In which the fans of the idea of a team help their hometown get an actual real live team.
THE 2007 MLS CUP MIGHT BE BEST REMEMBERED FOR WHAT WAS HAPPENING in the stands rather than on the field.
A group of about a hundred fans, some with drums, all dressed in light blue shirts, were visible and loud, yet weren’t cheering for New England or Houston. Instead, they rhythmically chanted “Phil-a-delph-ia,” and created songs around sentiments like “We don’t have a team” that they gleefully sang through the stadium. The Sons of Ben, rooting for a Philadelphia-based Major League Soccer team they envisioned and hoped for, brought fan support as performance art to MLS’s biggest stage in what ultimately was a successful endeavor like nothing the league—or indeed, any sports league—had seen before.
When the Sons of Ben formed in Philadelphia in January 2007, they weren’t coming together to support a team—they were coming together to support the idea of a team. The group’s founders initially met through the Big Soccer website, and according to founder Bryan James, he’d spent 2006 with other Philadelphia-area soccer fans, engaged in the same sort of public lobbying efforts that Soccer Silicon Valley had used to inspire a new ownership group to rekindle the Earthquakes.
“They were successful, so we’d wanted to emulate that,” James remembers. “But what we’d done up to that point was yielding no tangible results, so I thought what might work better is giving Philadelphians a chance to be fans of something rather than doing all of this background political wrangling, and I put out a call to anybody who might be interested in creating a supporters’ group for a team that didn’t exist.”
The idea started small. Six people came to the first meeting and became the de facto leaders, seized upon the Sons of Ben name (which had the added advantage of abbreviating to SoBs), chose the distinctive light blue and yellow colors of the city flag, created a logo, and set out to mobilize potential fans. Their first action was going out to a Philadelphia KiXX game to cheer on not the Major Indoor Soccer League team that had been active there since 1995 but the concept of a Philly-headquartered MLS team.
Good fortune struck them; they’d generated enough attention with the recruiting campaign that Steven Wells, an English ex-pat writer living in Philly, saw the Sons of Ben at the KiXX game and decided to write about them for Four Four Two, a revered yet irreverent English soccer magazine.
In a Guardian article recalling his visit, Wells wrote, “With their custom-made scarves, raucous chants and vigorously thumped bass drum, the 60 Sons made more noise than the rest of the arena put together. And they made particular sport of the Baltimore Blast keeper, Sagu. They got drowned out only once—when the 4,000 strong Girl Guide audience joined in with the SpongeBob SquarePants theme tune (something of a ritual at KiXX games). But then—in a flash of spontaneous genius that would have brought a smile to the face of the Kop—the Sons of Ben responded with a mournful ‘Sagu SquarePants’ And poor old Sagu visibly wilted.”
Unable to resist a dig at David Beckham, Wells continued, “With the entire U.S. soccer press (such as it is) fixated on how Mr. Posh Spice is going to save American soccer (from what, exactly, nobody ever says) very little attention is being paid to the ongoing revolution in U.S. soccer fandom. Sick of the dull, pasteurised, one-size-fits-all, preprogrammed Disneyfied McFan experience that’s all but got a deathgrip on U.S. pro sports, soccer fans have increasingly been doing it for themselves.”
He went on to praise American supporters’ culture by contrasting it to other pro sports, wherein “the majority of fans sit sipping pissy beer and munching tasteless hot dogs or nachos slathered in fake cheese while some blandroid on the PA makes all the noise. Which makes soccer’s new breed of self-organised, scarfed-up, singing, chanting, banner-hoisting, flag-waving, noisy-as-hell ruffians the sport’s clearest brand differential—and potentially its greatest asset.”1
The group then arranged for a group of twenty-five to attend a Red Bulls game in June. “We had a section far away from the New York supporters,” explains James, “but they knew we were there, and started singing ‘Fuck Philadelphia’ to the tune of ‘La Donna e Mobile.’ They were playing Kansas City, but they were focusing their hate on us, so it was good.” In response, the Sons of Ben initiated a new chant: “We’ve won as many cups as you, and we don’t have a team.” That appearance led to Sports Illustrated featuring the group in its weekly “Faces in the Crowd” section for the issue covering the San Antonio Spurs’ NBA finals victory against the LeBron James–led Cleveland Cavaliers, which further propelled their notoriety.
That was a victory in and of itself, but the Red Bulls game had been a test run for the ultimate goal: attending the 2007 MLS Cup at RFK Stadium in force to demonstrate to Don Garber and the many others watching that Philadelphia was serious about soccer. They were also meeting weekly, signing fans to petitions and season-ticket pledge lists, putting in their own money for scarves, tifo material, and room rentals, and continuing to contact political leaders who could help.
The group grew to fifteen hundred by the time the MLS Cup rolled around, and the Sons of Ben were able to send a group of a hundred to the match—as good luck would have it, right next to the Revolution fans whose team was representing the East. James remembers the reaction from other teams’ fans to the group tailgating and then entering the stadium as a mix of incredulity and respect.
The Sons of Ben wouldn’t be able to bring a team to Philadelphia on their own, of course. But even as they were putting together their first public appearances, Nick Sakiewicz was already at work, trying to put together the necessary elements to bring a team to Philadelphia, moving from the north to the south end of New Jersey.
As Sakiewicz explains,
I left New York right after I put the shovel in the ground on what would become Red Bull Arena. We wanted to do something at Rowan University, which is across the river from Philadelphia in South Jersey. We had gone down the line quite a bit in the development of six hundred acres at Rowan, with some real estate developers, that would include a soccer stadium. There was a small get that we needed, maybe five or eight million dollars of sewer and roadway infrastructure to be built. There was a change in governor in the middle of that—Jon Corzine became governor. And New Jersey was in about, I don’t know, six billion dollars in debt, and Corzine put a screeching halt to any kind of spending in the state.
Knowing that stadium development was essential to attracting an MLS team to Philly, Sakiewicz took over those efforts. In concert with his initial efforts to secure a stadium, he also convinced real estate magnate Jay Sugarman to be the majority investor for an ownership group he was looking to coalesce.
Sakiewicz learned of the Sons of Ben via Wells’s Four Four Two article, which he read while sitting on a plane in an Italian airport, returning home after a trip during which he had tried to interest AC Milan, the legendary Italian soccer club, in investing in MLS. “I read about this group and how they were lobbying for an MLS team, saw the names of the people in the group in the article, and decided to reach out to them,” he explains. “I thought these guys could help me lobby for a stadium and for a team. We had some competition. Don Garber, at the time, was talking to a few other cities about expansion. Other cities were in the mix. I wanted a grassroots movement to help with my political lobbying and my lobbying with the league.”
“Within a week or so of reading that article, [Sakiewicz] reached out to me for the first time,” James remembers. “His vision made this happen. When he started reaching out, we got a little more direction to our pursuits—it’s really how the hard work we’d been doing dovetailed into luck.”
Sakiewicz and the Sons of Ben met and developed a plan to showcase their enthusiasm for soccer and to make that the public face of the soccer-to-Philly movement. “Those guys were awesome,” Sakiewicz recalls. “They were really helpful in my efforts of credibility. When I went to Harrisburg to talk to the governor about how popular soccer was, they made it look like there were these thousands and thousands of people back in Philadelphia ready to support the team. They helped me create, really, in retrospect, an illusion of thousands of fans. It had really grown to maybe a couple of hundred by then, and eventually seven hundred, and then eventually to the thousands.”
James recalls Sakiewicz being at the 2007 MLS Cup with a potential investor in Philly soccer, but it was also during a time in which he was interviewing for a job with the Los Angeles Dodgers. “He saw us across the way [in the stadium], and the fact that he could see us very clearly really solidified what he wanted to do. I believe that solidified the funding as much as anything.”
Sakiewicz’s meetings with governor Ed Rendell started in August 2006, and he labeled the initial discussions as “really speculative.” By January 2008, however, he was able to negotiate enough money from the state of Pennsylvania, Delaware County, and the city of Chester to go forward with stadium plans.
“At the same time, I was meeting with whoever, talking to anybody and everybody trying to get investment into the league,” Sakiewicz says, noting that at one point he’d talked to Merritt Paulson as part of the Philly investment group. “I didn’t know he had his heart set on buying a minor league baseball team in Portland,” he adds, laughing. That was Paulson’s stepping-stone to launching an MLS team in the Rose City several years later. Though Sugarman was still committed to the project, Sakiewicz felt he needed additional investment from minority owners to get the team operational.
Sakiewicz and his group, buoyed by bringing in the stadium money package, did go ahead with the announcement that Philadelphia was getting an MLS team—the city’s first Division I team since the NASL’s Philadelphia Fury became the Montreal Manic at the end of the 1980 season.
The Sons of Ben were involved with that press conference, closing the event by presenting scarves to Philadelphia Union’s ownership group. According to James in an article for the Original Winger website, “The Sons of Ben, as a group, unofficially heard two days before the official announcement at an event we set up with the ownership group. Over 250 people crowded into The Dark Horse in Old City Philadelphia, and when Nick said, ‘If you happen to come down to The Wharf Building in Chester at around 2 o’clock on Thursday, you wouldn’t be wasting your time,’ we could all finally celebrate.”2
But behind the scenes, even with Philadelphia believing the team was coming, Sakiewicz was still working to get to the finish line, complicated by the recession—and, in particular, the stock market crash of October 2008. “It was crazy, crazy times,” Sakiewicz remembers. “That project could have died a hundred times in these twenty-four months” between the announcement of the team and its 2010 home opener.
The Sons of Ben would be involved in subsequent franchise milestone events, including the stadium groundbreaking in late 2008 and the unveiling of the Union name at City Hall in May 2009, and were brought in to give input on features they’d like for the stadium, which included having teams come out in a tunnel directly below the Sons of Ben section. As James characterizes it, “The unexpected was becoming normal.”
Sakiewicz is particularly proud about the process that brought about branding the Union, noting that even though he had been involved with management of both the Mutiny and the MetroStars, Philadelphia gave him an opportunity to build a brand from the ground up. He not only gave the Union a distinctive identity of its own but also nodded to the region’s soccer history through the team’s 2013 alternate uniforms (or, in soccer parlance, third kits). Those uniforms paid tribute to Bethlehem Steel FC, founded in 1907 and lasting until 1930, and revered by soccer historians and serious American soccer fans as one of the most successful teams of the early twentieth century, when soccer was gaining its first familiarity in the United States. (The Union’s ownership group would go on in 2015 to create an affiliate team in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and brand it Bethlehem Steel FC to honor its forerunners.)
Current Sons of Ben leaders still look proudly on the efforts that brought the Union. “To say there was a well-thought-out plan would be a mischaracterization,” explains Kenny Hanson, president of the group during its 2015 season. Yet, he boasts, “We were the only supporter group in American sports ever that created an organization from a bunch of fans.”
“There were so many rollercoasters of emotion with this,” adds current Sons of Ben president Ami Rivera. “There was never a definite that this was going to happen; when we finally got the announcement, it was just so relieving and validating and positive. People came out of the woodwork to congratulate each other. All these crazy things we had done finally made sense—and it became this really great story about how Philadelphia fans had done something positive, for MLS and everybody else.”
In the aformentioned Original Winger article on the Sons of Ben’s successful efforts, James said that Wells compared their group to the “South Seas Cargo Cultists [of Melanesia] who would build runways in hopes that the planes present during World War II would miraculously reappear and bring wealth to the island.” He then added, “The difference in this case was that we got the plane to land.”3
The opening day at PPL Park (today Talen Energy Stadium) was June 27, 2010—which ended up being the third rather than the first 2010 home game, due to delays in finishing the stadium. (The team used Lincoln Financial Field, where the NFL Eagles play, in the interim.) And yet, Sakiewicz—marveling that it’d taken him five years to solidify a stadium plan in New York, compared to just two years in Philadelphia—describes his mood at PPL’s opening as “euphoric.”
“We finally had a home of our own,” he remembers. “Getting my second gold shovel was awesome, and actually building the stadium and opening it was an incredible trophy day for me and all the great people who built that. I’ll never forget it.”
“Major League Soccer, from its very first season, wanted to be in Philadelphia,” explains Jonathan Tannenwald, a veteran Philadelphia-based soccer journalist. “But there was no suitable venue for it. There also was not a demonstrated demand for a team. Some person or entity had to be able to organize people to the point demand would be proven to have a team, and in turn invest in a stadium to house it. And that’s what the Sons of Ben ultimately did, and they did it in a way that no other market in MLS’s history has ever seen.”
Soccer has unfortunately added to the hard-luck lore that has infused Philadelphia sports for decades. The Union has only made the playoffs once in its first six seasons, back in 2011, and though the team has made U.S. Open Cup Finals in 2014 and 2015, it’s managed to lose both in heartbreaking fashion. In 2014, the Union took the Sounders to overtime before losing 3–1; the next year, they took Sporting Kansas City to penalty kicks, losing 7–6 in the shootout sequence.
The team also decided to usher in a post-Sakiewicz era at the end of 2015. This is how MLSSoccer.com’s Dave Zeitlin characterized the Sugarman-Sakiewicz relationship and its end:
In simplest terms, Sugarman provided the money and Sakiewicz the business savvy to drive the development of a new team and stadium—and both were equally instrumental in Philadelphia being awarded an expansion club for the 2010 season.
But around this time last year, Sugarman, the franchise’s chairman and majority owner, said he began to think about dissolving that long-standing partnership and forging a new direction without Sakiewicz as CEO.
And on Friday, he made the decision to officially let him go, just two days after the Union dropped their second straight US Open Cup final at home.
“I’m really appreciative of everything Nick put into this,” Sugarman said in a conference call with reporters. “I think he gave this team his heart and soul. And I guess when his employment agreement ended last year, we really needed to take a step back and decide how we were going to move the ball forward and really build on all the good stuff that has taken place. I think the conclusion is that what we need now is perhaps different than what we needed then. There were some issues that just didn’t seem to be getting resolved. This is not a decision that was made lightly, but I think it’s the right decision for the team to move forward.”
The article goes on to note that the team had “constant roster turnover” and two head coaching changes, as well as an admission by Sugarman that “there were philosophical things that he and Sakiewicz did not see eye to eye on,” though he didn’t elaborate on specifics.4
Sakiewicz, elaborating on specifics, says, “Jay never really liked or bought into anything the club did. He was not a big fan of the senior staff I’d put together, he wasn’t a big fan of the way we’d built the brand and constructed the brand together with the fans. He wasn’t a big fan of bringing in key marquee players. He was very skeptical and I think continues to be skeptical of the academy development system that I set up with Rich Graham, who was another co-investor. I don’t think he believes that to be money wisely spent. So, yes, I think there were a lot of philosophical differences between he and I in how I ran the club.”
Sakiewicz also points to on-the-field and in-the-ledger successes the Union had toward the end of his tenure. For the former, he points to reaching the back-to-back U.S. Open Cup finals as an encouraging sign, reflecting a well-founded faith in head coach Jim Curtin, who Sakiewicz named as the team’s interim head coach in June 2014 and its official head coach five months later. For the latter, he notes, “My last year there, we had the highest revenue we’d ever achieved in the history of the club. If that’s an indictment on my business savvy, then I’ll take it.”
One particularly alarming harbinger of front office change came that May, when the Sons of Ben preceded a home match against D.C. United by protesting the front office’s management of the team during a march to the stadium. As Tannenwald reported, the supporters’ group “raised a banner which read ‘UNION FANS DESERVE BETTER,’ and carried a coffin whose interior depicted Sakiewicz with the inscription ‘NICK SAKIEWICZ FRANCHISE SERIAL KILLER.’” Tannenwald’s article goes on to report,
The protest ended at the stadium gates, as the Sons of Ben had promised when it was first announced. In a statement Sunday morning on its Facebook page, the organization said: “Inside PPL is where we show support for our team. That support will not change—win, lose or draw.”
Still, it was a rare sign of organized dissent from a group that has long been among the Union’s most fervent backers no matter the results.
“It was clear that this was something our membership wanted,” Hanson told the Daily News at the group’s pregame tailgate. “People are frustrated, but I think that a lot of our members still support this club, and they support the team that’s on the pitch. We’ll continue to support our team inside PPL Park.”
One of my questions to Hanson was about whether there is any particular direction in which the Sons of Ben’s members are casting blame. While the protest focused on Sakiewicz, Hanson told me that a lot of parties are in the crosshairs for criticism. “Some people are pissed at the players, some people are pissed at the coach, some people are pissed at Nick,” he said. “Some people are pissed at the lack of investment that the investment group is willing to put in. So I think it depends on who you ask about where it went wrong.”5
Sakiewicz acknowledged the protest the day after with an official statement that simply read, “We agree wholeheartedly with the Sons of Ben and we share the frustrations of all fans to the start of the season. We are committed to assisting [coach] Jim [Curtin] and his Staff in every way so we can get the team back on the right track.”6
Rivera, in a November 2015 article on becoming the Sons of Ben’s new president, recalled, “It’s been a rough couple of years. The protest was probably the hardest I remember having it”—though she felt that having the protest outside the stadium and refusing to bring their signs, coffin, and invective toward the front office into the stadium was the best decision they could have made given their emotions.7
And yet the Sons of Ben, now boasting more than two thousand members, remain one of the most impressive supporters’ groups in MLS, displaying a sense of humor that has helped them rise above the indignity of multiple losing seasons. Their numerous chants include “No one likes us” (originated by fans of the generally disliked English club Millwall) and a goal celebration song simply known as “DOOP” (#DOOP is a goto hashtag for Union fans tweeting about the team).
For 2016, the group published a new chant on its website, imploring its members to “Learn it, live it, love it.” Set to the tune of the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup,” it goes, “Why do you build me up, Philly U baby, just to let me down and mess me around? Then, worst of all (worst of all!), you never score, Union, like you say you will, but we love you still! We need U (we need U!) more than anyone, Union, you know that we have from the start! So build me up, Philly U; don’t break my heart.”8
And where is Sakiewicz now? After considering a departure from sports altogether, or at least a hiatus following his time with the Union, he seized upon an opportunity to help grow a sport even more at the margins of American awareness than soccer was in 1996. Since January 2016 Sakiewicz has been at the helm of the National Lacrosse League for its thirtieth anniversary season, seeking to grow lacrosse in the same way that he helped grow soccer for two decades.