On October 21, 2012, 6,256 people shoveled dirt for two minutes on the site of a former factory across the street from the San Jose International Airport to break a Guinness world record for the largest participatory groundbreaking. The event was the precursor to something Earthquakes fans had long since hoped for: a new home stadium constructed specifically for their team. Fans joined San Jose city officials, team owner Lew Wolff, and a visiting Commissioner Garber in breaking ground for what ended up being a $100 million, fully privately financed, soccer-specific stadium with an array of features putting it into its own echelon of awesomeness.1
The Quakes, of course, spent the entirety of their first iteration in Spartan Stadium, and upon their reentry to the league, made a (smaller) home at Santa Clara University’s Buck Shaw Stadium, with a capacity of just 10,500, venturing out to Stanford Stadium every year since 2012 for the California Clásico match against the Galaxy, and staging one-offs in other larger, football-oriented Bay Area stadiums.
According to Earthquakes president Dave Kaval, a new stadium was part of the plan when the Quakes 2.0 came back into the league in 2008. As matters developed, it would take four years to line up the approvals, permitting, and financing, but when it came time to do the groundbreaking, it was important to Kaval to have it be a communal event in which fans could actually participate. “We didn’t just have a gold shovel ceremony for the high-falutin’ one percent,” Kaval explains. “We had a ceremony where everyone got to dig. We had seven thousand shovels. We’re more of a community team.”
The groundbreaking was a celebration of what was to come, but it was also a celebration of a 2012 season that was going incredibly well. The Quakes were decidedly outperforming expectations, winning seven of their first nine matches on the way to a Supporters’ Shield–winning 19–6–9 record. They were doing more than just winning, though; they were coming back from deficits to win games and sometimes scoring incredibly late in matches to pull out victories. After one such victory that May—a 3–2 thriller against their archrival, the Galaxy—the Quakes’ Steven Lenhart declared, “Goonies never say die!” in reference to the classic 1985 adventure movie featuring a band of misfits who prevail against long odds. The team then began dubbing themselves the Goonies—a nickname so beloved by Quakes fans that when the team created its new crest and uniforms to kick off the 2014 season, the back of the neckline—where many clubs choose to place a motto—was embossed with #NEVERSAYDIE.2
The Quakes’ rivals would, however, once again arise as a nemesis.
The Galaxy, as the West’s number 4 seed, needed to win its play-in wild card match against the number 5 Whitecaps to even get into the Western Conference bracket to face the Quakes. (In 2012, MLS simplified its playoff system, elevating the top five teams from each conference into the playoffs, and eliminating playoff seeding via the overall league table and the more-influential-than-perhaps-intended cross-conference migration of prior years.)
The Galaxy got past the Whitecaps, then dispatched the Quakes in a 3–2 aggregate win en route to a near déjà vu of the 2011 MLS Cup—this time, a 3–1 win against the Dynamo in the Home Depot Center, with Omar Gonzalez putting in an MVP performance and Landon Donovan converting the game-winning penalty kick.
In a major change that placed new emphasis on team seedings, the 2012 MLS Cup was the first to be played at the home stadium of the conference champion with the better regular-season record rather than at a predetermined neutral site—meaning that the 2011 Galaxy would be the last MLS champions to merely luck into playing the MLS Cup on their home field.
The 2012 MLS Cup would also be, as announced before the match, David Beckham’s final MLS appearance, in a season where he’d taken more of a complementary role than he had in 2011, but had still added to a lore of intermittent brilliance and tumult in his final two years. A Nick Firchau remembrance of Beckham on MLS’s website recounted,
He pinged San Jose’s Sam Cronin with a ball from twenty-five yards in June and came perilously close to scrapping with the Quakes’ mascot in a postgame shoving match. He missed an MLS game in Dallas in 2011 because he was a guest of honor at the biggest royal wedding in decades.
He rolled into the closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics with rock god Jimmy Page, and four years later brought the Olympic flame down the River Thames in London. He sat courtside at Los Angeles Lakers games. He adorned a Times Square billboard in nothing but his H&M underwear. He scored from 70 yards at The Home Depot Center and pounded home amazing goals to ruin nights in expansion markets like Portland and Montreal.3
Chris Klein, who started his involvement with the Galaxy as a player arriving two weeks before Beckham (and moving into the front office in 2011, eventually becoming the club’s president), reflects,
It was something like I’d never seen before. We introduced one of the most famous people in the entire world into the league and into the club. I don’t know that we were fully ready for it. Now we have designated players and big names—we’re much more prepared for it. But we had to go through those times with having David here, with the media attention. But that project didn’t really start to show the fruit until David was invested in the team and the Galaxy started to win. I think that’s when you saw the real benefit. In terms of him choosing MLS, I don’t even know if you can give it a value. Looking at guys like [Steven] Gerrard and [Frank] Lampard and [Andrea] Pirlo, who are now saying it’s okay to come to MLS—[Beckham coming to MLS] was definitely one of those watershed moments.
While the word dynasty might have been premature to bestow upon the Galaxy after its second straight championship, there was a growing sense around the league that the team might be capable of that. Los Angeles–based soccer writer Josie Becker comments, “With the Supporters’ Shield and the cups, there was a lot of talk that this was a dynasty from 2009–12. It certainly was a great group, but with MLS being such a young league, it just felt like LA needed to do more before putting them next to the D.C. United teams that won three out of the four first MLS Cups.”
The 2012 season also brought two milestones for Canadians. Though it was only just for one game against the eventual champions, the Whitecaps bested their Canadian predecessors in Toronto by becoming the first team north of the border to make the playoffs. And in what was the sixth consecutive year of expansion—a string that started with Toronto FC in 2007—the Montreal Impact officially joined MLS.
Negotiations between the league and Impact owner Joey Saputo (of the Saputo family, involved with Montreal soccer since the North American Soccer League’s Manic)—had been developing for more than a year before the official announcement was made in 2010.4 Like the Timbers and Whitecaps, who entered the year prior, the Impact was a longstanding team with a local following. It started life in the American Professional Soccer League in 1993, and had a role in the A-League, the United Soccer League, the indoor National Professional Soccer League, and the newest iteration of the NASL before making its transition to MLS.
The move was “welcomed” by Toronto fans; while it would take a while to gather a history approaching what the Maple Leafs and Canadiens had between them, a similar sentiment was certainly already there. As Toronto supporter Mike Langevin simply puts it, “We dislike them on ice, we dislike them on grass, we dislike them in politics,” adding that Toronto fans couldn’t even muster solidarity for the Impact in a competition that would have reflected well on Canada—the Impact’s deep run in the 2015 CONCACAF Champions League final, where the Impact reached the final before losing to Mexico’s Club America on a 5–3 aggregate score.
American soccer fans came into the 2013 MLS season with divided attention; in early February, the U.S. national team lost its first match of the Hex, the ten-match home-and-away series involving the top six CONCACAF teams to determine (in 2013’s case) which three teams would automatically qualify for the World Cup and which team would have to enter a playoff with Oceania’s top team. While many expected the Americans to advance, the result of the first match threw that into some doubt, and in the days prior to the match in Denver against Costa Rica, a Sporting News article by Brian Straus alleged disharmony among U.S. team members, some unhappy with head coach Jürgen Klinsmann’s handling of certain players.5 This led to team captain Michael Bradley having to address the article in a press conference prior to the game, with the requisite, expected allegiance to Klinsmann—perhaps, really, creating more of a sense of alarm and mystique around the Costa Rica game, a pop-up midterm exam for the Klinsmann era.
This did, of course, create a sense of urgency and interest around the game that rippled out to more casual American soccer fans. But there was another force generating interest in the hours before U.S. versus Costa Rica at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park—a chance of snow at game time.
The 2010 World Cup in South Africa had captured American attention, in part because the United States had been drawn into a group with Algeria, England (to potentially revive War of 1812 smack talk), and Slovenia. Michael Lewis, writing for the New York Daily News, noted, “Some words were uttered Friday night that hadn’t been heard at many, if any, World Cup draws” before quoting the Algeria and Slovenia coaches contending that the United States and England were the group favorites.6
But it would turn out that the United States would need a dramatic moment to advance out of the group in its final match against Algeria, coming in its final moments when a hard-charging Clint Dempsey had his point-blank shot blocked by the diving Algerian keeper, only to have a trailing Landon Donovan fire in the rebound for the 1–0 win. Fans reacted ebulliently in watch parties across America, and YouTube videos capturing those fan reactions circulated around the Internet. Doug McIntyre remembers celebrating for different reasons:
If in 2010 the U.S. hadn’t gotten out of their group, it would have been a big blow to me professionally. We had just started a U.S. national team blog on ESPN’s site, which goes on to this day. There was a question of are they going to continue this if the U.S. bombs out in the first round of this extremely easy group. So, I was watching the game in the offices of ESPN The Magazine in New York with my editor, behind closed doors, and when Landon Donovan scored, we were ecstatic, but it wasn’t just because the U.S. advanced, it was because it saved our asses professionally!
Though the United States was ousted in its subsequent knockout match against Ghana, the 2010 World Cup captured many more viewers than in 2006—the 11.1 million average for the three group matches (including 17.1 million for the United States versus England) was a 66 percent jump from 2006’s Nielsen numbers, and the 19.4 million who tuned in for the United States–Ghana knockout game were the most ever to watch a soccer match in the States. As in 2006 in Germany, South Africa’s time zone placed Americans into daytime hours for match watching, but the United States’ matches against England and Ghana were both Saturday games, which certainly didn’t hurt viewership.
The 2010 American team had a number of past and present MLS standouts on the squad, though U.S. Soccer’s official press release on the team boasted, “A record 19 players on the roster play professionally for clubs outside the United States,” noting that all in all, clubs from ten different nations were represented by the U.S. Men’s National Team. Some of the higher-profile players, including Clint Dempsey (with Fulham), Tim Howard (with Everton), and DaMarcus Beasley (with the Rangers), had all “graduated” from MLS teams to top-flight English and Scottish teams in what was characterized as a sign that American soccer players were beginning to make their mark on the world stage.7
The team looking to qualify for the 2014 World Cup was initially without Donovan—he’d taken an extended sabbatical from soccer following the 2012 MLS Cup, and though he’d worked out an arrangement with the Galaxy to return to the team in late March, his departure from the USMNT was indefinite.
I am one of the lucky people to have witnessed the United States–Costa Rica game in person with the American Outlaws, the homegrown U.S. supporters’ group created for the match in Lincoln, Nebraska in 2007. The rumors of snow throughout the day began materializing as buses provided by Centennial 38, the Rapids’ supporters’ group, shuttled fans from downtown soccer bars to the tailgate party the group was hosting for American fans outside Dick’s Sporting Goods Park.
The game was a Friday night ESPN-televised match, and the audience numbers were fueled by excited social media chatter, encouraging people to tune in for what were first snow showers and snow flurries and then a veritable snow globe, and to watch athletes valiantly struggle and even flail against those elements, which is about 95 percent of what is so fun about games—any games—played in the snow.
Deadspin’s Ryan O’Hanlon described the atmosphere this way:
By kickoff, temperatures were near freezing. The field was coated in white and, gradually, cleated footsteps. John Deere mowers plowed the sidelines pre-game and then gave way to men with shovels who worked diligently to keep the sidelines and the 18-yard-box visible. The refs supplied a yellow ball, too, but that’s about all that could be done to improve the conditions. For the fans, a flask—actually, many flasks—was the only thing that could be done to improve the conditions. The snow only got harder and heavier as the game went on, and it only got colder, too, because even during a sold-out soccer game, the world continues to spin. There was no staying warm. There was only staying slightly less cold.8
At the American Outlaws’ end of the stadium, there was certainly a growing sense that we were witnessing bizarre history, but there was also a sense of frivolity that permeated the game. Before the game, as the workers labored to clear the lines, we spontaneously started chanting, “Sho-vel! Sho-vel!” When Dempsey scored the opening (and only) goal of the game, at the opposite end of the stadium from us, we broke into celebration, and then settled into a bubble of delirium reminiscent of Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire.” When referees conferred with players a few minutes into the second half to determine if the game should really continue, we spontaneously broke into a chant of “Let them play!” that was so impassioned that we almost believed it to be a mitigating factor in the decision to continue. Late in the second half, a fan next to me said, “Well, you know, our next sub’s going to be Santa Claus, and they’ve got no answer for that,” which sent me into delirious laughter. Balls kicked to the corner closest to us, by game’s end, were skidding and then stopping behind the snowdrifts created in their wake, and this launched me into additional peals of laughter.
The postgame reaction was generally joyful and jingoistic, celebrating the win in the snow as a transcendent American triumph over the elements. The Denver Post’s Woody Paige wrote that the United States deserved a “home-snow advantage,” and in response to Costa Rica’s planned postgame protests over the conditions, asked, “If the match had been played in Costa Rica’s National Stadium (a $100 million gift from China), could the Americans have protested because of heat, humidity, mosquitoes and sloth interference?”9
David Wegner of Centennial 38 noted that the match, while not necessarily growing the ranks of Rapids fans, did galvanize existing ones and gave its newly formed tailgate crew a formidable test that they passed admirably. He recalls,
As for the residual effects of that game, it’s kind of a funny thing and parallels a lot of the crossover issues from fans of European and English soccer. I think the game here was already growing exponentially regardless of the snow game, but what it did is it shored up existing fans’ commitment to the game and to the USMNT going forward. I wouldn’t say the growing support of the U.S. teams, or higher visibility of the English Premier League et al. has really spiked numbers. We actually own two sections in the stadium and our numbers didn’t jump.
There’s a bit of elitism there though with local fans of that league that is frustrating since this team is their actual, attainable local club, yet the clamoring for squads 7000 miles away still trumps it. People have actual access to the actual players and staff of this team, but seem content with a long-distance TV relationship.
The following Tuesday, the United States was back in Hex competition, facing Mexico in Mexico City, and the combined audience numbers for both ESPN and Univision’s American telecasts approached eight million viewers, “making it easily the most-viewed World Cup qualifier in American soccer history,” according to a Soccer by Ives article—though the Spanish-language audience outpaced the English-language one by a nearly two-to-one margin.10
The remaining Hex qualifiers (and the Gold Cup tournament that summer, which is how Donovan reentered international play before being allowed to rejoin the team for its final few Hex matches) did two important things to place increased focus on American fandom and eventually help a wider circle of Americans gain greater awareness and understanding of supporters’ groups.
First, the coverage that the American Outlaws were generating throughout 2013, and into the actual World Cup year, was placing the group—and the very idea of supporting with specific learned chants as a loud, passionate, standing collective of fans—into more living rooms than ever before.
Second, U.S. Soccer had wisely chosen to place all five home Hex qualifiers in MLS stadiums with solid fan bases and concrete supporters’ groups. Many American Outlaws in MLS home cities are also members of their local MLS supporters’ groups; the coordination of C38 with the American Outlaws in Denver was an example of how shared memberships, and the familiarity of local supporters’ groups with their home stadiums, helped logistically.
Dan Wiersema, who handles communications for American Outlaws, notes that group has learned and taken cues from the various MLS supporters’ groups it has coordinated with:
If you look at MLS supporters—they’re incredible. Game in and game out, the coordination and the tifos and the regularity of support and the creation of new chants and how the whole pipeline of support works, the local supporters’ groups—it’s incredible. It’s admirable.
They get that because they have regularity. Look at the Timbers Army. They have thirty-four games a year in Major League Soccer. They get seventeen at home, in the north end, with the same people mostly, every time, with the same capos, who they probably recognize by first name. They have tifo committees, there are chants developed organically and inorganically, and they can practice them. A chant that may not get any traction in game one could be sung by two thousand people by mid-season or game seventeen. I’m jealous of that regularity.
When American Outlaws support, we have twenty games a year, we’re in twenty different stadiums in twenty different cities with roughly twenty different crowds. There are always regulars, but if you’re looking at a crowd of three thousand, maybe one hundred of them go to every single match, and that’s being generous. So how do you take an incredible experience in one city to the next city and the next city? How do you get people to chant something beyond “I Believe?”
The season, played against the backdrop of the international tournaments, was incredibly close, with fifteen of the league’s nineteen teams vying for playoff spots in the final two weeks of the season. Talk of a Galaxy dynasty would be suspended as Real Salt Lake defeated them in a conference semifinal matchup, with the Timbers ousting the Sounders in the other semifinals. The Dynamo and Sporting Kansas City lasted through overtime matches in their semifinal series to defeat the Red Bulls and Revolution, respectively.
Real Salt Lake and Sporting would advance to MLS Cup 2013, which turned out to be an endurance test thanks to its length and extreme conditions. The match went through ninety minutes of regulation, thirty minutes of overtime, and an incredible twenty penalty kicks before RSL’s Lovel Palmer’s penalty kick caromed off the bottom of the crossbar to seal the win for Kansas City and keep the goalies from having to face off against each other. It also gave MLS its version of the NFL’s still-legendary Ice Bowl; as ESPN noted in its coverage, “It was the coldest MLS Cup in history with a game-time temperature of 22 degrees and a wind chill of 12, and that only dropped as the sun set and the game pressed through overtime.”11
RSL coach Jason Kreis emerged from the locker room after the match to tell reporters, “I’d advise you if you have a choice not to go in there. It’s bad, real bad.”12 One of the RSL players who did speak after the match, Javier Morales, called for a return to neutral-site MLS Cup stadiums, noting he was so cold he “couldn’t talk at halftime.” But he was apparently in distress even before then; he said, “My toes were freezing the first 20 minutes and I looked to the bench to give me something because I couldn’t feel my toes.”13
The late afternoon match—placing MLS’s finale head-to-head against late-season NFL games—didn’t draw particularly well for ESPN. World Soccer Talk’s Christopher Harris reported, “The disappointing 505,000 viewing audience figure for the Sporting Kansas City against Real Salt Lake game follows the 29% decline in regular season MLS TV ratings on ESPN compared to last year, as well as a 8% decline on NBCSN.” He then piled it on a bit, adding, “The 505,000 number is the same as the viewing audience for a repeat of Everybody Loves Raymond, which was shown on TBS at the same time as the second half of the 2013 MLS Cup.”
But Harris’s next sentence contains literally half the story—UniMas’s Spanish-language telecast of the finals drew 514,000 viewers, the first time that the Spanish telecast surpassed the English telecast in MLS history.14 Soccer America’s account of the ratings noted that Kansas City and Salt Lake City TV markets drew 7.6 and 6.2 shares for the game—an indication that ratings might have only paled nationally compared to the prior Los Angeles–Houston matchups due to the size of the markets (and the Galaxy’s Beckham factor.)15
Several days before the finals, TV ratings were a primary topic in Garber’s State of the League address, along with the proclamation that the league was planning to expand to twenty-four teams by 2020, with Orlando City coming online in 2015, and other cities hinted at, starting with Atlanta and Miami (specifically, David Beckham’s Miami).
“We’ve been growing our fan base,” Garber told the media regarding the TV ratings. “We have to find a way to find a partner that gives us the right schedule, the right promotion and marketing, that is embracing us in a way that will allow us to have our programming be valuable and be a priority both for the broadcaster and for our fans.” He called for greater consistency in week-to-week scheduling, and pointed to NBC’s widely praised Premier League coverage as a model for how MLS could be promoted.16
The 2013 season also added to the evolving relationships—some positive, some less so—between front offices and supporters’ groups. Despite the gains that Revs supporters’ groups made in the wake of 2011’s Fort-Gate, YSA (and the league and front office reactions to it) was still creating controversy. In a 2012 Sporting News interview, Garber had called for the chant to stop, concerned that it created issues with the Federal Communications Commission, and clearly expressing a personal dislike for it.17 But for some supporters’ groups, the debate about YSA went beyond the chant itself and into resistance toward front offices looking to curtail expression and sanitize the experience.
In July 2013 Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky reported on letters that had gone out to at least two clubs’ supporters’ groups—Real Salt Lake and the New York Red Bulls—threatening sanctions (including rescinding parking passes, preventing fans from displaying banners, and eliminating use of megaphones and capo stands helping capos lead supporters in cheers) if supporters’ groups did not work to eradicate YSA.
The article speculated, “The general feeling among fans is that this latest crackdown is directly tied to MLS’s upcoming TV contract (deals with ESPN, NBC, and Univision all expire after 2014, so negotiations for the next deal are already ongoing). Garber has long pitched MLS as a family-friendly league, and the clearly audible profanities don’t help that image in person, or on TV.”18
The Red Bulls’ front office took the engagement one step further. According to the Village Voice, the club promised each of its three South Ward–occupying groups (the Empire Supporters Club, Garden State Ultras, and Viking Army) five hundred dollars per game to not say the YSA chant for the entirety of the game. To ensure that it became habit rather than a one-time thing, the club said they’d have to string four games together to get a lump-sum two-thousand-dollar payment.19
“Two groups, the Empire Supporters Club and the Viking Army, publicly supported the initiative and have since qualified to receive $4,000 each,” a New York Times follow-up article in September reported, while noting that the Ultras (who tend to present themselves as a more stern, hard-core supporters’ group) was not on board. “At one game over the summer, it unfurled a sign—written on four twin-size bedsheets—that read, ‘Not for sale.’ The group, unlike the others, did not make a public statement on social media supporting the effort, and at the same time, a message appeared on the group’s Facebook page that maligned the effort. In response, the club barred the group from taking its banners and flags to the games.” As an Ultras leader going by the name Terror reasoned, “We don’t do the chant, but we don’t want money to be told not to do something.”20
Empire Supporters Club board member Muller recalls,
We eventually agreed that the chant needed to go, if not for the think-of-the-children crowd, for the fact that it was just played out at that point. At first, we tried to get people to say something else—for example, “You suck, Garber”—but to no avail. Again, sanctions were threatened, but they also came with this dangling carrot of money for YSA-free games. We figured the best way to get rid of it would be to just sing through the goal kicks. Whatever song we were doing, we’d just push through it. It took a bit of time. The main thing was getting the more vocal people in the section on board. Once the section leaders started singing through the goal kicks, most people followed suit. Once in a while, there will be a few YSAs that sneak through, but for the most part it’s been eradicated.
Revs fans, displaying an admirable sense of humor in light of their FortGate experience, created an over-the-top alternative to YSA; according to Adam Sell of the Midnight Riders, the chant goes, “We all got together and decided that, among the two goalkeepers in this particular game, you are the one of lower skill and aptitude!” While it’s difficult to execute—Sell suggested creating shirts with the text on the back, so a supporter can just read it from the supporter in the next row forward—it perhaps signals a sea change in the debate over YSA.
Another evolving front office and supporters’ group saga, in Dallas, had its roots in the group’s 2011 formation, but reached a major point of contention early in the 2014 season.
The group started early in the 2011 season when Andrew Gerbosi (who’d moved to Dallas in 2010 from Long Island, met members of the American Outlaws’ Dallas chapter, and started going to FC Dallas games with them) came upon the idea to have a supporters’ group for the beer garden (located on the stadium’s north end, a concrete plank that doubles as a stage for music events). Gerbosi transformed a beat-up flag he’d found at the stadium into a banner that read FC DRUNK and, as he explained,
We flew it at a U.S. Open Cup match against Orlando City. We had it hanging in the beer garden, and we added a few more people and a few more banners. We had as many as twenty people or maybe even more who kind of hung out and latched on. About three quarters of the way through the season, the front office said the banner wasn’t exactly PC enough. We had to take it down. But we were still there every game, we still supported every game.
At the end of the year, [then FC Dallas president] Doug Quinn had called me and thanked us for coming out, and said, “We want you to continue with this. Do you maybe want to do something a little more politically correct, like FC Brew Crew?” We thought that sounded like a softball team. He told us that Budweiser was looking to sponsor us, we could do something beer related but not inappropriate, and if we came up with something, they could get us some Adidas gear, shirts, scarves. I said, “Give us a week,” and we sat around and talked about it, and we came up with Dallas Beer Guardians. We were in a beer garden, it just sort of fit us right, the way it rolled off the tongue sounded right.
By the start of the 2012 season, the group was officially christened, the club placed bleachers in the beer garden to allow for proper seating (or, at least, standing), and it flourished to become the club’s largest supporters’ group. Gerbosi recalls that Dirk Nowitzki once made an appearance in the DBG’s section, as did Brek Shea (then still with FC Dallas) while serving a suspension. As the group grew, the tradition of beer showers began organically, with fans in a section of the beer garden tossing the contents of their cups in the air to celebrate goals.
Becky Chabot, a PhD candidate in religious and theological studies at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology, centered her dissertation on the social ethics of professional club soccer (and her fan typology) on the DBG, spending the 2014 and 2015 seasons with them to conduct ethnographic research on life in an MLS supporters’ group. That May, as she recalls,
The club banned fans from beer showers after a goal celebration, supposedly due to complaints. The leadership of Dallas Beer Guardians petitioned the club for over a year to get signage on the garden to warn fans they might get wet in the event of a goal. The celebration was only in the beer garden, which was a twenty-one-plus [age group] section, and is pretty tame as far as fan celebrations go around the world.
Fans were informed through an e-mail to all members of registered SGs [supporter’s groups], not through their leadership per the policy that the FO and SGs had in place. The e-mail informed fans that they would be given the equivalent of a red card for violating the policy: they would be ejected and suspended for the following home match. They also said the ban was retroactive, and they would be going through security footage to identify those who had beer showered in the past and suspend them; that threat never materialized. But at the first match after the ban was put in place, quite a few people were ejected, and security was not only increased but there were undercover security officers throughout the section.
Jay Neal, the DBG’s director of community outreach, noted that signs were finally erected, as they’d requested, but rather than Sea World–style “splash zone” signs, they were signs explicitly prohibiting any beer throwing—which, as he says understatedly, was “not exactly what we wanted.” The DBG mulled over a response, which included either an alternate form of shower, including glitter or silly string, or polite golf clapping and even dressing like soccer moms, to make the point that if the front office wanted tame, family-friendly fans, that’s what they’d get.
The group instead decided to boycott beer purchases at the beer garden (a movement circulated in part, by a #BeerBoycott hashtag on Twitter), and put up a website publicizing the ban. For the first few games immediately following the ban, DBG members would still congregate outside the stadium for prematch tailgates, but the supporters’ group was more dispersed throughout the stadium during the game, the north end’s beer garden bleachers were noticeably more empty and, as Chabot recalls, goal celebrations were decidedly more muted: “It took about two months before the stadium sounded like a stadium again.”
The group eventually found its way back to the beer garden as the team readied for a playoff run (after all, that’s where its season tickets were), got a meeting with the front office several weeks after the initial meeting to discuss the situation, and has since successfully worked with the front office on other issues, even though the ban was never officially lifted and the club’s policy is still in place.
And though the fans have brought back their spirited and sometimes coarse support, complete with a drum line and two trombone players whose go-to song is “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” the beer showers are a thing of the past. “We have agreed to disagree,” Gerbosi said. “But we know that if people throw beer now, they risk getting thrown out.”
Overall, 2014 was a very good year for MLS—the season set an attendance record, with more than 19,000 fans per game. (The number would have approached the 20,000 mark had it not been for a troubled Chivas USA’s absurdly low turnout of 7,063). Though Brazil was aligned with American time zones, many of the World Cup 2014 games were in the afternoon, limiting the overlap that some expected when Brazil won the rights to host the tournament.
The final twenty-three-man U.S. World Cup squad included ten MLS players, with two key players who’d made recent moves back to the league from overseas: Dempsey had signed with Seattle in August 2013—participating in an unveiling ceremony before a regular-season match in which he was interviewed by Sounders majority owner Joe Roth on the field before unzipping a hoodie to reveal a Sounders jersey underneath21—and Bradley had been sold to Toronto FC by Roma in January 2014.
But there was one MLS player notably left off the roster: Donovan.
Steven Goff, in a Washington Post article examining the shocking (or maybe not so shocking after all) admission, wrote,
Despite his place in U.S. lore, not to mention 57 goals in 156 international matches, Donovan was not certain to make this year’s team. Since taking a sabbatical from soccer two years ago, he has had to work his way back into Klinsmann’s good graces. He featured in the CONCACAF Gold Cup last summer, joining several second-tier players, and returned to the primary group for the late stage of World Cup qualifying.
This year, the first sign of Klinsmann’s uncertainty about Donovan’s World Cup status came last month when Donovan did not start in a friendly against Mexico, even though first-tier European-based players were not on the roster. Donovan had been hampered by a knee injury and did not show well in practice leading up to the match.
In MLS, Donovan is scoreless in seven regular season matches. With his next goal, he will become the league’s all-time leading scorer.
Though neither side acknowledged it, there was persistent speculation in U.S. circles that Klinsmann questioned Donovan’s commitment to the program and his coaching philosophy.22
Andrea Canales, writing about the decision, took a perspective that might have surprised some—how much Mexican fans would miss Donovan’s presence in the World Cup:
For Mexicans and Mexican-Americans on both sides of the border, Donovan has for so long been an icon of American soccer that they dubbed him “Captain America.” It was immaterial to most that Donovan was not actually the U.S. team captain that often. But even as many who loved El Tri booed and chanted against Donovan, there was also an appreciation of his skills from the same people.
Donovan’s heritage was Irish-American, but he grew up in Southern California, speaking playground Spanish and learning the game with a distinct Latin flair. His control on the dribble, his cutbacks, his quick passes, were skills that Mexicans could appreciate, because they valued such ability in their own players. Mexicans could get Donovan, in a way that often his fellow Americans did not. They understood his superstition of crossing himself before a penalty kick; they knew why he raced into open spaces instead of chasing the ball; they admired, for his small size, his eerily accurate heading ability. Even at the moment when he enraged the entire country, nailing a header to help eliminate Mexico in the 2002 World Cup, taking off his shirt to celebrate and screaming into the camera, “Where is Mexico?” they could understand him, because he said it in Spanish.23
Canales reflects, on the article, “It’s a kind of interesting dichotomy that that respect for Donovan was so much more obvious to Latino fans. In LA he’d constantly get recognized by Mexican fans, and Americans would ask, ‘Who is this guy?’ It’s almost a ‘prophet is ignored in its own homeland’ type of thing.”
One thing that Donovan’s omission from the USMNT did do was suddenly bolster a Galaxy team that needed bolstering. “Honestly, that gave the team an advantage to rally back from the middling start to the season,” Canales says. “They hadn’t expected Donovan to be available, and all of a sudden, here he was, still playing. And in some ways, he said that was therapeutic too. He was glad to be there, and glad the season was still going on. Had he been on a European team, that wouldn’t have happened.”
And even though Donovan announced in August that 2014 would be his last season, and there was certainly an added impetus for the Galaxy to rally, there was something even more profoundly emotional affecting the team. As Canales remembers, “There was also the very emotional impact of A. J. DeLaGarza’s baby, who had been born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. His brief life and death, and the team pulling together for the charity they established, Luca Knows Heart, was important. It was kind of a continuation of all these emotional elements for the team that created this tight bond. It all made them feel life is very precious—carpe diem, seize the moment—and they carried that through to the final and the championship.”
The World Cup included a record 26.5 million Americans watching the finals between Argentina and Germany (with nearly 10 million of those watching in Spanish on Univision),24 and the United States had record numbers watching the men tie Portugal in a weekend group-stage game and then losing a heartbreaker in extra time in the Round of 16 to Belgium to crash out of the tournament. The Belgium match drew nearly 16.5 million ESPN viewers and more than 5 million Univision viewers, for a combined audience of 21.6 million, though at one least one analyst surmised that figuring in watch parties at bars and homes would bring the total closer to 30 million.25
The tournament was also what FIFA president Sepp Blatter proclaimed “the first truly mobile and social World Cup,” with 280 million posts on Facebook, and one match alone—Germany’s surprise 7–1 trouncing of Brazil—generating more than 35 million tweets, breaking Twitter’s all-time record for single-game traffic.26
The 2014 playoffs came down to two heated rivalries in an aggregate system that was now using away goals as the first tiebreaker for series tied at the end of the second game’s regulation period. On one side were the Red Bulls, in what would be Thierry Henry’s last MLS season, against a Revolution bolstered by the midseason signing of Jermaine Jones (returning to the United States after finishing out a contract in Turkey) and enjoying a breakout season from Vietnamese American midfielder Lee Nguyen, who’d played professionally in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Vietnam before returning to the United States. On the other, it was the Sounders versus the Galaxy.
In the East finals, the Revs got past the Red Bulls on a 4–3 aggregate, while the Sounders were done in on an away goal in the second half of the West finals’ second leg; an especially boisterous group of Seattle fans had to reconcile beating the Galaxy 2–1 at home, having a 2–2 tie on aggregate, and yet not advancing to their first-ever finals.
The Revolution were in store for their own heartbreak. In their fifth MLS Cup, as visitors traversing the country to attempt to spoil Donovan’s final match, they did take the Galaxy to extra time via a 1–1 scoreline. But a mere nine minutes from going to penalty kicks for a second straight MLS Cup, Robbie Keane scored the decisive goal, robbing the Revolution of a chance to finally taste success in the finals, but giving Donovan the storybook ending that even rivals felt he deserved.
The dynasty question reemerged after the finals, but with a more definitive yes answer. As Becker reasons, “A dynasty needs a constant. If we’re talking from ’09 on, then it’s Bruce Arena’s dynasty, and three titles certainly makes that case. If we’re talking from Landon Donovan’s arrival and those four MLS Cups, then that’s a decade where LA appeared in half the MLS Cup and won all but one. I think both are acceptable, and both are worthy of praise.”
“Now,” she adds, “we get to see if the Arena dynasty survives Donovan’s retirement or if Donovan’s is the only one that stands the test of time. For me, MLS’s two decades are divided into the DC years and the LA years, pretty much down the middle. And it’s the 2014 championship which sealed that.”
Despite the gains that MLS made in this chapter of its history, 2014 did lose a team at season’s end, the first since the dark days of the January 2002 contraction that left Florida without a team. Earlier in the year, Chivas USA had been sold back to the league to operate, and just one day after the team’s final regular-season match—a 1–0 victory over the Quakes that locked up seventh place in the West for the doomed franchise—MLS told the world Chivas USA was no more. Specifically, Garber announced “a new strategy for the Los Angeles market,” which Brooks Peck, on the Dirty Tackle website, pithily observed “sounds more like the introduction of a revamped McDonald’s menu than the shutting down of a sports team” as part of an article titled “MLS Shuts Down Chivas USA and a Cold World Shrugs.”27
But Los Angeles wouldn’t technically be losing a second team—rather than the team dissolving entirely, a new ownership group would rebrand, reshape, and relaunch it in 2017, even though the players would be dispersed to the rest of the league and the name would disappear (and be burned with fire if at all possible).
The new ownership group included Vincent Tan, the Malaysian businessman who was at the time of the announcement embroiled in a major conflict of his own making with Cardiff City FC fans. In 2012, shortly after buying the Welsh club, Tan pushed for a rebranding, changing the century-plus-old club’s kits from blue to red and placing a red Welsh dragon in a dominant position on the crest, demoting the team’s namesake bluebird to the crest’s bottom.28 The standoff lasted until January 2015; Tan told the media he’d decided to give the fans what they wanted, to revert to blue home kits, based on the counsel of his mother.29
The year 2015 would reveal the full extent of the new plan—a team called LAFC, with its own stadium to be built in downtown Los Angeles, a smart black-and-gold art-deco influenced logo, with actor Will Ferrell as part of an extended ownership group, giving the team a distinctive shift from what Chivas USA was at its outset and what it had become.
The twentieth-anniversary year would reveal so much more, including the question Becker posed about Arena’s dynasty versus Donovan’s dynasty, how two new franchises would fare, and a frightening, looming possibility that the season might not start on time—or indeed at all.