TO UNDERSTAND THE FUTURE OF MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER, IT REQUIRES A bit of a look back—to 2008, a time when desktop web browsing held a two-to-one advantage over mobile browsing and social media was still in its relative infancy. Facebook was emerging from its early identity as a photo-gathering locus and relationship-status notifier to its current status of being completely, culturally ubiquitous. Twitter was still pretty adherent to its creators’ original vision of it as a “microblogging” site, versus the rough beast it has evolved into today, and Instagram was still just a twinkle in a developer’s eye, a full two years away from launching.
In 2008, Sunil Gulati was teaching at Columbia University, and Chris Schlosser was a Columbia MBA student who decided to stop by Gulati’s office hours with an idea for taking MLS headlong into the Internet age. Schlosser, who wrote up a business plan following his meeting with Gulati, successfully convinced the league to embark on a different path from letting Major League Baseball handle its digital platform, which is what was happening prior to the summer of 2008.
Schlosser was brought on to head what is now arguably the league’s most important arm for fan outreach. He started where the league was initially focused, on its website content, by bringing on Greg Lalas of Goal.com (also, notably, Alexi’s brother) to build a team that has expanded from 5.5 million users in 2010 to 20 million users five years later.
MLS’s digital presence—now encompassing a robust website with both written and video content, numerous social media platforms (including standbys like Facebook and Twitter, but current enough to include Snapchat), and an online channel airing live MLS games—is more than just a way to reach fans. The digital space is where fans connect, and is arguably as vital to the American soccer experience in 2016 as stadiums and supporters’ groups are.
And soccer, particularly MLS, is witnessing the importance of the digital sphere, embracing it in a way that other American sports have emulated but haven’t as adeptly mastered. “Soccer wouldn’t exist the way it does in this country without the Internet,” Schlosser explains. “If radio built baseball, and TV built the NFL, we’re going to look back, and I think we can already say, that the Internet built MLS. It connected—it really was the secret thing that connected everyone.”
Part of that connectivity, according to Greg Lalas, comes from a DIY aesthetic that makes soccer fans from the 1990s to the present day analogous to indie music fans of the 1980s and early 1990s. Back when Top 40 acts ruled the radio airwaves and record label system of production and distribution, well before the Internet, there was a diasporic network of indie music fans who communicated through the creation of fanzines, which helped communication move from localized scenes built around college radio stations, alternative weekly publications, and indie-friendly venues.
He notes that in the years when MLS evolved from idea to actualized league, American soccer fans were much like indie music fans in the 1980s and 1990s; major media was heaping so much attention on mainstream sports that it couldn’t be bothered to give soccer attention, coverage was accessible only through out-of-the-way channels, and fans were left to create their own avenues for expanding knowledge about the sport. The emerging Internet provided an ideal way to bridge the physical distance between like-minded fans. He reflects,
That notion back in the ’80s was that you were alone, and everyone was alone. All these soccer fans across the country were alone, they might have had their high school buddy who was a soccer fan, but that was really it. But the whole mainstream world was talking about football, baseball, basketball, even poker for a little while. The only place you could go to have that communication with like-minded people was in the digital space.
So, originally, it was on the boards, like on Big Soccer, where a number of people in the community first came together. Then, it shifted to the comment area on websites like Goal.com, and then eventually, it shifted to social media, to Twitter, Facebook, wherever the latest one is.
So the soccer community was almost stitched together by the digital world. Those fed off each other—chicken or the egg, it’s hard to say which was which. To be a soccer fan in America in general fifteen years ago meant you were a little bit off the beaten path, you might have been ahead of everything on the curve on digital stuff. You were the first one to have an Apple, or an iPhone, so we’ve even seen on the analytics how much more advanced the soccer fan and the MLS fan are in terms of using smartphones and being digitally savvy. We know that for a fact. And so, that’s what they communicated differently. It was a digitally savvy group, because they were forced to by circumstance.
Amanda Vandervort, MLS’s senior director of social media, says, “I would add that soccer fans are interested in all kinds of innovation, in ways that allow us to explore our creativity, and different ways to engage them and bring them into our content and our community.” She also notes that soccer is full of “open and welcoming communities”—communities that, after all, create supporters’ groups from the diverse patchwork of people who forged the Screaming Eagles and Barra Brava community in Washington, DC, the Section 8 Chicago community, and the many fan communities that followed.
One example of this innovation came from the redesigned MLS logo at the centerpiece of the MLS Next event, held in September 2014 to showcase the branding and marketing upgrades the league was making in order to reach fans in the digital space as well as the stadiums.1
As Vandervort notes,
You can see in the logo, in the crest, the way it’s designed, there’s an empty space in the bottom corner. When we released it, we didn’t really address that space or tell fans what would be done in that space. What’s so cool is that fans really embraced it—they took the mark and really made it their own. So fans would put in their avatar, or their favorite club, or their hometown, or lightning bolts—they used those as avatars, and brought it into their own social world. That’s an example of how the brand is welcomed into their own social sphere, into the conversation.
One of the most poignant examples of how MLS Digital enhances actual MLS fandom is in its gamecasts. The MLS Digital team characterizes it as an ideal “second-screen” experience—if the televised (or web-projected) game is the first screen, then the gamecast provides a second screen for the fan to watch, to help augment the live game action he or she is seeing telecast or videocast. The gamecast is essentially a curated Twitter experience—MLS employees use proprietary software to sort through the tweets that fans are pushing out during a game, select the best ones, and add them to a running timeline of the game, providing a digital commentary to the action.
Though the tweets range from off-the-cuff comments from unaffiliated MLS fans, to in-stadium observations from home and away supporters, to insights from analysts and soccer journalists, MLS employees select tweets that help capture the ebbs and flows of the games. Lalas describes the criteria for gamecast elevation thus: show emotion, be funny, and/or tell us something we don’t know.
While the gamecasts can work for someone trying to follow a game without watching it on TV, it’s curated with the second-screen experience in mind. Research has shown the MLS team that those seeking out gamecasts are more likely to be with a second screen, most likely a smartphone, in hand as they’re watching a game.
While written content is still important, there’s been an increased emphasis on video—in part to respond to the need for what Vandervort terms “platform-specific content” as well as video’s increasing importance across social media, and in part to showcase the emphasis on quality that MLS Digital strives for.
The content doesn’t necessarily start and end with soccer, either; Rachel Bonnetta, a twenty-something Canadian with a quirky sense of humor and a comfortable rapport with pretty much everyone across the MLS spectrum, created some of the MLS site’s most noteworthy content over the course of the 2015 season. Some of the videos relate directly to soccer and fan culture; she previewed the 2015 playoffs, for instance, by interviewing herself dressed as fans from all twenty MLS teams, including a hilarious spoof of former Crew player and current Columbus Crew SC brand ambassador Frankie Hejduk. But another series, Off Topic with Rachel Bonnetta (sponsored by AT&T) features her with soccer personalities doing decidedly nonsoccer things like ice-skating in New York with then-Toronto forward Herculez Gomez, shoe shopping with Union midfielder Maurice Edu, and inhaling helium with Fox Sports commentator Rob Stone (in order to record helium-voiced conference final previews).
Bonnetta emphasizes that she’s a sports fan, but also wants to get to know athletes as people, and sometimes, traditional sports journalism doesn’t allow for that:
I’m curious to know what they like to do off the pitch, what makes them tick. You see these guys getting asked the exact same questions over and over, and they’re so programmed to say the same thing every single time. You’re not learning anything about them, and some of them have really amazing stories. My whole philosophy was to pull that out. I’m a soccer fan, and if I think that’s interesting, you’re going to think that’s interesting. That was my philosophy going into it.
The beautiful thing about working in the digital space is that you can have an idea that’s outside the box, and throw it against the wall. If it sticks, great; if not, try something else.
Bonnetta notes that the access she’s been able to get to MLS players—and their willingness to go along with some of her wackier ideas—is due to the desire of everyone within MLS to grow the sport. “We’re able to give the fans more,” she says. “I hope that it never gets to the point where it becomes an NFL or NBA, where we don’t have that access. It’s a beautiful thing. The supporters’ groups are right next to the pitch, and players can go up to them and hug them after scoring a goal. Every part of MLS is accessible, because they want to get bigger. I just hope that if they get bigger, we can still have that intimate Major League Soccer that we know and love.”
Bonnetta has since moved on from MLS, but is still creating original content featuring MLS players and fans. She was reportedly sought by both ESPN and Fox Sports after the 2015 season, and she opted for Fox, where, in addition to content creation, she hosts live video halftime and postgame chats tied to the network’s Champions League broadcasts, hosted on the Fox Soccer Facebook page.
American soccer fans’ engagement with the sport does, of course, extend beyond MLS. Soccer, for all its increasing popularity in the United States, is still a diaspora of passionate fans (dwarfed in numbers by pro and college football fans) who now have the means to connect across geographical boundaries digitally and instantly. Fans deeply passionate about soccer won’t just gravitate to a single MLS team; they’re also adopting Premier League teams, La Liga teams, and Bundesliga teams, and with more soccer on TV than ever before, fans are able to have first-screen as well as second-screen relationships with soccer.
There’s a reciprocal effect starting to happen as well. In part because Britain’s Sky Sports started carrying MLS matches in the 2015 season, there’s now an audience tuning in late at night to watch American soccer in the same way that American fans get up early to watch English soccer. In October 2015 the New York Times profiled a group of three English MLS fans who launched a website, MLSGB.com, directed at British fans of the league.2
And of course, online platforms are where conversations about how to make soccer better are happening. One prime example of this is the ongoing promotion and relegation (pro/rel) debate.
Ted Westervelt, a Denver-based veteran of Washington, DC, political campaigns (as a Democratic political consultant) is passionate about soccer, and specifically, about the adoption of a promotion and relegation system that top European leagues employ in the interest of teams being competitive with each other; he is leading a campaign for U.S. Soccer to adopt a pro/rel system across all its leagues, including MLS, with his @soccerreform Twitter account.
Westervelt’s campaign—often voiced with the stridency of a partisan fund-raising e-mail in the last hours before a quarterly deadline—paints MLS as a league frightened of competition and desperate to guard its D1 status; frequently retweets screenshots from @emptyseatspics if there’s visibly poor attendance at any MLS game; and engages with soccer personalities, journalists, fans, and virtually anyone who Tweets about pro/rel. Westervelt initially turned to the Big Soccer boards to start conversations in 2007, got kicked off Big Soccer, and then found Twitter to be an ideal platform for his campaign.
Westervelt explains,
When I started, I thought it would be an education process—you know, Americans just don’t get promotion/relegation.” We need to educate them on it, and the further I got into it, I realized I need to give a lot more credit to Americans. Most anybody who’s been a soccer fan for any amount of time gets promotion/relegation. What we got, initially back in the day, was the excuse that MLS wasn’t ready. One of the best things that’s happened since then, with people hemming and hawing about it, is that those excuses have gone by the wayside. All that’s really left is this idea that we owe MLS owners, that’s why they invested in the sport, and we have to do it that way because that’s the way they want it.
Specifically, the campaign is an appeal to U.S. Soccer to adopt promotion/relegation for all its existing leagues, making participation in the system a requirement for MLS to keep its Division I status. He believes that the current system is “suffocating” the development of U.S. soccer, and if every club in the United States had the same opportunity, “it will explode the game.”
Commissioner Garber, though certainly aware of the noise that the pro/rel camp is making, dismisses it as a small, vocal minority that doesn’t understand that the economics of the twenty-year-old MLS differ vastly from the economics of a Football Association hierarchy (to use the most familiar example of pro/rel for its American fans) in its second century. He comments,
I get asked a lot and read a lot about soccer promotion and relegation. It is coming from a handful of media people and a very small set of fans who are very active on social media. It is not something that is resonating in our fan base. It is not something that I get asked about by the traditional soccer press or sports media, ever. So it has, in many ways, taken on a life within a very vocal group of people.
Passionate fans are what drive professional sports, so I don’t dismiss it as being meaningless. However, none of them are engaged every day as we are in growing this league and managing this league, so that we can ensure that we are here for generations to come. Because if we stay to our plan and do it right, MLS will be one of the big soccer leagues in the world, and one of the top major sports leagues here in America.
All the pro leagues here in the U.S. don’t have promotion/relegation. Their playoffs rate anywhere from two times to five times their regular season. Their championship events are some of the biggest events on television that year, sports or otherwise. And every team is fighting hard to win every game and to win a championship. So I don’t believe that just because it’s existed in the rest of the world for one hundred years, that it means that it needs to be part of the American soccer solution. There’s no reason American soccer can’t be defined by what makes our leagues great. They’re looked at by the rest of the world as the way sports leagues should be structured. So I dismiss entirely this view that just because it works in the rest of the world in football means that it needs to work here in the United States.
I believe a lot of people are very engaged in global football, and they think that anything that’s going on in global football means it’s an all-for-one and one-for-all solution. I think we’ve learned in many ways that just because it’s part of the culture of international soccer doesn’t make it a one-size-fits-all solution.
We have a system of a player draft. We have union agreements. We have investors that have committed billions. They are partners in Soccer United Marketing. They have agreed to certain rules that have bound them, a wide variety of rules and regulations that are a phone book thick, commitments that they make to each other as partners. To think that somebody can come in or out of that partnership just because of the [team’s] performance, just because it exists in international football, is a structural and legal impossibility.
While there is some striation now developing in American soccer leagues, it’s the result of an expanding partnership between MLS and the USL, considered the third-tier league in the USSF hierarchy. The twenty-nine-team league includes a number of teams with clear ties to their parent clubs (like the LA Galaxy II, nicknamed Los Dos; the Portland Timbers 2; and Orlando City B), and others with more slightly veiled brands (including Kansas City’s playfully named Swope Park Rangers, Salt Lake City’s slightly redundant Real Monarchs SLC, and Montreal’s simply named FC Montreal).
Though the latest iteration of the North American Soccer League, launched in 2011, is considered the second-tier league by the USSF, it operates independently from the bridged MLS and USL, and its eleven teams in 2016 will reduce by one when Minnesota United FC moves to MLS in 2017 or 2018 (likely rebranding to, more simply, Minnesota FC). This edition of the NASL, like the prior one, has a New York Cosmos, a Fort Lauderdale Strikers, and a Tampa Bay Rowdies; it also has additional Florida franchises in Miami and Jacksonville, Canadian franchises in Ottawa and Edmonton, and the oddly named Rayo OKC—majority owned by the owner of La Liga team Rayo Vallecano—coexisting in the same small market (though with stadiums more than an hour apart) with the USL’s OKC Energy.
The NASL bolstered its profile by signing a TV deal with beIN Sports for the 2016 season, announced at the end of March 2016, but USL announced its own TV deal with ESPN (albeit involving its ESPN3 streaming service) three weeks later. There might be a future where all three leagues coexist, and some pro/rel advocates have even gone as far as to imagine what the composition of the 2016 leagues might look like based on 2015 results. But there also might be a future in which the NASL eventually folds or is at least partially absorbed into the USL.
Pro/rel isn’t the only debate around the future of MLS playing out among fans and thought leaders. Some feel that adopting the August to May calendar that the other major pro leagues around the world use will allow MLS to access a greater—and better overall—pool of players, whereas others blanch at the thought of attending MLS matches in January and February and feel that soccer in the summer months is a distinct element of MLS’s appeal.
And there are, of course, more and more cities that want to be involved in the league, even as some caution that the expansion beyond twenty-four teams might dilute the product. Atlanta United FC, LAFC, and Minnesota are progressing toward their opening days, while in Miami the David Beckham–led group, as of the start of the 2016 season, is working toward connecting all the dots on a plan that would allow them to be team 24 and coexist (or not) with the NASL’s Miami FC, which began play in 2016.
The league announced, from meetings the day before the 2015 MLS Cup, that the Beckham group has a stadium plan that has met MLS approval; it would now just be up to the group to work matters out with South Florida’s governmental entities to move forward toward, optimistically, the 2018 season.
The league also made it known that day that it was open to a future with twenty-eight teams—a message that has continued on into 2016.
That certainly has buoyed cities with MLS aspirations. Sacramento has been campaigning for a team for years; its USL team, the Sacramento Republic, lays out its aspirations on a page on its website, complete with a #BuiltForMLS hashtag. In April 2016, Garber visited Sacramento and according to an MLSSoccer.com article, gave quite strong hints that Sacramento will be team 25. As Evan Ream noted,
Sacramento Republic FC supporters gathered … for a block party thrown by the soccer club in downtown Sacramento, where hundreds of fans packed closed-down L Street between 15th and 16th in hopes of influencing MLS’s expansion decision.
As MLS Commissioner Don Garber took to the stage at the south end of the block, the massive crowd held up signs of the team’s “#BuiltForMLS” motto as well as giant cardboard cutouts of the commissioner’s face.
“We are making the announcement today that we will go to 28 teams,” Garber said to massive applause. “We hope and really we expect that Sacramento will be one of the next four [teams].
“The last piece of that is the process of that and the timing of that … is still to be determined,” he added. “But the good news is, I’m very, very impressed and excited by everything you guys have done.”3
San Antonio has also thrown its hat in the ring—provided everyone forgets all that 2005 unpleasantness—by buying Toyota Field (an 8,000-seat stadium built to easily be expanded to 18,000 should the city be awarded an MLS franchise), and partnering with Spurs Sports & Entertainment, which runs the dynastic NBA franchise. The new partnership, upon conclusion of the NASL Scorpions’ 2015 season, folded the Scorpions, and created a new Spurs-run USL team, San Antonio FC, positioning it for a potentially easier transition into MLS.
Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert announced their intentions to bring an MLS franchise to Detroit in April 2016, yet it wasn’t met with the enthusiasm you might expect from the city’s more hard-core supporters. “Detroit’s soccer hipsters are upset,” wrote Ty Duffy for the Big Lead. “The ‘Northern Guard,’ the Supporters’ Group for fourth-division Detroit City FC, is adamantly opposed to MLS coopting its precious brand,”4 referencing a Facebook post that declared, “Just because it’s the ‘top’ league doesn’t mean it’s actually worthwhile, and settling for MLS because you think it’s the best you can get just means you’ll never get anything better. The biggest and best-smelling turd on the buffet is still a turd you shouldn’t consume.” The Facebook post also noted “all of the options for moving up out of the National Premier Soccer League have major flaws. That’s not our club’s fault, but it’s a sign of the miserable state of American soccer that there’s no obvious place for a club built on passion rather than profit to continue its growth.”5
And a Detroit Free Press editorial, not quite sharing the Northern Guard’s invective for MLS, nevertheless groused, “It matters little that nearly 110,000 people filled Michigan Stadium two years ago, when Real Madrid played Manchester United—only two of the five most valuable sports franchises in the world. But just because there’s a soccer audience in this area doesn’t make it a sustainable market for an MLS franchise. It’ll be cute for a while because it’s new. But then even the heartiest soccer fans will realize that the quality of the MLS is mediocre, at best. And mediocrity only sells in Detroit sports if it comes from a team you’ve embraced your entire life.”6 (Should Detroit not welcome an MLS franchise, St. Louis, San Diego, Cincinnati and Indianapolis have all expressed interest in Garber’s pledge to grow the league to twenty-eight teams.)
Yet despite MLS’s growth and the increasing demand for its franchises, the league still maintains an accessibility to its players and its front office that is unparalleled among American sports leagues (which I would argue that MLS can now be counted among).
Sons of Ben president Ami Rivera, reflecting on the relationship the supporters’ group has with the team it helped launch, notes, “The fans here, in regards to the relationship we have with the front office and the players, is unlike anything I’ve witnessed before. We hang out with the players. We know these guys. We know their families. They come out to every [charity] event that we try to do—they’re willing to donate and actually be a physical part of it, which is huge. You don’t see that among any other sports groups. The Philadelphia Eagles aren’t coming out to some small supporters’ group’s benefit.”
Even with the demands of an MLS owner with a brand-new stadium, the Quakes’ Dave Kaval still maintains Tuesday afternoon “office hours,” born out of his belief in “being transparent and open,” having an open door, “almost over-communicating via social media,” and being upfront with fans to help build up trust. In office hours, “any fan can just come and meet me face to face, and talk about any issue they want to, to allow people to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and what was the path—how we were going to get to the point to open a world-class stadium and put a team on the field that people could be proud of.”
Office hours have gotten Kaval the eclectic mix you might expect; some fans come to him with starting lineups employing twelve or fourteen players, but he’s also met a local bank representative who became a sponsor, an analyst whom the club hired for a time, and in the process, he says, “It’s allowed me to have a really good feel for the pulse of the team and the fan base, and it also allowed me to talk to people who were irate, to discuss things … and to build an army of ambassadors and evangelists who have really gone out there to spread the message about what we do for soccer in the community.”
Not every front office around the league is willing to talk formations with fans, of course, but there’s a shared sense of the fan experience being vital to the future of MLS and to each club in particular, and different paths to get there. In Toronto, a major stadium renovation completed in May 2016 placed a roof over the seating areas to shield the fans from inclement weather. In Chicago, the Pub to Pitch bus is taking fans to Fire games, making the trip from soccer-friendly bars in downtown Chicago to Bridgeview and back in an effort to bolster numbers in the stadium. In Frisco, Texas, the entire south end of FC Dallas’s stadium is being transformed via a $39 million project with an end-of-2017 target completion date; at its conclusion, the stadium’s seating will be integrated into the design of the National Soccer Hall of Fame Museum, showcasing a century-plus worth of American soccer history.
As MLS continues its evolution, the supporters’ groups will certainly continue to be central to what happens in the league’s twenty and counting stadiums—sometimes brash, sometimes irreverent, sometimes even at loggerheads with the front office, but ultimately dedicated to the American version of the world’s sport, whether it’s the league they’ve known all their lives or the league they feared might not outlast them. Major League Soccer, unlike any of the leagues before it, seems positioned to remain intact and supported.