THE DESIGNATED PLAYER RULE—ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT, TRANSFORMATIVE rules in Major League Soccer history—will forever be identified with David Beckham, as he was the first player brought to MLS via the rule. Despite a recent wave of internationally known stars coming to play in America as career final acts and, increasingly, while still in their primes, Beckham may still be the best-known player to come via the Designated Player Rule through the entire decade of its existence.
Don Garber maintains that the rule “wasn’t just dreamed up on a piece of paper as a mechanism to attract world-class players.” He notes,
It came out of a fairly significant consumer research study we did in 2006 after the World Cup, to try to get an understanding of what American soccer fans were really thinking about as they were becoming more and more engaged with the sport.
They wanted to see more star players—more world-class players—and they wanted to see more American players who they watched compete for their country in the World Cup. We needed a mechanism to do that that would not break our system, and that mechanism was the Designated Player Rule, which gives teams the opportunity to sign outside the [salary] cap. That mechanism exists for all teams, which is part and parcel to our core equity. It’s not like Real Madrid, who can just go out and sign whichever players they want. Each team has the same opportunity.
The idea of providing our teams the right and the opportunity to sign world-class players did not come from owners, and it didn’t come from David Beckham. The DP concept came from a research study that told us the fans are looking for more players that they recognize. We then met as a league, utilizing the value of our single entity, and met to come up with a strategy that would allow us to do that and provide the opportunity to sign a player outside the budget.
Garber does admit, though, that the Galaxy were having conversations with Beckham about bringing him over to play during the latter half of 2006, when the league was looking at how to make this possible. In fact, according to Alexi Lalas, AEG had a relationship with Beckham dating back several years, tied to soccer camps he’d started in Los Angeles: “They understood that this was something that would change the LA Galaxy brand, change MLS, and change soccer. But you also needed a mechanism in order to do it, and MLS is very, very adept at creating mechanisms as need be.”
The chance to bring in Beckham at age thirty-two was enough of a catalyst to make the Designated Player Rule a reality, and Beckham announced his move to Los Angeles on January 11 from London, on the eve of the MLS SuperDraft. The New York Times reported,
Beckham’s signing by the Galaxy, long-rumored, catapults the league into the global soccer spotlight. Up until last November, M.L.S. tightly controlled player salaries under its single-entity system, in which the league owned all player contracts and a team’s salary budget could not exceed about $2 million a year, with only a few exceptions. The league’s board of governors voted to relax that restriction and allow each team to sign one player for any amount, of which the league would pay only the first $400,000. They called it the designated player rule, but to soccer fans in the United States it has been referred to as the “Beckham Rule” since Day 1.1
Lalas says,
I remember the moment we finally got the signed papers. I remember being at Christmas with my family and having to leave the table to go over the Excel sheets to look over the numbers. We were paying a lot of money; it had to make sense about how we were going to monetize this off the field, with international tours, with jersey sales, with ticket sales. I’ll never forget when I finally got the call that it was done and sending the email out to my staff saying things are going to change now, from this moment on, in how we do our business. It’s up to us to make sure that we monetize this and use this to better the Galaxy and MLS.
“I was surprised he was coming as early as he was,” Grant Wahl remembers. “I thought he still had some time to play at the highest level in Europe. But I’d also written a column a few months before, looking at his situation in Madrid, and thought that maybe MLS should pursue him sooner rather than later.”
Though some media outlets reported that Beckham’s contract was a colossal $250 million over five years, ESPN Soccernet found that the annual salary was more in the neighborhood of $9 million a year, with the bulk of the $250 million coming through “endorsements and creative clauses.” One rumor mentioned in the article was that “Adidas will be paying an additional $5 million to $6 million a year just to sponsor the Galaxy’s jersey, ironic since they already manufacture them.”2 Soccer America’s Paul Kennedy revealed, in a 2013 article, that one bonus in Beckham’s contract was the right to purchase a MLS franchise for $25 million upon his retirement from playing, as long as the franchise was not in New York.3 (But Miami, for instance, would be acceptable.)
The AEG (and MLS) plan for Beckham involved him playing out the rest of the season in Madrid, with a debut press release on July 13 preceding an exhibition match in which the Galaxy would play Chelsea on the July 21—a perfect time for a debut, provided the ankle he suffered in the later stages of the victorious 2006–7 Madrid campaign would heal in time for him to play.
The AEG’s vision was for the introduction to be historic, and in Lalas’s words, “a big, Los Angeles, epic event.” It drew media from all over the world, and satisfied the AEG’s expectations, while placing them squarely in what Lalas called “the hurricane of the Beckham effect.”
Beckham was also unveiled at that year’s MLS All-Star Game on July 19, at the newly opened Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City, Colorado, just east of Denver. The soccer-specific stadium, which Garber proclaimed “our newest soccer cathedral” in the press event announcing the 2007 All-Star Game location,4 seemed a hybrid between FC Dallas’s integration of academy-ready auxiliary fields within its footprint, and an aesthetically pleasing stadium owing to its older sibling in Carson, with a series of slanted roofs over the sideline seats evoking the nearby Rocky Mountain peaks.
Doug McIntyre recalls,
I was at his first game against Chelsea, and the amount of media there was just incredible. You had every outlet in England, and from as far away as Asia and Australia. They had to set up an auxiliary press box. It was a huge, huge game. It was on ESPN, it was marketed, I still remember the commercials. I remember the day he signed in early January, and the buzz in our office at ESPN the Magazine in New York. There weren’t many soccer news stories that had everyone in the office talking, and that one absolutely did. It was just shocking, and it was the biggest story in U.S. sports for a day or two. Everyone was watching his games with Madrid leading up to him coming here, as he helped them win the title. He’d worked himself back in toward the end, and Madrid wanted to keep him. So he came in playing well. There was an awful lot of buzz.
Andrea Canales comments,
I myself was disappointed when Beckham came from Madrid. We knew that he’d been given Spanish lessons in Madrid. Occasionally, he’d make a few remarks. And the Spanish-language media in Los Angeles was excited to get him on camera to say a few things, even if it was just a little statement, “It was a good game” in Spanish, and he absolutely refused. He was shy about it. As a shy person I understand, but it was still a huge disappointment. The media here was dying for Beckham to do something in Spanish, and he didn’t.
We would have postgame press conferences and people would ask him about Tom Cruise. And it’d be frustrating because we’d be on deadline for an article on the game, and we can only ask a certain amount of questions, and someone’s saying, “We saw Tom Cruise in your box watching the game; did that inspire you?” They were sending people from People magazine or OK or whatever tabloid, and those poor people had to ask those dumb questions. And we’d say, “You’re going to come to our press conference to ask this?’ On the other hand, we also knew he was the reason we were getting extra assignments.
The rise in website traffic for MLS’s fledgling website, MLSnet.com, was even attributed to Beckham. A press release from London-based digital metrics company comScore attributed the July 2007 traffic, over one million unique visitors, to curiosity about Beckham, noting that in December 2006 the site only attracted 206,000 visitors, while in January 2007, the month Beckham announced the move to the Galaxy, traffic jumped nearly fourfold to 808,000, with more than 200,000 of those in Europe.5
Due to the ankle injury, Beckham only played sporadically in 2007, though his first start was about as memorable as a first could be. The August 18 game in Giants Stadium pitted the Galaxy against the Red Bulls, who had signed their own difference-making designated player—Colombian international Juan Pablo Angel, who’d previously played with Argentine giants River Plate and Premiere League stalwarts Aston Villa. The match exploded into action with a fourth-minute free kick goal by Angel, who sent the ball under three Galaxy players in the wall who chose to jump, but Beckham assisted on two goals before the ten-minute mark to pull the Galaxy ahead. The Red Bulls, though, would level the match just before halftime, two important national team players (Landon Donovan and a promising young striker named Jozy Altidore) would involve themselves in second half scoring, and Angel would score a game-winner, for a 5–4 final score, with less than ninety seconds remaining.
“That was one of the best advertisements for MLS we had seen to that point,” McIntyre says of the match. “Everyone in that building walked away from that game thinking they had gotten their money’s worth. It was exciting, it had star power, it had buzz, it had everything. It was back-page news in New York the next day, where they were saying Beckham was basically the king of New York for a day. For a regular-season match, we hadn’t seen anything like that since Pelé’s last game. It was easily the biggest game they’d had in their ten seasons, and possibly since.”
Empire Supporters Club board member Jennifer Muller, who joined the group that day, remembers, “The atmosphere was definitely electric with the larger than normal crowd. But there was definitely an air of resentment among regulars toward those that just came out to the game because of Beckham.”
Beckham brought much to the Galaxy, but he didn’t bring instant success. The Galaxy ended the season eleventh out of thirteen teams, and wouldn’t get to the playoffs until 2009. “We didn’t have a great team until 2009 when Bruce [Arena] revamped the roster,” Donovan says. “From 2006 through 2008, we had an average team and it showed in the standings. In soccer, more than any other sport, you need a group of players that achieve things together. You can’t just do it with one player.” He adds, “Once we got the right players into the team, Bruce was able to mold us into a champion”—though it would take longer than many anticipated.
Wahl, who’d flown out to Madrid that May to meet Beckham (in preparation for a July cover story to coincide with his American debut), remembers,
He seemed pretty at ease, at least in talking to me, about his decision to come over. It was a story that transcended sport; in fact, the soccer part of it wasn’t important to anyone at the time. Off the field, it was successful—he’d obviously come here as an A-list celebrity. But he arrived injured, and on the field, it went poorly. I don’t think people knew how to prepare for it exactly, and no one wanted to say no to Beckham. So that would result in situations where he played for England in Europe, got on a plane, and tried to play for the Galaxy less than twenty-four hours later in LA.
On August 30, in the final of the SuperLiga tournament involving Liga MX and MLS teams (which the Galaxy lost to Pachuca on penalty kicks), Beckham left partway through the match with a knee injury and would only return to action for the Galaxy’s final match of the 2007 season as a sub. “It was clear with that injury he’d be out for a while,” Wahl noted. “The lunacy stopped because it had to stop.”
Though Beckham dominated MLS coverage in 2007 and beyond, that year was also remarkable for Chivas USA. The “other Los Angeles team” completed a worst-to-first transition, topping the West and just missing out on the Supporters’ Shield to D.C. United. But both top seeds were bumped in the conference semifinals by the number 4 seeds—the Wizards were fifth in the East and slotted into the West’s number 4 slot to face Chivas, whereas the East’s number 4 Fire met the United. But it was the number 2 seeds that ultimately advanced to the MLS Cup—the first time that finalists repeated from the prior year.
The Revolution got off to a lead with a twentieth-minute goal from Taylor Twellman, but second half goals from Joseph Ngwenya and Dwayne De Rosario gave the Dynamo its second straight championship—a dynastic four in seven seasons, if you count what they did as the Quakes—while the Revs were continuing a Charlie-Brown-with-Lucy’s-football existence with a 0-for-4 MLS Cup run.
The 2008 season brought an expansion Earthquakes team back to San Jose to rekindle its rivalry with the Galaxy, but they finished last in the league (though the Galaxy did tie them on points), with the Crew and Dynamo heading their conferences, but the playoffs held a bit of a surprise—the Red Bulls, finding their way to the MLS Cup as the West’s number 4 seed, in a continuation of an MLS playoff conceit that was having fun with geography.
The Crew’s success in 2008 had much to do with a player they’d secured the year before, who would be granted Designated Player status at the end of that year—Argentine forward Guillermo Barros Schelotto. As author Steve Sirk recalls,
The signing of Schelotto was immensely important. I imagine I was probably like most people in Columbus when I say that I honestly didn’t know much of anything about him prior to his arrival. I’m sure there are some people who follow South American leagues, but most of the big names come from Europe or make their names in the World Cup. When Schelotto signed, his resume at Boca Juniors spoke for itself, but it’s not like he was a well-known name to many Ohioans. That, of course, would soon change.
If you talk to players that played with Guille, they talk about how he simplified the game for them. Everybody knew their roles. He made so many players better. Schelotto was very good about coaching players on the field, especially the younger guys.
It wasn’t just what he did on the field. Sirk notes,
He was committed to Columbus and really wanted to be just one of the guys. He cherished that he and his family could live a relatively normal life in Ohio, and he had zero of that superstar attitude. He got along with everyone on the team, regardless of age or nationality. An example of how he wanted to be one of the guys is that he would participate in Frankie Hejduk’s NFL picks pool. Guille didn’t know much about the NFL, but he studied hard and wanted to do well in the pool. After all, Guille is a competitor who wants to win. He was always asking questions and trying to learn. Learning English is another example. Learning a new language can be daunting and it risks embarrassment, but he embraced it. He was never afraid of making mistakes. He carried a little book around with him to write down what he learned and to correct any errors he made. A player of his stature could have done none of those things and nobody would have thought twice about it, but he was determined to be just one of the guys and to make the most of his American experience. I’m sure that went a long way toward the growth of the team as a unit, both on and off the field.
The league’s regular-season MVP, Schelotto also became the MLS Cup MVP by assisting on all three goals in a 3–1 game that saw Columbus pull away in the second half, with a Chad Marshall goal two minutes after the Red Bull’s John Wolyniec tied it. The match, in the Home Depot Center, featured two teams from the same conference for the first time, and featured two first-time finalists for the first time since, of course, the inaugural MLS Cup.
It would also show, perhaps unexpectedly, the power of the designated player (DP). While Schelotto wasn’t made the Crew’s first DP until immediately after delivering Columbus its first cup, he had the immediate, transformative, galvanic reaction that spoke keenly to the impact of a single player, even if Beckham didn’t. Their 2008 MLS Cup opponents, the Red Bulls, had secured two DPs in Angel and Claudio Reyna, and upgrades improved a team that was appearing to shed its mediocrity along with the MetroStars moniker that led fans to react to its team’s failings with a weary, “That’s so Metro.”
Even franchises that didn’t launch themselves into the upper echelons of the playoffs found value in the designated player. The Fire, for instance, signed veteran Mexican striker Cuauhtémoc Blanco and reengaged a portion of the fan base they’d largely lost five years earlier when the team was exiled to Naperville. There was a mechanism in place to bring internationally known players to the league, even though the highest-profile players were coming to MLS for the final few years of their career, which didn’t exactly help the image of the league’s comparative competitiveness (though that perception would continue to evolve, and to be buoyed by future DP signings).
Beckham—to pick his story line back up—did play more in 2008, scoring five goals and adding ten assists, but at the conclusion of the season arranged a loan to Italian club AC Milan, which needed to be signed off on by both the Galaxy and MLS. The loan was presented as a means for Beckham to get more European seasoning in advance of the 2010 World Cup, meaning that he wouldn’t sit idle while the Galaxy waited out the November–March period in which many of his English teammates, as well as on-the-bubble players competing for spots on the team, were in the thick of a Premier League season.
The loan was initially announced as spanning just two months, from the first week of 2009 to when training camp started, though Milan director Umberto Gandini did tell the media the loan was “for as long as David wishes.”6 But then Beckham decided to extend his loan through the end of the Serie A season; Milan and Beckham contributed jointly to what was termed a multimillion-dollar payment to the Galaxy in order to extend the loan.
This did not sit particularly well with some Galaxy fans. In a particularly ugly incident in July 2009, in Beckham’s first start after returning from Milan (in which, incidentally, he tallied two of his three 2009 season assists), he was booed and jeered repeatedly and even got into an angry confrontation with several fans in the LA Riot Squad section. Fans also expressed themselves with banners that called him a “fraud” and a “part-time player,” as well as asserting their Galaxy fandom as resolute “before, after, and despite” Beckham.
Bruce Arena responded to the incident in fatherly fashion, telling the media, “We regret the incident that happened at the end of the first half. While it is important that our fans remain free to voice their opinions, they must do so in an appropriate manner. We appreciate our players’ and fans’ passion for the team and the game, but we all must aim to hold ourselves to higher standards.”7
Regarding the “part-time player” banner, Canales notes that it was
valid to a certain point. He was trying really hard to make the England national team, and [England coach Fabio] Capello was saying he didn’t trust the level you’re playing at in MLS. The England national team was always coming first to him, and he was doing what he needed to, to be on the team, only playing with Milan to get to England. But it was important for the fans to let him know, “You can’t play half the season with another club and say you’re committed to this club.” I thought that it was important for fans to care enough about their club to show that point of view. That confrontation was probably needed from both sides, which ended in an agree to disagree.
And yet, there was no denying Beckham’s importance despite the part-time status. As Lalas observed, “At the time, and to a certain extent, there is nobody else even to this day who is able to check all those boxes and bring more people into the tent. When you think about Major League Soccer [in its twentieth year], the first team you think about is the LA Galaxy. And we paid for that type of relevancy and perspective, and we got it. David Beckham gave us that relevancy.”
The year 2009 was strong for the Galaxy, but was ultimately owned by Real Salt Lake, who’d created some buzz heading into the 2009 season by opening Rio Tinto Stadium in October 2008. Bill Manning, who was general manager for RSL, thought that the team should dot all i’s and cross all t’s before opening the new stadium to the public, and debut the stadium at the start of the 2009 season. Dave Checketts—who, remember, had scheduled a stadium groundbreaking on faith before a deal was finalized—thought the good people of Utah had waited long enough. Manning, like many who worked with Checketts, credited him with the vision to charge forward. “He knew they needed the stadium,” Manning says, and the team rode a league-best home record into playoff contention.
As Trey Fitz-Gerald recalls, the 2009 regular season boiled down to a final-day situation in which five teams were in contention for the eighth and final playoff spot. “We were a sub-.500 team that got into the playoffs on the last day because five different results went our way,” he says, laughing. In addition to RSL needing to beat its rival Rapids (which they did, 3–0), a number of other dominoes needed to fall, leading Fitz-Gerald and other fans to scoreboard-watch. Fitz-Gerald even created a flowchart—“my greatest professional achievement,” he jokes—to help track the results that would deliver RSL to the playoffs, which included an improbable (but certainly welcome) 5–0 Toronto loss to the MetroStars.
RSL defeated Supporters’ Shield winner and defending champs Columbus in the first round of the playoffs (as the East’s number 4 team), and then relied on a shootout-savvy Rimando to get past the Fire in the Eastern Conference finals that went seven penalty kicks deep. Meanwhile, in the West, an improved Galaxy dispatched their crosstown rivals in the conference semifinals, and then knocked the Dynamo out with two extra-time goals—after a scoreless first 102 minutes—to advance to the finals. A year after two East teams played an MLS Cup in Los Angeles, two West teams would face off in Seattle for the championship.
The Seattle Times described the match as, in large part, a celebration of Sounders fandom: “A crowd of 46,011, mostly Sounders FC fans, turned out for one last match on their team’s home pitch, and were treated to a classic between the two teams. Thousands of fans in rave green on hand to say goodbye to the inaugural season, part of the fourth-largest attendance for a Cup final, stood and made noise for much of the match. They witnessed RSL, a five-year-old franchise, capture its first-ever league MLS Cup and were in full throat during the penalty-kick phase.”
As in the conference finals, the penalty kick sequence went seven shooters deep, with RSL winning 5–4, in part because a normally reliable Donovan pushed his shot over the bar, in part due to “tired legs.”8
“The 2009 MLS Cup may be the greatest disappointment in the history of the LA Riot Squad,” says Scott MacKay, the supporters’ group president, adding, “In penalties, you never expect your three strikers to miss.” Several hundred Galaxy supporters (from both the Riot Squad and the Angel City Brigade) made the trip up the coast; AEG president and CEO Tim Leiweke even dropped in to their pregame bar to buy drinks; MacKay recalls it was supposed to be for an hour, “but ended after about ten minutes and a massive bar tab.”
The 2010 season—in a World Cup year that would be memorable for the Americans—would bring another first-time winner into the circle of MLS Cup holders in an even more bizarre playoff configuration than years past. MLS altered its eight-team bracket to only guarantee two spots per conference versus the three per conference of the prior few years. The underachieving Eastern Conference only produced two playoff teams. One was the Red Bulls, which bolstered its lineup by bringing in two DPs doubling as legendary fan-base motivators: French international striker Thierry Henry, who’d been revered during his stellar years at Arsenal and had most recently featured for Barcelona, and Mexican international Rafa Marquez, who’d spent the past seven seasons with Barcelona and who’d served as El Tri’s captain since the 2002 World Cup. The other was Columbus, for which Schelotto was playing his final season.
The Galaxy won the Supporters’ Shield, involving more team depth than before due to Donovan’s and teammate Edson Buddle’s involvement with the American team and what was supposed to be Beckham’s return to England. Beckham’s March 2010 injury—an Achilles tendon rupture suffered while on his second loan with Milan, keeping him sidelined until his September 2010 return to the Galaxy—ensured he wouldn’t be playing in that summer’s World Cup. The Telegraph’s Henry Winter, declaring it a “desperately sad development,” prophesized that the severity of the injury plus Beckham’s advancing age (thirty-four) meant he’d never be the same again, and would certainly not see national team action. “For all the celebrity circus around Beckham,” Winter wrote, “he remains a remarkably humble individual obsessed with football and he will be devastated to miss the World Cup.” Winter then looked into the future again, incorrectly predicting, “Beckham can still deliver for England in a World Cup but only as an ambassador, in winning the rights to host the 2018 tournament.”9
Lamar Hunt speaks at the groundbreaking for what would become Pizza Hut Park in Frisco on February 18, 2004. Dignitaries seated behind the podium include Hunt Sports Group chairman Clark Hunt and MLS Commissioner Don Garber.
(Photo courtesy of FC Dallas)
“Timber Joey” Webber stands in front of the Timbers Army faithful in Providence Park’s famed North End for a September 2015 home match.
(Photo courtesy of Steve Dykes, USA TODAY Sports)
DC United fans create a tifo of the District of Columbia flag prior to an RFK Stadium match in March 2013.
(Photo courtesy of Matt Mathai)
Carrying on a worldwide tradition of red vs. blue rivalries, Toronto FC’s Sebastian Giovinco and Montreal Impact’s Victor Cabrera battle during an August 2015 game in Toronto.
(Photo courtesy of Nick Turchiaro, USA TODAY Sports)
Sporting KC goalkeeper Jimmy Nielsen raises the Philip F. Anschutz Cup with his team after winning the 2013 MLS Cup over Real Salt Lake at Sporting Park.
(Photo courtesy of Peter G. Aiken, USA TODAY Sports)
Landon Donovan addresses the crowd with a bullhorn, celebrating the LA Galaxy’s 2014 MLS Cup victory over the New England Revolution.
(Photo courtesy of Gary A. Vasquez, USA TODAY Sports)
#TIFOSWEAT members gather in their warehouse in April 2016, preparing a tifo for an upcoming Columbus Crew SC match.
(Photo courtesy of TifoSWEAT)
Ray Hudson, the former Miami Fusion coach, and Phil Schoen, who called the first-ever MLS game for ESPN, now work together as beIN SPORTS commentators.
(Photo courtesy of beIN SPORTS)
President George W. Bush with the MLS Cup–winning Houston Dynamo team for a White House reception on May 29, 2007.
(Photo courtesy of Houston Dynamo)
The fan-created Supporters’ Shield, awarded annually to the team with the best regular-season record, framed by a selection of scarves representing MLS supporters’ groups. Scarves are typically brandished by fans in pre-game ceremonies and are de rigueur for any serious supporter.
(Photo Credit: Sean Dane)
Houston Dynamo fans, in the new Zona Naranja section created by the team for its supporters, cheer on their team during an April 2016 match against the Seattle Sounders.
(Photo credit: Phil West)
American Outlaws, the official supporters’ group of the U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Teams. Founded in 2007, they helped raise awareness of American supporters’ culture in the lead-up to the 2014 World Cup.
(Photo Credit: Will Leverett/American Outlaws)
The Galaxy couldn’t get through to the finals, losing 3–0 to FC Dallas in the Western Conference finals. The Rapids, a wild card team that was seventh in the standings, beat the Earthquakes in the “define east” Eastern Conference finals to reach their first finals since 1997, and then would face the first-time finalists in the first MLS Cup hosted on Canadian soil.
The Washington Post’s Steven Goff was not impressed. His review of the finals began,
Appropriately, an MLS Cup lacking artistry and losing the attention of a thinning crowd was decided by an own goal. And with the deflection in the 17th minute of overtime Sunday evening, the Colorado Rapids claimed their first league championship with a 2–1 victory over favored FC Dallas before an announced sellout of 21,700 at BMO Field.
In front of thousands of empty seats, vacated by neutral observers escaping the late-night chill, reserve Macoumba Kandji settled Conor Casey’s long diagonal ball just inside the penalty area. After toying with Jair Benitez, Kandji struck the ball an instant before Ugo Ihemelu’s challenge.
George John slid over to protect the near side, but with goalkeeper Kevin Hartman committed to the far end, the ball caromed off John and floated into the closest corner.10
Though certainly heartbreaking for FC Dallas, it was a breakthrough moment for a franchise that had, as the league’s official website pointed out, had “overhauled nearly everything except their team name” since last appearing the finals—including five coaches, three logos, one color change, and, of course, one new stadium.11 And with the victory, a Galaxy team entering its fifth season with Beckham was still without a title.
But that would change the following season. Finally, in 2011, Beckham’s fifth year with the club, the Galaxy won its first title since 2005 with a 1–0 victory over the Dynamo. The game’s lone goal, coming in the seventy-second minute, came on a play that intertwined all three of the Galaxy’s designated players: Ireland national and Premier League veteran Robbie Keane, perhaps the final piece that the team was missing, combined with Beckham to assist on Donovan’s goal. It was the culmination of a playoffs in which an unlikely hero emerged: Mike Magee, acquired via a trade with the Red Bulls in 2009, scored crucial goals in matches leading up to the Galaxy’s Cup appearance.
The Galaxy had finally done what the front office had envisioned when they’d signed Beckham half a decade earlier, albeit with a third designated player completing their transformation from a team that couldn’t quite win a championship to a team that looked like it could win many.
The five-year period between 2007 and 2011 in MLS was writ large with Beckham’s presence and sometimes absence, but there were certainly other fascinating story lines during this era that saw the league grow from twelve to eighteen teams. One of the most fascinating ones doesn’t even involve players or coaches but rather a group of soccer fans from Philadelphia who didn’t have the heart or the stomach to support teams from natural rivals like New York or Washington, DC. So, rather than sit idly by and wait for MLS to come to Philadelphia, the fans decided to entice MLS to come to them.