THE 2002 WORLD CUP DIDN’T, AT FIRST GLANCE, APPEAR TO BE THE BEST possible World Cup to hook the SUM wagon to. South Korea and Japan, the first-ever Asian hosts of the worldwide tournament (and, as matters would develop, the only cohost nations ever) shared a time zone that happened to be thirteen to sixteen hours ahead of the four major American time zones. This led to the high hilarity of U.S. Soccer issuing a press release that sold the prowess of the team while glossing over the ghastly times during which new American soccer fans would need to tune in—2:25 a.m. ET for its match against Korea, 4:55 a.m. ET for its match against Portugal, and 7:25 a.m. ET for its game against Poland.1
In addition to the insomniac start times to matches, the draw wasn’t particularly friendly for a U.S. team whose 1998 campaign had been horrific. The Americans’ first game would be against Portugal, led by a trio of world-class stars in Luis Figo, Rui Costa, and Nuni Gomes; the second game against the Korean cohosts; and the third against Poland. By the somewhat baffling rating system FIFA had in employ for 2002, the United States was actually the highest ranked of the four teams, but was still considered an underdog in the opening matchup.
In a 2014 retrospective on the 2002 World Cup team, Philly.com’s Ed Farnsworth noted that U.S. coach Bruce Arena had used thirty-one different players in the sixteen qualifying matches for 2000–2001, increasingly relying upon a pair of twenty-year-olds—DaMarcus Beasley (who’d started his playing career in 2000 with the Chicago Fire while still just seventeen) and Landon Donovan (who’d had a pretty spectacular 2001 season)—who brought down the average age of the squad to twenty-nine. The team included eleven veterans from the 1998 World Cup and, interestingly enough, eleven Major League Soccer players (along with six players with English club teams and six from other European club teams). Arena was not terribly optimistic about how the Americans would fare. As Farnsworth noted, “We’re not going to win [the World Cup] because we’re not a good enough team. I don’t think anyone is going to be damaged by us saying that. I mean, how many countries have won it? If we can get a point in the first game, it will put the whole group in chaos.”2
“Bruce said those things publicly but, inside the team, we just prepared to play against a very good Portuguese team,” Donovan recalls. “We knew they were better on paper. We also knew that we had the capability of beating good teams if we played well enough. I think the players really believed we had a chance to get something out of that game.”
National Public Radio’s Tom Goldman, in previewing the World Cup, declared, “Having qualified for its fourth straight World Cup, the United States still hasn’t established a recognizable style,” yet he also conversed with soccer historian David Wasser, who told Goldman he believed the United States was “on the cusp of finally adopting a national style” built around scrappiness, and speculated they could fight their way to an upset victory over Portugal.3
But that wasn’t the only pre–World Cup coverage that concerned itself with American style. The New York Times Magazine ran a fashion photo spread a week before the start of the tournament, featuring what you might describe as provocative, even smoldering, photos of the U.S. national players in Prada and Tom Ford designer clothing with price tags in the hundreds and even thousands.4 The clothing leaned toward the silky; Pablo Mastroeni’s outfit, in particular, was edging into the Steven Tyler Zone.
Brian Phillips, in a hilarious 2013 send-up of the shoot, noted,
Need to drum up some publicity for your sports team in advance of its big event? Of course you sign them up for a New York Times Magazine style spread photographed by Dutch photographer and ex-Armani creative director Matthias Vriens. I mean, of course you do. What are the odds that the resulting photos, published in late May under the title “The Boys of Soccer,” will be so tonally bewildering, such a steamy potpourri of sullenness and arch poses and billowing paisley and smothered rage, that they look like Mike Tyson’s dreams the night after he first saw The Muppet Show? What could possibly go wrong?5
Nearly a decade and a half after first appearing, the photo of Donovan drinking from a water fountain remains an iconic image of the era that he hasn’t entirely lived down. When a fan ribbed him about it on Twitter in 2015, he half joked that he wished that photo could be removed from the Internet forever, and when another Twitter user declared that the Donovan water fountain had been surpassed by a New York City Football Club promo photo of Frank Lampard, Andrea Pirlo, and David Villa in tank tops, uniform shorts, and with what appeared to be oiled triceps, Donovan responded, “I’ve been waiting for this day,” and followed that with a series of hands-in-prayer emojis.)6
Once the soccer started, the United States was out to show that 2002 would not be the goal-bereft train wreck that 1998 was, and it didn’t take long to do so.
In the fourth minute of its opening match, Brian McBride headed an Earnie Stewart corner kick toward goal, forcing Portugal goalie Victor Baia to dive to stop the shot. Baia got tangled up with one of his defenders while going to ground, and the resulting rebound fell to a lurking-at-the-far-post John O’Brien, who put the Americans up. In the thirtieth minute, Donovan intended to send a cross into McBride, who was being guarded closely by Jorge Costa; the ball struck Costa’s shoulder and shockingly spiraled into the goal—Baia was taken off guard and too late to react. Donovan reacted with an expression that was part bewilderment and part, “Look what I just did!” In the thirty-sixth minute, McBride scored what might have been the game’s first legitimately good goal—meeting a solid Tony Sanneh cross with a diving header that simply beat a prepared Baia with speed and placement.
Three minutes later, a poor O’Brien clearance, on a corner kick that devolved into pinball, found Beto’s foot to slot past goalkeeper Brad Friedel to make it 3–1. In the seventy-first minute, Agoos misplayed a Rui Costa cross, doing his best forward finishing impression on the wrong goal to bring it to 3–2. But the Americans had created enough of a cushion and displayed enough intestinal fortitude in the remaining minutes to beat one of the traditional soccer powers for its first World Cup win outside the United States since 1950.
In the second group match, the United States would tie the cohosts 1–1, with Clint Mathis scoring in the twenty-fourth minute, Brad Friedel saving a fortieth-minute penalty kick to temporarily preserve the lead, then making several memorable second-half saves, and Ahn Jung-Hwan heading in the seventy-eighth-minute equalizer, celebrating by imitating a speed skater, to remind the world of a speed skating controversy involving American and South Korean racers at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City that past February—which, at that point, was a controversy exclusively remembered by South Koreans.
After the match, Friedel said, “If someone had said we could have four points going into our final game, then I think we would have taken it,”7 but they unfortunately stayed on four points following a lackluster showing against Poland in its final group match.
The United States seemingly returned to 1998 form, giving up two goals in the match’s first five minutes. Nigerian-born striker Emmanuel Olisadebe won a header on a corner kick and then kicked in the resulting rebound to make it 1–0. It looked like Donovan had equalized a minute later, but was called for a foul on the play in which he’d headed the ball into the net, and on the ensuing play, forward Paweł Kryszałowicz beat Friedel with a well-assisted shot to make it 2–0.
Friedel made several brilliant saves to keep it 2–0, but the United States wasn’t able to mount a successful attack, and in the sixty-sixth minute, substitute Marcin Żewłakow found an unmarked spot amid the frozen American defense to make it 3–0. The combination of a Friedel penalty save and a Donovan goal late in the game kept it a more respectable 3–1, but four points, under normal circumstances given this group’s makeup, would not be enough to advance in the World Cup.
Fortunately for the Americans, this World Cup was not being played under normal circumstances. While the United States was losing, the Koreans were upstaging Portugal with a 1–0 victory perhaps most notable for the Europeans being reduced to nine men—a twenty-sixth-minute straight red for Joao Pinto, and a sixty-fifth-minute second yellow for Beto serving as preludes to Park Ji-Sung’s seventieth-minute goal.
The Round of 16 was a gift from the soccer gods: the United States versus Mexico, the first time the fierce Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) rivals had ever met in World Cup play. The United States won by the “dos a cero” scoreline that American fans have since come to favor, playing a cavalier 3–5–2 formation and riding an eighth-minute McBride strike and a Donovan header in the sixty-fifth minute to advance to the quarterfinals—already the U.S.’s best showing since its third-place finish in the 1930 World Cup—to face Germany.
The Americans’ World Cup dream ended there, though they didn’t go down easily. The game’s lone goal came in the thirty-ninth minute, when Michael Ballack rose up in traffic on a set piece kick lofted into the penalty area for the successful header. But the game’s definitive moment came in the forty-ninth minute—a shot by American fullback Gregg Berhalter appeared to bounce off goalkeeper Oliver Kahn, spin over the line for a brief second, and then connect with defender Torsten Frings’s hand on the way out. Neither a goal nor a handball was called, and despite several other great chances from the Americans during the second half, the aforementioned hard-luck moment was the definitive one of the match, and Germany went through to dispatch South Korea 1–0 in the semifinals before losing 2–0 to Brazil in the finals.
The U.S. team had exceeded the expectations for its performance, beating one of the world’s most respected soccer nations and their bitter rivals before giving one of the perennial best teams in the world all it could handle. They were doing this, unfortunately, in a time zone that was a direct affront to American TV viewers. According to Nielsen, the 1.4 broadcast rating and 0.7 cable rating (only counting English-language TV) was cumulatively down from the 2.6 broadcast rating and 0.5 cable rating that the previous World Cup had recorded. Just over an estimated 6 million Americans watched the finals, which was down from the 8.6 million watching in 1998, though the finals did air live at 6:30 a.m. ET on a Sunday morning, as compared to the midafternoon Sunday start time for the 1998 Finals.8
But the ultimate triumph of the 2002 World Cup, from an American soccer standpoint, was that it created a foundation for future World Cup cycles and the coverage that was to follow, making World Cup broadcasts more sellable to advertisers in future, more broadcast-friendly cycles. (And, when Nielsen would start factoring in Spanish-language broadcasts in 2006, it would reveal that half of more of the American audience for the World Cup was watching en español.) And for those Americans who were watching, the inspired and inspiring play was something to be excited about, creating a hope for the future of American soccer that the prior year’s angst over MLS’s fortunes had adversely affected.
For MLS, the performance was a double boon, as it not only provided a solid initial return on investment (excitement-wise, if not ratings-wise) for SUM’s World Cup play but also helped raise the profile of players returning from the World Cup to MLS.
Mark Abbott recalls that, as a result of the Americans’ World Cup success, “You have Landon Donovan and these players who are playing in the league who are all of a sudden known throughout the United States. That was a quick change from where we had been to what became people seeing what the future could be. And that was a real turning point. There was this decision made in 2001, and then with the success in the 2002 World Cup, a lot of people who had not been interested or engaging with the league became engaged. And that’s what set the foundation for expansion.”
Don Garber saw something in American fans’ love of the game, through its team’s incredible run, that gave him hope:
I remember sitting in the stadium in Korea when the United States beat Portugal, and I remember looking a few rows behind me—where Lamar Hunt was sitting—and he was crying. And he said, “This could be the turning point for this sport”—the sport that he’d been committed to since the 1970s with the Dallas Tornado. It began to really resonate with people in America, getting up in the middle of the night watching in bars, the beginnings of these viewing parties and viewing events. I remember coming home from the final in Yokohama in Japan, and saying, “You know what? There’s something happening here. Americans really do love this game.” You’ve gotta give ’em the right product. You’ve got to package it right. You’ve got to put it in their hometown. And you’ve got to celebrate it in ways that they were able to see the beauty of the game when they were watching the World Cup. That means great stadiums, great marketing, great quality of play.
While the 2002 World Cup did create an excitement about soccer that MLS was poised to capitalize on, it was also during a period in which the remaining teams were cost conscious and careful by choice. While not exactly a holding pattern period for the league, especially for the two California teams whose burgeoning rivalry was becoming one of the league’s best story lines, the three seasons following contraction, if MLS were a movie, might be handled via montage to move the audience along to the next significant act.
The 2002 season was obviously a transitional one, not just for the league as an entity but also for many of its individual franchises. With MLS back down to ten teams, it reverted to two conferences from its short-lived three-division alignment, but still took the top eight teams into the playoffs regardless of conference affiliation; this resulted in the overachieving Western Conference getting all its teams into the playoffs, though both conference’s top teams would find their way through the bracket into the finals.
Contraction, of course, allowed some (but definitely not all) Fusion and Mutiny players to find homes with other teams through a one-round allocation draft followed by a dispersal draft held just three days after the announcement. Though a number of teams were hamstrung by salary caps and passed on players in the dispersal, the Revolution found themselves with five All-Star caliber players after MLS Christmas, with Alex Pineda Chacón and Mamadou Diallo among them (though Diallo would go to the MetroStars that coming May in a six-player move, the biggest MLS trade to date, which also sent allocation-drafted Diego Serna to the Revs). Other notable dispersals included Pablo Mastroeni going to Colorado to be forever intertwined with that club’s lore, Kyle Beckerman going to Colorado to mature into an oft-capped national team player and MLS mainstay, and the legendary Preki returning to Kansas City.9
Fusion coach Ray Hudson quickly landed on his feet, being named to D.C. United within an hour of the Fusion folding announcement. John Haydon’s Washington Times article on the announcement noted that “the club’s post-game news conferences will never again be the same” and noting,
The colorful Hudson, known for his hilarious quote collection, didn’t fail to please the crowd at the District’s ESPN Zone. Hudson’s audience included dozens of United fans and a number of United players.
“This is not just big,” said Hudson, still a little shell-shocked on acquiring the United job, “this is Anna Nicole Smith big … this eclipses every job in the league.”
Haydon also captured these thoughts from Hudson on the new D.C. United:
“This will be a team with belief. They will be bursting out of their shorts. They will come out like jets and act like gladiators behind the bayonet … I’m going to let the players express themselves, to play free like lads in a sandlot. These lads will bloom under me.”10
Despite those bold (and entertaining) predictions, and even with goalkeeper Nick Rimando rejoining Hudson at D.C. United via the allocation draft, the club finished dead last in the league, though they were in contention for a playoff spot heading into the final match.
The Chicago Fire faced perhaps the most challenging 2002 for any of the surviving teams. Soldier Field was closed for nearly two years of renovations in January 2002. Its primary tenant, the NFL’s Bears, had found a temporary home downstate at the University of Illinois’ mammoth football stadium in Champaign, but the Fire was also in need of a home, and suburban Naperville’s Cardinal Stadium (after several may-you-live-in-interesting-times months for the Fire front office) emerged as the team’s one viable option. As Peter Wilt recalls:
At the end of the day, it ended up being play in Naperville or take a couple of years off. We’d even considered building a modular stadium quickly in Cicero, we considered playing at the horse track in Cicero, building a soccer field on the infield. We also considered playing in Milwaukee. And we thought about Rockford, but I don’t think we even looked at a specific site there. We were told by Mayor [Richard M.] Daley that Comiskey Park was going to be made available to us, but when I met with Jerry Reinsdorf, he said no. So we only had about ninety days to get a deal done.
We had businesses leaders there who didn’t want us because they thought we might take away from their business, we had million dollar homes surrounding the stadium and the homeowners were NIMBYs, and understandably so. We met one-on-one with every alderman, often with the mayor, and then with the college; we had to make a financial deal with the college.
And then we had to expand the stadium—it was a 4,500-seat stadium. So, in those ninety days, we had to add 10,000 seats, we had to add portable concession stands, merchandise stands, restrooms. It was arguably the most rewarding accomplishment of my career, just getting that done.
The Fire ended up playing to 95 percent capacity crowds in their first season in Naperville, and Wilt was even named Naperville Person of the Year by the Daily Herald, the newspaper serving Chicago’s western suburbs. But the Fire lost many of the Polish and Mexican fans during the Naperville years, only getting some of them back upon returning to Soldier Field. Diehards like Marek Krupa still made it out to games—the most remarkable time being when he was with his wife at a family member’s wedding reception, told her he was going to the bathroom, and then disappeared for three hours to run out to a home game at the new stadium—but the trek proved difficult for some to make on a regular basis. On the bright side, though, the move allowed the team to tap into a young, suburban market that followed them to the City of the Big Shoulders once they returned there.
“It really did hurt support early on when we moved to Naperville,” Ben Burton observes. “We picked up a new breed of people, though, who are still coming to games. It was a shift. But just being transient was very hard on people. Getting back to a solid home helped,” he said, referring to the coming Toyota Park that would open in 2006.
The year 2002 was also the one in which the Galaxy would finally break through and hoist an MLS Cup. They rode two dominant wins in a best-of-three series with the Wizards, blanked the Rapids in the conference finals, and avoided the Earthquakes—who went to the Eastern half of the bracket and were bounced in the first round—altogether. The finals were at Foxboro, the very stadium where they’d lost to D.C. United in 1996 and 1999. And awaiting them there? The hometown Revolution, who’d reached its first MLS Cup by getting past the Fire and Crew in successive three-game series.
The match was scoreless throughout the first ninety minutes and well into the second half of extra time, but in the last MLS Cup to feature a golden-goal ending, Carlos Ruiz disappointed the partisan Revs crowd (which, at more than 61,000, was the largest ever to gather for a finals) in the 113th minute, allowing the Galaxy to capture its first title.
“With expectation often comes disappointment,” wrote reporter and clearly jaded Boston sports fan Nate Thompson in the Taunton Daily Gazette. “New England’s four other major professional sports franchises learned that the hard way and now so have the Revolution.” He did also note, to momentarily accentuate the positive, that “the loss was just the Revolution’s second since Aug. 18, a span of 13 games, but the outcome will do little to tarnish New England’s best season since the team’s inception seven years ago.”11 It would, indeed, mark the start of a new era for the Revolution; MLS Coach of the Year Steve Nicol, who was initially named interim coach in May, would guide the Revs to the playoffs in eight straight seasons; Nicol himself would be a fixture on the Revs sidelines for a decade.
Like the Fire before them, the 2003 edition of the Burn moved from its spacious, aging stadium (in this case, the Cotton Bowl) to a small, flawed, suburban stadium (in this case, Dragon Stadium in the northern Metroplex outpost of Southlake, where a nearly $20 million stadium was built in 2001 for perennial Texas high school football power Carroll High School).
Lamar Hunt had acquired the Burn from the league to help save the league, in part because he felt that the team in his hometown should have an investor-operator after going the first five years without one. According to Dan Hunt, now the team president for FC Dallas, the Hunts had two things in mind upon setting the purchase in motion (which would take until 2003 to finalize): rebranding the team, as the Burn moniker hadn’t really ever been relevant to Dallas fans, and building their own soccer-specific stadium, as Lamar Hunt famously had in Columbus, to serve as a long-term home.
The rebrand was relatively easy to push forward. As Dan Hunt notes, “Dallas Burn is a little bit of an unusual name, and so we wanted something that had a more traditional feeling to it. We didn’t get negative feedback about the Burn, but from a graphic standpoint it was a very difficult graphic to work with, it was very hard to get it right on uniforms, on branding stuff. It was a difficult logo to work with.”
The Hunts acknowledged that any rebranding could be tough, but going with a traditional name was imperative, and FC Dallas was as simple, streamlined, and traditional as they could get. FC Dallas acquired its logo the same way another Hunt-owned team, the Kansas City Chiefs, did: according to Dan, his father sat in his kitchen and sketched out his vision for the FC Dallas logo by hand—a bull inside a shield, with a flame-shaped birthmark on the cow’s forehead to show linkage to the fire-breathing horse that somehow had come to embody the Burn. While it wasn’t quite the interlocking KC inside an arrowhead drawn on a napkin on a flight from Dallas to Kansas City, it did add a chapter to Lamar’s innate skills in branding.
The elder Hunt had also brokered an agreement with the City of Frisco, Texas—announced in April 2003, with some of the salient details written out on a napkin during a meeting with the city manager—for the construction of a $65 million stadium to open in 2005, in concurrence with the official rebranding. But the team announced its move to Dragon Stadium in January 2003, before the move to Frisco was finalized, showing what might be construed as dismissal toward the Cotton Bowl before spinning Dragon Stadium as a preferential move:
“The Cotton Bowl has been a fine home for the Burn since 1996, however we feel this interim move to the Northern Perimeter of the Dallas–Ft. Worth Metroplex will be beneficial to our diverse soccer fan base in numerous ways,” said Burn President and General Manager Andy Swift. “We will be able to create an intimate, high-energy atmosphere for the continued growth of the game. Burn home games will now be free of game scheduling conflicts which have in the past created problems related to dates, traffic and parking. Any change in venue inevitably becomes more convenient for some and less for others, however we believe that the evolving demographics and continued growth of the Northern Perimeter of the Metroplex make this shift appealing.”
The release also went on to say that Dragon Stadium’s artificial surface was “synthetic ‘Field Turf’ which has received high marks when tested by several groups of MLS players at other sites,” helpfully adding, “‘Field Turf’ is a FIFA approved playing surface.”12
The 2003 season went poorly for the Burn; they drew an MLS-low average of just under 8,000 (for a stadium the Burn themselves expanded to fit 12,000), and the team finished with an MLS-low 6–15–9 record, missing the playoffs for the first time in its league history. Fans expressed their disenchantment to such a degree that the club repaired its ties to the Cotton Bowl and signed a stopgap one-year deal for 2004 while its new stadium was being built. The club mea culpa’d by way of press release: “As an organization, we pride ourselves on maintaining open and direct communication with our fans and the marketplace,” said new Burn President and General Manager Greg Elliott. “In this case, our fans spoke loud and clear and we listened. While we appreciate everything the Southlake community did for us last year, this move is the right thing for the Dallas Burn, its fans and our sponsors.”13
“There was a lot of feedback,” recalls Dan Hunt, laughing. “We still hear about that today.” Though owning the one-year move to Southlake as an experiment they tried, he also notes that his belief that soccer should be played on grass made coming back to the Cotton Bowl for an interim year the right choice in the end.
The stadium debut of the season, however—and in many respects, the story of the season—was the debut of the Home Depot Center that June, transforming the idea of what a soccer-specific stadium could be. What began as a $50–70 million soccer stadium morphed, according to Nick Green in his article on the opening, into a $150 million multisport complex (including track and field facilities, tennis courts, and a velodrome) endorsed by the U.S. Olympic Committee. The soccer stadium, with a Teflon-coated roof covering a percentage of its 27,000 seats and a grass berm at one end of the stadium serving as overflow seating for additional fans was, of course, the centerpiece of the complex.14 While the initial opening on June 1 was for a track and field competition, the Galaxy staged its home opener there less than a week later. Pomp and circumstance included a gala dinner the night before with Pelé and FIFA president Sepp Blatter in keynote speaker roles, with President George W. Bush congratulating Phil Anschutz via taped message, and a live appearance at the match itself by Pelé, who handled pregame coin flip duties.15
“There’s no doubt that if we didn’t invest in stadiums, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” Garber says, attaching special significance to the Home Depot Center. He’s not shy about using the nickname “the Cathedral of American Soccer” to refer to it, and though the nickname is self-assigned—deriving from the “Soccer’s Cathedral” declaration on a Soccer America–produced advertising circular commissioned by U.S. Soccer and the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG)—the stadium has lived up to the lofty nickname. When compared to Columbus Crew Stadium, launched just four years earlier, it is a clear evolution, and even when compared to stadiums that opened in the years following, it’s evident that it has endured in its first decade-plus as a well-conceived and well-executed stadium. It was certainly seen by its creators as a model for what other soccer-specific stadiums should be—the publication had AEG president and CEO Tim Leiweke predicting that “there could be 10 new MLS teams in the next five years all using the model of stadiums such as the Galaxy’s new home.”16
“I think it really celebrated the game for the first time in ways that rivaled the rest of the world,” Garber notes. “It gave fans and the league a building a facility that was to the future of Major League Soccer what Lambeau Field was for the NFL, or Wrigley Field was for Major League Baseball. It wasn’t just a building; it was a statement about what the future holds for us, if we’re able to build hallowed ground for all our teams.”
The league made sure to showcase the stadium right away; it was the site for both the 2003 All-Star Game, in which an MLS All-Star team beat Mexican powerhouse FC Guadalajara (a team about to be linked more intractably with MLS), and for the 2003 MLS Cup. Perhaps predictably, the West’s fourth-place Galaxy drew the division-leading Earthquakes, setting up what became one of the greatest series in MLS history.
In 2003, MLS went to a two-leg aggregate playoff system for the first time ever for its conference semifinals, in which the lower-seeded team hosted the first match and the higher-seeded team hosted the second match, with ties broken via sudden-death extra time in the second game. The Galaxy, hosting the first match in their new “cathedral,” won 2–0, and in the return leg in San Jose, went up 2–0 (and, most importantly, 4–0 on aggregate) after just thirteen minutes.
But the Quakes were ready to mount what many still regard as the greatest comeback in MLS history. As Dylan Hernandez reported for the San Jose Mercury-News,
Earthquakes Coach Frank Yallop said it was the greatest game in which he had been involved. Landon Donovan said the same. And had they been given an opportunity to share their thoughts, many of the 14,145 fans at Spartan Stadium on Sunday night probably would have said they had never seen anything like it.
What else could anyone say after the Earthquakes scored five consecutive goals in a 5–2 overtime victory over the Los Angeles Galaxy that vaulted them into the Western Conference final?
San Jose had lost the first leg of this first-round, aggregate-goals series 2–0 and was trailing by the same score after 13 minutes on this night. It was a daunting mountain to climb but the Earthquakes did it, scoring four goals in regulation, the last in the ninetieth minute on a header by Chris Roner.
That set up a sudden-death overtime, which ended after six minutes when substitute forward Rodrigo Faria put away a feed from Donovan. Faria’s strike had the screaming crowd hopping as if on pogo sticks, waving their blue promotional rally towels.
“That crowd was more dynamic and louder than any of those at the World Cup games I was in,” said Donovan, who scored the Earthquakes’ second goal, in the 35th minute. “I would’ve loved to have had a ticket and been watching it.”17
The Quakes met the Wizards in the conference finals—a Wizards team led by a rejuvenated (or maybe juvenated all along) Preki, who won an MVP at age forty with a twelve-goal, seventeen-assist season. It took the teams twenty-seven minutes of extra time, after a 2–2 deadlock, before Donovan scored the winning goal to put the Quakes into the finals in their rival’s stadium, against a Fire team who had its own extra-time win against the Revolution, back in a newly renovated Soldier Field, to get to the finals.
In the finals, Ronnie Ekelund’s fifth-minute goal on a free kick put the Quakes ahead, and Donovan doubled the lead in the thirty-eighth minute. Donovan’s national teammate DaMarcus Beasley scored for the Fire to open up the second half, and after trading goals (a Quakes goal followed by a Quakes own goal), the Fire had the chance to equalize on a penalty kick but couldn’t convert, and Donovan slotted his second goal in the seventy-first minute to preserve a 4–2 Quakes win—the team’s second in three years.
The 2004 season was one that placed prior champions on a collision course, in the last year that MLS was a ten-team league. But it would be two rookies, both promising prospects when they came into the league, who would help define the season.
One was a twenty-one-year-old three-year college player who joined the Revolution, and one was a fourteen-year-old star-in-the-making who joined D.C. United. Both lasted three years with their initial clubs and eventually made their way overseas, but even by then were experiencing very different trajectories.
The Revolution’s Clint Dempsey, who became the MLS Rookie of the Year in 2004, would move from the United States to enjoy great success with then Premier League side Fulham, peaking with a seventeen-goal, six-assist season in 2011–12 before moving across London to Tottenham Hotspur, and eventually back to MLS. United’s Freddy Adu, who eventually ended his first U.S. era with a brief 2007 sojourn in Salt Lake City, was signed by perennial Portugal power Benfica, but went on loans throughout Europe (including, at its most obscure, Turkish second-division team Caykur Rizespor), and attempted a 2011 comeback with the Union. After several years in Scandinavia, he found himself back in the United States by mid-2015 with the NASL’s Tampa Bay Rowdies.
Hudson missed his window to coach Adu—he was fired and replaced by former Fire standout Piotr Nowak just before Adu was officially signed to the team—but he does remember workouts prior to the signing, when he was still at D.C. United’s helm:
He was a precocious young talent when he came in. We had two or three practice sessions where we invited Freddy in, and he was wonderful. It was twinkle-toes, he had a great light-it-up personality, he was wonderful with the ball. You could see the promise of magic.
Whatever happened—it didn’t work out with him under Nowak, and it just sort of spiraled from there. I don’t know what happened. I can only speak for the few times I worked with him, at a young age. It was all there: the balance, the pace, the control, the touch, his inventiveness, his sharpness. The sky was the limit. That’s why people were excited. There was something genuinely special there, but it just didn’t pan out. They might have pinned that on me if I was still there.
In the short term, the team that signed Adu had a better 2004; D.C. United would make the playoffs (thanks in large part to prodigal son Jamie Moreno returning after a year with the MetroStars), would get past the Revolution in the Eastern Conference Finals (albeit on a 4–3 penalty kick shootout), and would defeat the Wizards 3–2 in the finals, despite losing Dema Kovalenko on the first-ever MLS Cup red card. Kovalenko was sent off for an intentional handball on a sure Wizards goal, and the Wizards’ Josh Wolff converted the penalty to boot, but D.C. United returned to the winner’s circle for the fourth time.
United hasn’t held a trophy since the 2004 championship, but the win did harken back to the nascent days of the league—before the contraction, before 9/11, back when the 1994 World Cup was still a recent memory. And Nowak winning as coach gave him the unique distinction of winning the MLS Cup in both his first year as a player and his first year as a coach.
And yet, 2004 was more an end to a beginning. There were all kinds of new lying in wait: new teams to bring the league back to twelve teams, new owners with distinct visions about what their new teams could be, and—in one unfortunate case—a new city for an established team.