized atmosphere that would come naturally with smaller, soccer-specific stadiums, but not in the larger stadiums that teams would play in before soccer-specific stadiums could be funded, built, or even conceived: “To generate a sense of excitement and intimacy with much smaller crowds, the league has adopted a novel strategy. Teams in nine cities will use colorful tarpaulins to cover vast expanses of empty seats, effectively downsizing football stadiums. ‘To expand, we just have to roll back the tarps.’”8
This simple and elegant solution was employed perhaps earlier than anyone had anticipated. At the first Galaxy game at the Rose Bowl—a 2–1 win over the MetroStars—soccer fans made a pilgrimage to Pasadena that overwhelmed expectations.
Nick Green, a Los Angeles–based soccer writer who attended the first match, recalled,
All week long the L.A. Times revised (upwards) the estimated attendance for the Galaxy’s first game Saturday against the New York–New Jersey MetroStars: 25,000, then 35,000, 45,000 and then somewhere north of 50,000.
I drove down from Ventura with my wife in our 1983 Oldsmobile Omega, which had a habit of overheating and certainly didn’t disappoint, grinding to a vapor-spewing, volcanic halt in bumper-to-bumper traffic en route. We finally got to the vast stadium, negotiated the grassy oceans of [the nearby golf course that doubled as a parking lot] and got in a huge line for tickets (the first and last time I bought tickets the day of the game).
It was around half time before we got in. It was impossible to find your seat. People sat and stood anywhere. I didn’t care. Football was back.9
The opening day crowd of 69,255—still the all-time record for an MLS regular-season game—was largely the result of what Green depicts as a multiethnic city starved for soccer.
Green notes that there was a significant Mexican American contingent in the crowd—entire families coming out to celebrate soccer, tailgating in the golf course/parking lot before making their way to the actual game.
Rick Lawes, then a USA Today soccer reporter, but today the MLS’s resident historian, noted the Rose Bowl game provided the exact hypothetical regarding the tarp plan he’d asked Kevin Payne about before the first season started. He figured as soon as the next people found their way to a game in a stadium that had reached capacity, the team in question would likely “find a way to take their money and not turn them away.”
Thanks to that stellar opening day turnout—as well as a Father’s Day doubleheader on June 16, 1996, bringing more than 92,000 to see the Galaxy versus the Mutiny and the United States versus Mexico—the Galaxy led the league in attendance, with nearly 29,000 per game filling the Rose Bowl (albeit a stadium that can seat about 100,000). While numbers varied from stadium to stadium, only the Clash regularly saw its stadium more than half full—with its 17,232 average attendance, fifth among teams, comparatively testing the limits of Spartan Stadium’s 30,456.
Some of the teams did not test their tarps all season. The MetroStars averaged nearly 24,000 in Giants Stadium, which held more than 80,000. The Revolution averaged just over 19,000 for a stadium holding just over 60,000. The Crew’s nearly 19,000 was respectable for Columbus, but dwarfed in “The Horseshoe,” Ohio State University’s 102,000-plus-seat stadium. Some of the lowest-drawing teams also played in some the league’s largest stadiums—Colorado drew just more than 10,000 fans a game to a Mile High Stadium that could house more than 76,000; the Mutiny drew nearly 12,000 to the 74,000-plus Houlihan’s Stadium; and the Wiz had nearly 13,000 attending games at mammoth Arrowhead Stadium, which could house more than 81,000 fans.10
On the field, the Tampa Bay Mutiny was arguably the most dominant regular-season team, and that dominance went beyond its league-leading 20–12 record. Carlos Valderrama, one of the all-time best-known and best-loved Colombian players—partly for his talent, partly for his impressive and distinctive blond mane—entered the league as a thirty-four-year-old rookie and emerged as the league’s first MVP.
Teammate Roy Lassiter, a Washington, DC–born striker who came to MLS via the unlikely route of North Carolina State University and Costa Rica’s Primera Division, banged in twenty-seven goals and added four assists, playing in thirty of the team’s thirty-two regular-season games, to win the league’s first scoring title. (Though Chris Wondolowski and Bradley Wright-Phillips both tied the record in the thirty-four-game 2012 season and thirty-six-game 2014 season, respectively, no one’s ever broken the record.)
Midfielder Steve Ralston won Rookie of the Year honors. (Though technically everyone who played in 1996 was an MLS rookie, MLS gives the award to a player with no prior professional experience, and Ralston, just off his college career at Florida International University, definitely qualified.) Thomas Rongen, a Dutch NASL veteran who started his coaching career at a South Florida high school and elevated to the Fort Lauderdale Strikers of the American Soccer League and the American Premier Soccer League, was named Coach of the Year for his work with the new team.11
And yet, D.C. United—which lost six of its first seven games, and only began flirting with the .500 mark in the last third of the season—reinvented themselves, made the MLS playoffs (eight of the league’s ten teams made the postseason), and proved formidable when it mattered.
Payne was confident from the get-go; he told the media, following the post–MLS Unveiled event, “The very first-line item in our budget is for championship rings. That’s something we intend to do—bring home the championship in the first year.”12
Payne attributes the team’s early season woes to several factors. Coach Bruce Arena and assistant coach Bob Bradley were stretched in the early part of the season due to their U.S. Olympic team duties; the United moved their preseason training to Southern California to be closer to the U.S. team headquarters where the coaches were based. And, heading into the season’s start, the team needed to acquire some players that better fit with what it wanted to do. They made acquisitions throughout the season, bringing in five key players that Payne feels made a difference in the playoff run, including Mark Simpson, who brought stability in goal, and Jaime Moreno, a skilled forward who brought out the best in the talented Marco Etcheverry, who was still hobbled from a World Cup knee injury.
Part of D.C. United’s success had to do with working within the MLS system to acquire players—a system that confounded a number of their compatriots around the league. Payne comments, “I think we had success because instead of complaining and throwing our hands up, we tried to figure out ways to work within the league rules. Billy Hicks [the Burn’s first general manager] used to call us Loophole United. I never thought of it that way. Loophole has sort of a negative connotation. We just spent the time to really understand the rules, and then figure out how to accomplish what we wanted to within the rules.”
Payne also understood the importance of creating a proper home atmosphere within RFK Stadium, and as someone who embraced soccer traditions, was intrigued rather than frightened when he was contacted in the summer of 1995 by two soccer fans looking to create supporters’ groups for the nascent team—Matt Mathai, who founded the Screaming Eagles, and Oscar Zambrano, who founded Barra Brava. Though both groups still dispute who was first, Payne recalls that he first received an e-mail from Mathai, but that Zambrano called him shortly after. Zambrano, a native Bolivian, was inspired by South American supporters’ groups and wanted to create something similar for the team, whereas Mathai had been part of Sam’s Army, a core group of fans going to USMNT matches, and had been following soccer in DC since the NASL’s Washington Diplomats were active.
Payne says of the fledgling supporters’ groups, “It was kind of a no-brainer to support this. Of course we wanted to create a raucous environment in the stadium. We went out of our way to encourage those groups.” This included advocating for the groups when stadium officials said they’d restrict flags, drums, and other musical instruments. “We spent a lot of time with the stadium on that. Luckily, we were dealing with reasonable people who ran the stadium. We convinced them that we could police the fan clubs, and that this would help us be more successful. And they bought into it. Right from the beginning, we were able to do things that most of the stadiums didn’t allow.”
Lawes understood the advantage immediately. He recalls, in particular, that a number of supporters in the Barra Brava section were on portable metal stands, moved around RFK to fit both the stadium’s baseball and football configurations:
It didn’t take long for the Barra Brava to figure out when they’d jump up and down, those seats would start jumping up and down. So, even in the first years of the league, there would be these wonderful visuals of that entire set of stands, packed, with people wearing black and red and white, all jumping up and down and the seats going up and down. We maybe didn’t have the tifo, the big huge banners, but they did have banners that they’d display along the front railing, and that people would hold up, and it was 1996, but it was really the first. They were really the forerunners, and there wasn’t really anything like that anywhere else. There were certainly places that had good crowds, and big crowds, and people going to their games, and people supporting them, but what you look at now, as far as the MLS supporter culture, DC was it. It was really pretty awesome. Poor RFK gets beat up these days, and it seems like it’s going to fall down at any stretch, but the architecture of the place, with the roof covering up all the seats, was such that if you had 25,000 people in there, it was a rock concert.
Payne involved the groups early on. Mathai created a webpage on his personal site that would eventually morph into the official Screaming Eagles site, and when Payne’s team was mulling over the team name, Mathai created an online poll to allow fans to vote. Mathai recalls that the team took out an ad in the Washington Post directing fans to vote, pointing them to his website.
Sotoudeh recounts, “The three names were Justice, Force, and Spies … Matt looked at those and said, ‘Eww, those are awful.’ A couple of weeks later, Kevin called Matt and said, ‘You know, I’ve been talking to folks, and what do you think of the name D.C. United?’ And Matt breathed a sigh of relief, and said, ‘That sounds great.’”
Once United was an option, Mathai explains, “I did everything I could to drum up votes for it. I strong-armed everyone I knew into voting for it. Family, friends, kids, everyone. I didn’t resurrect people from the dead to vote, but I was tempted to. D.C. United won in a landslide.”
Though the assumption was that Barra Brava drew a Latino fan base and the Screaming Eagles drew an Anglo fan base, representatives from both groups insist that the groups were ethnically diverse from the outset; Sotoudeh goes as far as to say, “Barra Brava had chants in Spanish, but the Eagles had Spanish chants, too—we just did them with more white people!”
Jay Igiel, a longtime Barra Brava member, notes that from the outset two stylistically differences distinguished Barra Brava from the Screaming Eagles: first, “A large number of our songs and chants are in Spanish, and are adaptations of songs sung in South or Central America,” and second, “through the atmosphere of really continuous singing, jumping, the involvement of the drums,” which he characterizes as “more organic, free-flowing and lasting than the English style, which is more start and stop.”
The United (if not yet entirely united) support helped propel the team to second in the East, and, thanks to the league’s playoff plan, the opportunity to witness a plethora of playoff matches.
After a regular season that concluded on September 22—with only the Revolution and Rapids failing to make the first-ever MLS playoffs—the league embarked on a playoff schedule wedging a potential six matches per team into a tight window leading up to the first MLS Cup on October 20.
The eight-team playoffs incorporated a best-of-three format; the team with the better record hosted games two and three. Each of the four conference semifinals went to three games—with the series between D.C. United and the New York–New Jersey MetroStars providing particular drama and helping to foment the rivalry’s contentious nature.
The rivalry was aided, in part, by the MetroStars having their own supporters’ group, the Empire Supporters Club. Like the Screaming Eagles, the group was started before the league launched, with Sam’s Army veterans in leadership positions.
Mark Fishkin, part of the original group of MetroStars fans in 1996, recalls meeting with many of the original members, who were interested in joining the Empire Supporters Club but also interested in seeing it expand beyond the core fifty members—a goal not necessarily paramount to the group in its first years.
“They were very funny and clever and even snarky,” he said. One favorite early anti-United chant, “Sos Cagon Washington” (based on a taunting chant Argentine club River Plate directed at their Boca Junior rivals) name-checked their rival supporters’ groups, including the lines, “Screaming Eagles are posers, they sing for the TV” and “Your Barra is quiet whenever you’re losing.” Ribbing other teams has remained part of their routine throughout their evolution; they would go on to welcome Houston to the league by calling them “just a street in Manhattan,” and give an American welcome to Toronto by informing them, “You can be State 51.”
D.C. United lost the series opener to the MetroStars via shootout after giving up a tying goal in the seventy-fifth minute; as a Jeff Bradley article on the MLS site noted, MetroStars sub Giovanni Savarese “[tugged] the shirt of rookie defender Eddie Pope to gain just enough space to touch the ball into the net from close range.” The shootout went eleven players deep and involved controversy. As Bradley later recalled, “The MetroStars appeared to be out of shooters because (Peter) Vermes had injured his shin during the game and was not on their original list of shooters. When he stepped up to take his turn, D.C. claimed he was shooting out of order and, therefore, a miss should be recorded. Chaos ensued on the field before Vermes limped out to take his shot, which he made.”13
The United, however, won game 2, with a score of 1–0, and in thrilling fashion won the deciding game 3, giving up a tying goal in the eighty-sixth minute, and nearly giving up a tie-breaking goal a minute later, only to win a penalty in the eighty-ninth minute and convert.
The other three conference semifinals had their own moments of drama. In the East, the Mutiny won on the road, 2–0, to open its series against the Crew, then lost 2–1 in the first match in Tampa, but then won 4–1 in the deciding match—with Lassiter scoring five of the Mutiny’s seven goals in the series. In the West, the Galaxy lost the opener against the Clash in San Jose, 1–0, and then won a pair of 2–0 matches in the Rose Bowl to close out the series—though that makes it sound easier than it was, given that the game 2 goals came in the eighty-fourth and ninetieth minutes.
The other semifinal in the West was also the hardest one to say with a straight face: the Wiz and Burn went to a shootout in the deciding game 3, after each team won a home match by one goal. In the shootout, Frank Klopas, Preki, and Paul Wright made their goals to lead the Wiz to a 3–2 win.
The conference finals weren’t as suspenseful in that they were both 2–0 sweeps. Kansas City did take Los Angeles to a shootout at home in game 2, after the Galaxy beat the Wiz, 2–1, at home in the opener, but the Wiz were bested 3–1 in the shootout. The Eastern Conference finals between the United and the Mutiny became the Raul Diaz Arce show—he scored a hat trick in the 4–1 opener in DC, and then scored a late winner in the second game to propel D.C. United to the finals.
MLS adopted the Super Bowl/Final Four model of preselecting a site for its first finals, and apparently did not consult the Farmer’s Almanac before selecting Foxboro Stadium just outside Boston. A torrential rainstorm, accompanied by winds of up to fifty miles per hour and temperatures in the low fifties, made the field borderline unplayable. But as the Christian Science Monitor pointed out, the league’s willingness to play the game—and the willingness of nearly 35,000 fans to witness it—said something about the hardiness of soccer folk:
The same nor’easter that wreaked havoc here had made a mockery of any attempt to hold Game 1 of the World Series in New York the night before, dropping four inches of rain on Yankee Stadium. But MLS was out to show it was of tougher stock, and the opportunity for a little one-upsmanship was not lost on MLS Commissioner Doug Logan.
“There was never any doubt in our minds that we were going to play this game,” Mr. Logan declared in the press tent over the sound of flapping canvas and smacking rain. “And there was never any doubt that we stood in juxtaposition to some sports that don’t play in the rain.”14
The Galaxy went up 1–0 in the fifth minute on a goal by Eduardo Hurtado, nicknamed El Tanque (the Tank) and responsible for a team-leading twenty-one goals during the regular season. Chris Armas would make it 2–0 in the fifty-sixth minute, and as the rain continued to pour down and the minutes ticked down toward a Galaxy victory, the United dramatically rallied. On a seventy-third-minute corner kick, Etcheverry lofted a corner kick to the back post that found a leaping Tony Sanneh for a deftly headed goal.
Mathai recalls that Payne left the executive box to stand with the Screaming Eagles in the downpour during the second half; for a 2011 MLSSoccer.com article, Mathai remembered the moment Sanneh’s goal went in: “I screamed and as Kevin and I hugged, we fell over onto the people standing in the row in front of us. Thank God they were there—I could have killed our president.”15
D.C. United wasn’t done. With eight minutes left and Etcheverry free-kicking from a dangerous area, substitute Shawn Medved was in perfect position to settle an ill-advised Campos punchout to force extra time.
And, less than four minutes into extra time, Eddie Pope headed home an Etcheverry corner kick that would be his third assist of the day, evoking a wild celebration. Etcheverry recalled, for MLSSoccer.com,
After we scored, I saw everyone celebrating and euphoric and I only thought it was because we were up in the score.
I didn’t think the game was over. That’s one of the memories I had. I thought it was our third goal but there was a lot of celebration. And I celebrated with them. But when I saw no one was getting ready to kick off again, I realized the game was over.16
In the cleverly titled “Galaxy Go Thud in Mud,” Kevin Acee of the Los Angeles Daily News described the Galaxy’s postmatch deflation:
Exhausted, hurting and so wet and cold their internal organs were shivering, the Galaxy players marched quickly off the marsh that used to be the Foxboro Stadium field.
It was more than not wanting to watch the Washington D.C. United skip around in the mud while accepting the trophy they were certain was theirs. They were simply in a trance.
Having a two-goal lead yanked from you in the final 17 minutes of the championship game will do that.17
Mathai almost didn’t make the game—his flight from Washington to Boston was grounded in New Jersey, and he and fellow fans rented a car at the airport and drove the rest of the way. As he recalls of the match, “I’ve never felt an atmosphere like that before or since. The stadium was mostly DC fans, as you might expect given the opponent was LA, and it was loud. I have that match on my phone and I still watch it every month or so and it still gives me chills.”
United fans were so moved by the win that they treated the players returning home to Washington to a postmatch celebration. An Associated Press article noted that nearly a thousand fans swarmed National Airport to laud the returning players, arriving an hour before the team was due to arrive:
When the drums and chants of “Ole, Ole” started 20 minutes before the team’s arrival, police bolstered security.
After the first officer on the scene radioed that the “crowd was too big too handle,” a group of officers ushered fans from the boarding area and down a level to the terminal’s larger baggage claim concourse.
The players, many weary after celebrating the MLS’s inaugural title game, appeared startled by the size of the crowd.
[John] Harkes and the other players were engulfed by a sea of singing fans in the team’s red and black colors as they rode down the escalators to the baggage claim.18
To be successful in its first season, MLS had, first and foremost, to survive, and it decidedly did so. League officials had projected attendance numbers of 8,000 to 10,000, and with an average of over 17,000, had definitely underpromised and overdelivered.
All the franchises survived their inaugural season, though one team name—not surprisingly, the Wiz—didn’t. New York City–based electronics retailer Nobody Beats the Wiz (whose unwieldy name doubled as a slogan, and was often abbreviated colloquially as just the Wiz) argued that Kansas City’s team name infringed on their copyright, and the franchise opted to change its name from the Wiz to the Wizards, but still retained their rainbow color scheme.
At the start of the season, U.S. national coach Steve Sampson observed, regarding MLS’s future, “The most important thing is stability. We shouldn’t have such great expectations that we can hope to compete with the major sports in the U.S. right away. If we can establish slow growth, but consistent growth, in four to five years we’ll probably have the fifth major sport in this country.”19
To kick off the league’s second season, Logan made the bold prediction that MLS attendance would rise appreciably from the first season, settling on the nice round number of 20,000.
This turned out to be an overly optimistic prediction; average game attendance for the 1997 season actually fell to under 15,000, and some playoff games ebbed into four-digit territory. Logan, to his credit, owned the misstep in predicting such a significant increase. At a press conference preceding the 1997 All-Star Game at Giants Stadium, he addressed the then average of 15,500, saying, “Fifteen-thousand-five-hundred is very credible, except for the fact that this idiot went out and said his goal was 20,000. By comparison it pales.”
He also said, in an odd metaphor to contrast the first and second seasons, “We had this infant baby sitting in a cradle. Everyone had taken great delight in the birth. As with newborn babies, nothing goes wrong. Everything is terrific. Everyone overlooks even the soiled diapers. In a very real way, we’re administering to a league that’s going through its terrible twos.”20
Back in the league offices, the 20,000 comment was merely seen as Logan being positive about MLS rather than making a bold promise the league was incapable of delivering on. “He was the leader of an organization trying to be optimistic,” Abbott remembers. “He was thinking, let’s set a goal, and some people really wigged out about that. Here we are twenty years later, and guess what? We’re not hurt by the fact that someone twenty years ago said we’d be averaging 20,000 in our second season.”
Yet some expressed concern about the proclamation. Payne notes, “He was trying to be bullish and optimistic. It ended up being a millstone around our necks. And for years, every MLS game story started out, in the first paragraph, there was always a mention of the attendance. And that didn’t happen in the NHL—the Washington Capitals were drawing six thousand people a game! But it was always part of the story about MLS games. It took us a long time to lose that.”
Lawes adds, “It certainly brought everything to bear on that attendance number that second year and beyond,” noting that while the National Basketball Association had established from the inception of the Women’s National Basketball Association that attendance was not a barometer for the league’s success, Logan had invited the media to use attendance to calibrate the league’s performance.
MLS was decidedly making strides ahead of its initial season in providing soccer worth watching. In a New York Times article assessing the midseason status of the league’s sophomore year, Harkes noted, “The product has increased on the field. Foreign players have settled in, and the young American players are starting to lift their level of play. Last year, some of them were nervous and panicked a little. Now they’re more confident.”21
Fans were making strides as well; the Screaming Eagles were embarking on well-organized road trips of the variety that Sotoudeh said made for comprehensive fan support—one example of this being a trip billed the Northeast Invasion, in which a busload of fans from Washington, DC, was able to root for the United against the MetroStars on a Saturday before proceeding to Foxboro Stadium for a U.S.–Mexico and Mutiny–Revolution doubleheader the next day, returning on a Monday.
“I don’t think you can’t call yourself a fan group if you’re not traveling,” Sotoudeh explains. “It’s expected. Around the world, away days are a huge part of being a fan—the idea that you’ll always be there for your club. From a purely organization-building perspective, those kinds of trips, especially the overnight trips, really build camaraderie.” He also points out that new chants would be practiced on the bus, tested out in away stadiums, with the ones proving satisfactory brought back to RFK.
The Screaming Eagles also helped bring about a change in how supporters’ groups partnered with their clubs to fill seats, stemming from Mathai’s wishes to move to a different part of the stadium. In the inaugural season, Barra Brava was in section 135 of the stadium—visible to TV audiences on the right side of the field—while the Screaming Eagles were across from them in section 113, above the dugout where the players would come out. Mathai wanted to move the Screaming Eagles into section 134—in part to be seen, and in part to help the two supporters’ groups seem like one massed, unified front. Mathai talked to Fred Matthes, the United’s director of ticket sales, about wanting to move there but, as Mathai explains,
He refused, saying that those seats were too valuable and would sell easily. David Goodwin [a good friend and the current Screaming Eagles president] convinced me to take over section 134. We spent all but one thousand dollars of our money and bought the front row of 134. We figured that as season-ticket holders, they couldn’t kick us out. We’ve been there since the start of 1997 and have since completely sold out 134 as well as a couple of sections on either side and other blocks around the stadium. I almost bankrupted us by commissioning a large sign to be put up in front of our section at RFK. It was huge and ultravisible. Most importantly, it would be in plain sight every time the TV camera passed the midfield line. I figured that people would see the sign and the group and want to come out and join the fun. It worked.
Ticketing was a pregame nightmare. We’d man a ticket window and the team would have to shuttle us more tickets as we sold our stock. We didn’t have the time, and the team didn’t have the resources, to devote to shuttling back and forth on game day to give us more tickets to sell. Fred and I came upon an arrangement that the team would hold aside an entire section of tickets and turn them over to us. At the end of the day we’d hand over the unsold tickets and the money. Additionally, we’d get the tickets at a discount, allowing us to give our members a price break and keep some cash off each ticket in addition. It’s a classic win-win. The team doesn’t have to worry about selling three to four sections in the stadium while we get discounted tickets for our members.
The trust came in time. I always insisted that we obey the team rules to the letter. We’d always ask before doing anything. By doing that and establishing ourselves as “good citizens,” we laid the groundwork to be able to ask for more stuff down the road since the team knew we would stick to any arrangement we made.
Our arrangement with the team was unique for the time and pretty revolutionary. Fred used to tell me about the league meetings he’d attend where he’d be asked by other league executives how he could just turn blocks of tickets over to us.
The league’s 1997 story ended in much the same way the 1996 season did—namely, with D.C. United holding the MLS Cup on a waterlogged field. As in 1996, eight of the league’s ten teams advanced to the playoffs, with teams advancing in their conferences via a best-of-three series.
D.C. United’s route to the finals involved series sweeps. Against the Revolution, they dominated their opener, 4–1, and then won a shootout match on the road to close out the series. In the conference finals, they edged the Crew 3–2 and 1–0 to advance to the MLS Cup, which just happened to be in their home stadium.
The Western Conference also involved sweeps, though from an unlikely candidate. The Colorado Rapids—the league’s worst team in 1996—also finished the 1997 season with a losing record again, but it was good enough to finish fourth in the West and win a date with Kansas City, whom the Rapids dispatched via a shocking 3–0 win at Arrowhead Stadium, followed by a 3–2 win at home.
The Burn got past the favored Galaxy on the other side of the bracket with a shootout victory (following a scoreless regulation) and then a 3–0 drubbing at home. The Rapids won its first match, 1–0, in Dallas, and then closed out the series at home in a 2–1 match that saw both sides trade goals in the first five minutes, followed by a tense, scoreless eighty-two minutes, broken when Chris Henderson bicycle-kicked the Rapids into the finals.
Sanneh, who sparked the 1996 comeback, was the outright hero of the 1997 finals, assisting Moreno on his opening thirty-seventh-minute goal and capturing the lead on a sixty-eighth-minute strike. Though the Rapids’ Adrian Paz would score in the seventy-fifth minute to mount the start of a potential flashback-inducing comeback, they’d get no closer than 2–1, and United fans—by virtue of MLS selecting RFK as the “neutral site” location for the 1997 Cup—got to relive the rainy trophy presentation of 1996 in their own home stadium.
MLS officials spent the day after the finals congregating in a Washington, DC, hotel to contemplate the future. Associated Press reporter Joseph White noted that they were looking to reverse a “16 percent decline in regular season attendance and 14 percent dip in cable television ratings” as well as contemplating the end of the shootout and perhaps replacing it with overtime. Logan expressed concern with overtime fitting into the allotted two-hour TV time slot for a game; one proposal floated the possibility of an eight-minute overtime period that could fit within a telecast.
Logan struck a decidedly more cautious tone than he did before the 1997 season started, saying, “We have the patience to wait this thing out until we get it great and right. And we’re going to take those small steps, and we’re going to resist trying to create instant answers for anything,” terming the 1997 MLS Cup “another step along the way.”22
Payne, in a Washington Post article looking at the future of the league, said, “This whole league has been built from the beginning on a long-term vision. We didn’t want to be a flash in the pan.”23
And yet, the league would embark upon something ambitious the following year—bringing in two expansion teams for its third season, and going head-to-head with the quadrennial event that helped give birth to the league in the first place. For those invested in the league, 1998 would be important in gauging its solvency.