IF YOU’RE LOOKING AT MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER FROM A PURE SPORTS NARRATIVE, the story of 1999 is fairly succinct: D.C. United won a third title in four years and looked to be an unstoppable dynasty. (In reality, as a cautionary tale as to how quickly an MLS team’s fortunes can turn, D.C. United was about to enter a barren, trophyless quadrennial, a return to MLS Cup glory in 2004, and then, save for the occasional Supporters’ Shield or Open Cup triumph, relative anonymity in the annals of Which Team Won.
But if you’re looking at MLS from how fan culture has evolved, and how the league moved from curiosity to relevance and apparent permanence, 1999 was one of the most important years in the history of the league, in large part due to two debuts: first, a new, built-from-the-ground-up stadium that was conceived and created with soccer in mind that is still standing; and second, a commissioner who would make initial, difficult choices to improve the league and ultimately ensure its longevity—and who is also still standing.
People following soccer and, specifically, the fortunes of MLS, knew the stadium was coming. Now known as MAPFRE Stadium (for its sponsors, a Madrid-based insurance company with American offices based in Webster, Massachusetts), Columbus Crew Stadium opened on May 15, 1999, and—despite Lockhart Stadium’s debut a year earlier—is still regarded as the initial soccer-specific stadium of record. The soccer-specific stadium was writ into the initial plans of the league, and Columbus Crew Stadium bringing those plans to life was as important to soccer’s development as stadiums like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field were to baseball earlier in the decade. Like those stadiums, Columbus Crew Stadium had the size and the sight lines to enhance the fan experience, and others—improving on the concept and looking to further enhance the fan experience—would come once the stadium in Ohio opened its doors.
A Soccer America article told the story of the stadium’s birth:
After one public vote in Franklin County and one city referendum in Dublin, Ohio to build a stadium both failed, MLS Investor-Operator Lamar Hunt decided to take matters into his own hands and privately finance a major league soccer-specific stadium in Columbus. Stadium construction began August 14, 1998, leaving just 10 months and one day before the new 22,500-seat facility would open its doors to Columbus and America’s soccer community. Due to the May 15 opening date, MLS schedulemakers had Columbus on the road for the first seven games of the 1999 season. After winning just four road games in each of the last two seasons (Columbus was 4–12 on the road in both 1997 and 1998), the Crew has jumped out to a 5–2 record and leads the Eastern Conference with 11 points. “If we didn’t have a new stadium I don’t know if I’d want to go home,” Columbus Head Coach Tom Fitzgerald said.1
Hunt was already one of the league’s main proponents for soccer-specific stadiums, and knew one was especially needed in Columbus—to garner attention for a team far removed from one of the league’s major markets, as well as to create a place to snugly, attractively house soccer.
Steve Sirk, an author of two books about Columbus Crew SC, saw the creation of the stadium as a logical extension of what the team was in the first place—evidence of “Columbus growing as a community and wanting to be more than just a college town.” Regarding the team’s inception he notes, “Ohio State totally dominated (and still does) the local consciousness, but as Columbus started to grow, there were more and more people who were transplants from other cities, meaning they weren’t necessarily OSU-crazed. They craved pro sports. Plus, Columbus had long lived in the shadows of Cleveland and Cincinnati, so pro sports seemed to be a way of legitimizing Columbus’ ascendency into a major city.”
And yet, the Crew was still in the shadow of Ohio State University even while established as a pro team, because they were playing in the paradox that was Ohio Stadium: the largest-capacity stadium in the league, seating over 100,000, but the narrowest stadium in the league, shoehorning a sixty-two-yard wide field into a stadium that included a sizable running track. Sirk remembers,
For the games where there were 20,000-plus people there, it looked okay because fans were crammed into the areas along the sidelines. In those instances, you didn’t really notice the empty B and C decks, nor the empty closed end of the Horseshoe. But anything less than 20,000, and you’d become acutely aware of the enormity of the stadium.
There were two other main problems. One was that the ’Shoe had a track at the time, so the playing field was far from the fans. The second main problem was that because of the track, the playing field was much too small. People likened it to a postage stamp or a bowling alley. It was only sixty-two yards wide. The first game I ever covered in 1998, the Crew beat D.C. United in a game that finished 10 versus 9 due to red cards. Afterward, D.C. coach Bruce Arena sarcastically theorized that the refs were under a mandate to get the game to 7 versus 7 on that field so actual soccer could be played.
The Clash’s Eric Wynalda, who played home games at a similarly narrow Spartan Stadium, remarked on the difficulty of playing soccer on narrow fields: “The real fans were watching and saying, wow, it must be so hard to play out there. But the on-the-fence guy or the casual sports fan was saying, they’re not very good, they keep turning it over, the passes are bad, it keeps going out of bounds, it doesn’t look good. They were right.” He felt that once soccer-specific stadiums came on, giving players the room to showcase their talent, “the soccer just got better.”
Columbus Crew Stadium was built out of necessity, in part, because Ohio Stadium was set to undergo several years of extensive renovations, starting in 1998—on the Buckeyes’ schedule rather than the Crew’s. Dan Hunt, today the president of FC Dallas, asserts that “one of the critical moments in the growth of this league was the soccer-specific stadium, with my dad taking the plunge first, and that’s what catapulted the league forward,” and that’s by and large how MLS leadership and proponents regard the stadium.
For fans, it definitely made a difference to have a home stadium built for soccer. Sirk notes, “The new stadium was received incredibly well. Columbus led MLS in attendance in 1999, and … showed that there was a benefit to staging games in a true soccer stadium instead of in cavernous football stadiums. It completely changed the way the game looked, played, and felt to those in the stands and watching on TV. This was Lamar Hunt’s calculated gamble, and since his wager paid off so handsomely in Columbus, it sparked the soccer-specific stadium revolution across MLS. Even today, we’re all still benefitting from Lamar Hunt’s vision and his faith in Columbus.”
The Crew, who entered the league on the strength of season-ticket pledges, sold an MLS-record number of season tickets (9,300, besting the mark the team set in 1996), and when the team put its final thousand seats for the home opener on sale, a month before the match, they sold out in eight minutes. Also, in the lead-up to the game, MLS determined that nearly forty publications wrote more than eighty articles on the opening of the stadium, reaching an audience of (as those doing the PR metrics would have it) over 40 million in the process. While the articles certainly didn’t reach 40 million different people, the numbers do give a sense that the breadth of the coverage went beyond just central Ohio.
Sirk recalls that the first game at the stadium, a 2–0 win over the Revolution, included a number of MLS and United States Soccer Federation dignitaries, such as Michael Buffer stepping out of a limo to do his then still relatively fresh “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble” routine, and a clearly joyous Lamar Hunt beaming broadly the entire night. Sirk also notes, “What I mostly remember was that the stadium was an incalculably better experience than the Horseshoe over at Ohio State. Instead of a running track that essentially served as a moat to keep the fans separated from the field, fans were seated just a few feet from the corner flags. You were right on top of the action.”
The Crew would end up leading the league in attendance, with the new stadium placing them in the same rarified air as D.C. United and the Galaxy, with attendance of over 17,000. This would end up propping up the league average numbers, offsetting teams that were struggling; most notably, the Fusion and Wizards struggled the most attendance-wise, both below the 9,000 mark.
Thanks to Doug Logan’s proclamation at the start of the 1997 season, attendance was still being used by the media as a barometer for the league’s success. Michelle Kaufman, in her Miami Herald article covering Logan’s season-opening press conference, elaborated on Logan’s declaration that 1999 would be “the year of no excuses,” listing:
No excuse for lagging TV ratings.
No excuse for dwindling attendance in six of 12 markets—New England, San Jose, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and most damaging of all, New York.
Closer to home, no excuse for 939 Fusion season-ticket holders, up from last season but still dismal in a soccer-rich market such as South Florida.
Kaufman went on to quote Logan as saying, “I don’t think having 1,000 season tickets in Miami at this point is good. There’s been a modest amount of improvement, and the Fusion is still in the throes of reorganization. It will come in Miami; it just takes time and hard work. Selling sports is not rocket science. I’m not saying they haven’t worked hard; they just need to work smarter.”2
Another representative start-of-the-season article—from the San Diego Union-Tribune and ominously titled “It Could Be Do or Die for MLS in ’99”—noted, “It’s easy to say that the most important season in the future of Major League Soccer is any current season. And there’s some truth to that. But the season that begins Saturday is really the most important one. There was the novelty of the inaugural season in 1996. There was the inevitable sophomore slump of Year 2. There was expansion and the World Cup in Year 3. Year 4 has none of that.” The article went on to say, “Attendance has fallen from an opening-year average of 17,416 to 14,312. TV ratings fell slightly last season as well. If those key numbers don’t improve, or at least hold steady, the league could be in trouble. If they fall, the league is really in trouble.”
In the article Logan expressed “cautious optimism”—which worked its way into at least one headline—and added, “Am I a little nervous? Sure. But I’ve been nervous since the day I accepted the job.”3
The final 1999 average attendance numbers would be just several hundred below 1998’s—essentially, a three-year flatline after the roughly 20 percent dip between seasons 1 and 2—but Logan would not even be allowed to finish out the year he’d placed so much hope in. MLS would look to the National Football League for new leadership—specifically, in the form of Don Garber, the forty-one-year-old vice president of NFL International and overseer of NFL Europe—to help the league move out of its malaise.
Garber was named commissioner on August 4, 1999, in a press conference that commenced with Logan announcing his resignation; then Stuart Subotnick, in his role as MLS board of governors chair, introduced Garber. As Logan told the assembled media, “Yesterday I was an ‘is.’ Today I’m a ‘was.’ Tomorrow, I assure you, I’m going to be an ‘is’ again. There’s no elegant way to say I was fired.”4
Subotnick said, regarding Logan’s “year of no excuses” pledge, “We took that seriously. We are at an OK level but not where we want to be in respect to revenue and fan participation.” The league was switching commissioners in midseason, according to Subotnick, to reach out to potential sponsors for 2000 and beyond while there was still time. Rothenberg, quoted in a Columbus Dispatch article on the change, lauded Garber for his “great marketing skills” and “grass-roots effort.”5
Garber’s lack of soccer experience didn’t bother those who brought him in. Mark Abbott recalls, “He had a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm for getting involved in the league. He had a lot of experience in the professional sports business, and he was someone who was really going to commit himself to helping the league achieve its potential. I was really struck by the energy that he brought to it. He was a young guy when he came. He’s still young, but he was particularly young then. He really threw himself into it.”
Garber came in with a good deal of optimism, as well as praise for the owners. Reflecting on what excited him about the league, Garber notes (projecting a bit into the future),
There were changes afoot—there was every indication that America would rise as a soccer nation. There were shifting demographics with the growth of the Hispanic market, all these young people who were growing up playing were consumers and influencers, and the fact that digital media was beginning to transform the way we were consuming content so that somebody could [eventually] watch a Premier League game or could watch the World Cup on their iPhone or early on Sunday morning. I believe those things would drive our country to become passionate about the sport.
I saw enormous growth. It clearly was a start-up in the epic sense—it was only a couple of years old, and floundering when I came in.
Most importantly, you had Robert Kraft, Lamar Hunt, and Phil Anschutz, three of the great sports industrialists of our time, who were really “long” on soccer. They were deeply committed to MLS—philosophically, spiritually—and I knew we would be able to get through some tough waters with those guys.
Despite Garber’s optimism, though, he did have concerns. “The first couple of years were really rough,” he acknowledges. “Attendance was dropping, our television ratings were struggling, we had a difficult time attracting sponsors, we were paying to get our games on television.”
Kevin Payne says of Garber, “I think Don got it pretty early, even though Don was not a soccer guy. But he admitted that, and he tried his best to listen to what the soccer community was saying.”
One thing that Garber instantly got, according to Abbott, was that MLS’s “opportunity” lay in “authentic” soccer, stripped of the embellishments some of the early decision makers felt were necessary to sell the game to a hypothetical audience of youths and soccer moms with an American frame of reference.
“We’d had some rules that were Americanized,” Abbott explains, “and we had been debating those, and he came down clearly and said the opportunity is to align ourselves with the international game, and very quickly ended the debate and said, this is the way we’re going to go. Although he did not have a background in the game, he clearly understood where our opportunity was.”
In particular, the shootout and the countdown clock were negatively impacting MLS’s credibility as a league abroad, and angering American fans who wanted the game to be more closely aligned with world soccer.
Payne recalls a board of governors meeting in 1999 in which Garber asked, “Why are we doing this? This is pissing off the very people that we need to be the backbone of our fan base.” Payne summarizes, “The players didn’t like it. The coaches didn’t like it. The serious fans didn’t like it. So Don was asking the logical question of why were we doing this.” It would be a question that Garber and the league would address head-on at the conclusion of the 1999 season.
One of the most important changes of 1999 involved a fan base rather than a team. The season started with the defending champions drawing an average of 16,000-plus fans to Soldier Field, with its two separate but spirited fan groups setting a tone that was sometimes a little too spirited.
The Barn Burners and Polish Ultras came together to form what is now known as Section 8 Chicago—a marriage arranged by Peter Wilt in the middle of the 1999 season. Security concerns, stemming from what was happening in the stadium’s section 9, drove the discussion. Liam Murtaugh remembers a June 1999 “friendly” between the Fire and the Polish club Legia Warsaw, in which the Fire Ultras were “lighting flares, fighting, and sort-of supporting both teams,” as a catalyst for the club to ponder options. It was, ultimately, a move that allowed the Fire to unify and strengthen the two most vocal factions of Fire fans.
Wilt recalls,
A lot of the Polish Ultras were young, first-generation immigrants who brought with them to Chicago an aggressive style of support from Eastern Europe. That aggressive style of support sometimes meant treating opposing fans poorly, and even on occasion, their fellow fans. By that I mean violence. We had to have additional security for fans, unlike anything MLS had seen prior, and we had to mediate and bring the two groups together in a way that they would not be competing and fighting with each other. I think that was an important watershed moment in fan culture in MLS history. It was in the second half of the second season—I scheduled a meeting with the leadership. Well, first I met with the leadership of the Polish Ultras at a soccer pub on the north side of Chicago, and got to know them. That, I think, was a big step, in that before they were maybe seeing us as a faceless organization, but once they were able to put a face to the team, they didn’t want to cause as much trouble, I think.
So we set up a meeting with the leadership of Barn Burners, Polish Ultras, Soldier Field, and the security company in the bowels of Soldier Field on a non-game day, and had a come-to-Jesus meeting, and at the end of the meeting, the Polish Ultras agreed they would close down their section 9 and would relocate to section 8 and integrate with the Barn Burners.
From an operational standpoint, up to that point, the Barn Burners had the greater numbers, but Polish Ultras had the chants, the songs, the capos, the culture of supporting a team. So, when they combined, it was magical. It made the atmosphere in Soldier Field like none other—in my opinion—in sports in the United States.
Section 8 Chicago’s website characterizes the merger as the Polish Ultras “choosing” to move into section 8, but they do agree with Wilt that the effect was galvanic. The site notes the melding of the two groups, “in a way that could only happen in Chicago sports,” created “a completely new, vibrant, and infectious blend.”
Don Crafts felt the Fire Ultras worked well in the newly configured section 8, in large part because
they just didn’t stop. From before the game started to the end, they were just always on, whereas our group was all just learning this and making it up, so we didn’t have that insane intensity. We were writing songs to sing and copying English songs, that were always really long and nobody knew the words. They just simplified it down to a few simple words and chanting, and everybody could follow along within the first thirty seconds of it starting. That helped. The one everyone went home singing went “Lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo, Fire go!” It was really simple, but it was really catchy.
Mike Krupa says of the merger, “Barn Burners were a bigger group than us, and there were a lot of good people in that group, but we had this energy in us that they lacked. They were a well-organized group when it came to Internet forums, barbecues, selling T-shirts, or organizing large events.” He says that comparing the two groups was like “comparing one hundred cats to five tigers,” yet ultimately he feels that “each group brought something to the table and it worked out well.”
Today, Section 8 Chicago has evolved into more than just a group of soccer fans, and certainly beyond what its founders initially envisioned: it’s a registered 501(c)7 organization with an elected board of directors and an operating budget of more than $200,000, paying for everything from road trip funding, to tifo, to platinum-level charitable donations, to the club’s Fire Foundation.6
The 1999 season saw both Florida teams—even with losing records—join the dominant United and Crew in the East bracket, whereas in the West, the Galaxy grabbed the top playoff spot, with the Burn (benefitting from Jason Kreis’s MVP season), the Fire, and the Rapids following.
In the East playoffs, D.C. United made easy work of the Fusion, winning 2–0 at RFK Stadium and closing out the series with a shootout win (after a scoreless game) at Lockhart. The Crew blanked the Mutiny with two identical 2–0 outcomes to advance to the Eastern finals. In the wild Eastern Conference finals, D.C. United won a 2–1 opener, lost 5–1 in Columbus (going up 1–0 and then giving up five straight goals, including a Stern John second-half hat trick), and then winning the deciding match 4–0.
In the West, the Galaxy was unscathed, sweeping the Rapids 3–0 and 2–0, while the literalist’s dream matchup of Fire versus Burn went three games, including a game 3 in which the Fire jumped out to a 2–0 lead after five minutes yet gave up the equalizer and game-winner in the match’s final six minutes of regulation to lose the series. The finals also went the distance; though the Burn was able to extend the series with a game 2 shootout win at home, the Galaxy won the series with a decisive 3–1 win in game 3.
So, the 1999 MLS Cup was déjà vu all over again: Galaxy versus United at Foxboro, though with much better weather conditions than the landmark 1996 match.
The Boston Herald’s Gus Martins led his postmatch article saying, “Even under difficult circumstances, D.C. United’s unrivaled creativity and pride allows them to assert their personality.”7 But the Galaxy bore the brunt of difficult circumstances in the match—its MLS Defensive Player of the Year, Robin Fraser, was knocked out of the match in the ninth minute with a clavicle fracture, United’s first goal came in a pinball sequence started when the Galaxy missed a chance to clear a ball sent into the goalbox, and United’s second and final goal, just before halftime, was a true howler—goalkeeper Kevin Hartman badly misplayed a backpass and ended up losing the ball outside the box, giving MLS Cup MVP Ben Olsen a clear path to a twenty-yard goal.
Jimmy Golen’s Associated Press account of the game mused as to whether the United had achieved the dynastic status of comparable late-1990s teams like the New York Yankees and Chicago Bulls:
Major League Soccer might soon have to ask itself whether D.C. United, which has never missed an MLS Cup while winning three titles, is hurting the sport by dominating the competition so completely.
“I’m not worried about it,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said Sunday after D.C. won its third Cup in four years with a 2–0 victory over the Los Angeles Galaxy. “But I think that our fans would like to see another team give them a good run.”
So, it’s not time to break up D.C., yet?
“That’s why they’re called the United,” Garber joked.8
If the third title in four seasons for D.C. United didn’t provide enough drama for MLS fans, the U.S. Open Cup Finals certainly did. The Open Cup, an annual competition held since 1914, was a single-elimination tournament involving amateur and professional soccer teams throughout the United States. Whereas the NASL teams before them opted out of the Cup competition, MLS teams competed in the tournament, and won the first three finals, timed to be played just after the MLS Cup. Results almost exactly paralleled what happened in MLS—United won the 1996 MLS Cup and U.S. Open Cup, and the Fire won the 1998 MLS Cup and U.S. Open Cup, and while the Dallas Burn won the 1997 U.S. Open Cup, it was via penalty kicks against United after a scoreless match.
But the 1999 finals (the first in which teams were playing for the newly named Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup trophy) featured the Colorado Rapids, who were marginally playoff-bound, against the A-League’s Rochester Raging Rhinos. As a Dave Zeitlin article for MLSSoccer.com noted,
The 1999 Rochester Raging Rhinos weren’t a merry band of underdog misfits like in those clichéd sports movies. There were a lot of talented and experienced players on the team, some of whom could have played in MLS and a couple of others who later did.
They usually played in front of at least 10,000 fans in their home stadium, nestled in an upstate New York community rich with soccer history. They were a dominant force in what was then called the A-League (now the USL PRO), capturing titles in 1998, 2000 and 2001. And in the franchise’s inaugural season in 1996, they stormed to the US Open Cup final before losing to D.C. United.
But let’s also be clear about one more thing: as good as the Rhinos were and as young as Major League Soccer was at that time, Rochester still weren’t expected to beat any MLS teams during their magical 1999 US Open Cup run, let alone four of them in succession.9
In the September 13 finals—for once, not held the week after the MLS Cup, but rather a month before the playoffs started—the Rhinos beat the Rapids 2–0, at Columbus Crew Stadium, to conclude a tournament in which they beat the Fire, Burn, and Crew on their way to the finals.
Zeitlin pointed out, “Back in 1999, one could argue the A-League was a serious contender with MLS, at least in terms of fan support. The Rhinos were such a thriving franchise that they made a serious push to join Major League Soccer.” He added that the Rhinos fans’ chanted, “If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em” throughout their U.S. Open Cup run.10
But for Garber, witnessing his first U.S. Open Cup as commissioner, on his first visit to Columbus Crew Stadium, it was a bit startling to see an A-League team win—even one that could have functioned as a franchise in the 1999 edition of the league. “Our Colorado team lost to a [lower-division] team. I remember going in there and going, ‘Man, what’s up with this?’ Here we have an MLS team losing to a minor league team?” It would turn out to be the last time that a non-MLS team won the U.S. Open Cup.
The week of MLS Cup 1999, Garber announced the rule changes that players and more traditional fans had been awaiting for to bring the game more in line with how the great majority of nations played it. The countdown clock was eliminated in favor of referees keeping time on the field (with the scoreboard clock now starting at 0:00 and going up), and as Garber boldly declared, “Beginning with the season of 2000, the shootout will be dead.” There were a few other substantive changes made—the actual season was to be shortened by two months, and the league was divided into three four-team divisions (West, Central, East)—as the New York Times pointed out, “to create more interest in playoff races and, perhaps, will make it easier to allocate teams if the league expands.”
The Times article noted, “Changes were made to comply with the wishes of the some 60 million people in the United States who considered themselves soccer fans. One of the first things Garber did when he took over for Doug Logan three months ago was to conduct a survey of soccer fans about their feelings for the shootout. The research showed much more than a mere dislike for it.”
As Garber told the media via conference call, “There was a negativity buzzing among the hardest-core fans. It took a couple years to figure out you can’t conclude a basketball game with foul shots.” The ultimate message from Garber was, “We have to go back and shore up our existence with the core soccer fan.”11
Wynalda, who was a vocal critic of the shootout process even before he was injured in a 1998 shootout collision with then Dallas Burn goalkeeper Garth Lagerwey, applauded the decision. “I think it was for the betterment of the game,” he says. “I’d said before, when it comes to stuff like this, you kind of get tired about being right about stuff like this ten years too late. A lot of torture and stupidity and a lot of trial and error that really wasn’t necessary in the early days of this league. We really did things in a maverick way, trying to be American if you will, and all we did was confuse the hell out of people.” He adds, by way of explanation, “This league was founded by a bunch of NFL guys who were trying to make things more exciting.”
The 2000 season would commence with more traditional rules, as well as with a resolution to a legal case that might have significantly impacted MLS had the ruling gone against them. In April 2000, a Massachusetts District Court ruled on the Fraser v. Major League Soccer lawsuit—filed by eight MLS players in the fall of 1996, contending that the league and the United States Soccer Federation were conspiring to monopolize the professional soccer market in the United States. The judge ruled that the league, as a single entity, could not violate section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Though it took until 2002 for the case to be fully resolved in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the initial ruling and the subsequent appellate decision reinforced the league’s position.
As Elizabeth Cotignola, a Montreal-based lawyer and devoted soccer fan who writes on legal issues pertaining to soccer, observes, “Fraser was significant for MLS, obviously, because it validated the League’s single-entity status (and all that that implies) in the eyes of the law. From a broader legal perspective, Fraser is significant because it serves as judicial precedent in the assessment of how economic co-venturers with disparate economic interests should be treated under antitrust law, which could have a considerable effect on both traditionally organized leagues and nonsports joint ventures that require cooperation among economic competitors.”
“The fact that MLS won this case allowed them to continue as a league,” explains veteran soccer journalist Grant Wahl, currently with both Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports. “I have a hard time thinking that the owners would have continued had they lost. The reason so many of them got into the league was it was designed with the single-entity structure in mind. There’s only so much tolerance these owners would have for losing money, and if the lawsuit created a situation where they couldn’t continue as a single-entity league, I think they would have pulled the plug on it.”
The season itself held one major surprise—not only was D.C. United unable to defend its championship, it wasn’t even involved in the finals, even though RFK did host the 2000 MLS Cup. The Kansas City Wizards, who’d finished last in the Western Conference two years running, won the Supporters’ Shield in the newly configured three-conference league, and won its first-ever MLS Cup.
Defender Peter Vermes, who came over from Colorado in the offseason to become the league’s Defender of the Year, was seen by those close to the team as the key acquisition. Though Tony Meola was the league’s MVP as well as its Goalkeeper of the Year, and served as the team’s titular captain, the team was responsive to Vermes’s leadership.
“Peter has no ego,” Thomson says. “And he was the key to the championship team. In ’99, we were 8–24, we were terrible, we had no leadership. Peter was the final piece to the puzzle. Tony Meola was the captain, but people knew Peter was really the captain. He didn’t have to wear the C. He knew he was the leader.”
“The team that we had in 2000 was very much a team,” recalls Chris Klein, now president of the Los Angeles Galaxy, who started his lengthy MLS career with the Wizards in 1998. He noted that the mix of veteran leaders and younger players—himself included in the latter group—allowed for a cohesion that helped the team create an identity as a collective rather than a group of individuals. “That was a different group from the beginning. It was a group that had maturity, that had personality, that knew how to win. And we saw very early on that this was going to be a team that was difficult to beat, and a team that could definitely win the championship.”
Even though the 2000 Wizards were a success on the field from the get-go, winning ten of their first twelve on the way to the league’s best record, the team still struggled to bring in fans.
“We were embraced by a small amount of people,” Thomson remembers. “There wasn’t a rush to get tickets, because who can’t get tickets for a 79,000-seat stadium? We were partnered with the Chiefs, and the corporate sales team was for both the Chiefs and the Wizards, so when it came to sponsors, we were throw-ins. From that perspective, there wasn’t that much value to the club. People would come to the games, and enjoyed it, the kids would be running around and enjoying themselves, but if you asked them the next day who won, they wouldn’t know.”
As the number 1 seed in the eight-team playoffs, the Wizards were on the opposite side of the bracket as the number 2 seed, the Central Division–winning Fire, and the number 3 seed, the East Division–winning MetroStars. D.C. United was conspicuously absent in the 2000 playoff picture, having finished eleventh, just one point above the league-worst Earthquakes in the table.
Playoff excitement did not help the Wizards’ attendance woes. For the Wizards’ quarterfinal series against the Colorado Rapids, fewer than 9,000 people came out to Arrowhead for the initial game, and just over 4,000 saw the third and decisive game. (To be fair, this wasn’t just a Kansas City problem: The lone Rapids game drew barely a hundred more than the first Kansas City game.)
In the semis, a more respectable gathering of nearly 12,000 attended the first match against the Los Angeles Galaxy, who’d gotten past the Mutiny, and the Wizards got to play the third, decisive game in front of more than 8,000. But the Galaxy, in its one Rose Bowl appearance in the three-game series, drew more fans than in both Wizards-hosted games combined.
The series demonstrated just how convoluted the MLS playoff system had become, and how not all of the early Garber-era rule changes were easy to understand. In the first game of the best-of-three series (with three points awarded for a win, and one for a draw), the teams played to a 0–0 draw. In the second game, the teams tied 1–1 in regulation, and then in the third minute of added time, the Galaxy’s Danny Califf scored to give the team the win. The Wizards scored the third game’s lone goal in the twenty-second minute to bring the series to a 4–4 tie on points.
Because this was a “first-to-five” series, with three points awarded for a win and one for a tie, the series went to a sudden-death overtime period, lasting all of five minutes and change before postseason hero Miklos Molnar scored the winning goal.
In the finals, which drew nearly 40,000 to RFK Stadium, Molnar scored an eleventh-minute goal, which would be enough for the victory, especially with league MVP Meola making ten saves to render the Fire’s 20–6 shot advantage moot. Yet the postmatch coverage from the Associated Press marveled that Lamar Hunt chose to attend the MLS Cup over the Chiefs–Raiders game, and made reference to the league as “money-losing MLS,” including Hunt comparing the MLS Cup to the early Super Bowl years the Chiefs were so instrumental in. As Hunt noted, “The battle here is against the bill collector. Here, the battle is to sell tickets.”12
There were end-of-year reports, fueled by an ESPN the Magazine article running the last week in December, that one or two teams could be contracted in the new year to help offset operating costs after the league had lost an astonishing $250 million in its first five years. Papers in the Bay Area and Tampa Bay tailored a Steven Goff–penned Washington Post article to reflect that the Quakes and the Mutiny, respectively, were one of the teams rumored to be in danger of being folded.13
Michelle Kaufman, in a New Year’s Eve article for the Miami Herald, ominously noted that the Fusion was a candidate due to its league-low attendance of under 7,500 a game, adding, “Garber has said he was disappointed in the Fusion’s attendance, and it is no secret the team’s future in South Florida is contingent on improved gate receipts. A Winston-Salem, N.C., group interested in building a soccer stadium already has inquired about the possibility of the Fusion relocating.”14
Even the new league champions were being murmured about, given their five years of low attendance numbers. Yet, as Klein notes, the team didn’t have to worry about its future in MLS as long as Hunt was involved in ownership. “Our league was built on strong ownership, more than anything else,” he asserts. “We were owned by one of the greatest owners in sports. There was never that fear.”
For other teams, however, that fear was very real. The year started with doomsday fervor for the nation and much of the planet in the form of Y2K, and it seemed the league was on a collision course with its own version of end-times hysteria. MLS would, ultimately, enter 2001 unchanged from the year before—with twelve teams and three divisions, playing soccer with rules in concordance with the rest of the world. But 2001 would prove to be MLS’s most challenging year yet—and, indeed, ever.