THERE WAS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY, TO HEAR THOSE CLOSEST TO THE DISCUSSIONS of late 2001 and early 2002 tell it, that the story of Major League Soccer would end with this chapter. People close to MLS call these the dark times or the low point, and if not for the sheer will of a few of the key people in the negotiations, 2001’s behind-the-scenes discussions about the future of MLS would have been not only the tipping point leading to the league shutting down but perhaps even the centerpiece of a once-and-for-all declaration that soccer and America were mutually exclusive.
The year 2001 was already a very nervous one for those rooting for MLS to succeed, even before its regular season was prematurely ended—and thrown into the existential crisis that all American sports were thrown into—by the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC. The more established National Football League took a week off, and its return was billed as an essential part of what the American zeitgeist positioned as a return to normalcy: essentially, serving as proof to Americans that terrorists from a very different part of the world could not take away the quintessential American ritual of pro football, and therefore, could not take away our spirit.
Soccer in 2001 was not even remotely close to American ritual, and unlike NFL football, was at the ending rather than the beginning of its season. The decision to cancel the ten remaining regular-season games—which came from the league office on September 13—was prudent to be sure, but still left teams to begin the playoffs on September 20, under the staggering gravity of fresh national tragedy.1
Had it been a normal year—in which fans were focused purely on the game, the players, and the jockeying of teams in the still unfamiliar three conferences and playoff format—2001 would have belonged to one of the most celebrated rookies in MLS history (but curiously, not the 2001 Rookie of the Year), Landon Donovan. Loaned from the Bundesliga team, which held his rights (Bayer Leverkusen), and allocated to the San Jose Earthquakes, Donovan spearheaded an incredible turnaround for the Quakes that culminated in a fantastic playoff run, and in the process, kicked off a career transforming our collective notions of American soccer players. The capacity for Americans to shine on the World Cup stage and the value of playing professional soccer in the United States versus the top European leagues weren’t even debatable topics when Donovan first donned an Earthquakes jersey, but now they most definitely are.
Ultimately, though, 2001 was the year in which the mounting murmurings about the future of the league, fueled by mounting concerns about money, attendance figures, and the hard realities of coaxing American soccer to adulthood, would culminate in difficult, soul-searching discussions by year’s end about whether MLS would live or die.
The simple answer as to what happened comes down to surgical analogy: MLS was a patient in grave danger, and Florida needed to be amputated.
The Dallas Burn and the Tampa Bay Mutiny were still, at the closing of the 2001 season, the two remaining league-owned and league-maintained teams; D.C. United was undergoing an ownership transition throughout the season to the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG).
However, the Burn had a better situation in that it made its home in the Cotton Bowl, which had its own sense of soccer history and World Cup tradition, and happened to be the only team in one of the nation’s largest states, Texas.
The Mutiny spent its first three years in a truly ungainly football venue: Tampa Stadium, also known as Houlihan’s Stadium, though often unofficially called the Big Sombrero for the undulating shape of its outer wall. Then, along with the NFL’s Buccaneers, the Mutiny moved to Raymond James Stadium in 1999, and in what was perceived as a positive move, signed a five-year lease prior to the 2001 season that would keep the team there.
It’s unfairly reductive to say that the Tampa Bay Mutiny were so bad that no one wanted to buy them. After all, they did have a promising 2000 season in which new acquisition Mamadou Diallo (awesomely nicknamed Big Mama) scored twenty-six goals, leading the Mutiny to a playoff spot (albeit with a first-round exit).
The 2001 edition of the Mutiny, however, showed no playoff prowess whatsoever. It had one of the worst records in the league’s history, mustering only four wins and two ties in twenty-seven games. The number that perhaps mattered most, the attendance average, was next to the lowest in the league at just over 10,000.
Gabe Gabor remembers that Raymond James was better suited for soccer than some of the older football stadiums: “The new Tampa stadium was more modular, with decks, and a lot of different sections. I remember from pregame and postgame interviews on the field how loud it can get, even with ten or twelve thousand people. From the field, it feels way fuller because of your perspective.”
He also notes, mischievously, “The team hotel for the visiting team was literally a stone’s throw from Mons Venus, which is a very world-renowned adult club. I don’t know if the team’s intent was to distract [the opposing] players or not, but I thought that was interesting. It was close to the airport as well, and maybe they got the best deal there, but strategically, if you want to distract an opponent, not a bad idea.”
Bill Manning served as general manager for the Mutiny’s final two years in the league; Nick Sakiewicz, who initially came to MLS as part of the league’s executive team, and who served as Mutiny team president from late 1996 to 1999, advised Manning on his way out, “Get an owner and build a stadium,” for he thought Tampa could be a great market if it could just secure those two crucial elements.
Manning’s principal issue was the inability to create supply and demand for season tickets in a 70,000-seat stadium: “The feedback we always got was, ‘Well, if I feel like going, I’ll just buy tickets the day of.’ And so you literally couldn’t create demand. It was a difficult situation trying to build a fan base of season-ticket holders who were really vested in the team.” Manning claims that Sakiewicz was able to prop up the 1999 season-ticket numbers by selling blocks of as many as 500 to various corporations in the Tampa–St. Petersburg market under the auspices of “saving the team.” But those companies didn’t renew in 2000, telling Manning, “Well, you’re here now, we don’t need to save you anymore.”
The Fusion, on the other hand, had a season that might have swayed the league that it was turning things around for the better—that is, if it had been a league-owned and league-operated team.
The irrepressible Ray Hudson, now a famously ebullient color commentator for beIN Sports, replaced Ivo Wortmann as manager in the middle of 2000, moving directly from the broadcasting booth (no, really), inserting life into the club as a decidedly player’s manager. As he recalls,
The Fusion had been a disaster for the first two and a half years, losing crowds with horrid football. Once the team was 1–8, 1–9, they’d said that was enough, there’s not just a fire in the basement, the roof is on fire. They were desperate. [GM] Doug [Hamilton] was lining up [interim and eventual Revolution head coach] Stevie Nicol for the job, and I said, ‘Tremendous. Great signing if you can get him.’ I knew him as a player and a commentator, and I thought he was an inspired choice. And Doug said, ‘Just take over the team for the first game; we should have it wrapped up pretty soon.’ Then it went four games, and we kept on winning. We beat D.C. United in our first game, and then we won our next three. We were playing lights out. The team was rejuvenated. I took them to the beach every day and played tennis with them. I gave them days off in the midweek. They could go to Disney World, have a good time—go and see your girlfriends, take them to the beach, have a couple of beers, but you’re gonna come back Thursday and work like you’ve never worked before. That was the structure!
On the field, the Fusion was the league’s best team for the 2001 season, and arguably one of the best of all time. Alex Pineda Chacón was both the league MVP and scoring champion (with nineteen goals and nine assists). Preki had come over to the Fusion (in his only non–Kansas City MLS year), contributing with eight goals and fourteen assists. Ian Bishop, another addition, contributed with thirteen assists. Diego Serna, a mainstay from earlier Fusion seasons, had a stellar fifteen-goal, fifteen-assist season.
Hudson credits Hamilton’s acumen as GM—calling him a “magic man”—for bolstering the squad, but also notes he made some cavalier choices in fielding a strong starting XI. Hudson explains, “I put Pablo Mastroeni back in defense instead of midfield; Pablo didn’t like it, I didn’t care! It was inspirational for us. Nicky Rimando took the place of Jeff Cassar, he wasn’t happy about that, I didn’t care—Nicky Rimando turned out to be an absolutely Herculean player for us.”
Rimando, who’d been drafted by the Fusion in 2000, had immediately emerged to challenge Cassar, starting more than half the games. Rimando started the majority of the 2001 games and was one of four Fusion players in the All-Star Game’s East starting squad that year, though Rimando was to lose Goalkeeper of the Year honors to future fellow U.S. Men’s National Team member Tim Howard.
Hudson might be overstating it when he says that the 2001 Fusion “played Barcelona football before Barcelona played it,” but the team was decidedly the best in the league, and as Hudson accurately assessed, they did increase the gate by 50 percent—though the jump from 2000’s woeful 7,460 to 2001’s 11,177 still placed it in the bottom third of teams for 2001 attendance. By 2001 Gabor was just a fan rather than part of the organization, but still went to matches, recalling, “The atmosphere at Lockhart was electric. It was by far the best it had been those four years.”
As Ken Horowitz tells it, the team was trying everything it could to market itself, including playing several midseason games in Miami’s Orange Bowl as an experiment. Despite earlier friction between Horowitz and the city, leading to the exodus to Lockhart, Horowitz said the city was enthusiastic. He recalls, “The City Council of Miami lit up the buildings in our colors every time we had a game. The Miami skyline was lit up. People knew we had games, in our most successful season ever. People still didn’t come. I was so sure that this was going to make a difference—you’d look out your window and wonder why are the colors like this. It was in the newspapers. We really were baffled.”
Gabor notes that the team was getting better media support than other teams in the league, especially from the Miami Herald, which published stories about the Fusion three to four times a week. Horowitz knew, especially with Hamilton as GM, that the front office was skilled enough to put a good product on the field. Despite stories that Horowitz didn’t want to spend money to market the team, he countered by saying the Fusion were outspending other teams on advertising and were getting guidance from the league on marketing. And, as he pointed out, he did spend literally millions of his own money to create a stadium for the team.
In my conversations with Horowitz, weather is a recurrent scapegoat, and indeed, players who toiled in the summer months were profoundly aware of its effects. Wynalda, recalling his time with the team in 2000, acknowledges that the weather did impact play as well as the fan experience, though it typically favored the players who trained in it: “In June and July, you could get dehydrated. Watching guys from Colorado, or New York, the West Coast … they’d get twenty minutes into a game, and they just became clock watchers, saying, God, I just want this game to be over with. Games were slower—and if you didn’t know any better, it made for great soccer. It looked like great offense for us, whereas it was really just a guy too tired to defend.”
Horowitz’s mood that final year might best be described as bewilderment. Despite a great team, a popular coach, and a stadium that he invested heavily in, the team wasn’t approaching the 14,000–15,000 in attendance that Horowitz and his investors assessed would be enough to generate the revenue needed to keep it going. And toward the end of 2001, when it was clear they still wouldn’t hit that mark, Horowitz said he was ready to do the one thing he wasn’t accustomed to doing in business. As he recalls,
I came to the league. I finally said to the league, ‘Unless somebody has an answer to this, this can’t go on. We’re bleeding.’ It was financial. If you’re running a business, and you can’t fix it, no matter what you’ve tried, what do you do? It was me approaching the league saying this is enough.
I started talking about it by telephone [toward the end of the 2001 season], and we decided we’d have an owners’ meeting about it, what the ramifications would be if I went through with it. It was absolutely my decision. The league doesn’t have the right to close a team—that’s not in the bylaws, particularly when an owner pays a large amount to purchase a team.
Don’t forget, the way the league worked, we shared revenues and expenses. So if there’s a deficit, the league is sharing in this deficit. If there’s a profit, they share a profit. So not only was I and my investor group losing money, the league wasn’t making any money on the team, at the expense of the players. In Tampa, without an owner, the league was incurring all the losses for that team.
While Horowitz was talking to MLS’s top officials privately about the very real possibility of folding the team, Hudson and an inspired group of players were on a collision course with another talented but troubled franchise in the Earthquakes.
The Quakes–Fusion series was one of the more dramatic offerings in the eight-team playoffs, again using the three-conference, first-to-five format that jumbled geography. In 2001, the Galaxy emerged from rounds that involved the MetroStars, Fire, and Burn to get to the all-California finals. The Quakes defeated the Crew in 3–1 and 3–0 matches, while it took the Fusion all three games to advance past the defending champion Wizards.
The third and deciding game between the Quakes and Fusion came down to extra time. Hudson was apoplectic about losing and recalls, “We got beat by Landon Donovan’s stinkin’ San Jose Earthquakes, on that Troy Dayak goal,” referring to the defender’s corner-kick header just three minutes into overtime for the match’s only goal. “It was Landon. You don’t need to say anything more about him—he was a one-man wrecking crew. That was the difference.”
Hudson even goes as far as to intimate that the Quakes–Fusion series was a literal “loser leaves town” series, saying, “The rumor was at the time that whoever lost that semifinal was going to die. That was the heavy rumor. The players didn’t know it, of course, but Doug had an indication that this might be it. That was hard to bear.”
Others, however, saw hope in the narrow loss and the Fusion’s stellar season. Greg Cote, putting an epitaph on the season (but not the Fusion itself), wrote in the Miami Herald,
Hudson’s band fashioned a season that stands as a hallmark in the almost 30-year and oft-mottled history of pro soccer in South Florida. This was the most inspired, attractive soccer we have seen since the old NASL Fort Lauderdale Strikers (led by a young British midfielder named Ray Hudson) made the same Lockhart rock. This was the most successful season, by the bottom line, since Hudson’s Strikers lost in the 1980 Soccer Bowl title game.
This was the season that saved the team, the sport down here.
This was the season that made soccer begin to grow again.
Oh how Hudson deserved to be the MLS coach of the year, not runner-up.
The Fusion was on the brink of being moved, or folded, before Hudson assembled a bunch of discards and misfits and made them a magical team. Wednesday’s robust crowd of 11,242 hints of the rejuvenation.
Now the coach, even as he stanched tears after the loss, vowed to attack next season.
“We will be ruthless,” he said. “We’ll get stronger. We’ll get better. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”2
The Earthquakes started 2001 with an incredible transition—in January of that year, Silicon Valley Sports & Entertainment, which managed the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League, took over as the Quakes operators from the Kraft Sports Group, which had been operating both New England and San Jose since 1999. Two days after taking over, the new owners fired coach Lothar Osiander, who’d led the Quakes to the worst record of 2000, and replaced him with Frank Yallop.
Dominic Kinnear, a former San Jose player who started 2001 thinking he would play for the Mutiny, retired and became Yallop’s assistant while still recovering from abdominal wall surgery.
“During his five-year career in Major League Soccer,” the Tampa Tribune recounted, “Kinnear underwent reconstructive knee surgery and surgery on his ankle, as well as a second-degree concussion, a serious sprain of his spine, and assorted hamstring, thigh and ankle contusions that forced him out of numerous matches.”3
The most important improvement to the Quakes 2001 squad, in a busy offseason that included acquisitions of veteran defender Jeff Agoos, Canadian midfielder Dwayne De Rosario, and Danish standout Ronnie Ekelund, came in March, when Landon Donovan was loaned to San Jose.
The Quakes were able to come after Donovan by virtue of having the worst record in the 2000 MLS season and thereby receiving the league’s first allocated player. Soccertimes.com—a soccer news site that still actively posts soccer news despite its retro, CSS-be-damned appearance—termed it “a complex deal in which he signed a four-year Major League Soccer contract, but is guaranteed to be with the team only for 2001.”4
Donovan was initially supposed to circumvent MLS altogether. He had been signed to a six-year contract with Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen while just sixteen, and the plan was for him to develop within the Leverkusen system, earn his way onto the senior squad, and potentially become a landmark American player in gaining the success (read: attaining regular starting XI status with a Bundesliga side) that eluded generational players that came before him. But a little more than a year into his contract, they decided to loan Donovan to an American team, ostensibly with the hopes that he’d get experience in MLS that he could then take back to Germany and translate to success there.
When asked to contrast his experience between Bayern Leverkusen and the Earthquakes, Donovan simply says, “My fondest memories of San Jose were that I actually got to play professional soccer for the first time. MLS and the Bundesliga were vastly different in every way, but I loved being in San Jose and finally getting a chance to play.”
After opening the season with a win over cross-state rivals the Galaxy, the Quakes lost their next two games—but then went undefeated in the next twelve games, bouncing back from an uncharacteristic loss with two more wins to head into the All-Star Game.
And then—in front of a home crowd at Spartan Stadium, with six Earthquakes on the West squad, Donovan scored a hat trick in the game’s first nineteen minutes to kick off what was arguably the wildest All-Star Game in MLS history. The West added a fourth goal in the twenty-sixth minute, conceded a goal two minutes later, let in two Brian McBride goals in the thirty-fourth and thirty-ninth minutes, conceded the tying goal just after halftime, regained the lead, conceded two goals at the eighty-fourth and eighty-seventh minute to go down 6–5, and then Donovan reemerged on the score sheet in the second minute of extra time for the final and tying goal, giving MLS its first All-Star Game draw ever.
Seeing that the league was on the precipice of folding immediately after the 2001 finals, that might have cast the Earthquakes’ triumph as an ultimate Pyrrhic victory for the club.
But the victory did come—at the expense of the Galaxy, who’d made three appearances in five years of MLS Cups without once hoisting the trophy. Playing just four days after both California teams won overtime matches to get to the finals, the teams went to overtime again, after Galaxy standout and Mexican international striker Luis Hernández traded first-half goals with Donovan. De Rosario’s ninety-sixth-minute goal earned him the match MVP trophy and the Quakes the crowning achievement in a worst-to-first season. The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out that with the Bay Area CyberRays recently winning the inaugural Women’s United Soccer Association Championship—created, of course, to capitalize on the success of the 1999 Women’s World Cup team, that the Bay Area was “the unofficial capital of American professional soccer.”5
And yet, while the drama of the MLS Cup was playing out on the field of what is now MAPFRE Stadium, a more significant drama was happening in other parts of Columbus around the MLS Cup.
As Kevin Payne notes, Horowitz’s decision to fold the Fusion sent the MLS board of governors into a series of meetings about how to proceed with the future of the league. Without knowing it at the time, MetroStars goalkeeper Tim Howard might have saved the league with a well-timed, inspirational speech by virtue of being named Goalkeeper of the Year. Payne recalls,
There was a board of governors meeting in Columbus around MLS Cup. That was a very, very difficult meeting. The business model was broken. There was not much consensus about how to go forward. I’ve always believed that one of the things that saved the league, ultimately, was we met all day, and it kind of went nowhere. Then we broke to go the awards ceremony, which was in a theater-style setting. It’s much more formal than what MLS does today. So I was sitting with Phil and Nancy [Anschutz], and Tim Howard won the Goalkeeper of the Year award, and he made this really beautiful speech about the struggles he had had growing up with Tourette’s. And he talked about how big an influence the game had in his life, and how it helped him overcome his challenges. He expressed enormous gratitude to Major League Soccer. And as we walked out of the building, Phil turned to Nancy and to me and said, “We have to keep this league going for young men like that.”
Payne knew Anschutz’s commitment to the league was serious—he remembers talking to him at the 1998 World Cup, and asking him, “Why do you do this? You could be in any sport.” And Payne recalls Anschutz saying, “I think I can help this sport a lot more than I can other sports, and I think it’s a game that deserves an opportunity to succeed.”
Yet there was no resolution by the time the board of governors left Columbus, and that’s when the league’s future was in its greatest jeopardy. Payne recalls a post–MLS Cup conference call so dismal that his group ended up getting off before it ended, followed by a meeting in New York where an actual decision was made to take the league into bankruptcy.
Dan Hunt, in an April 2016 interview for the Soccer Today radio show on ESPN Radio Dallas, recalled a slightly different timeline, but remembers being on the conference call where the decision was made to go into bankruptcy, with his father and brother in the Kansas City Chiefs’ office, with this visceral level of alarm: “On my very first day on the job, it went out of business. They were preparing the documents and that was it. My brother looks over at me and in typical big brother fashion goes, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been hired and fired on the same day’ with a big smile, although it wasn’t quite big enough because the situation was pretty grave. My dad was able to call everybody, get ‘em back, and within 48 hours everybody was back all in.”6
As Payne recalls, Anschutz followed through on what he’d said to him in Columbus, determined that the league could not yet fail:
What ended up happening was Phil said, I’ll step up and take responsibility for six teams, and he looked at Robert and Lamar, and said, can you guys stand up with me? Lamar said, yes, we’ll do the two teams we have and we’ll do Dallas. Which obviously made sense because that’s where they lived. And then Robert said, we’ll keep New England alive. And from there, we kind of reoriented the whole league. We adopted a very strict five-year spending plan. And the whole idea was to try to get the losses under control, to use some to build up commercial revenues.
Anschutz, who’d been operating D.C. United transitionally in tandem with the original ownership group, exercised his option to become sole investor-operator on the same day the Florida contractions were announced. He’d also coordinated a transition with Silicon Valley Sports & Entertainment to take over the Quakes—AEG would be its sole investor-operator by the end of 2002—adding to an empire that also included the Galaxy, Rapids, and Fire, as well as the MetroStars, which he’d purchased from Metromedia in November 2001.
“I think there was a recognition that the strategy we had been pursuing was not working, and that we continued to have an opportunity, but we needed to adjust, as all good businesses should,” Mark Abbott remembers. “A few key decisions were made. One came from an insight that looks simple in retrospect, but which we hadn’t had before, which was that there was a large market here for professional soccer, for capturing that, which led to the formation of Soccer United Marketing [SUM]. There were other aspects of the soccer business we could be involved with, that would allow us to generate revenue that would help the league, strategically, to help reach people who were potential fans of MLS.”
Payne termed this a “doubling down” on the World Cup’s potential to attract American fans. Indeed, a week before announcing that the Fusion and Mutiny would officially be contracted—even though there were already reports from media outlets speculating that the future was nigh for both teams—MLS sought to set the tone for 2002 via the public reveal of what would be SUM’s centerpiece—the multiyear deal between ABC, ESPN, and MLS to air the 2002 and 2006 World Cups, the 2003 Women’s World Cup, and MLS matches each year during the terms of the contract.7
But the league also recognized that more teams needed what Abbott termed “additional investment and infrastructure”—namely, more soccer-specific stadiums to follow what had been created for the Crew in 1999.
“We recognized early on that if the league was going to be successful, it needed its own stadiums, where its teams were primary tenants,” Abbott explains. “What we learned when we went out and talked to potential investors in ’94 and ’95, they said, let’s see if we can get the league up and going before we spend in what would become billions of dollars in stadiums. But by this point in time, there was clear recognition that we needed stadiums. We made some changes in the way expenses and revenues were allocated to further incentivize development of stadiums and I think that that helped. We also recognized that we needed to continue to invest in our product quality.”
That had to do with the development of what Abbott called “MLS’s media properties,” which started with the new ABC/ESPN deal, as well as the questions “How do we get people to develop players?” and “What’s the role of star players?”—which would eventually lead the league into the designated player rule and additional rules about how to attract marquee players to the league and how to allocate them to teams.
Garber characterizes the whole scheme as part of a plan B to make the league more attractive to new investors, summarizing it as “divesting the league-operated clubs, having Anschutz and [Lamar] Hunt take them over, making a commitment to build soccer stadiums—with the Home Depot Center being the first one to come out of that—and probably most importantly, it was a near hundred-million-dollar investment in the formation of Soccer United Marketing, which gave us a vehicle to capture the rise of the commercial value of soccer that was not necessarily dependent on what was a very long term growth plan for MLS, because SUM was invested in many non-MLS soccer properties that were doing very well.”
Garber saw the contraction part of the plan as “part of a broader vision for MLS soccer.” He adds, “While that is viewed as the most traumatic aspect of the new vision, ultimately we were able to come out of that with the blueprint for a better, stronger, more popular league, which ultimately is the league that we have today.”
That frank matter-of-factness, which Garber maintains today, was evident in the Associated Press report on the Mutiny and Fusion contraction news in which Garber said, “The decision to leave both cities for the 2002 MLS season was extremely difficult. I can assure all of our fans that we worked tirelessly to find a plan that would have allowed us to remain in both markets. We simply could not find a solution that was economically feasible at this time, and we hope to return to the state of Florida when the league expands in future years.”8
Ironically, the Mutiny had had its best financial year in 2001, according to Manning, and despite plans to upgrade the team while improving its financial status heading into the 2002 season, the lack of a buyer—despite the league’s ongoing efforts to attract one—ultimately doomed the team to contraction.
“I got a phone call from Don saying, ‘We’ve made a decision at the board level, and we’re going to close the team down,’” Manning recalls. “It was literally twenty-four hours before the announcement. And I get it; they discussed several different options, and while they were doing so, they didn’t want us to take our eye off the ball.”
The St. Petersburg Times presented a rather sad epitaph for the Mutiny in its January 9, 2009, edition. Rodney Page began his article, “Mutiny employees showed up Tuesday morning at their office at Raymond James Stadium ready to work. By the afternoon, they were packing boxes and filling garbage bags with personal belongings, out of a job after Major League Soccer ceased operations of both the Mutiny and Miami Fusion.”
The article noted that the league had spoken to “six to 12” potential owners since the league launched, with the Glazer family, which owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, being the closest to forging ahead. “We needed an owner in Tampa,” Garber told the Times. “We spent an enormous amount of time trying to find that owner.”9
Sakiewicz remembers an eight-month period in which he was trying to sell the franchise to the family for $5 million, and once he left Tampa for the MetroStars in 1999, encouraged Garber to pursue negotiations, believing that the Mutiny could succeed if the Glazers would step in.
Malcolm Glazer, quite famously, eventually did decide to invest in soccer—starting with a £9 million purchase to acquire 2.9 percent of Manchester United stock in March 2003,10 with additional increases coming over the next two years until, in May 2005, he completed a £740 million (nearly $1.5 billion) bid to take control of the club.11 Sakiewicz likens the process of going from the Mutiny to Manchester United to “walking into Macy’s for a pair of socks and walking out of the store buying the whole franchise.”
As far as the league was concerned, Tampa was welcome back—provided it could produce a soccer-specific stadium as well as an investor-operator ready to come on board.
For Fusion fans who’d had their hopes buoyed by their near storybook 2001 season, the news was particularly heartbreaking.
Hudson felt that the team could succeed there had the bookends of the first few games and few last games been consistent, but observes, in his inimitable fashion, that 1998’s initial slide had sent the Fusion’s fortunes “downhill like a giraffe on roller skates.”
“The Fusion wasn’t a failure in any way,” Gabor maintains. “The team wasn’t failing on the field. It was more of a situation between ownership and the league, and the direction the league was going, and the direction that ownership wanted to take.”
As MLS headed into its sixth year, it had finally found investor-operator matches for all its teams, though it was obvious that the arrangement of one owner in charge of more than half the league’s clubs was temporary.
Payne, in his new role, overseeing six teams, left soccer operations in the hands of general managers in each of the markets and worked from the D.C. United offices, sharing best practices and operating under a mandate “to do everything possible to reduce losses on the local level.”
“Slowly and surely, we began to make progress,” Payne notes of the postcontraction era. “The whole idea, when I was overseeing the six teams, was to try to show regular improvement in the bottom line of each of those teams, so we could potentially attract qualified buyers. Preferably, buyers who had an interest in the market. It took some years, but the process eventually worked.”
And that process started the very next year—in large part, due to the gamble that MLS took on the World Cup.