IN 1998, THE STILL FLEDGLING MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER PUSHED TO EXPAND to twelve teams, which involved two cities that are, in a number of important ways, quite similar. Both are among the United States’ most populous TV markets, serve as anchor cities for geographically sprawling regions, are home to sports franchises that have writ themselves into the annals of their respective sports, and—perhaps more important to a league entering its third season—have large and diverse multinational and multiethnic communities—important for MLS’s strategy of appealing to fans already familiar with and hungry for soccer.
But, from the get-go, in choosing Chicago and Miami, MLS set the franchises upon divergent paths. The Chicago Fire made the best possible journey for a franchise in its debut year, winning both the MLS Cup and the U.S. Open Cup en route to becoming firmly entrenched as an MLS franchise. The Miami Fusion, on the other hand, would be out of the league within four years, a reminder of the fragility of fledgling soccer franchises, which invested observers knew all too well from the NASL’s swan song. Fortunately for MLS, Miami was an anomaly rather than an omen of additional folding franchises.
The league announced both teams jointly in April 1997; Phil Anschutz would exercise his option for a second team from the initial investor-operator meetings to launch the Chicago team, while Cellular One cofounder Ken Horowitz, based in South Florida, would own the Miami franchise. As Grahame L. Jones wrote in his Los Angeles Times article covering the announcement, Horowitz “paid $20 million for an MLS franchise that two years ago would have fetched a quarter of that price.”1
Peter Wilt, who became the Chicago team’s GM in July 1997, recalls, “The first thing I did was visit every other MLS team, to do a best practices tour. And, as it turned out, it ended up being a worst practices tour. I learned what not to do from virtually every team in the league except for D.C. United.”
One memorable moment in Wilt’s tour took place in Kansas City; there he noticed Wizards GM Tim Latta getting on a walkie-talkie to instruct security to throw several fans out of the stadium. They’d been tossing confetti, and as Latta told Wilt, “Our agreement here with the stadium is that we have to pay for cleanup, and it’s so expensive to clean up after the games.”
“That’s obviously an extreme example,” Wilt notes, “but it kind of encapsulates the relationship between the front office and supporters in the early days of MLS. They saw the supporters as a nuisance, maybe a necessary evil.”
In Washington, DC, however, Wilt saw the one team that wasn’t afraid of supporters’ culture, and it made an impression on him. “They had three strong supporters’ groups there, they created a culture in the organization that was in some ways driven by the fans. That was something that I thought was authentic, and we tried to replicate it in Chicago.”
The team staged an event in October 1997 at Chicago’s famed Navy Pier to announce the team name; as Chicago Tribune writer Bonnie DeSimone pointed out in her article on the launch, the team’s decision to hold it on October 8, the anniversary of the infamous Chicago Fire of 1871, “dropped a broad hint” as to what the team would be called. And, yet, as DeSimone’s article notes,
An entirely different name, the Rhythm, was all but set in stone earlier this year when MLS announced its expansion into Chicago for 1998. It had been conceived by sportswear monolith Nike, which held the first option to be the team apparel supplier, and approved by the league office. The Rhythm logo and colors, a coiled cobra in red, yellow and black, already had appeared on merchandise in soccer catalogues.
But there was one small glitch. The Colorado-based ownership balked at the name. Early this summer, the team backers dug their heels in and so did Nike. And while the situation eventually was smoothed out and Nike stayed in the fold, the struggle points up the high stakes involved in naming pro sports teams in today’s market.
DeSimone pointed out that after rejecting the Rhythm, team president Bob Sanderman and Wilt went about test-driving other possibilities; Blues and Wind were considered and rejected in favor of Fire, even though the name had been used once before, by a mid-1970s franchise in the now defunct World Football League.2
Wilt’s concern heading into the launch event was how it would translate into selling season tickets the next day. The Fire followed the event with a traditional media campaign: full-page ads in the city’s two major newspapers, and TV ads featuring Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” playing over a montage of top MLS players (which, as Wilt described them, “were probably seen then as really cool and cutting-edge, but when you look back on them now, you were almost embarrassed at how rudimentary they were”).
First and foremost, Wilt wanted the season-ticket sales numbers for Soldier Field to surpass two thousand—the number that the Colorado Rapids had sold so far for 1998. Competition with the Rapids, in fact, was something that drove the Fire’s young front office. Looking back, Wilt says, “I think early on in MLS, people thought having single ownership [of multiple teams] would result in teams colluding with each other. We were competitive, on and off the field. I mean, we shared best practices, but we cared more about outdrawing Colorado than New York or DC or LA. We wanted Mr. Anschutz to like us best.”
But there was more to the Fire’s strategy than what Wilt termed the “outbound, external approach”—he also sought to encourage the supporters’ culture that gave D.C. United its home-field advantage. As he recalls, “We connected with the group that became the Barn Burners. Even before we had a name and they had a name, they were online, on a listserv. I communicated with Don Crafts, who was the leader of that group and ended up being the first president of the Barn Burners, and gave them credibility and recognition as legit, and to an extent, inside information as to what was going on. I gave them an opportunity to look at Soldier Field and pick where they wanted to stand during games. They felt a connection to the team and were able to organically grow.”
Wilt cheekily observes that building fan culture wasn’t the only aspect of D.C. United that Chicago wanted to replicate. The Fire did, after all, hire Bob Bradley away from the United to become the Fire’s first head coach three weeks after announcing the Fire name. And they were also taking notes on United’s player acquisitions; when Wilt was overseeing the Minnesota Thunder in 1996, United was the only MLS team to inquire about Tony Sanneh. “He turned out to be an okay player,” Wilt laughs, marveling. “He’s playing in the second division of America and there’s only one team that’s trying to sign him?”
“D.C. United was an outlier in the early years of MLS, in that they did not rely exclusively on Sunil and the league office to provide players,” Wilt continues. “I don’t think any team relied 100 percent on the league, but D.C. United, more than any other team, was out pounding the pavement, using their networks, scouting and working lower divisions.”
The Fire built a team with two aspirations in mind: gathering good players who would function together as a cohesive team, and signing players that would appeal to Chicago’s diverse demographics—particularly, as it turned out, its Polish contingent. Polish national team captain Piotr Nowak, along with Jerzy Podbrozny and Roman Kosecki, became pillars of the new team. Another Eastern European player, defender Lubos Kubik from the Czech Republic, rounded out a so-called Eastern bloc. Greek forward Frank Klopas was acquired from the Columbus Crew in a trade; Wilt contends that the Wizards “tried to bury him in Columbus” by trading him to the Crew just prior to the 1997 MLS expansion draft, which allowed the Fire and Fusion to draft unprotected players from the league’s other teams. Another trade, with the Galaxy, brought Jorge Campos and Chris Armas to the Fire; despite Campos’s high profile, Wilt felt that Armas was the key player in the deal.
Like D.C. United before them, the Fire had two high-profile fan groups that helped create atmosphere in Soldier Field, and like Kevin Payne before him, Wilt knew it would help create stadium atmosphere to coordinate efforts with supporters’ groups rather than ignore them or work against them.
The Barn Burners 1871 were created shortly after the announcement of the team coming to Chicago in 1997, under the working title of the Chicago Ultras, officially taking a Great Chicago Fire–themed name soon after the Fire made its initial arrhythmic name announcement. Group founder Don Crafts reached out to Anschutz’s group in Denver soon after MLS announced a team was coming to Chicago, and was directed to the recently hired Wilt. Crafts found Wilt to be incredibly receptive; he remembers, “He hooked me up with everything we could hope for. He gave us information, he let us know it was going to be at Soldier Field, he asked where we wanted to sit in the stadium—which was fantastic.” Wilt, in fact, proposed section 8 for its having cheap seats near where cameras would capture shots on goals, corner kicks, and other game action.
“He also hooked us up with being able to have banners and drums, and other things regular fans couldn’t bring in,” Crafts adds, noting that the Fire issued the team special laminate badges to get through certain doors and, eventually, allowed the Barn Burners to store gear in the stadium.
Crafts had also reached out to Matt Mathai early in his process of starting the Barn Burners to learn more about how to start a supporters’ group. Mathai sent samples of what the Screaming Eagles gave to members and fielded Crafts’ questions.
The Barn Burners, like the Screaming Eagles, started via online communications among soccer fans initially, but then graduated to meetings in conjunction with Premier League game showings at Chicago-area bars. The group initially started with about fifty people—by Crafts’ characterization, split between urban and suburban twenty-somethings, with Craft being one of the few thirty-somethings involved—but by the middle of the first season, its ranks had swelled to over three hundred, thanks in large part to tailgate parties they were hosting.
“Personally I came to it with a punk rock, DIY ethic,” Crafts explains. “We didn’t want a product presented to us. We needed to be an integral part of the club, not customers. We were all in, and wanted desperately to make this thing happen and make it amazing.”
The Fire Ultras were founded in early 1998 by a group of about thirty Polish fans, some of whom had recently immigrated to the United States and drew experience from being at games in Europe. As founder Mirek Krupa (known to his fellow fans as Mike from Fire Ultras) explains, “I think our group was responsible for bringing to MLS something different. Back then, in my personal opinion, none of the MLS clubs could compete with us when it came to the soccer atmosphere and organized support at the stadium. We had plenty of respect for D.C. United, but they were not even close to us back then. When I watch MLS now I’m proud of most things I see in the stadium: the atmosphere, the flags, banners, supporting sections; everything looks pretty good, and I think it is going in the right direction.”
He also cheekily describes the Fire Ultras’ specialty as “getting in trouble,” and notes, “I was banned from the games many times. The police and security did not know how to deal with us, and we were in constant conflict with them. They were giving us trouble for everything but, believe it or not, they gave us everything that we wanted: a reputation as bad boys, and that’s exactly what we wanted. The bad boy rep made our group extremely popular and we grew in numbers exponentially”—to an estimated eight hundred by the end of the first season.
Liam Murtaugh, an original Barn Burner, remembers that the Fire Ultras’ style of standing for the entire game “was pretty novel for everyone involved, including security, who repeatedly pulled down anyone who tried to stand up in front of everyone. This was ’98, this was old Soldier Field, and it’s a certain kind of security. They’d never seen anything like this before in their lives.”
Though the Barn Burners and Fire Ultras were the most prominent of the supporters’ groups, Wilt notes that the Fire drew such a diverse contingent of fans—including a great number of Latino fans—that public address announcements were made in English, Polish, and Spanish.
“The very first game, there were more than 36,000 people there,” remembers Ben Burton, part of the first season’s Barn Burners, “and I’d estimate that 60 percent of the crowd, if not more, were non–white bread U.S. men’s fans. They were fans from all over, and they brought a different flavor. Different styles, different methods of supporting; so there were clashes for sure, in the way that people did everything. It was a cacophony, and quite chaotic, but it was beautiful at the same time.”
Chicago, in its first year, certainly bore out Burton’s assertion that “you can’t really have a major sports league in the U.S. without Chicago.”
In Miami, Horowitz was discovering that MLS ownership was perhaps more challenging than he’d first anticipated.
Logan’s announcement of the Miami franchise included mention of a ten-year deal in place with the Orange Bowl, but according to Horowitz, Miami mayor Joe Carollo “changed the deal” on the team in the summer of 1997. A Miami Herald article on the troubled negotiations reported, “The future of Miami’s expansion Major League Soccer team was left in doubt … because of an acrimonious lease disagreement that boiled over—of all places—in the men’s restroom at Miami City Hall.” There Horowitz told Miami commissioner Tomás Regolado that he was ruling out the Fusion playing at the Orange Bowl—in part because the city was insisting on a ten-year lease, whereas Horowitz sought “a three-year or five-year lease, with an out clause after three years if average attendance finishes below 16,000.”3
The article detailed Horowitz’s predicament: other area stadiums didn’t meet the league’s minimum capacity, and the franchise couldn’t be moved from South Florida without league approval. But the article hadn’t factored in what Horowitz planned in order to move forward: take an existing stadium (in this case, Fort Lauderdale’s Lockhart Stadium, a 7,800-seat facility operated by Broward County Public Schools), and completely renovate it to be a soccer stadium with a capacity of over 20,000.
Within weeks, the “courtship,” as the Miami Herald characterized it, was underway, with one Broward County School Board member reasoning that the expanded capacity would, at the very least, allow the stadium to host high school football championships.4
Horowitz remembers, “We had a season coming up … I had no choice. We said, ‘Let’s build the stadium,’ we hired a design firm, and we did it.” While not disclosing the exact amount he personally spent to finance the stadium renovations, Horowitz said it was definitely in seven-figure territory and approaching $10 million, though MLS’s website puts it at closer to $5 million.5 The renovations included redoing the field, expanding the stands to accommodate three times what they once held and putting in new lighting, an electronic scoreboard with video capabilities, broadcasting facilities, and offices for the team’s game-day operations.
A number of league officials and historians credit the Columbus Crew SC (and Lamar Hunt’s ownership group) with building the league’s first soccer-specific stadium in 1999. Although Lockhart wasn’t “built” in the strictest sense of the term, Horowitz contends that Lockhart was the league’s first soccer-specific facility, even noting that Hunt came to Fort Lauderdale and scouted Lockhart as he was planning the stadium. Horowitz boasts that Lockhart was transformed into “the best soccer field in the country—brand-new stands, broadcast lighting, beautiful field, the seats were right up at the field. It was a gorgeous stadium. People went on and on about how great it was.”
Jeff Rusnak, in an October 12, 2008, Sun-Sentinel article, remembers, “When the Fusion debuted at Lockhart a decade ago … MLS teams were secondary tenants in football stadiums that were too big, often too narrow, and never truly home; Horowitz took the first step in changing all that when he abandoned plans to play at the Orange Bowl and instead expanded Lockhart to seat 20,000 fans. The Fusion lost to D.C. United in its opening game, but it wasn’t the result that stuck. Instead, it was the sight and sound of 20,450 people packed into an intimate, almost claustrophobic stadium that had a pulse rarely seen in larger MLS sites.”6
Horowitz, who moved to West Palm Beach in 1989, was aware of both the opportunities and frustrations of operating a sports franchise in South Florida. On the one hand, he was operating a team in a media market with nearly five million people, with a significant Latino population, a smaller but still significant European ex-pat population, and an NASL legacy in the Miami Gatos and then Toros, which rebranded (more successfully) as the Fort Lauderdale Strikers for seven seasons. But on the other hand, it was a sports franchise in South Florida. As Horowitz recalls,
Everyone wanted to see Florida work. There was a lot of discussion—the league was actually split on whether Florida was going to be successful. There was a lot of concern about whether Florida would make it. And Tampa was not doing well—it was an iffy situation.
The big concern was the track record of sports in general in Florida. I got to consult with everyone—from Wayne Huizenga on down, everyone who owned a team in Florida—and we talked about the pros and cons. One of the real problems, the concerns we had, and there was nothing we could do about it, was the weather. It was very hot and humid, game nights would typically be Saturday nights. By the time eight o’clock rolled around, there would be thunderstorms, and it was hot. And you’d think about getting into your car and going to a game, and the weather was just really bad.
Horowitz even remembers at least one instance of dealing with Florida weather at its most extreme: having to disassemble the tents behind one of the goals, used for VIP receptions, because of an incoming hurricane.
Kevin Payne was one of the most vocally concerned observers within the board of governors about the Miami franchise, for the same concerns that Horowitz had about consistent support from a notoriously fickle fan base.
“I’ve always felt bad for Ken, because Ken bought the option for the team in Miami in 1998 really on the back of the ’96 season, when we’d had a great deal of success,” Payne reflects. “It’s too bad, because if Ken had waited until the ’97 season, maybe he would have done things differently, or paid less money for his team. I did, and I do have grave reservations about the Miami market. If David Beckham called me up tomorrow and asked me if he should move forward with this team in Miami, I would probably say no. The Miami market doesn’t support any professional sports teams well.”
Gabe Gabor, now part of MLS’s front office as its Miami-based senior international communications consultant for Spanish-language media, said he instantly became a fan when it was announced that the team was coming to soccer-starved South Florida, and then was hired early in 1998 to be part of the front office frantically readying itself for the launch.
He recalls, “They brought the bulk of the front office in January 1998. If you compare that to now, with a team like Atlanta, which is getting a two-and-a-half-year head start, the people at the Fusion were getting a two-month head start. I had two months to put together a department, put together a plan for the opening of a revamped stadium, hire staff, do a media guide; we had to physically put that together from scratch. It was hard work!”
Gabor felt that Lockhart Stadium was a strong selling point for the team, and the work that had gone into it—especially the upgrades to the field itself and the seating—made it attractive. And yet, during his travels around the league during the first year, he noticed a distinct difference in the infrastructure between a Rose Bowl or an RFK Stadium when compared to Lockhart. “Other stadiums had tunnels for the team buses and permanent press boxes,” Gabor remembers. “At Lockhart, the press box was essentially a giant trailer that they put on top. The existing press box that we used to use was the high school press box, so we had to build additional areas to accommodate press.”
He notes that the evolution of the soccer-specific stadium over the last twenty years makes the league’s newer facilities shine in comparison to Lockhart, yet feels that the stadium was important to the evolution of the league and the accumulation of knowledge in the making of new stadiums. “When I started traveling around the league, and getting the perspective of some of the venues other teams were playing in, then I felt there was a distinct advantage to playing in what was the first soccer-specific stadium,” Gabor says. “While Columbus gets all the credit, Lockhart was the first stadium that was built on the idea of creating demand by having a 20,000-seat stadium.”
But the Fusion would find it challenging to fill even a 20,000-seat stadium in its first year. “I remember telling Ken and the people who worked for him that the most important game for them was not their opening game,” Payne explains. “That would do great. It would sell out. The most important game for them was their second game. They needed to be focused 100 percent on their second game. Unfortunately, the guys running the team there didn’t do it that way. So the first game was a big success, and the second game, it dropped by 50 percent. And they were never able to get a consistent message across to that marketplace.”
The team itself was good enough to secure a spot in the playoffs, and the front office accumulated a roster that still has some influence in the league today. The opening-day Fusion roster included one legendary player, Carlos Valderrama, who was moved from the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a trade that Horowitz said Logan helped shepherd in order to help draw fans (particularly, Colombian ones) to the team. Goalkeeper Jeff Cassar (today the Real Salt Lake head coach), plucked from the Dallas Burn as part of the expansion draft, would emerge as a critical member of the squad. Colombian forward Diego Serna and Argentine-born U.S. national player Pablo Mastroeni (today the Colorado Rapids head coach) would start their MLS careers with the 1998 Fusion.
The league opted to start the 1998 season at Lockhart, announcing in early January that Miami’s March 15 game against D.C. United would be the stand-alone season opener, with Chicago coming to Miami to open its season the following week. But the announcement of the full season’s schedule answered another pressing question going into the 1998 season: how the league would coexist with the upcoming World Cup in France. Whereas most professional leagues around the world opted for an August to May schedule to leave summer open for the World Cup (and other international tournaments more than happy to fill the vacuum in non–World Cup years), MLS was avoiding the bulk of the National Football League schedule in favor of a March to September regular season.
Logan was addressing the World Cup question as early as February 1997, even before the United States officially qualified for the tournament, saying during a media conference call, “In our first, formative years, we cannot afford to be out of sight, out of mind” for the month in which the World Cup dominates soccer consciousness.7 And yet, MLS would ultimately have twenty-one of its most talented players, an average of nearly two per team, play in the 1998 World Cup.8
MLS ultimately struck a compromise: it would run its season concurrently with the World Cup, but would scale back the schedule so each MLS team would play three games or fewer during the World Cup’s first two weeks, when all the World Cup teams played in the group stage games. (As it turned out, the U.S. team didn’t last past the group stages in 1998, which allowed players to return to their clubs just as the MLS schedules were ramping back up.)
There was still an untamed, anything-goes approach to preparing teams for the season and for the week-to-week grind. Rob Thomson, now executive vice president for communications with Sporting Kansas City, remembers being with the Wizards for their 1998 preseason tune-up in Bradenton, Florida:
We’d gotten a sponsorship with Olive Garden that year, which means that the team was eating every meal at Olive Garden, which as you can imagine, is not great for training. The night before one of our training sessions there, three days before our first preseason game, we’d all stayed out really late. Coach [Ron] Newman wanted the team to do a two-mile run that day. The way those runs worked is that I’d be at the finish line, Coach Newman would call me when he started the run, and I’d start my stopwatch and then log their times as they’d reach the finish line. Before that day’s run, Mo [Johnston] took me aside and said, “Some of us have had a rough night; maybe start the clock thirty seconds after we actually start.” I’d intended to do that, but I actually started the clock three minutes after Coach told me to do so. And we had some really good times that day, and Coach was very excited by that, and thought we could play with an allout attack formation in that game. Jake Dancy, who normally played left back, clocked in at 8:40, so all of a sudden he wanted to play him at striker.
Thomson noted that the Jake Dancy striker experiment was brief and, sadly, not as fruitful as Newman had hoped.
Some players endured the other extreme of pregame preparation in MLS’s early years. Eric Wynalda recalls that the Clash’s first coach—English-born Laurie Calloway (who lasted all of 1996 and half of 1997)—ran grueling practices that Wynalda felt actually put players at a disadvantage. “This is going to sound horrible, but our coach was clueless,” Wynalda comments. “He would run trainings too long, he had never really been in a professional outfit, he didn’t know any better except maybe a ’60s, ’70s English-style thing where everybody runs for three and a half straight hours and runs to the pub and gets drunk, and comes back tomorrow and does it all over again.”
Wynalda had a perspective that many of his teammates didn’t have in that he’d been part of German practices playing with VfL Bochum. “In Germany, it’s on a clock, seventy minutes long every day,” he says. “It was completely explained to you, what you were going to do, minute by minute. And then if you had it in you that you wanted to do extra, you had to go to your coach with your hands behind your back and ask for permission to do more. The way they looked at this was the most important thing was taking care of your body. Your body was your capital.”
By contrast, with Calloway, “There were some of days of training where we might as well have just taken off our socks and shoes and run through a field of glass and then just pick the glass out of our feet and come back the next day to see if we weren’t limping. We practiced for four hours—it was horrible. It was the most unorganized mess I’d ever been part of.”
One story in particular, from the inaugural season, highlighted an additional dynamic that put Wynalda and Calloway at odds—a league that was looking to promote a still largely unfamiliar sport by banking on its most marketable stars. Wynalda recalls the time the league decided to take a star player from Tampa to do a photo shoot, which neither Calloway nor Wynalda were particularly thrilled about:
I flew a red-eye flight after practice all the way to Tampa—I didn’t get any sleep. They put me in a uniform, put some makeup on me, said juggle, laugh, say this, say that, you’re done. And then I had some lady standing there saying, okay, we’re going to take you back to the airport now … so I go back to the airport, flew through Dallas, fell asleep on the plane, and got back to the airport, and I thought my wife was going to be there to pick me up.
And it was my assistant coach with a bag with my gear, and he told me we were going to the stadium and I was going to run the stadium stairs because I missed practice. I looked at him and said, “Are you serious?” I went up the stairs once, and came down, and he said, “He wants you to do it ten times.” I said, “All right, that was ten, and I hope you enjoyed it.” I walked off, and I got fined one thousand dollars for that.
Alexi Lalas recalls training in the Rose Bowl parking lot as part of their regimen. “Certainly when you talk about this generation of players coming into MLS, they have no idea about what went on and off the field in the early days. Nor should they. I’m actually proud of them being, for the most part, oblivious to that.”
The 1998 season brought some playoff surprises, even given that it was an eight-team field that now represented two-thirds rather than four-fifths of the league. Both expansion teams made the playoffs, and half the bracket went into the playoffs with identical 15–17 losing records.
D.C. United once again led the Eastern Conference, though the Columbus Crew had a strong showing to finish second in the East, in large part due to newly acquired Trinidad and Tobago international Stern John, who won MLS’s scoring title with twenty-six goals and five assists in twenty-seven games. The MetroStars finished third in the east, with the Fusion edging its cross-state rivals by a single point to win the East’s final playoff spot.
In the West, the Los Angeles Galaxy won twenty-two of its thirty-two matches outright and added another two shootout wins to capture the most points in MLS with sixty-eight. The Fire finished second, with the Rapids—finally reaching the .500 mark for a season—grabbing the third spot in the West and the Burn grabbing the final playoff spot.
The Galaxy also became the first recipients of a newly created award, the Supporters’ Shield, born of a fan-led movement to honor the season’s best regular-season team. According to Kansas City soccer fan Sam Pierron, writing on a fan-created website detailing the Shield’s origin story, the suggestion came via the North American Soccer listserv, which Pierron described as “a large, sprawling list of nothing but emails back and forth among a few thousand subscribers that maintained a higher level of discourse than any forum for the discussion of the game in this country than any medium of any sort that existed before or since.”
Pierron recalled that Mutiny fan Nick Lawrus, likely inspired by the Mutiny’s stellar 1996 season and disappointing playoffs, proposed calling it the Supporters Scudetto, after the trophy given to the winner of Italy’s Serie A. Pierron headed a committee composed of fans representing each team; Lawrus had a distinct vision of calling it a scudetto versus a shield and didn’t want to count shootout wins, and when the committee disagreed with him on both points, he declined to continue, and the committee’s enthusiasm waned.
But Pierron was able to revive interest in 1998. He cites a meeting with broadcaster Phil Schoen, himself a member of the listserv, as instrumental in moving the project forward; Schoen gave Pierron a five-hundred-dollar donation toward creation of the trophy. At the 1998 MLS Cup, fans from the listserv came together to hold the first-ever MLS Supporters’ Summit—league officials were invited to attend a Q&A, accepted the invitation, and Pierron presented the idea along with sketches for his vision of what the trophy would look like.9 Pierron notes that additional donations, including a significant one from Commissioner Logan, enabled them to create the shield (which cost about two thousand dollars to make) and award it to the Galaxy early in the 1999 season.
The committee decided—partly out of the practicality of not having to create a new trophy each year, and partly out of the romanticism attached to the Stanley Cup—that there would just be one Supporters’ Shield traveling from winner to winner each year, and no replicas would be made for the winning team to keep in its trophy case after it left. A second, sturdier Supporters’ Shield was made in 2013, which pays homage to the original trophy with an etched image at its center; Pierron said it is “five times the weight, and five times the price.” (Pierron promised the original trophy will be donated to the new National Soccer Hall of Fame when it opens at Toyota Stadium in Frisco, Texas, in 2017.)
The conference semifinals were all sweeps; D.C. United did need a shootout in game 2, however, to get past the Fusion, and the Crew similarly needed a game 2 shootout to get past the MetroStars. In the West, the Galaxy dominated the Burn with 6–1 and 3–2 wins to advance, while the Fire had a pair of one-goal triumphs over the Rapids.
In the conference finals, D.C. United made its third straight MLS Cup with a 3–0 game 3 win, after winning the 2–0 opener at home and losing 4–2 in Columbus, while in the West, the Fire beat the Galaxy in front of more than 25,000 in the Rose Bowl for game 1, and won a shootout before more than 32,000 Soldier Field faithful to punch its ticket to an MLS Cup that was—to Galaxy fans’ dismay—in the Rose Bowl.
Unlike the previous two rain-swept MLS Cups, the game was played in partly cloudy, seventy-four-degree weather, and in what was probably correlation rather than causation, D.C. United did not win its third straight championship. The Fire, on the strength of stout defense the entire match, got a Podbrozny goal in the twenty-ninth minute with assists credited to Piotr Nowak and Ante Razov—which is all they’d need to win—and then added another goal just before halftime when a Nowak shot, probably going in on its own, deflected off Diego Gutiérrez.
Not everyone in Chicago was impressed with the championship, however. Chicago Tribune sports columnist Bernie Lincicome, in a day-of-finals preview titled “MLS Cup Runneth Over with Nonsense,” poked fun at the league, saying the MLS Cup “sounded like a food additive” and the league name itself “sounded like a software program,” and yet quoted Nowak’s observation, “Michael Jordan said that the key to success is defense, and we have the best defense in the league,” before concluding, “We may be the next champions in Chicago sports history.”10
Fire fans, however, were buoyed—Murtaugh remembers watching the match with his father in one of a number of Chicago’s Halsted Street bars airing the match, and celebrating after the final whistle in a postmatch conga line down the street. The week after winning the MLS Cup, the Fire hosted the Crew in the U.S. Open Cup final, and the match served as both a celebration of the MLS Cup win and its own triumph—a 2–1 extra-time victory, allowing the Fire to do what D.C. United did in its first year: win a double.
It’s perhaps simplistic to say that in the early years of MLS, D.C. United seized upon the best formula for success—which included the hearty endorsements of fans who, in Crafts’ words, wanted to be more than just customers, but results certainly bore this out, especially given that the Fire followed much of the United blueprint and parlayed it into instant success. The year 1999 would prove to be another for the team’s dominance—but it would also be the start of MLS’s most challenging era, in which the league would struggle for its very existence and bring in a new commissioner to help with just that project.