WHEN HISTORIANS OF MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER PRAISE THOSE WHO KEPT the league alive in its time of need, Phil Anschutz, Don Garber, and Lamar Hunt are rightfully heralded. But there’s another person deserving of praise—former National Basketball Association executive Dave Checketts, who fortuitously and successfully brought a team to his hometown of Salt Lake City despite the fact that Utah was not initially on MLS’s radar as an expansion site.
For the 2005 season, Mexican powerhouse franchise Club Deportivo Guadalajara—known by its nickname Chivas (Goats)—proposed to launch a Los Angeles–based franchise named Chivas USA. This would be the first expansion team since the league’s existential crisis following the 2001 season, and yet, just one expansion team seemed insufficient for a league that had just navigated contraction and a series of playoff changes for a ten-team league. Bumping up to eleven teams would have been odd in both senses of the word. Enter Checketts.
“Dave Checketts didn’t want to come in [in 2005],” Kevin Payne recalls. “He wanted to wait another year or even two. He was hopeful to find a stadium solution before they started playing, and the league put a lot of pressure on him. To Dave’s credit, he said, okay, I’ll come in now. It would have been really awkward had we gone to just eleven teams. So Dave, over his own best judgment, agreed to come in early. And that was a really brave thing for him to do. And that was a really huge step.”
Official league accounts have Chivas USA as MLS’s eleventh team and Real Salt Lake as MLS’s twelfth team, even though the Utah announcement preceded the Los Angeles announcement by about three weeks in the summer of 2004. The expansion would not only bring the league back to twelve teams, but would also send a message of solvency that countered the prior message of contraction.
And yet, the two-team expansion wasn’t as cohesive as the 1998 expansion. Despite the reservations about trying to bring soccer to South Florida, the 1998 expansion had been aimed at putting the league in additional, large markets. The 2005 expansion, by contrast, would place a second team in an existing market (focusing on a Latino demographic that the Galaxy wasn’t exclusively courting, yet was still attracting) and place a team in what is still—even a decade after entering it—the league’s smallest media market.
Chivas USA represented an approach to MLS that hadn’t been tried before—namely, the owner of a soccer club residing in another country, exporting its brand and even some of its players. The Mexican team was officially established in 1906, adopted its current name in 1908, and has been an enduring brand in Mexican soccer since.
Chivas USA initially tried to set a festive tone with a mariachi band, balloons, and streamers upon its announcement as the latest addition to the MLS family, according to Andrea Canales, a Los Angeles–based journalist now primarily covering Mexican soccer for ESPN FC (and called “Internet Girl” by colleagues early on because she wrote for Goal.com and four other soccer websites).
Chivas USA’s 2005 season was not much of a party, however. It was, after all, a team that started out about as badly as a team could in its inaugural season—with a 4–22–6 record, switching head coaches midway through the first season, twice, and drawing just over 17,000 compared to the 24,000-plus the Galaxy were drawing to the exact same stadium.
But there was more. Canales noted that Chivas USA did not market themselves successfully to attract the Mexican American fans they sought, citing several key missteps: they populated the team with Mexican players from Chivas’ reserve team, giving an impression of arrogance (or, as Canales put it, “we think your league is so pitiful that we can bring in our reserve players and win!”); they didn’t do recruiting in Los Angeles to come up with potential “hidden gems”; and, perhaps most important, they aligned with a brand that was polarizing to supporters of Chivas’s main Liga MX rival, Mexico City–based Club America.
Canales comments, “I realized from the beginning that their being wedded to the parent team was going to be problematic. It’s not a concept that can translate well to the U.S. If it was maybe more that we wanted to honor the heritage of Chivas, and we want to be inspired by Latinos, kind of the more creative, dramatic flair that MLS needs, I think a lot of people would have been so on board with that. If it meant bringing, you know, more ‘salsa,’ more spice into this American league.”
The Chivas–America rivalry and its potential to translate into a new crosstown rivalry wasn’t lost on the Galaxy; Canales remembers a shirt soon after Chivas USA entered MLS in which the Galaxy’s logo and color scheme was morphed into America’s, so much so that Canales’s reaction was, “Wow, there should be some copyright infringement there!”
But Chivas USA’s branding problems went beyond that. Canales recalls,
It wasn’t just alienating the Club America fans. It was alienating every other fan base as well. Chivas had come into the league and said we want to represent all of Mexico. If they’d wanted to be the Liga MX club in MLS, I think other fans would have gotten on board. But by being so wedded to the Guadalajara brand, it became alienating to every other Liga MX team. Like León fans, for example; if León gets eliminated from the playoffs, then they’ll cheer for Chivas—it becomes a nationalistic thing. But for Chivas to take its own brand to the league, to a different league, all alone, and to not even take the best … because it also became a joke as soon as Chivas started losing, it was so bad that a bunch of fans of Mexican soccer were horrified. They said, oh no, this is making us look bad, and making our league look bad. And then they became even more anti-Chivas USA. It was really obvious that it was hard for the brand to recover from that.
Canales does credit Antonio Cue, part of the original ownership group, for trying to inject some fun into a crosstown rivalry that Canales believes—had it been done right—the city might have embraced.
“Cue would do all sorts of fun bets,” Canales comments. “Like, he promised to wash the car of [Galaxy president] Doug Hamilton if Chivas lost, or everyone in his office would have to wear a Galaxy outfit for one hour. He was really affable and putting up these silly bets—it added a really fun spirit to things. The Galaxy were winning all those games, so Cue was washing cars and wearing shirts. He was a good sport. He held up his end of every bet.”
Just before the start of the 2006 season, Hamilton died of a heart attack while returning home from a trip to Costa Rica. Hamilton, a multiple winner of the MLS Executive of the Year award, was highly regarded for his work with the Fusion in its final years as well as with the Galaxy, and was beloved by many in MLS. His absence decidedly changed the tenor of the relationship between the teams.
“I don’t want to say that Doug Hamilton ruined it because he died,” Canales says. “I just think that Cue didn’t feel right starting it with the new president. It just started things on a more somber note after, and then the Chivas USA [front office] infighting just sent them more downhill, and they didn’t have any more of that playful spirit.”
Bob Bradley was brought in to coach the squad in 2006, and he was able to work enough magic to immediately transform one of the historically worst teams in MLS history. While Chivas USA wouldn’t ever be confused with the team it shared a stadium with, and though it would never make an MLS Cup in its decade of existence, it did something the Galaxy couldn’t do in 2006: it made the playoffs.
The origin story for the league’s other 2005 expansion team, in Salt Lake City, actually goes back to 2002, according to Trey Fitz-Gerald, who moved from MLS’s top public relations post in 2004 to head up the new team’s communications, in part to be able to be involved with a soccer team—or, as he put it, to “root for wins and losses instead of good attendance numbers and sponsors.”
Checketts, a pro basketball player turned executive who’d seen soccer in Europe up close while managing NBA International, attended a conference for potential MLS investors in December of that year, which planted the seed for him. By June 2004 Checketts had committed to bringing the team to Salt Lake City with a $7.5 million investment and a pledge to make the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium a temporary home on the way to a soccer-specific stadium.
Fitz-Gerald points out that the demographics made sense: There was a young male “counterculture” element and “rebelling bishop’s daughters with tattoos” who would embrace soccer but not the region’s sports offerings; there were the two-thirds of Mormon missionaries who’d journeyed to soccer-loving countries in their formative years, and brought that love of soccer back with them; and there were Mormons from other countries who’d grown up with soccer and had specifically chosen, for religious reasons, to come to Utah. And Checketts knew how to successfully market sports in Utah—he’d become the Jazz’s executive at age twenty-eight and helped engineer a turnaround from the initial rocky years following the franchise’s move from New Orleans. According to Fitz-Gerald, Checketts thought—especially with his vision of a stadium on the fringes of downtown—that the team could “own the summer.”
And Checketts also had designs on a name that would generate attention for its seeming incongruity: Real Salt Lake. “This name was not bestowed upon us by a Spanish king,” Fitz-Gerald jokes. But it was a name that Checketts had in mind from the get-go. From his time in Europe, Checketts had gotten to know the Real Madrid front office, respected and admired them and their philosophy, and felt Real Salt Lake would be a fitting tribute. Though more than forty teams around the world use Real in their names, Checketts still felt it appropriate to ask their permission to use the name as a last step before officially announcing it. He reports they responded by saying, “You’re going to be our sister team, go with our blessing.”
“He wanted a name that was authentically soccer,” Fitz-Gerald explains. Some of the first names floating around following the initial announcement came from former Salt Lake City–based soccer franchises, like Golden Spikers and Blitzz. But they didn’t communicate soccer to Checketts in the way that a D.C. United did. (Plus, Blitzz featured that double z, instantly rendering it unworthy of consideration.)
Though Checketts was already heavily leaning toward the Real Salt Lake name, a Deseret News article that ran several weeks after the MLS announcement—and several weeks before the name announcement—depicted a jovial Checketts turning the annual meeting of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah into a focus group on the new franchise’s identity:
“It’s not going to be the Crickets, nor the Seagulls, nor the Pioneers, nor the Brine Shrimp. It’s not going to be any of them,” [Checketts] said during the lighthearted presentation.
If Thursday’s applause levels are any indication, the franchise may want to keep the name real rather than Real.
Among the name options discussed Thursday, Real Salt Lake—patterned after European soccer power Real Madrid—drew the least-enthusiastic response. It prompted nothing but quizzical murmurs when Checketts first tossed it into the name mix.
“Nobody will pronounce it properly,” he said, explaining that “real” means “royalty” in Spanish. “That might be part of the appeal, don’t you think?”
Other possibilities included the Glory, the Alliance, and the Highlanders, the latter inspiring Checketts to jest, “You like the kilts? That will bring the women in.”
But, as Checketts helpfully explained to the gathering, “Names of soccer clubs are a little bit different than other teams … You want it to be known as a soccer club. You don’t want any question that it might be an arena football team or remind you of an indoor lacrosse team. Soccer clubs are a little bit more traditional, when you think about the international names, they’re a little bit more about tradition.” He then proceeded to make a dig at the new cross-Rockies rivals, the Colorado Rapids, by saying their name sounded like an arena football team.1
As part of the process, Checketts did public polling via several different avenues, including a Salt Lake Tribune poll in which Highlanders triumphed with nearly 40 percent of the just more than 2,200 votes cast. In the Tribune’s poll, Real Salt Lake finished fourth, also trailing the Alliance and Glory.2 But it wouldn’t matter; Real Salt Lake won out, by one vote, in the only poll that ultimately mattered.
The actual name unveiling happened at Rice-Eccles in October 2004; USA Today’s coverage of the event, which included a pronunciation guide to Real in the lead, noted, “The event drew more than a thousand fans, who cheered the name when it was announced and began chanting ‘Re-AL Salt Lake.’ A huge banner with the team’s crest was hung from the south bleachers, although it took several minutes to display the banner because the wind kept getting under it.”3
“It didn’t come off the tongue nearly as smoothly as it does now,” Fitz-Gerald says of the name. “We still get people every week who come on our Twitter feed and tell us, this is stupid, you need to change your name. But we’ve embraced it, our fans have embraced it, and for all of us, it screams soccer in a way very few names would have.”
Checketts sought to make the team one that everyone in the state could get behind—the team’s color scheme purposefully mixed red and blue to unify both sides of the “Holy War,” the keenly contentious rivalry between the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. It did also, unintentionally, dress a team inspired by Real Madrid in the home colors of its implacable Barcelona rivals.
Checketts remembers, “We had so much educating to do, that if someone came up to me and asked, ‘Why’d you use the Real name with Barcelona colors?’ I would have said, ‘I’m so happy you know that.’”
In addition to readying the team for its arrival into the league, Checketts was also trying to deliver a new soccer stadium funded through a private-public partnership, so the new team wouldn’t have to keep playing in a college football stadium. According to Checketts, the state legislature had earmarked hotel-motel tax money to fund the stadium, but the county wouldn’t vote to release the funds.
It was a political battle so fraught and so challenging that the team began pursuing the option to move to another city. Checketts had actually gone as far as to secure an escape hatch sending the team to St. Louis, which, as Fitz-Gerald quipped, would have allowed the team “to at least be able to keep the RSL initials.”
The battle between Checketts and the county culminated during several days in August 2006, when Real Salt Lake hosted Real Madrid for an exhibition match that highlighted their burgeoning relationship and their shared names. Checketts had learned about the county’s latest downvote on the stadium money while on the way to a dinner with political leaders and the Real Madrid contingent the night before the match.
But rather than give up and move forward with plans to sell the team, he conferred with the Real Madrid contingent to see they’d help him announce the new stadium, and then used the dinner to declare a ground-breaking ceremony for ten o’clock the next morning—which would involve David Beckham, his Real Madrid teammates, and club officials. “So, literally overnight, we mowed this hayfield that had lain fallow in the middle of Sandy, Utah, for forty years, and put together a press event and ceremonial groundbreaking,” Fitz-Gerald recalls. “It was the biggest leap of faith.”
“I knew that that picture of David Beckham with the shovel would be all over the world,” Checketts adds. “I knew that would put a lot of pressure on the county government. It was me playing some mischief, but it really worked. The news story was everywhere.”
The Deseret News account of the ceremony quoted Checketts as saying that though details still had to be worked out, “sooner or later you have to make a go or no-go decision … I put my trust in our leaders that details will be worked out.” The article noted that there were multiple suitors, seven in all, willing to buy the team and move it out of Utah. The story also included a quote from Sandy mayor Tom Dolan, who gushed, “Honestly, the emotions I’m feeling are similar to when my first son was born. I just want you to know that Dave Checketts is the man.”4
But it would ultimately take more than a feel-good ceremony—namely, the intervention of Utah governor Jon Huntsman—to connect the dots necessary to unite all the parties and to make sure that Checketts’s hayfield in Sandy would be transformed into what is now Rio Tinto Stadium.
While the presence of two expansion teams wouldn’t directly affect the 2005 playoff race, a significant offseason move would. The Bundesliga experiment ended for Landon Donovan in early 2005—he decided to return to MLS, and because the Quakes had traded his rights away at the end of the 2004 season, he would be obtainable through MLS’s allocation system. FC Dallas had the first pick, but the Galaxy traded Carlos Ruiz, its 2002 MLS Cup hero on the last year of his contract, for rights to the pick. The Galaxy, while cryptic about how they’d use the allocation when the trade was announced on March 30, were indeed involved with the press conference Donovan announced for the next day in Los Angeles where he said “everything would be decided.”5
Donovan, who regards the Quakes–Galaxy rivalry to be the greatest of MLS rivalries, announced he’d be signing with the Galaxy, thus placing himself on both sides. Adam Serrano, who covers the team for the LA Galaxy Insider website, remembers,
Landon was certainly not immediately welcomed when he arrived from Europe. The Galaxy–Quakes rivalry is the fiercest in Major League Soccer, and Galaxy fans were not eager to celebrate a player who had tormented them in the past. This reason is also why the acquisition was not viewed as a “victory” among Galaxy fans. LA supporters (and all soccer fans as a whole) are insanely territorial and wanted little to do with a player that had helped the Quakes succeed.
The loss of Ruiz certainly stung among hard-core supporters because he’d quickly become a fan favorite after his heroics in the 2002 MLS Cup. In addition, he attracted a large Guatemalan fan base that still remains with the team to this day. Those fans soon flocked to Donovan once he started succeeding, but Ruiz remains a legend amongst Galaxy supporters.
The Quakes won the 2005 Supporters’ Shield, but they again drew the Galaxy in the first round of the playoffs, losing 4–2 on aggregate, with the difference being Donovan’s two goals in the Galaxy’s 3–1 opening win. The Galaxy, in the one-match conference finals against the Rapids, won 2–0 on a Donovan brace. The Revolution, the number 1 seed in the East, led by MVP Taylor Twellman’s seventeen goals, went down 2–0 on aggregate an hour into its second and deciding match with the MetroStars, and rallied with three goals in the remaining thirty minutes to make the conference finals, where Clint Dempsey’s fourth-minute goal was all they needed to get past the Fire.
The 2005 MLS Cup, showcasing Frisco, Texas’s new Pizza Hut Park, was scoreless for 105 minutes until Guillermo Ramirez struck from the eighteen-yard line to put the Galaxy ahead. Since MLS had dispensed with the golden goal, it wasn’t quite a repeat of 2002’s cruel end for the Revs, but they couldn’t answer in the remaining fifteen minutes of extra time, and the Galaxy won their second title to equal the cup tally of their northern neighbors.
The offseason would bring one major change that further expanded the misery of Quakes fans, who’d just seen Donovan win an MLS Cup with his new team: the Anschutz Entertainment Group announced ten days before Christmas 2005 that the team would be leaving San Jose for Houston. While San Jose would retain the Earthquakes name and branding, to leave the door open for a Cleveland Browns–style reinvention, coach Dominic Kinnear and his players would find themselves moving from the Bay Area to—in more than one respect—its antithesis.
Alexi Lalas, the Quakes general manager at the time, notes that for the AEG, the lack of a soccer-specific stadium to replace Spartan Stadium—to be more specific, the inability for the AEG to get public funding to support a new stadium—was the key issue for a group concerned with keeping multiple teams afloat and the task of eventually selling some of those teams.
San Antonio was a rumored destination for the Quakes in the early part of 2005, when mayor Ed Garza was courting MLS by offering the 65,000-seat Alamodome as a home for an existing or expansion team. However, that May, Garza lost a reelection bid to Phil Hardberger, a relative political outsider whose first order of city business was to sever ties with MLS. Hardberger believed that a deal with MLS didn’t make financial sense for the city, and was quoted as saying the only thing he would literally say to MLS was “good-bye,” though MLS saved him the trouble by pulling out of negotiations with the city; Garber publicly declared, “This has been changed at the twelfth hour due to politics, and it is appalling.”6
Houston would prove to be a more accommodating home for the Quakes, promising a soccer-specific stadium as well as a massive metro market accessible to dedicated fans in Austin and the newly neglected San Antonio (both closer to Houston than Dallas), and one closer to Mexico than any MLS franchise save for the two Los Angeles franchises.
Houston did, however, misstep immediately with its new identity. The original franchise name, Houston 1836, was announced in late January of 2007, intended as a nod to German franchises that included a year in the team name (most famously Hannover 96), and incorporating the year Houston was founded. However, 1836 was also the year that the famed Battle of the Alamo was fought. This was not the best way to engage Latinos, who then made up 40 percent of the Houston metro population and were largely weary of generations of Texas historians and even teachers framing the battle as one in which valiant whites protected themselves against Mexican aggressors.
Simon Romero, a Houston-based New York Times reporter covering the controversy, noted that the AEG appeared “to have upset some of the very soccer-crazy fans they were hoping to lure, after basing its venture in part on the crowds of Spanish-speaking fútbol aficionados who regularly fill stadiums here to attend the matches of visiting clubs from Mexico.” Romero also quoted Houston-based Latino marketing expert Paco Bendaña, who dryly noted, “Clearly, not enough homework was put into this. Historically speaking, 1836 is not something we celebrate.”7
Several weeks later, answering what the Houston Chronicle termed as the demands by numerous Mexican American corporate and political communities in Houston, the AEG announced a name change to the Houston Dynamo.8 This was an inoffensive nod to the city’s integral energy industry, it harkened back to MLS’s history with abstract singular noun team names, and it capitalized on the European name trend that Real Salt Lake and FC Dallas had started; Dynamo was favored by a handful of Eastern European teams, most notably Dynamo Kyiv in Ukraine’s capital and Dynamo Moscow in Russia. Houston also briefly had a soccer team (in 1984 and 1985) named the Dynamos, a member of the short-lived United Soccer League (not to be confused with the existing USL), assembled from remnants of the American Soccer League and the collapsing NASL.
Even though rumors had been swirling around the team for several years, the move still came as a shock to the team. As Brian Ching, who’d been with the Quakes since 2003, notes, there had been so many rumors that the players didn’t put much stock in them: “We were shocked. We were told we’d be moving to a new city within a month, and for a lot of the team, with the salaries how they were, their wives were working. And I had January camp [for the national team], so I literally had fifteen days to move. I didn’t know anything about Houston before I got here. I flew in, I had one day to go find a house. I walked into a place, said, okay, I’ll take this, without not knowing too much about the city or where practice was going to be. We didn’t really have too many people informing us about what parts of the city are best for what.”
The promised soccer-specific stadium took until 2012 to manifest, in the form of BBVA Compass Stadium in downtown Houston. The WPA-built Robertson Stadium, which housed the University of Houston Cougars and went through renovations in the late 1990s to bring the stadium to near a 33,000 capacity,9 served as the Dynamo’s home for its first season (and far beyond), but it looked not unlike the Spartan Stadium the team had just left.
“To be honest, we thought our situation was pretty much the same, but just throw in 100-degree heat,” Ching says. “We were still in a rundown college stadium, sometimes they had band practice out there, and sometimes there were college kids running around the track. There were times that our locker room lost AC. It wasn’t ideal, but I think that’s one of the things that made our team stronger on the field and attributed to our success. I think we were hardened by all the things we dealt with. It drew us closer as a team.”
It wouldn’t be long before San Jose got soccer back. In May 2006, Lew Wolff and John Fischer, principal owners of the Oakland Athletics, put forth a plan to revive the team that included a soccer-specific stadium.10 To the relief of many Bay Area soccer fans, including a group that had created the Soccer Silicon Valley group in 2004 to lobby for a permanent stadium, the Earthquakes would return to MLS in 2008, though the stadium would be a little slower in coming.
In hindsight, Lalas and many others saw the move as a positive for both cities—especially for San Jose, which got a local ownership group occupied with just one MLS team and striving for a stadium. “I’m glad Houston got a team,” he says, “but I’m also glad that, in a strange way, it made San Jose come back as a better version of itself.”
But in a bittersweet development for Quakes fans, the Dynamo were instantly successful, winning two straight championships in 2006 and 2007 upon arriving in Texas. Both wins came at the expense of the New England Revolution, who’d made the MLS Cup in 2005 as well. The three straight losses, combined with the 2002 loss, cast them as the 1990s-era Buffalo Bills of MLS, making four of the past six championship games and losing them all.
The year 2006 brought another significant change; an MLS team was rebranded to share a name with an energy drink. That’s the most reductive way to characterize the purchase and the subsequent name change, from MetroStars to Red Bulls. It’s not as extreme as it might seem on its face: the MetroStars name is not so far afield from its Metromedia parent company, and Red Bull is a company who has notably branded other soccer teams worldwide, most famously Red Bull Salzburg (a top Austrian team). Given the lean toward Euro-styled names in this era, New York Red Bulls makes a certain sort of sense.
But still, for some observers, this close marriage of a product brand and a sports brand seemed a bridge too far.
The New York Times wasn’t shy about using “a bracing jolt of Red Bull” as a metaphor for what the purchase of the team would do for a franchise it termed “terminally mediocre.” Of course, the deal would bring with it the construction of a new soccer-specific stadium by 2008—one that would be more appropriately sized and more conveniently located than Giants Stadium, though still in New Jersey. But the front office also believed that the team was now poised to achieve greatness; Lalas told the Times to prepare for “America’s first superclub,” sounding very ’90s when he added, “Red Bull is cutting edge and loves to push the envelope in everything they do. I hope everyone keeps an open mind because we are going to blow your mind.”11
Nick Sakiewicz, who came to the MetroStars in 1999 from Tampa to head up that organization, was secretly involved in a prior rebranding effort; he notes, “For a couple of years, I tried really hard to acquire the Cosmos’ IP and rights. I couldn’t do it, so we ended up redoing the MetroStars logo before Red Bull eventually came to buy the team and change the name.”
As Sakiewicz tells it, Red Bull’s interest in buying the team hinged in part on the ability to rebrand, and even a name as revered as Cosmos might have not survived the purchase. MetroStars certainly wasn’t going to endure as a brand.
“There were three real big triggers for the deal happening,” Sakiewicz comments. “The first was getting the stadium done, so if I wasn’t able to get that shovel in the ground when I did, Red Bull wouldn’t have bought the team. Renaming the team Red Bull was a condition; there was really no option. That was part of the deal. And then the stadium and uniforms being Red Bull–branded was also a big condition. But the stadium was the biggest one. 20,000 people in an 80,000 capacity stadium with football lines all over the field did not work for us, and did not work for Red Bull.”
Though fans should have been happy about a deal that got them out of a massive football stadium, the corporate name was going to be a roadblock for new fans who wanted to keep their sports as removed from commercial influence as possible—despite the slippery slope it was already on. A follow-up New York Times article recalled, “In 2004, a ‘Spider-Man 2’ promotion that would have placed ads on bases was shut within twenty-four hours after Major League Baseball heard from angry purists,” and quoted one branding executive as saying, “No one’s going to want to see the Coca-Cola Cowboys or the Kraft Singles,” though it also included Lalas saying, regarding those disdainful of the Red Bull name, “The righteous indignation that people have about what this represents and the direction that this signifies is at times understandable, but also, I think, at times it’s laughable.”12
The sale of MetroStars to Red Bull was a quickly evolving sale of one of the teams the AEG was most eager to sell, a year after Anschutz sold his original team, the Rapids, to Kroenke Sports Enterprises to bring AEG holdings down to five teams.
“There was talk and concern about corporate ‘sellout,’” Sakiewicz recalls. “But you have to remember what year it was. The league had just come out of a very difficult period. We were trying to get momentum. We needed partners like Red Bull. We needed to create strong partners, and you can’t get much stronger than Red Bull as an organization and a brand. At the end of the day, I think the smart decision was made to make a good win-win deal with Red Bull.”
“It came as a complete shock to us,” says Mark Fishkin, speaking for the New York fans. “Not only was the team being completely rebranded, and for the first time in North American sports, for a consumer product, but we had no idea that the sale was happening until about forty-eight hours before. I know there were a few people for whom the name change was just too much, but of course, at the time, there was no other team to go to. They just said, ‘Screw you, MLS,’ and left.”
“That day the team changed ownership and name was insane,” explains Jeremy “Truman” Cadmus, an Empire Supporters Club member since 2005. “It was so close to the season starting, so it caught everyone off guard. For me, it was shocking that a company would rename a team after their product, but being a fan of the actual drink, I didn’t flip out over it. A lot of people justifiably did.”
“Ultimately, it ended up well,” Lalas says, “but there was plenty of trepidation from the outside for how an energy drink was going to benefit MLS and benefit this particular team in the New York metropolitan area. For some people, the connotation was that this was just a marketing expense. When you’re talking about sports, there’s real emotion behind it, even though people understand it’s a business, and there’s a human element to it, be it the players or the supporters.”
The year 2006 also brought another World Cup, and with Germany hosting, the tournament was more accessible to American TV viewers and to American producers overseas, with another Bruce Arena–coached team featuring twelve players from the 2002 World Cup squad, and a near fifty-fifty split among MLS players and overseas players.
It was not an easy draw for the allegedly fourth-in-the-world Americans, as they’d been placed into the tournament’s Group of Death, matched with the second-place Czech Republic, eventual tournament winner Italy, and Ghana—a rising African power (and newly emerging American nemesis) despite its deceptively low FIFA ranking.
Michael Davies—today known to American soccer fans as half of Men in Blazers—blogged for ESPN’s Page 2 in a series of columns that looked at the World Cup through a bemused, sometimes grumpy, but ultimately entertaining perspective that boldly claimed to be “unburdened by journalistic anything.”
Covering the Americans’ opening group match—a disheartening 3–0 loss to a superior Czech Republic side—Davies was critical of the team’s defensive lapses and lack of width, but was also critical of the American fans who couldn’t seem to be more imaginative in its “U-S-A, U-S-A” and “Ka-sey Kell-er” (in the familiar cadence of “Let’s go, [team name]”) in its chants and cheers. Noting the despondence of the team leaving the field at halftime, and the importance of fan support, Davies said, “At the World Cup you’ve got to sing, get up, shout, do whatever you can to lift your team—the U.S. fans are being dominated by the Czech fans more than the U.S. players are being dominated on the field.”13
Ronald Blum’s blunt assessment, writing for the Associated Press, was, “The United States looked like a bewildered World Cup newcomer again. The Americans didn’t just lose Monday night, they were routed, roughed up and run over by the Czech Republic, a 3–0 crusher that put the Americans in danger of first-round elimination.” An opening goal in the first five minutes by 6’ 7-½” forward Jan Koller stunned the Americans, and Tomáš Rosický added thirty-sixth- and seventy-sixth-minute goals in a performance so lackluster that Arena criticized the team, specifically Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley, after the match.14
But according to Davies, both the team and the fans underwent a seismic transformation in the space of five days. The Americans played Italy and drew 1–1 in an ugly match that also drew blood—quite literally—when Daniele de Rossi viciously elbowed Brian McBride. That warranted the first of three red cards on the day. The Yanks, in turn, had two players sent off: Pablo Mastroeni for raking Andrea Pirlo’s ankle, to which Mastroeni reacted postmatch, “I think that foul anywhere in the world is a yellow card,” and Eddie Pope for a pair of yellow cards, the second coming just after halftime.
The Guardian’s Amy Lawrence asked in her postmatch report,
Is this the group nobody wants to win? Welcome to the group of fear, where at various stages so far all four teams have lost their nerve. The capacity for Italy and the USA to shoot themselves in the foot was liberally exposed here. The Italians started it with a gauche own goal and a nasty red card, only for the Americans to prick their own balloon with a dismissal either side of half time. More of the game was played with 10 men against nine than any other numerical formula and it made for an intense, overstretched encounter which was strangely compelling. Particularly as the USA were the more ambitious, more enthusiastic team by far.15
Davies, so critical of American fans earlier in the tournament, was full of praise after the draw, declaring the match “[a]n incomparable performance by the U.S. national team in the modern era. And listen to those fans. Football just arrived in America, I think. The players and fans played and cheered with the true passion of a footballing superpower. The U.S. may not win this World Cup, they may not even qualify for the next round, but this performance continues to lay the groundwork for the future. In fact, watching the performance of those players lifted in communion with their fans, I think they just completed the basement and the first five floors.”16
Thanks in part to a controversial penalty at the end of the first half against their group stage closer with Ghana, the Americans lost 2–1 and would not advance—and yet there was optimism in the loss. Coach Arena, quoted in U.S. Soccer’s official release about the bouncing, said, “U.S. Soccer has a bright future. I think in another group we would have had a better chance to advance. I think we were among the top half of the teams in this tournament. Despite the two losses, I think we demonstrated that we can play.”17
Back in the States, D.C. United was winning a Supporters’ Shield but couldn’t get past the Revolution in the conference finals, with Taylor Twellman (like Clint Dempsey the year before) scoring a fourth-minute goal to get the team into its second straight finals. The Dynamo, formerly the Earthquakes, were almost undone by another Los Angeles team, Chivas USA, in the first round, but Ching scored a second-half stoppage time goal in the teams’ second match to get the Dynamo through to the conference finals, where they took care of the Rapids.
The 2006 MLS Cup in Dallas rivaled the original MLS Cup (from ten years earlier) in drama. For 113 minutes there were no goals, and then there were two goals in quick succession, first from Twellman, then from Ching, to deliver MLS’s first-ever penalty kick shootout to determine the league champion.
“It was a pretty boring game heading into the last overtime,” Ching remembers, laughing. “There weren’t a lot of opportunities. And then once Taylor scored, it didn’t take the air out of us—it was more like this wasn’t something we were going to accept, and fortunately, we had a little bit of time to rectify it. But our owner, Phil Anschutz, told me after the game that he didn’t even see my goal, because after they scored he walked out of the suite, thinking we had lost.”
After Brad Davis missed his fourth-round kick and Twellman converted his, the teams were tied 3–3. Ching converted his, and then Dynamo keeper Pat Onstad denied the Revs’ Jay Heaps by diving to block the final penalty kick.
“When it was time for me to take the kick,” Ching remembers, “I just thought, man, what a great year we’ve had, and it took the pressure off, just thinking that it was great no matter what happened.” Ching recalls looking up after the game and seeing a Texas sky that was a brilliant Dynamo orange, and seeing his team’s fans (who’d made the four-hour drive up Interstate 45 en masse to see the match) in the stands. “I’m not the kind of person to believe in destiny,” he says, “but this was definitely a case of things falling in place and going right.”
The year 2007 brought expansion, with Canada joining the all-American (up until then) MLS in the form of Toronto FC. Toronto had been awarded an MLS franchise in October 2005, going with the simple Toronto FC moniker rather than trying to wrest a nickname from Toronto’s confused NASL past. Toronto was represented for all but two years of the NASL’s fifteen-year history, fielding four different teams in that time. The Toronto Falcons came into existence in 1967 to join the National Premier Soccer League, became part of the NASL for the league’s inaugural season, and then promptly folded. In 1971 Toronto received the Metros franchise, which bravely hung on through the 1974 season. Then, needing a cash infusion to stay afloat, the Metros sold 50 percent of the team to Toronto Croatia of the National Soccer League. Fun While It Lasted, a website dedicated to failed franchises in multiple sports, noted, that the newly merged Toronto Metros-Croatia was:
an anomaly within the North American Soccer League during the NASL’s boom years of the mid-to-late 1970’s. To the chagrin of league executives and observers, the merged club played up its ethnic identity, coming up with the awkward “Metros-Croatia” moniker and filling its management (entirely) and roster (largely) with ethnic Croats. In 1977, Tampa Bay Rowdies beat writer Ken Blankenship from The St. Petersburg Times published a long screed against the Metros-Croatia organization (and, by extension, the NASL for tolerating the club). Blankenship’s hackles were raised by a miserable experience trying to cover a Rowdies road game in Toronto. The writer described the Metros-Croatia as essentially an insular “neighborhood soccer team” lacking the most basic professional standards of operation and promotion, and existing solely for the amusement of a tiny band of expatriate supporters.18
The team did have successes that were hard to ignore—namely, its 1976 Soccer Bowl triumph against the Minnesota Kicks in Seattle—but it was ultimately an iteration of the franchise that only lasted through the 1978 season. With the team’s sale to the Global Television Network, the Toronto Croatia entity returned from whence it came (to the National Soccer League), and to the relief of many, the team was rebranded the Toronto Blizzard, hanging on until the league’s demise after the 1984 season. In fact, the final NASL game was played in Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, with the Blizzard losing the second and final game of the experimental Soccer Bowl best-of-three series to the Chicago Sting.
There was skepticism that the MLS would work in Canada—specifically, in Toronto—prior to the 2007 launch. “Before we launched,” Mark Abbott recalls, “we were getting telephone calls saying, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to fail miserably there, the minor league team never drew more than a couple of thousand, you’re crashing the league by going up there.”
According to ESPN writer Doug McIntyre, the arrival of Toronto FC (and a fan base that understood what it was to be a proper soccer fan base) created an atmosphere that helped MLS move to a more cohesive, unified, and loud fan base—in other words, a fan base that seemed to effortlessly evolve from past to present generations in the major European leagues.
McIntyre remembers,
When I started noticing the fan culture of MLS changing was when Toronto FC came into the league in 2007. I knew there was a buzz around that team, and I had the opportunity to go to a few early games, and I said, “Wow, this is just a different opportunity than you see with other MLS teams.” The other professional sports teams in Toronto were not very good, and here they have this nice little stadium right on the water, a team that was well branded, that did things right at the start. They marketed themselves well and sold a lot of season tickets. And that was really an authentic sort of soccer atmosphere. Around the league, up until that point, I think the league had mostly marketed to families, as opposed to a sort of young urban core. And it showed. So that was the only place in MLS that had a sort of intimidating venue where fans were singing and chanting, and it was young men drinking beer and yelling things. You had that in pockets in other MLS stadiums. You had the Barra Brava in DC, and even the MetroStars had a fan section, it was just very small behind the goal—the majority of the stadium was still soccer moms and their kids, by and large.
That was really where it exploded, and then two years later, with Seattle, you saw it go to another level. And so you were starting to see a change where MLS started changing the way it marketed itself. It did start trying to appeal more to young urban professionals. I think that was a big turning point for the league. They started attracting a different sort of fan—maybe fans who had watched soccer on TV.
The advent of soccer on TV changed things a lot. I think a lot of people were watching the Premier League on TV in the mornings, and really enjoying it, and wanted to experience that themselves, and go out to a stadium. People talk about going to a winter schedule in MLS, but I think one of the great things about MLS is that on a beautiful summer night, you can take a subway or a short drive to a beautiful, soccer-specific stadium that has a grass field, you have a beer in your hand, you’re yelling for your favorite team—that experience can’t be re-created on television. You can say whatever you want about the quality of play, but if you want to have that experience as a soccer fan, you can’t get that watching a team on TV that plays three thousand miles away, no matter how good they are.
Abbott remembers the MLS executives’ trip to Toronto FC’s inaugural home opener, which included Toronto brass renting a streetcar to take them through downtown Toronto to the stadium: “I remember we go past this pub, and these people come out of the pub after watching the Premier League game that morning. And they have their TFC scarves on, and this one guy kisses his wife, who’s got a baby in the stroller, and then he goes off with the other fans … it’s like we’re in Europe or something. And I’m thinking, this is a soccer fan base. That opened up a lot of people’s eyes when they hit.”
Mike Langevin, one of the original and still current leaders of Red Patch Boys (one of Toronto FC’s primary supporters’ groups), notes that the team’s incredible diversity made Toronto soccer-ready without even its residents even realizing it. The main concern, at the outset, was reconciling the British, South American, and other Spanish-speaking styles of support into one cohesive, unified group. Langevin remembers,
It took a while to find a happy medium between these styles of support, which can often be in contrast to each other. Luckily the guys were all here to support the Reds, so we were generally happy to reach a compromise. I think a key factor we’ve always embraced is the desire to be inclusive, and to invite people to participate.
We sometimes see people yelling at the casual fans, demanding that they sing along, and that tends to backfire. Our policy has always been to sing the loudest and encourage people to get involved. Come paint banners, come practice songs. We just make a point of being open to outsiders, and welcoming to different opinions. That’s how we grew so fast, by realizing that there’s no right way to do it, and that imposing some old-world vision of what is a real supporter would probably keep a lot of great people on the sidelines.
Toronto FC had a successful inaugural year, with 14,000 season tickets sold, sellout crowds for all its home games, and finishing third in league attendance with over 20,000 per game. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that some MLS eyes were on Toronto in 2007, but thanks to one of the most famous players in the world—one known beyond soccer-loving households—many more eyes were on Los Angeles or, really, wherever David Beckham happened to be throughout the 2007 season.