MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER’S HEADQUARTERS ARE HOUSED ON TWO FLOORS of a Midtown Manhattan office building, three blocks north of the Empire State Building. Exit the elevator to the office’s reception area and you’ll see white-on-white signage with a gleaming silver MLS Cup (officially, the Philip F. Anschutz Trophy) in a clear glass case. The halls are white, but augmented with affirming bursts of solid color—from the current generation of MLS uniforms, logo-embossed shovels from multiple stadium groundbreakings, and photos capturing twenty years of history. It’s a league aiming for the enduring inevitability of its more established siblings, such as the National Football League counting its Super Bowls in increasingly unwieldy Roman numerals or the National Basketball Association’s logo featuring the silhouette of a player who was a star a half century ago. MLS headquarters is just blocks from the headquarters of the other four major American sports leagues, but there’s an approachability and even an accessibility to the league that places it in a whole different neighborhood from its sterner older brothers.
The league commissioner is unfailingly affable in his public appearances, going on halftime shows for the major marquee events in his sport—All-Star Games, finals, and conference championships—to answer questions with candor, even with gratitude to be having the conversation about soccer.
The deputy commissioner—the league’s first employee and someone who has been with it since before it was even a league, orchestrating the careful choreography of cities, investors, and TV partners to get MLS off the ground—keeps articles about how the league wouldn’t make it (which his wife had framed for him) in his study. Among his fondest memories of the league’s early ascendancy: going into a bar called Froggy’s in Playa del Ray, California, and asking them to find the satellite signal for a market-specific broadcast of an MLS match.
When the league launched in 1996, Americans were most likely to associate soccer with “soccer mom,” a demographic crucial to that year’s presidential election. They didn’t necessarily hear soccer and recall the World Cup that had blown through the nation just two years prior, in which American players wore a star-spangled monstrosity which has since lovingly, nostalgically, become known as the Denim Kit.
There were fans of soccer, but there was almost a secret-society quality to them. They’d watch a PBS weekly show called Soccer Made in Germany with highlights from Bundesliga games and Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) competitions. They’d congregate at English- and Irish-themed pubs to watch top-flight English teams. They’d go to newsstands and bookstores to purchase publications on “football” (for that’s how most of the countries, then as now, refer to soccer) that had wended their way across the Atlantic. Before the league launched in 1996, professional soccer was hard to find: there wasn’t an Internet to speak of, though it would soon come, albeit in the Pleistocene form of listservs and crudely designed websites and message boards.
Twenty years after the league’s inception, of course, that’s all changed. For instance, I can watch my beloved Arsenal (I’ve never been to London, but I love them all the same) on TV and via highlight videos; I can read and talk about them online; I can write about them for a fan-run website where Arsenal fans communicate; and, thanks to the team’s first American trip in twenty-five years, in 2014 I was able to be in the same stadium with some of them.
But it’s not the same as being in a stadium on a regular basis and having an ongoing relationship with a team. And if you choose the level of dedication that is part and parcel of being a supporters’ group member, you have a relationship not only with a team but also with people who feel as irrationally passionate about that team as you do. You might invest time, money, and energy into proclaiming your love for your team in the enemy’s stadium. You might paint a giant sheet over the course of several days, to unfurl it for only a mere thirty seconds before the start of a match, knowing that it will in all likelihood be captured by TV cameras—because, after all, that giant sheet is helping to set a fan-generated narrative for the match. You might scream yourself hoarse during ninety minutes of action. And at the end of the match, the players you’ve been screaming for, about, and very occasionally at will come over and clap for you, acknowledge you as the fans who are unabashed about your dedication.
If this sounds like the kind of experience you wish existed in American sports, then you should keep reading, because it exists in MLS.
This is a book about MLS and its first twenty years—but not everything about it. Creating a full history of MLS, even at this stage in its young life, would be staggeringly large and even encyclopedic in its scope. My intent in the following pages is to give you a sense of the arc of the league’s competitive, year-to-year action. MLS has a “competitive balance” (the term the commissioner prefers to “parity”) that has allowed thirteen teams in the league’s first twenty years to play in MLS Cup finals, which is impressive considering that the league hovered between ten and twelve teams until 2007. And to understand the league, it’s important to know at the very least who’s worn its crown at any given time.
But the league’s importance transcends scores, individual feats of brilliance, and even victors. Soccer in the United States is—as hokey as it might sound to the uninitiated, or even the initiated—a movement. Though soccer is a sport, and though it’s a decidedly American inclination to win at every sport, the movement attached to American soccer is more about learning, about belonging, about syncing our steps with others’ around the world. In the international game, the Americans are not favorites, our victories are continental rather than global, and our discernibly American guile and gumption makes us likable underdogs rather than a respected-yet-feared superpower. To draw from the movie The Karate Kid, we’re more Daniel LaRusso than Cobra Kai, and given how we’ve fared in the last few World Cups, we’re really more Daniel LaRusso before he learned how to crane kick.
MLS doesn’t have the longest traditions, the best players in the world, or the most money. But it’s a lot further along than it was in 1996, and there’s a strong sense among many that as it grows and develops it will get to a place among the world’s elite leagues, even if it continues to be slightly out of step with the rest of the world—operating without a promotion and relegation system, and on a different calendar, blithely continuing its regular season through the summer months when the rest of the world is quadrennially, exclusively fixed on the World Cup.
MLS also has a supporters’ culture that deserves to be known in greater depth by greater numbers, and that was an impetus for this book from the outset. On its surface, a supporters’ group is merely a self-declared group of dedicated fans who like to be loud and boisterous while wearing the colors of a hometown team. But it’s clearly more than that. A supporters’ group is a self-selecting community that is sometimes coarse in its language and brash in its countenance, yet ultimately an ambassador for soccer—loving the sport with an unparalleled dedication and trying to inspire that in others through example.
Supporters’ groups, when they’re their best selves, foster camaraderie and enable a sense of humor that is vital to following a soccer team. Even in high-scoring games, goals are events, and most fans’ reactions to the majority of game action are exasperated responses to a series of moments of almost. Soccer’s a sport that demands community, and supporters’ groups are the most dramatic expression of that.
And yet, in 2016, community can be found digitally and instantaneously. With a Twitter account and a hashtag, you can participate in an ongoing game discussion that is constantly moving and continually providing opportunities for commentary. Soccer is best enjoyed when it can be talked about, exulted about, or laughed about. Soccer has humor, personality, anecdotes worth sharing with others, and narrative.
This book has history, to be sure, but it also has stories and voices that go beyond who scored when and which team won. The interview transcriptions that became part of this book—the voices of people who have helped shaped the game, the famous and the not so famous—were periodically punctuated by my own laughter.
The writing of this book has been a personal journey in which I set out to learn more about the sport I love in the country I love. And it all starts on a particularly important July 4.
(No, not that one.)