THERE’S BEEN SOME RESISTANCE IN MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER TO FRANCHISES rekindling their old North American Soccer League nicknames for reappropriation in the new league. In part, that was to seek separation from the former league, but it was also to avoid rekindling memories of the failures of yesteryear. After all, this was a league trying to find its own narrative rather than borrowing one authored by NASL.
And yet, one of the most successful regions in the league, now with a three-team rivalry that sometime plays as three spirited siblings trying to best one another, and sometimes plays out in a two-against-one dynamic, revels in its NASL history. Its teams proudly bear the names they started with in the mid-1970s.
In 1974 the Seattle Sounders and Vancouver Whitecaps joined the NASL and started hating each other, and by 1975 the Portland Timbers joined suit. The team names all later became attached to United Soccer League (USL) A-League franchises, once the A-League emerged to fill the void for cities who were either waiting to be awarded MLS franchises or weren’t large enough to expect them.
Given that the Pacific Northwest was passionate about soccer and intractably wound into NASL lore, you might expect that MLS would have found its way to the region before the 2009 season. It wasn’t for a lack of trying—but in Seattle’s case, initially, it was for lack of a proper stadium.
The Sounders were the first of three professional sports franchises that brought about Seattle’s great sports legitimization of the mid-1970s and charioted Seattle into a more defined national focus. Seattle did have since 1967 an established NBA franchise in the SuperSonics (a team that remained there until whisked away to Oklahoma City and renamed the Thunder in 2008), but the city wasn’t fully embraced by the major leagues until the Seahawks joined the NFL in 1976, and a year later, the Mariners joined Major League Baseball to endure generations of futility (2016 will be the franchise’s fortieth season, and the team has still never won an American League pennant).
The three new franchises had a common home—a domed concrete monstrosity, the Kingdome, which was shorthand for King County Domed Stadium rather than something more intentionally grand. The first sporting event in the stadium was soccer: a match between the Sounders and the New York Cosmos on April 9, 1976, brought 58,128 fans, making it the largest gathering to watch soccer in the United States to date. Pelé scored twice, the Cosmos won 3–1, and the Sounders found a nemesis that would haunt them throughout the entirety of their NASL stay.
The Kingdome served all of the major Seattle franchises—yes, even the Sonics—through the late 1970s and 1980s, but would barely survive the following decade so crucial to Seattle’s national identity. There was growing dissatisfaction with the Kingdome from both the Mariners and Seahawks camps even before July 19, 1994, the day that four ceiling tiles fell from the stadium’s roof, causing that evening’s Mariners game to be cancelled. (This was followed by a monthlong exile to the road before the MLB players’ strike prematurely ended the season.) By 1995, plans were underway for a baseball-specific stadium to be built next to the Kingdome, and Los Angeles—which lost both the Rams and Raiders that year—began courting the Seahawks.
As the Guardian’s Les Carpenter noted in a January 2015 article titled “How soccer saved the Seattle Seahawks,” Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen offered to buy the team in 1997 and keep it in Seattle, but on one multitiered condition: “He wanted a new stadium to replace the dreary Kingdome, he wanted $300m of public money to help finance it and he wanted the financing to be approved in a statewide referendum that Allen would pay to hold.” If the referendum failed, Allen would refuse to buy the team, allowing its owner to move the Seahawks to Southern California.
The pro-stadium campaign turned on a phone call from Seattle attorney Fred Mendoza to Allen’s office, with the idea that the stadium could be marketed as both a football and soccer stadium. Mendoza claimed that 300,000 people in the Seattle metro area had some involvement in soccer (largely through its numerous youth leagues), and a number of them would vote for a stadium if an MLS franchise were to follow. Allen’s team created blueprints for a stadium that would be able to showcase soccer as well as football, and Mendoza led efforts to engage area soccer fans in the project.
As Carpenter wrote, “A key moment came in the spring of 1997 when MLS Commissioner Doug Logan and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue attended a city luncheon in support of the stadium. After the lunch, Logan said: ‘You have our assurances that Major League Soccer will be here if the stadium is built.’ Suddenly Seattle’s soccer community had something tangible: a guarantee. People who hated the idea of helping to fund a stadium for Allen were campaigning to have it built.” The referendum passed by a narrow margin—under 37,000 votes out of 1.6 million cast—and proponents of the stadium maintained that the soccer vote made the difference.1
Construction began in 2000, shortly after the Kingdome was (cathartically) imploded, and the stadium was ready for the Seahawks by the start of the 2002 season. MLS happened to be fighting for its very existence those years, and the promise Logan made to Seattleites in 1997 wouldn’t be fulfilled for a full decade after he spoke it.
Frank McDonald, a Seattle soccer historian who’d been part of a committee working to bring a team to Seattle since the mid-1990s, notes,
Once the new stadium was built, it seemed you also needed strong local ownership. It seemed like a moving target because initially the league had only a few owners, and not all of them were local. I wrote a guest editorial for The Seattle Times that effectively said, “MLS, keep your promise. We built it, now let’s have our team.”
The effort to get an expansion team in 2005 was unsuccessful and relatively quick and low-key. However, we began to sense it was just a matter of time. To be honest, perhaps it’s best that we waited. By the time 2009 rolled around, MLS was much more mature and respected, because of [David] Beckham and the [Designated Player] rule, and because of the supporters’ culture driving success in Toronto. When the team was awarded, the timing felt right.
The Sounders brand was a bit star-crossed—the final NASL year in 1983 was widely regarded as disastrous due to new ownership, a new coach, a new uniform scheme featuring pinstripes, and decidedly less enthusiasm from fans in response to all that new. McDonald remembers, “My biggest concern by the time the MLS franchise was awarded in 2007 was that the Sounders brand would be more closely associated with a second-tier product that averaged only around three to four thousand fans.”
The club held a name vote in March 2008, and fans were allowed to choose among Seattle Alliance, Seattle FC, or Seattle Republic or to cast a write-in vote.2 Of the 14,500 votes cast, nearly half were write-in votes, with nearly half of those being for some permutation of the Sounders’ name. As the club’s official press release noted, “Traditionally, write-in campaigns rarely have an impact on the final results but in this case the write-in name received over 20% more votes than the other choices.”3
Ultimately the gravitation toward the Sounders name had much to do with the goodwill that the NASL edition of the Sounders fostered. “While it ended badly, fans held onto some great memories of those teams,” McDonald recalls. “Particularly in the first few years, the team was so connected to the community. The players were friendly and served as true ambassadors of the game. Seattle didn’t have the stars and championships of the Cosmos, but as the sign read at Memorial Stadium for Pelé’s first visit in ’75, ‘Pelé, we’d be here even if you weren’t.’ The team played hard, played together and played attractive soccer. When the NASL era ended, the Sounders brand was still associated with some very good, very special times.”
For the Timbers and Whitecaps, there was even less hesitation about adopting the NASL names as their own.
Timbers owner Merritt Paulson, who bought the USL version of the Timbers in 2007 with an eye toward MLS, comments, “There was never a question about the name. There was so much brand equity built up—Portland’s an anomaly in the American soccer landscape in that we have such a rich history here, forty years now. The wind was at our back from that perspective. Timbers is a name there from day one, in all the different iterations and leagues. There was absolutely no doubt—I would have been crucified if we’d changed the Timbers name, and for good reason. We actually tweaked the logo a bit and had tremendous amount of backlash from that process.”
Bob Lenarduzzi, who played with the Whitecaps for the team’s entire eleven-year NASL history and now serves as the president of the MLS Whitecaps franchise, also didn’t have questions about wanting to use the name; it was just a matter of legally being able to do so. One of the owners of the original NASL Whitecaps had trademarked the name and was guarded about selling it, and until the team’s ownership group worked out a deal to purchase the name the new Vancouver team was simply announced without a name. Lenarduzzi wasn’t considering a second option; as he puts it, “There’s a whole pile of history behind the name, and it seemed crazy to not want to capitalize on that.”
Before the Cascadia teams, only the San Jose Earthquakes had harkened back to their NASL roots for a nickname, and the San Jose team was the Nike-coined Clash for its first four seasons before delving back into its own history. (According to current Quakes president Dave Kaval, there was even some concern expressed about the name by league officials as recently as 2011.)
But there were also those in MLS who also understood the incredible resonance the names had in their respective markets, and those voices ultimately triumphed. Mark Abbott remembers, “There was a big debate about the Sounders when they came in, it was a traditional soccer name that had a forty-year history in that market…. There was a debate about whether they should have a more current versus traditional name. I think they made the right decision going with the one that had such a heritage in their marketplace. I think that wouldn’t work everywhere, but I think in a number of markets, that brand was still so relevant from the success they had in the ’70s.”
And it helped that the three teams had kept the embers of their rivalry aglow by playing in the USL while they were waiting for versions of themselves to graduate to MLS. It was during the USL era that two of the best-known and most fiercely competitive supporters’ groups—Emerald City Supporters and Timbers Army—were born.
Timbers Army, officially named in 2002, was an outgrowth of a group of fans calling themselves the Cascade Rangers (for the mountain range that gives Cascadia its name), joining with other supporters for pregame drinks at a nearby pub, and then to section 107 in the north end of what was then PGE Park.
The Timbers Army’s official site notes,
In 2002, Section 107 (the “Woodshed”) was made general admission and became a place where fans relinquished their assigned seats in favor of a standing only, terrace-like atmosphere. Supporters made banners, waved flags and hung them from the baseball dugout located in front of the section, and lit smoke bombs and fireworks in fervent celebration of goals. Pickle buckets served as makeshift drums, creating a deafening cacophony accompanying the chants. Supporters spontaneously erupted onto the dugout after successful match results. The group embraced the now infamous chant “We are Timbers Army; We are mental and we’re barmy; True supporters for-ever more,” in the midst of the 2001 season. “Mental” and “barmy” seemed to aptly describe the heterogeneous mix of supporters when they abandoned their daytime personae as lawyers, ironworkers, carpenters, chefs or firefighters, and raised their voices in unison, singing the praises of the Timbers.4
Scott Swearingen, a founding member of the 107 Independent Supporters Trust (or 107ist) that oversees the Timbers Army’s organizational needs, has been enamored of MLS since writing to the LA Galaxy for stickers in the league’s inaugural season—while he was in grade school. While studying sports business at Oregon State University, he did course-work framed around the idea of bringing an MLS team to Portland, and met Timbers Army members upon arriving for graduate school in 2007, getting involved with them through games and through the Soccer City USA online message boards where a number of future Timbers Army members first congregated. He also jumped into work with the MLS to Portland website, which involved a number of Timbers Army members looking to engage beyond just rooting for their USL team in the stadium. After all, the USL’s fortunes were in continual question, and Seattle was leaving it for the first-tier league.
“If Timbers Army is the party,” Swearingen comments, “then the 107ist is the party planning organization.” Using the Section 8 Chicago bylaws as a jumping-off point, they created a structure for a democratically elected board that would serve as a liaison to the front office and create a platform in which individual sections could have their own identity and creative expression, encouraging organic, authentic support while staying one unified group.
Swearingen feels that the group set themselves up for success by starting two years in advance to create its structure, and preparing to work with the front office on issues that mattered to them, which allowed them to have a say in how the MLS version of the north end would be. He asserts that Vancouver fans, by contrast, “partied until it came time for 2011 to start, and then got totally steamrolled by the front office, ticketing, and new faces, and they’re still struggling to get unified now.”
Paulson recalls, “When I got here, the prior ownership said, ‘Stay away from those guys! It’s dangerous over there—you don’t want to be anywhere near there!’” Looking to get past the acrimony existing between the prior front office and the Timbers Army, Paulson met with the newly elected 107ist board members once every two weeks to involve them. “There was going to be mutual respect, and the communication lines were going to be open,” he explains, noting that Timbers Army input shaped some key factors to the supporters’ group experience: the move to a general admission model, the location of capo stands (where the capos, or yell leaders, would be positioned), and even the pricing of north end tickets.
The Emerald City Supporters (better known by their ECS initials) started in 2005, when the USL edition of the Sounders played in what was then known as Qwest Field, the new stadium that soccer supporters had helped vote in. One of the group’s founders, Sean McConnell, recalls a formative 2004 Sounders–Timbers game he attended there. “They brought up a good fifty to one hundred guys, and in 2004, for a USL second-division team, that was a good number. In our supporter area, which wasn’t really an organized group yet, there might have been twenty to thirty of us. And so we were definitely outnumbered by away fans in our home stadium. The Timbers Army always rubbed it in our faces in those days, how big they were and little we were.”
That offseason, McConnell and several other supporters determined they could organize into a cohesive unit. The group’s name came from a banner that a fan had brought to a 2002 game, and the group began recruiting members, aiming for a “continental” style of support owing to chants and imagery from Italian and German supporters, departing from the British style more familiar to the region’s fans. Buoyed in part by the Sounders’ 2005 USL Championship over the Richmond Kickers (which included a playoff series victory over the Timbers to get them there), the ECS ranks swelled to several hundred in the first year, and by the time of the 2006 season opener against the Timbers, the ECS matched the Timbers Army’s numbers.
While the MLS announcement was exciting for fans, McConnell noted it also created concern for the ECS, as they weren’t sure that the Sounders would field a USL team in the 2008 “gap year” predating the inaugural 2009 season. They ultimately did so, playing where they had played a number of 2007 games—at Starfire Soccer Complex in the southern suburb of Tukwila. The 2008 season allowed the ECS to continue its momentum into the inaugural MLS season—which brought, McConnell recalls, “thousands of people who were willing to be led by a capo.”
Not everybody agreed with the continental style of support; McConnell recalls that some preferred the sort of organic chants that circulated in the terraces of England, but as he reasons, “I know the culture of this town, and I know people aren’t just going to sing to sing. They want to be led, they want to have someone starting the songs and then join along. It lends to more powerful support. When you hear it in the terraces of Poland and Italy, and they’re all on cue, it’s the most powerful support in the world. And that’s what I really wanted. Heavy, powerful support.”
The Southsiders have been supporting the Whitecaps since 1999, when they were using the 86ers nickname, but as president Brett Bird notes, membership was down to several devoted dozens in the waning days of the team’s involvement—though the Whitecaps’ elevation to MLS in 2011 helped the group grow from about a hundred at the start of the season to eight hundred at season’s end, in proportion to how the team’s audience ballooned from several thousand in the final USL season to over 20,000 for its inaugural MLS season. The Southsiders, the largest of three Whitecaps’ supporters’ groups (alongside the Curva Collective and the Rain City Brigade), now claims more than two thousand members.
What’s clear in talking to each supporters’ group is there’s respect (not even of the begrudging variety) and general accord between Timbers and Whitecaps supporters’ group members, but they both vehemently hate Sounders supporters.
Perhaps Garrett Dittfurth of Timbers Army explains it best (or, at least, most bluntly) when he says, “I love Vancouver and I love their fans. You’ll never meet a nicer set of people. We definitely enjoy ribbing one another about a win or a loss right after buying each other pints. Vancouver is a good-natured rivalry. I believe both the Timbers Army and Vancouver feel pretty much the same way about Seattle: if a meteor hit CenturyLink Field during a match, the world would be a better place. I dislike Seattle fans; they believe they invented fan support in MLS. In 2007, the ECS was quite literally forty fat guys and a fog machine.”
Bird is a little more diplomatic in communicating his preference for Timbers fans over Sounders fans, merely saying that Sounders supporters “like to maintain this edge of disagreeability.”
The rivalry has even evolved to where there’s a Seattle-based Timbers supporters’ group known at TA:CO (Timbers Army Covert Operations), formed in 2013 to provide Portland ex-pats and other Timbers fans in Seattle a place to coalesce. Though the group was initially seen as an outlet for Portland fans in Seattle to engage in some fun mischief-making (mostly, putting up Timbers stickers and logos around town), it’s taken on an increasingly more overt presence, including gathering to watch Timbers matches at Seattle bars (including the awesomely named Angry Beaver, a Canadian-themed hockey bar), and even attending Sounders matches not involving the Timbers in full Timbers regalia.
To Swearingen, the main divide between the Timbers Army and the ECS is cultural. He notes that Portland is more “DIY,” compared to what he sees as a more corporate culture in Seattle. In his view, that’s reflected by the Sounder in the capo-led ECS support, in the flame-spewing towers behind the goalpost that stadium operators in Seattle set off after each Sounders goal, and in virtually everything else that the Sounders and its fans do.
Swearingen notes that Portland gets its reputation as “the People’s Republic of Portland” for being collectivist, but also notes that’s part of what makes Timbers Army such a strong group. He’s also critical of the ECS for having a separate supporters’ group, Gorilla FC, spring up alongside them rather than being one unified group like Timbers Army. The FC in Gorilla FC, incidentally, stands for “football collective,” and its website declares the group to be “an antifa (anti-fascist) supporters’ group … opposed to acts of racism, sexism and homophobia.”5
Paulson is very aware of and appreciative of Timbers Army culture; while he notes that Seattle’s immediately massive soccer audience helped sell skeptical Portland City Council members to bet on soccer in the Rose City, he also picks up on the same cultural nuances separating Seattle from Portland that the Timbers Army espouse. “Having anything feel forced to supporters in Portland is death,” he explains, and it is a philosophy that was put to the test when the team’s original mascot (though that seems too simple a word to cover everything he did) “Timber Jim” Serrill retired in 2008 and was replaced by the team’s current mascot, “Timber Joey” Webber. Serrill, who was originally invited to Timbers games by his father, immediately saw the appeal of what he characterized as “drinking beer and yelling at the goalie.” Around the start of the 1978 season he approached the Timbers’ front office with the greatest question ever asked of management by a fan: “Can I bring my chainsaw to the game?” Serrill and Timbers general manager Keith Williams discussed it and struck a deal: For two comp tickets a game, Timber Jim would come out from the dugout (for then, the stadium they played in was configured for baseball), pull out his chainsaw, and saw a slab off a giant log.
Later that season, his act evolved when—during a possession-heavy, low-scoring game—he decided to scale one of the stadium’s 110-foot poles on which was the lighting was mounted, hooked a rope linking his pole to an adjacent pole, and then, as he explains, “I rappelled down, and inverted, and started swinging back and forth, and got a pretty good swing going. Then I fired up my chainsaw, and everyone was looking around to see where the noise was coming from. And that was a hit!” Throughout the years, he integrated new elements into his routine, including beating a giant drum, climbing a pole and staying on top of it until the Timbers scored their first goal, and doing handsprings in front of the assembled north end fans.
Timber Jim’s story took a somber turn in 2004 when his teenage daughter Hannah died in a car accident while Jim was performing at a Timbers game. The singing of “You Are My Sunshine,” a song Jim had sung to Hannah when she was a child, became integrated into the Timbers Army in-game routine, but he never quite felt the same way about being a mascot after the tragedy and retired in the early part of the 2008 season.
Webber, who had both a logging and a rugby background, became a soccer fan in 2001, when friends took him to a game. That’s when he first saw Timber Jim, and initially remembers being “excited to see a chainsaw in the middle of downtown Portland.” Upon seeing a 2007 news report that Timber Jim was retiring and the Timbers were looking for a replacement, Webber decided he wanted the tradition to continue, and since he knew his way around a chainsaw, he applied.
It was important to Paulson that Timber Jim bless the transition, and a halftime ceremony at a 2008 friendly between the Timbers and Juventus served as that. “It was a mixed bag,” says Webber about officially becoming Timber Joey. “There were people telling me that I’d never be able to fill Timber Jim’s shoes, and I never wanted to. There were also so many people, though, who were extremely kind, who welcomed me with open arms.” Over time, though, Timber Joey’s become an increasingly essential part of the Timbers’ game-day atmosphere.
Timber Joey, unlike Timber Jim, doesn’t scale poles or otherwise put his life in peril—he’s typically circulating around the stadium and meeting fans when he’s not as his post in front of the log along the stadium’s north end. The slab-cutting ceremony at the heart of Timber Joey’s act has evolved a bit, though—the log is now passed from Timber Joey to north end fans, circulating throughout the crowd before being awarded to the goal-scorer in a postmatch ceremony.
What was evident from the outset is that Cascadia fans were ready to come out and be part of the experience that supporters’ groups were helping create, and that hasn’t let up. In the Sounders’ inaugural season, the team averaged over 30,000 for home matches at what was then called Qwest Field, and in 2015, set an attendance record with nearly 45,000 per game—even though upper portions of the stadium are only opened for select games each year, in part to manage traffic on days when the Mariners, next door at Safeco Field, share home game days with the Sounders.
The Whitecaps moved into B.C. Place toward the end of 2011, after spending most of the season at a temporary stadium in a city park. B.C. Place has an upper deck and lower deck situation akin to Seattle’s; Lenarduzzi notes that a series of “sails” covering the stadium’s upper sections was commissioned by his front office to create a more deliberate aesthetic than tarps. The Whitecaps averaged just fewer than 20,000 in its first full season at B.C. Place, using a 21,000-seat plan that can convert to a 27,500-seat configuration if demand warrants.
Due to its footprint, its downtown location, and the narrowness of some of its walkways, the Portland stadium is at a constantly sold-out 21,000, with a 10,000-person waiting list, though the Timbers do have a plan they could conceivably activate to get to 24,000.
The Sounders, first from Cascadia to the MLS party, made an auspicious debut in 2009. Led by two designated players in opposite directions of their careers—just-starting Colombian striker Fredy Montero (today with Sporting Lisbon) and now-retired Swedish midfielder Freddie Ljungberg (part of Arsenal’s legendary Invincibles squad)—the team won a U.S. Open Cup, qualified for the playoffs, sold more than 22,000 season tickets (and sent out season packages that included a scarf proclaiming the bearer a 2009 season-ticket holder).6 And were it not for the Dynamo’s Brian Ching breaking a two-leg aggregate scoreless tie with an extra-time goal in the Houston-hosted second match, they might have faced the Galaxy (quickly emerging as its first MLS rival) in the Western Conference Finals.
The Timbers and Whitecaps’ 2011 debuts weren’t as successful on the field; Portland narrowly missed a playoff spot, while Vancouver was tied for last place in the league with New England.
Though 2011 had two true expansion teams in the Timbers and Whitecaps, the season also featured a reinvented team. Kansas City unveiled a new, stellar stadium to put its Arrowhead Stadium days to rest forever, and unveiled a new name that would create buzz to rival what Real Salt Lake had experienced—or, for that matter, what Kansas City itself had experienced when the franchise launched as the Wiz.
The Wizards had long been in need of a rebrand. Rob Thomson, who’d been involved with the club almost since its inception, notes, “There was no brand equity. We didn’t have an identity, we didn’t have a set demographic. We were last in the league in merchandising, below the generic MLS line. We had an order with Adidas, and they would send us fifty-five jerseys to sell for the season. That’s all they’d give us. Now, we sell more jerseys in a halftime of a game than we’d sell in entire seasons with the Wizards.”
The drive to rebrand was initiated in 2006 when a group of five local entrepreneurs bought the team from Hunt Sports Group. They informed the league a year later about the desire for the name change, which would eventually be timed with the opening of a desperately needed new soccer-specific stadium in 2011. On MLS’s recommendation, Thomson met with a branding firm that the league had used. He recalls, “We had breakfast with them, and we told them everything about our club, about Kansas City, and what was important. They came down to Kansas City about a month later, they flew down, and presented to us. They said, we’ve got it, from now on, you’ll be the Kansas City Bees, because the state insect of both Kansas and Missouri is the bee! And we’re like, what in the world are they talking about?”
“We wanted something different that would unify the city, both sides of the state line into being part of a club,” Thomson explains, and “Bees” was definitely not it. “We thought the best thing to do would be Sporting Kansas City, and we knew at the beginning people wouldn’t understand it and it would be a lot to take in. The owners despised it, but we were confident.”
One important facet of the club’s marketing was buy-in from both the Kansas and the Missouri sides of the state line. The new club crest featured a graphic that subtly but surely emphasized how the state border specifically circumnavigated the city—and that diagonal line angling into a straight north-south bisection was important in defining the team’s identity.
The opening ceremony, however, only vaguely articulated what the name change was about. CEO Robb Heineman told the thousand who braved wet and cold November weather for the unveiling, “Our goal is to revolutionize the way a professional sports team connects with fans through premier experiences and spaces. We believe a change in identify for the club was necessary to effectively live and breathe this vision. The name ‘Sporting’ represents our desire to become a dynamic organization focused on creating opportunities for social, cultural and athletic connections.”
Ben Palosaari, with Kansas City alternative newspaper the Pitch, described the ceremony: “When a wall of soccer balls fell away to reveal the team’s new crest, everybody for the most part cheered, before breaking out in a Wizards song. But those were the hardcore folks, the ones that would probably buy season tickets if the team’s new logo was an orange cartoon platypus in cleats. Now that all the fans and media outlets have absorbed the news, the goodwill appears to have evaporated.”7
Palosaari went on to describe incredulity from the Kansas City Star, which posed the possibility of calling the team the ’Tings, while high-profile sports website Deadspin offered the Fightin’ Gerunds as a possibility.8 Palosaari also described the team’s post-announcement Facebook page as “a straight up cat fight, with haters pounding their keyboards with rage or simply looking for an explanation for the name and supporters coming back with ‘Aw, shucks, it’s not that bad’ optimism.”9
And the nickname also drew initial criticism from one of the city’s sports integrity vanguards—Jack Harry of NBC affiliate KSHB-TV, who, in perhaps one of the highlights of his forty-year career covering sports in Kansas City, playfully referred to the team as “the Sporties.”10 Thomson notes that once the club was able to show that fans were gravitating toward the name and buying merchandise, Harry “went on air and did an impromptu thing where he said he was wrong. It was the first time he’d done that in about 70,000 years of sportscasting.”
And Harry also acknowledged the team’s success, lauding Sporting as “the only winning professional team in K.C.” The team did, after all, advance to the 2011 Eastern Conference finals as its legitimate number 1 seed (before losing to the Dynamo, now also in the East).
The year 2011 brought a watershed moment for front office and supporters’ group relationships. Dubbed FortGate, it involved the New England Revolution and two of its supporters’ groups, the Midnight Riders and the Rebellion. The front office and supporters’ groups were in ongoing discussions around what fans refer to in shorthand as “YSA”—the “You suck, asshole” chant that has unfortunately found its way to multiple MLS stadiums. The chant—directed toward a visiting team’s goalie on any and all of his goal kicks—is seen as harmless tradition by some and a tired, infantile, or even vulgar (not to mention sponsor, broadcaster, and suite holder-offending) one by others.
Soccer magazine Howler attempted to find the origins of YSA for a 2012 podcast covering multiple facets of the chant, including an interview with veteran goalie Jon Busch and one with a sports psychologist to confirm its negligible effect on goalies. While they couldn’t find a definitive source, theories they happened upon included it being gifted by then MetroStars fans around 2000 to the rest of the league, or Americanizations of even more offensive English or Mexican chants.11
Steve Stoehr, reporting for the SB Nation blog the Bent Musket, pieced together a narrative in which the Revolution front office cracked down on fans during a June 18 match against the Chicago Fire, despite efforts by the Riders and Rebellion leadership to try to eradicate YSA throughout the 2011 season. As Stoehr alleges in his story, “TeamOps [the stadium-hired security company], security and police descended on the Fort [two stadium sections occupied by supporters’ groups] with what seemed to be extreme prejudice”—resulting in two arrests, more than twenty forcible ejections, and many more walkouts by fans throughout the course of the match.12
By the next week, in an article updating readers on the situation, Stoehr opined, “If supporters’ groups receive a clear message from their club’s front office that a particular behavior will no longer be tolerated, it is their duty to work with that organization to either convince them that the request is unreasonable or implement a plan of attack that will allow them to accommodate the rulings of team officials.”13
He did also, however, defend the Revs’ supporters’ groups for trying to work with the front office on eradicating YSA in the first place, and showcased shows of support, in tifo and banner form, from various supporters’ groups around the nation, including Barra Brava and the Crew’s Yellow Nation Army. Union fans even created a moment of silence in support of their what is typically one of their rival fan groups. The incident, and especially its aftermath, showed that a network that was once consigned to message boards and listservs was using a multitiered online approach, with websites and social media, to communicate and even mobilize.
Dittfurth, in an essay on the Timbers Army website in response to FortGate, offered this advice to fellow supporters’ groups:
We had a problem with the “You suck, asshole” chant years ago. It took almost two years to completely kill that thing and we didn’t have as many years of doing it like the Revolution’s supporters did. Our front office worked with us to kill off that chant long before MLS sniffed Portland. It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen without some relapses and false starts. It took a lot of work from a lot of dedicated people. You won’t hear that chant here because we’ve had enough time to educate people on why it’s not used and the Timbers FO was a good faith partner who understood that working with us as equals and providing positive incentives was a smarter solution than threats and bans.14
Fran Harrington, current president of the Midnight Riders, noted that FortGate was important to help resolve long-standing and deep-seated differences between fans and the club. The Midnight Riders’ website, for example, refers to “ongoing issues between the Riders and club management that contributed to growing frustration on both sides” in the 1996–99 section of its history, including a 1999 MLS Cup incident involving “unjustified harassment and the unfortunate, unnecessary arrest of some Riders.”15 FortGate necessitated a long-overdue meeting between front office reps and supporters’ groups.
Harrington explains,
This really is what changed the dynamic of the relationship we have with the front office. The first result of the blowback was a town-hall-type meeting where all supporters were invited and were able to directly ask questions to the Revs front office, security, and MLS officials. As a result of this meeting, we instituted meetings before every home match where members from the supporters’ groups, FO, and security are all present. It’s helped a lot, as now everyone really knows everyone. If there are issues on game day, they know to come to me and I feel much more comfortable going to them. This had helped on numerous occasions. I feel like before all this started, the FO was sort of a faceless bad guy in a lot of people’s eyes. We still have issues from time to time, but now there’s protocol in place to deal with them.
The Revs’ red, white, and blue–clad fans came into league-wide focus in an unfortunate yet important episode in helping to define the supporters’ group’s role in defining MLS. But it would be another group of red, white, and blue–clad fans, not tied to any one MLS team, that would soon help a far greater number of Americans—casual fans of the game, as well as people falling for soccer for the first time—understand what supporters’ groups did and why they were vital.