THE TUESDAY BEFORE THE 2015 MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER SEASON STARTED, the New York Times ran an article that led with the good news of “the start of eight-year television deals with Fox, ESPN and Univision worth $90 million a year,” which also established more of the predictable weekly pattern Don Garber had sought in his late 2013 State of the League address, and heralded the news that “the league’s new expansion teams, Orlando City and New York City F.C., are to face off Sunday on ESPN2 in front of more than 60,000 fans at the sold-out Citrus Bowl.”
But it then veered into a dark place, noting that “all that good news might get buried, for at least a little while, if M.L.S. players go on strike over free agency and higher salaries. The players’ union and the league have been negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement for weeks, and have been in talks with the aid of a federal mediator since Sunday in Washington. But a strike could be called as early as Wednesday to keep the teams that are scheduled to play Friday from traveling to game sites that would be shuttered.”1
In a nutshell, the dispute revolved around salary increases (from the league minimum $36,500), each team’s salary cap being raised (from the current $3.1 million) and, most important, free agency provisions that—under MLS’s single-entity system—didn’t exist the way they did in other pro sports.
The two sides were able to come to an agreement just days before the start of the season. As the Los Angeles Times reported,
Neither the league nor the union released details of the collective bargaining agreement, which still must be formally ratified by the players. But several media reports said the five-year deal, approved only 50 hours before the season was scheduled to begin, includes a raised salary cap, a higher minimum wage and restricted free agency, all items the union demanded to avoid a walkout.
Yet, while the union won on every major point, some players apparently believed it didn’t push hard enough for more concessions, especially on free agency, something the league had steadfastly said it would not consider.2
In many respects, the resolution was a relief; in the immediate term, any delay in the season starting would have deprived MLS fans of witnessing how far the league had come with the initial matchup between 2015’s two expansion teams. On the purple Orlando side, Brazil and Real Madrid veteran midfielder Kaká was the captain and the clear star on a team with its origins in the USL, for a franchise that five years earlier was playing in a high school stadium in Austin, Texas, against the likes of the El Paso Patriots and the Laredo Heat. On the sky-blue New York City Football Club (NYCFC) side, Spain and Barcelona veteran forward David Villa was the other captain, the first of three highly prized international players featured on the squad, for a franchise born of the alliance between Manchester City Football Club and the New York Yankees. Probably none of that was discussed as a possibility for MLS when Alan Rothenberg and Mark Abbott were building the league out of a promise to FIFA in the early 1990s.
For Orlando City SC, hosting the home opener was a chance to show the world that Florida was once again ready for MLS. For club president Phil Rawlins, the home opener was the culmination of a strategy to take the team he’d purchased in 2008 (the Austin Stampede, which was then rebranded as the Austin Aztex) and drive it toward the MLS on-ramp.
“We started to open a dialogue with MLS, and it was fairly obvious from what they were saying that they wanted at least one team in the Southeast,” Rawlins remembers. “That helped immensely with figuring out where we should locate. We did a due diligence exercise, looked at several marketplaces, and Orlando just started to rise to the top of the list, and by the end of the exercise, it was the obvious choice.”
Rawlins announced in late 2010 that the USL team would move to Orlando, but at that additional announcement, made clear the goal was to graduate to MLS—and had contacted the league about its intentions. “We simply asked them what we had to do to bring a franchise to Orlando,” Rawlins explains. “They gave us an outline, and we went toward checking off all the boxes during the next three years.”
These included being able to “prove the marketplace” in both numbers of fans and commitment of corporate sponsors, putting a funding plan in place for a downtown soccer stadium, and assembling an ownership group that could sustain the club in the long term. The team’s success in USL helped draw fans; for its 2013 championship game, the club launched a campaign (dubbed #Mission15k) to have at least 15,000 fans in the stadium; more than 20,000 witnessed the team’s triumph in the Citrus Bowl, making it the best-attended minor-league sporting event to date.
The organization checked enough boxes for MLS to announce the arrival of Orlando City SC in late 2013, with a plan to play in the Citrus Bowl until the team’s 100 percent privately funded stadium (accommodating 25,500) came online in the summer of 2016. Majority owner Flavio Augusto da Silva, described on OCSC’s official website as “a wealthy Brazilian entrepreneur with a deep passion for the game,”3 was not only able to fulfill MLS’s ownership requirements but was able to bring Kaká over to the team, after nearly eighteen months of negotiations and logistical coordination, as its first truly bankable star. The team also repeated its #Mission15k campaign on a much grander scale for the inaugural home opener, with a campaign to do what soccer hadn’t done in Orlando since World Cup ’94.
“It was obviously incredibly emotional,” Rawlins says of the first match. “We’d launched #FillTheBowl six to eight weeks beforehand, with the goal of getting over 62,000 people to the game, which was an audacious goal. Our front office felt confident we could do it. We sold out the stadium with more than ten days to go. Had we had limitless capacity, we projected that we could have sold 80,000 tickets. But it was also emotional because up until the week of the game, with the CBA [collective bargaining agreement] negotiations, we weren’t sure the game was going to continue. So there was a lot going on!”
The league’s other 2015 expansion team, NYCFC, was announced in May 2013—with the Manchester City–Yankees partnership surprising some observers who’d thought that New York’s other baseball franchise, the Mets, would be involved. NYCFC, billed as the first team that would actually play in New York City (a not-so-subtle dig at the Jersey-based MetroStars/Red Bulls), was definitely intertwined with Manchester City. The November 2014 jersey reveal showed NYCFC would play in jerseys essentially identical to its parent club, sky blue with Etihad Airways as the kit sponsor, and this set off a fair amount of Twitter snark. (The best of these came from Seth Vertelney, who posted a side-by-side picture of both kits, with a Photoshopped arrow pointing to the NYCFC badge, and underneath it, “#branding.”4)
Though the initial announcement came on the heels of a Manchester City–Chelsea exhibition played in Yankee Stadium four days later, the club didn’t officially announce that it would be the home for their inaugural season (and beyond, despite the distinct possibility of a soccer-specific stadium somewhere in New York’s five boroughs) until April 2014—at which time it laid out specifics on how the baseball-to-soccer transition would take place, including the dismantling of the pitcher’s mound (which turned out to not be necessary; the mound ended up as part of the sideline, painted to function as an advertisement for season tickets).5
The Third Rail, NYCFC’s supporters’ group, described its birth coinciding with the club announcement and happening when “prospective fans took to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to share their excitement.” Its website said, “Known at the time as ‘New York City FC Supporters Group,’ it began as a loosely-knit group interacting first on social media, then increasingly in public meet-ups, pub crawls and other events.”6
But the Third Rail didn’t just seek traditional (read: twenty- and thirty-something male) supporters; the group also created a space for families under its umbrella, called Light Rail. According to the current “conductor” of Light Rail, Jenny Lando, the group doesn’t have a designated family-friendly section but does encourage kids and parents to congregate for pregame face-painting, arranges with the club for members to have the opportunity to be player escorts and ball kids, and generally invites parents to fully participate in whichever level of soccer culture they deem appropriate, be it rated G, PG, or otherwise.
NYCFC defined itself in its first season through three extremely high-profile players presumably preparing to make the Big Apple their final professional soccer destination. The first, arriving in June 2014, was David Villa, best known as a Barcelona player, though he’d most recently played with Atlético Madrid. The signing came early enough to not only generate stateside buzz about the team but also allow him to spend time at another of Manchester City’s recently acquired entities, Melbourne City of Australia’s A-League, to prepare for life in MLS.
The second, Frank Lampard, proved to be a slightly more contentious acquisition with American fans thanks to how he was initially utilized. Lampard, who’d played with Chelsea from 2001 to 2014 as one of the club’s most celebrated players, was let go by the club, and NYCFC signed Lampard in July 2014. Ten days after the signing, Manchester City announced that NYCFC would loan Lampard to the parent club for the remainder of the calendar year, to participate in a title race against his former club. Then, before that deadline arrived, Manchester City announced that the loan was being extended to the end of the Premier League season in May—when the MLS season Lampard was supposed to have signed on for was well underway.
But NYCFC wasn’t done yet. With its third and final designated player slot, the club signed Juventus and Italian national team legend Andrea Pirlo in July to a contract keeping him in New York until the end of the 2016 season.
Other teams also strove for relevancy via the Designated Player market. Toronto FC brought in still-in-his-prime Italian striker Sebastian Giovinco from Juventus during the offseason. Initially he was supposed to wait until the Serie A season finished to come over, but Juventus allowed him to leave early in time for the start of the MLS season; Giovinco pounced on the opportunity with twenty-two goals, winning an MVP in a season where Columbus Crew mainstay (and season-long Golden Boot rival) Kei Kamara was also making a case for himself. In July, Montreal brought in Didier Drogba, the former Chelsea and Ivory Coast star (whose “Drogba Legend” banner followed him from Stamford Bridge to Stade Saputo) and made a spirited playoff run in which he featured significantly. Portland brought in Argentine international Lucas Melano, also a July addition, who would figure into a particularly important playoff moment.
The Galaxy had brought in its own designated player of note, Liverpool mainstay Steven Gerrard, who, upon learning he would be gradually phased out of the only club he’d ever known, arranged to make the same move that David Beckham had made eight years earlier.
Chris Jones, writing for ESPN FC on Gerrard’s July 4 welcome at StubHub Center, gave the impression that the veteran Premier Leaguer would enjoy MLS:
Steven Gerrard takes his seat in the front row of a private box at StubHub Center and settles in to watch his first game as a stateside member of the Los Angeles Galaxy. It’s July Fourth, and the stadium is sold out, 27,000 strong and festive. The Riot Squad, one of the more notable L.A. supporters’ groups, has been well-refreshed by the truckload of California beer that Gerrard bought them for their tailgate—veteran move, that—accompanied by a hand-signed letter: “I look forward to meeting you at tonight’s match,” Gerrard wrote. He is more than getting his wish. This isn’t Anfield, and Gerrard is essentially sitting in the crowd, separated only by a low cement wall. A steady stream of fans stop by for autographs and pictures; a few of them are already wearing Gerrard’s No. 8 in Galaxy white. “That’s a bit of a gamble,” he says. “They haven’t seen me play yet.”7
Gerrard debuted well, looking sharp in his first official Galaxy match—a U.S. Open Cup 1–0 loss to Real Salt Lake—and then scored and assisted on another goal in a July 18 California Clásico win against the San Jose Earthquakes.
But it was another Galaxy signing, requiring the league to create another mechanism to allow it, that proved to be impactful and controversial, while allowing the Galaxy to meaningfully reach a whole new fan base.
It’s helpful to understand, in discussing this, that the evolution of MLS signing rules draws some level of skepticism from longtime observers of the league. Some prominent soccer journalists, for instance, have looked askance at signings of the past several seasons—regardless of how well they’ve served the league and its competitive balance—to insinuate that the league is participating in some level of orchestration.
For example, in an August 5, 2013, article detailing how Dempsey recently signed to Seattle (instead of Los Angeles or Toronto, other potential destinations), Wahl quoted Roth as saying, “I think it was important that [Clint Dempsey] ended up … how do I say this politely? … not in Los Angeles. Because from a perception standpoint it would make MLS look essentially like a one-team league when it came to important international players.”8
In the summer of 2014, when Jermaine Jones became available, both the Chicago Fire (who would go on to finish ninth in the East) and New England Revolution (who would go on to the MLS Cup finals) coveted him, and the league needed to determine where he’d go.
Goff cynically observed, “From the league that introduced weighted lotteries, homegrown signings, discovery selections, re-entry drafts, the SuperDraft, designated players, allocation orders and designated players exempt from allocation orders, MLS unveiled a new acquisition mechanism Sunday: the blind draw.”
Goff noted that Jones, like Dempsey and Michael Bradley before him, wouldn’t need to go through the allocation process because, as MLS rules stated, “Designated Players of a certain threshold—as determined by the League—are not subject to allocation ranking.”
As he explained,
Protocol, however, requires the league to run a player’s name through the entire membership to identify other clubs financially capable and interested. Historically reluctant to spend big bucks, New England stepped forward at some point and became an unexpected suitor. Chicago suddenly had competition.
Jones preferred to play for the Fire—closer to his family in Los Angeles, a home stadium with natural grass, an established dialogue with Chicago brass—but because MLS could not ensure his destination if multiple teams were interested, Jones backed away last week.
MLS wanted him badly and increased the offer. His salary would be the same whether he landed in Foxborough or Bridgeview. The rub: Jones would have to drop his demand to play for Chicago and allow the process to play out.9
The random draw sent Jones to the Revs on a contract through the end of 2015; his 2015 season ended on an unhappy note when he was sent off after shoving referee Mark Geiger in the dying moments of the Revs’ playoff-ending loss to D.C. United, and Jones posted wistfully to Instagram several days later, a black-and-white picture of him walking past a stadium brick wall, captioned, “I am so thankful what has happened in one and a half years with the club, the teammates & fans, the city of Boston! I appreciate the love from everybody! I’m going home now and finally enjoying my family! Very excited to see what will be the next step in our life!”10 (This led more than one fan to post a message along the lines of “Don’t go!” in response; but Jones would indeed go, ending up in Colorado to start the 2016 season.)
When the Galaxy signed Gerrard, it reached its maximum of three designated players per MLS rules, as Gerrard joined Roy Keane and U.S. national team defender Omar Gonzalez. On July 7, though—via an article on MLS’s own website—Mexican national star Giovani dos Santos, playing with Villarreal in La Liga, confirmed that the Galaxy was interested in his services but was coy about reports that he had already signed.
The next day, MLS announced new salary cap rules allowing a team to spend an additional $500,000 above the $3.49 million salary cap, and the ability to buy down the contracts of existing DPs, through what the league termed “targeted allocation money.” The MLSSoccer.com article detailed a key provision of the rule: “Teams may also use Targeted Allocation Money to convert a Designated Player to a non-Designated Player by buying down his salary budget charge to below the maximum salary budget charge. When using Targeted Allocation Money to free up a Designated Player slot, a club must simultaneously sign a new Designated Player at an investment equal to or greater than the player he is replacing.”11
As ESPN.com floated, “The new rule opens the door for a club such as LA Galaxy to pay Omar Gonzalez’s cap hit with these funds to get below the DP threshold, then add another big earner, such as Mexican national team star Giovani dos Santos, who is reportedly in advanced discussions with the club.”12
By the next week, the Galaxy had done exactly that. While Galaxy fans were thrilled with what dos Santos could bring to a team fighting for playoff position in a competitive Western Conference, detractors saw the move as a rich-getting-richer situation (which would have most certainly been the complaint had, say, Dempsey found his way to Los Angeles rather than Seattle in 2013).
Fusion’s Kevin Brown, in an article snarkily titled, “The L.A. Galaxy Signed Giovani dos Santos Because Rules are for Chumps,” remarked,
The midfielder joins a Galaxy team that already features the league limit of three designated players … so the league had to create a new mechanism (drink!) to make all of this legal. Targeted allocation money to help pay for expensive players is a thing now. The only relevant detail from a fan perspective is it means better (or at least more famous) players have another pathway to join MLS.
The sort of person who gets angry at MLS finding ways to improve the on-field product either a) made a poor choice and supports a cheap franchise (shout out to Colorado), b) finds valor in pointing out the obvious that “MLS is weird,” but has no real intention of watching less of it, or c) is unfortunately a member of the players union and is starting to realize that the last round of collective bargaining agreement negotiations wasn’t the breakthrough they thought it was. For you, the fan who invests time and energy in search of entertainment, this is a win.13
Speaking of the targeted allocation money provision (TAM), Grant Wahl comments, “It does make you laugh, with some of the communistera names that they come up with at MLS headquarters. And based on the timing, it does seem that this was allowing the Galaxy to have four designated players.” Yet he notes that TAM hasn’t just favored the Galaxy but rather has positive for the league so far in that it’s allowed a number of teams to bring in good players, and is increasing the overall collective star power within MLS.
For the Galaxy, Giovani dos Santos was more than just an attacking midfielder with a high motor who could fortify the team’s 2015 playoff position and play a role in what the club would coin the #RaceForSeis. Seeing that dos Santos has been a captain and one of the highest-profile players on El Tri, and seeing that the Galaxy probably wouldn’t mind galvanizing Mexican American support before a still-coalescing LAFC has a chance to sign players, the move is fan minded as well as field minded.
“The impact of him coming to our club has changed us,” Chris Klein explains. “It’s changed the way that the marketplace is looking at us. It’s enhanced our relevancy in the market. The real test is going to be the success of Gio and how he produces, because as we’ve seen, you can’t just have a player who comes for marketing. But certainly, we’re getting fans who have traditionally supported their clubs in Mexico that are now supporters of the Galaxy.”
And yet, despite the focus on the dos Santos signing coming right before the All-Star Game, it was still a celebration of the designated players who had come into the league to kick off the 2015 season.
The twentieth edition of the MLS All-Star Game, had injuries not interfered with plans, would have served as the coming out party for Gerrard and Lampard. Even though they had only finished their Premier League seasons that May, and neither had played a minute in MLS, Garber named the two English stars to the All-Star squad as commissioner’s selections. Injuries would claim them, as well as Bradley, Keane, Sebastian Giovinco, and Chris Tierney. Jozy Altidore, a late substitution for Giovinco, ended up also adopting Giovinco’s number 10 jersey as his own customary number 17 (plus many other reasonable jersey numbers) had long since been claimed.
And yet, the setting of Dick’s Sporting Goods Stadium on a perfect Colorado summer evening, with an opening ceremony reminiscent of the pregame ceremony at the first-ever MLS game in San Jose, heralded the twentieth season with appropriate pomp, even if all the special guests couldn’t be on the field as planned. The game itself pitted the MLS All-Stars against traveling English Premier League team Tottenham Hotspur, with Kaká (the game’s MVP) and David Villa scoring for the All-Stars and breakout Spurs star Harry Kane getting on the score sheet in the losing effort. The event also featured Landon Donovan in his coaching debut the night before the All-Star Game, overseeing the MLS Homegrown team (of top young academy players) against the Club America U-20s.
The Gerrard and Lampard saga took an additional twist on August 23, when the two of them were supposed to face off with NYCFC’s trip to StubHub Center to face the Galaxy. Despite shirts and posters that celebrated the renewal of the rivalry—the StubHub Center’s store sold shirts that read RENEWED RIVALRY underneath their names and faces—Lampard failed to make the NYCFC eighteen-man squad.
It’s maybe just as well; after being lucky to only be down 1–0 at halftime, NYCFC let in four second-half goals and turned a dubious penalty call into a David Villa penalty kick to make the final 5–1 scoreline slightly less lopsided than it should have been. Keane’s exclamation-point goal was the Galaxy’s thousandth goal, making the Galaxy the first MLS team to reach that milestone.
But one of the more intriguing elements of the game played out in ESPN’s broadcasting center. The broadcast, scheduled to start at 3:00 p.m. ET, was held off by the Junior League World Series finals, in which a team representing Chinese Taipei was bettering a team representing Virginia, 10–0, in the seventh inning. American Soccer Twitter came alive with commentary, with expectations that they’d get soccer when and only when Chinese Taipei recorded the final inevitable out. Even the broadcasters commented on soccer in passing—namely, how it’d been years since they’d personally played it—on the way to saying they’d stay with the game until its corporeal end.
Then at 3:15 ET, minutes before kickoff, ESPN broke abruptly from preadolescent baseball, proclaimed it time for soccer, went to a quick pregame commercial, and then the game was on. ESPN soccer producer Chris Alexopoulus tweeted, “I’ve never seen ESPN dump out of an event in the 20 years I’ve worked there,”14 and Jonathan Tannenwald, who wrote extensively on soccer coverage on TV during his time at Philly.com, tweeted in response that it was “among the most stunning moments in MLS history” with no sign of sarcasm whatsoever.15
“I hesitate to say something grandiose along the lines of ‘It was the moment when Major League Soccer finally arrived,’” Tannenwald comments. “But it was a moment in which people could say here is an event within MLS that ESPN will draw a large-enough audience to be bigger than a little league baseball game. ESPN has a fairly hard and fast rule that it will not jump out of live programming to go to other live programming, except for something really drastic. They always let whatever game they are televising finish.” Though Gerrard versus Lampard didn’t materialize, and though the game ultimately showed viewers that three world-class DPs do not a great team make, MLS fans got to feel, at least for a moment, some acknowledgment that their sport merited a moment of sports TV history.
MLS also got its newest cathedral in 2015. Avaya Stadium opened with features reflecting a mindfulness of all elements of the league’s fan base. Dave Kaval said the stadium design was inspired by European stadiums—they’d scouted a number of them in their preparations for the $100 million project—with the steepest seat grading of any MLS stadium and with overhanging roofs to help capture noise. One end of the stadium is designed with the team’s four different supporters’ groups in mind; the other end features North America’s largest outdoor bar, replete in reclaimed redwood, underneath the stadium’s giant double-sided video-board. The stadium’s eighteen suites are, in a novel move that might be trendsetting for future stadiums, at field level and incorporate porches that butt up to the sidelines, meaning that those paying top dollar for seats are closest to the action as opposed to literally and metaphorically above it all.
And, since Avaya is a “cloud-based solutions provider” in the heart of Silicon Valley, the stadium also bills itself as the “first cloud-enabled stadium in MLS.”16
As stellar as the stadium is—in the league’s tradition of showcasing the new, it was selected to host the 2016 All-Star Game—the Quakes had a bittersweet end to the 2015 season, just missing out on the sixth playoff spot in the West in their final regular-season game. The 2015 edition of the playoffs brought in twelve of the league’s twenty teams, with the top two teams in each conference receiving byes. Though a system in which 60 percent of the league advances seems generous—or, as some complained, dismissive of regular-season results—the 2015 playoffs brought some of the most entertaining, epic finishes in the league’s history.
Some criticized the fact that opening-round games, including the showcase Sounders–Galaxy match, were telecast exclusively on UniMas; for English-speaking audiences who weren’t aware of the SAP feature providing alternative commentary, or who couldn’t get the feature to work, the game provided impromptu Spanish lessons with the action. Beyond the opening rounds, though, the league’s other two broadcast partners, ESPN and Fox Sports, were involved in telecasting matches. The numbers for 2015 only upticked slightly from 2014’s; those who watched, though, saw MLS at its best.
The Timbers—playing in their smart retro third kits for their entire Western Conference playoff run—set themselves up as a potential team of destiny with a first-round match against Sporting Kansas City that went to penalty kicks. Kansas City had already won the U.S. Open over the Union via PKs early in the year, and of course, had recently won an MLS Cup that way. But this shootout was happening in the north end of Providence Park, directly underneath a full-throated Timbers Army. The ensuing PKs went eleven players deep, with Timbers keeper Adam Kwarasey converting his kick and then returning to goal to save Sporting keeper Jon Kempin’s shot. Sporting defender Saad Abdul-Salaam, with a chance to win the match earlier in the PK session, fired a shot that hit one post, caromed across goal to the other post, and bounced out, to the terror and/or delight of everyone watching.
In the following playoff game the next week, the Timbers Army (who adopted a Kenny Powers–themed tifo motif for the playoffs, under the slogan “Cup bound and down”) commemorated the moment by creating a giant tifo, directed at the visiting Whitecaps, that read THE POWER OF KWARASEY STOPS YOU HOSERS. But when fans discovered that Kwarasey would be out until the following week’s return leg, enterprising Timbers Army fans created an additional sign that read NEXT WEEK to hoist next to the original one.
That match, which finished 0–0, included an eighty-ninth-minute shot by the Timbers’ Max Urruti that bounced off the far post. Abdul-Salaam hilariously Tweeted (from his couch, presumably), “Wow those posts in Portland are something else #ishouldknow,”17 which earned him appreciative responses from a good number of Timbers fans.
Though it looked as if the Timbers and Sounders might be on course for an epic Western Conference finals, top-seeded FC Dallas had other ideas. Seattle won the opening leg at home 2–1, meaning that a scoreless tie would send Seattle through, a 2–1 Dallas win would send the game into extra time, and the other likely scorelines would bring the confusing-to-outsiders away goal rule into effect.
For eighty-four minutes, the match in Frisco, Texas, remained scoreless. Then, Tesho Akindele scored a header for Dallas, and the stadium roared as a 1–0 win sent Dallas through by virtue of the away goal rule. Six minutes later, on the cusp of stoppage time, Chad Marshall scored a header on a corner kick, Seattle took the aggregate lead, and the stadium deflated. But less than two minutes later, with the Sounders just needing to hang on through stoppage time, central defender Walker Zimmerman scored, the crowd found life once more, and after a scoreless thirty minutes of extra time, Dallas keeper Jesse Gonzalez saved two of Seattle’s five penalty kicks to propel his team to a finals with Portland.
The Western Conference finals provided a continuation of the earlier rounds’ drama. Portland won the opening leg, 3–1, at home, including a beautiful goal (Dairon Asprilla’s twenty-seven-yard parabola, recommended for any MLS evangelist collecting YouTube clips to bring fans over to the league) and two ugly ones by centerbacks either falling into or away from the goal. The return leg in Dallas started slowly and with thin crowds, partially due to unseasonably cold, rainy weather (on Twitter, some newer fans wondered if the match would be canceled), but mostly due to a security bottleneck—a cautionary measure due to the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier that month. The Timbers increased their aggregate lead with a Fernando Adi goal early in the second half, but FC Dallas scored twice after that, leading to a frantic final fifteen minutes in which Dallas chased the equalizer before late-game sub Lucas Melano killed Dallas’s hopes with a stoppage-time goal in which he swerved around Gonzalez to the end line and chipped in from an extremely acute angle.
In the East, the Red Bulls were dominant over D.C. United in getting to the Eastern Conference finals, while Columbus needed to go to extra time in the second leg with Montreal for a Kei Kamara winning goal, after Kamara had missed a second-half penalty that would have put the Crew through without extra time. Columbus won the first leg at home, 2–0, with Justin Meram scoring the opening goal just nine seconds in, and for 92-½ minutes the teams were scoreless in the return leg at Red Bull Arena. Then, Anatole Abang broke through for the Red Bulls to score with ninety seconds officially left in stoppage time, though the officials let the match play out an extra minute. In the dying throes, with the ball bouncing around the Columbus box, Bradley Wright-Phillips attempted a header, which slipped past keeper Steve Clark but bounced off the post, where Kamara then met the ball and cleared it.
The 2015 MLS Cup, which sold out the day after the conference championships, included two thousand Timbers Army fans creating an enclave on the stadium’s south end and bringing portable tifo to the game. Timber Joey did travel to Columbus with log in tow, just in case any Portland goals needed acknowledgment, but, according to a Massive Report article, “Crew SC Director of Stadium Operations and Merchandise Dan Lolli pointed out on Twitter that ‘chainsaws’ and ‘Logs of any wooden variety’ are against MAPFRE Stadium policy.”18 (In fact, those two items topped the list in what seemed like a hasty amendment to have some fun with the opponent.) The Timbers ended up bringing the log to Columbus and featuring it at the tailgate party but not inside the stadium.
The match itself featured three stunning goals in the first seventeen minutes. Portland’s Diego Valeri scored the fastest goal in MLS Cup history, just twenty-seven seconds into the match, when he saw Columbus goalie Steve Clark dawdling with the ball in front of goal, charged, and took a chance slide at the ball, and swept it in. Six minutes later, on a sequence in which the Timbers had clearly gone out of bounds with the ball but were allowed to continue play, Melano found Rodney Wallace with a far-post pass that he headed in. The Crew benefited from a seventeenth-minute lapse by Kwarasey, who fell after awkwardly punching a ball into rather than away from danger. Kamara pounced on the mistake, winning the ball, creating a bit of space, and then firing into the net to bring the Crew back to 2–1.
But the score would remain there for the entirely of the game, despite several tantalizing chances—most notably a shot that, on review, clearly struck a parked-on-the-goal-line Columbus defender Michael Parkhurst on his outstretched arm before ricocheting down to his foot, where he cleared it, avoiding a red card and a Portland penalty kick in the process.
The Timbers’ victory, a feel-good story for everyone but Crew and Sounders fans, capped off a year with one fitting success for its twentieth year: the league finally broke through the 20,000 average attendance ceiling that had evaded it in years past and that even haunted it through its early years of trying to get traction with American audiences. The Sounders led the way with 44,247, placing the team second in the Western Hemisphere, higher than Liverpool, and besting its own record from two years earlier. Ten teams averaged above 20,000, and even the lowest-attended teams still averaged around the 16,000 mark.
The attendance numbers were strong enough to bring MLS to seventh in the world, past top-flight leagues in Argentina, Brazil, France, and the Netherlands. While there’s still a clear striation between the top professional soccer leagues in the world and MLS, there’s a growing sense—made more defensible with numbers like this—that the league born of a promise to FIFA in order to host the World Cup is cementing a place among the world’s leagues, staying stridently American yet being solidly part of a global community.
One more piece of news, coming just a week after the MLS Cup (but hinted at three weeks before), was another pivotal moment in MLS history—the announcement that Dynamo minority owner Gabriel Brener bought out majority owner Anschutz Entertainment Group to take a controlling interest in the club.19 This left AEG owning just the Galaxy, and for the first time in the league’s history, each of the twenty teams in MLS was owned by a separate, distinct ownership group.
For Abbott, turning twenty is more than a number. Reflecting philosophically, he says,
When you’re in your twenties you can’t imagine twenty years later. It’s not comprehensible. You can’t sit there and say, in twenty years, I dream to be this. Ultimately, for the kind of league we want to have, you have to show that you’re viable and sustainable. People are not going to give their hearts and their passions to something that will fail. Once you’ve got to twenty years, you’ve done a full generational turn. We joke about it all the time in the office. We have people here who grew up as kids going to MLS games as fans, and who went to All-Star Games on vacations—we laughed at that. But that’s what the truth is. Many of our interns were not born or barely born when the league started. They don’t see it the way you or I might see it, which is that it’s still a relatively new thing. It’s always been there for them. Soccer’s always been there. They don’t get people who think it isn’t a popular sport, because it has been for them. It’s the sustainability of having reached that. And now, people are making that association.