His introduction resembled the fanfare generated by Pele and Franz Beckenbauer of the Cosmos two decades ago. Television cameramen and still photographers jostled for position, a crush of reporters asked questions in several languages and even the food was up to Cosmos' vintage ... The thing he liked the most, Matthaus said, was that he went around asking people if they knew the name Lothar Matthaus and they said no.
Unfortunately, for most of the season Matthaus's performances were equally anonymous, the ebbing of his skills leaving behind only a towering ego. In a match against Kansas City, incensed that a foul had not been given in his favour, he spent an age remonstrating with the referee's assistant, then removed his captain's armband and threw it at him. When the assistant tossed it back, Matthaus lingered on the touchline as play continued, then took up an argument with Kansas City's manager.
The MetroStars claimed their first division crown, though they generally performed better without the 1990 European Footballer of the Year than with him. Matthaus featured in only half the club's 32 regularseason matches, partly because of his ill-fated appearance at the European Championships that summer, and partly because he had been hampered by a back injury. Told to find somewhere warm to recuperate, he was photographed with his girlfriend on the beach at St Tropez - an incident that nearly prompted his dismissal - but such high-profile antics proved irresistibly valuable to an attention-seeking league (Garber confessed that he liked how the German superstar kept MLS 'in the news'). Soccer America reported that Matthaus, unhappy with the rented furnishings in his New York apartment, for which MLS was paying $10,000 a month, had sent out his girlfriend to stock it with items more to his taste. His 'thirst for tufted chairs could have been tolerated,' it claimed, 'had he not played with the immobility of a leather ottoman for most of the season.'
Rather more vision and guile came from another European Footballer of the Year, Hristo Stoichkov, who broke off an eight-month retirement to join the Chicago Fire. His appearances, too, were limited by injuries and temper, but he helped the Fire to a division championship and knocked the MetroStars out of the play-offs, scoring a superb goal in the deciding match. 'I don't miss Europe at all,' he claimed. 'Life here is calm.' (Though not always. In a pre-season friendly against a university team, Stoichkov was sent off for a high tackle that broke the leg of a first-year college player in two places and forced the abandonment of the match.)
Perhaps the best import of the lot was the Tampa Bay striker Mamadou Diallo, a journeyman Malian international whose professional career had accommodated stays in Morocco, Switzerland, Turkey and Norway. Benefiting from the midfield wizardry of Carlos Valderrama, who at 36 continued to torment defences, Diallo became the league's leading scorer with 26 goals. Yet his reputation was tarnished by a collision with the MetroStars goalkeeper Mike Amman - in a one-on-one situation where it appeared he had time to avoid contact - that left Amman with a punctured lung, three broken ribs and facial bruising. The injuries helped to end Amman's career, which had included two seasons with Charlton Athletic, and effectively put Diallo out of the running for the year's Most Valuable Player award.
That honour went to Tony Meola, a name many had written off but who had been reunited with his former national team boss Bob Gansler in Kansas City. Appointed the season before, Gansler quickly turned the Wizards around with a team built, predictably enough, on a cautious defence. Meola kept 16 clean sheets during the regular season - a significant statistic to a league which insisted on assigning win-loss records to goalkeepers - and helped the Wizards to their first championship. In the MLS Cup against Chicago, he made a series of crucial saves in the final ten minutes to be named man of the match in a 1-0 win.
The Washington crowd of 39,000 had been largely starved of entertainment, but few begrudged Lamar Hunt his first soccer championship since the Dallas Tornado's invisible NASL triumph of 1971. The USSF even took the unusual decision to rename the Open Cup in honour of soccer's most benevolent sugar daddy. The 'Lamar Hunt US Open Cup (for the Dewar Trophy)' hardly tripped off the tongue, but few millionaires had stood by the game for as long as the impassive 68-year-old, still as confident about the game's future as ever. 'I believe the league will be a successful financial entity within five years,' he predicted, adding - not for the first time in his life -'I seriously think soccer will become a major spectator sport in this country.'
Evidence to support such optimism was flimsy, with another small decline at the gate in 2000. ABC trimmed its broadcasts to just two matches, leaving the bulk of coverage on ESPN's fledgling second channel. Only about a million households watched the Wizards' titleclinching victory, but Garber remained outwardly cheerful. 'Right now it's vogue to bash MLS,' he claimed. 'I think it would have been much easier if we said initially we were expecting only 5,000 fans a game. We said 10,000 and nearly doubled that. Then we set our goal at 20,000, so 15,000 is seen as a failure.'
Arguably the most impressive area of growth had been in the labyrinth of rules, quotas and definitions the league had imposed on itself in pursuit of'competitive balance'. The limit of four foreign players per club excluded'youth internationals','transitional players' and'youth discovery players', though only the latter two counted against the league's 19-man roster. For 2000, the selection of college, Project-40 and other hopefuls had been funnelled into what the league termed a Superdraft, a development which may have been precipitated by exasperated comments from coaches such as David Dir, who said he didn't have any problems following the rules, but 'could never find out what the rules were'.
Just how tortuous player personnel matters had become is painfully evident in this extract from a wire-service report detailing the arrival of the Mexican striker Luis Hernandez:
Under MLS' single-entity structure, all players sign contracts with the league. Players of Hernandez's stature are then assigned to teams. Because the Galaxy were not due to be allocated a player, they agreed to make midfielder Clint Mathis and defender Joe Franchino available to all 11 other MLS teams for a special draft. The New York/New Jersey MetroStars had the first choice in the draft based on it having the fewest points in the league over the past 32 matches and selected Mathis. The New England Revolution then chose Franchino. The Galaxy will also have to relinquish one of their four other foreign players to stay under MLS' salary cap and foreign-player limitations. Costa Rican midfielder Roy Myers is expected to be that player, likely returning to the MetroStars, which traded him to the Galaxy last season.
With his long blond hair and eye for goal, Hernandez was widely expected to rejuvenate flagging interest in the Galaxy, and 40,000 turned up in the Rose Bowl for his home debut. But he ended the day in hospital with a sprained shoulder and his MLS career proved short and woefully undistinguished.
Garber began a second full year with his debt-ridden league still bent on expansion, but most of the soccer talk in 2001 centred on the new professional circuit that had been created to capitalise on the apparent surge of interest in the women's game. Underwritten by $40 million from cable television companies - and after intense consultation with M LS, which was contemplating a league of its own - the Women's United Soccer Association received the blessing of the USSF and kicked off an inaugural 21-game season in April.
Big-time sports leagues for women were not entirely new- the Women's National Basketball Association had been around since 1996 - but they were rare, and the WUSA seemed to stem from emotion as much as solid business principles. Hardly a famous name in the American team could resist making references to dreams having come true, even if the modest salaries amounted to rather less than a college graduate might expect to earn in other professions. But money seemed to weigh less heavily on some players' minds then posterity. `Have you ever planted a seed yourself, and it actually grows after you've watered it for months and months, and then it blossoms?' wondered Brandi Chastain. `That's how I feel about this league.'
'The women's World Cup players have demonstrated enormous drawing power,' asserted Joh
n Hendricks, a cable TV executive who emerged as the WUSA's main benefactor. Like most American soccer entrepreneurs, Hendricks hadn't grown up with the game, but he had taken his soccer-playing children to the Atlanta Olympics, where he was overwhelmed by 'the deep connection made by most of the kids in the audience' towards the American team. 'I just knew in the stands that night that the missing ingredient was television,' he insisted, that if television was added, it would be overwhelming for the country.'
In fact the nation was far from overwhelmed by the eight-team, singleentity league, and television failed to nurture an audience large enough to please its advertisers. Things started brightly enough, with 34,148 in RFK Stadium watching Mia Hamm and the Washington Freedom take on a team from San Jose bewilderingly named the Bay Area CyberRays (no one, it seemed, could explain what a CyberRay was).* Though the WUSA would never again produce such a gate, business remained sufficiently brisk. The league had originally set itself a target of 6,500 fans a game but ended up averaging above 8,000.
Part of this could be attributed to a level of player recognition and empathy strong enough to make MLS jealous. Before a ball had been kicked, fans from coast to coast lined up behind their World Cup heroines: Hamm of the Freedom, Chastain of the CyberRays, Foudy of the San Diego Spirit, Kristine Lilly of the Boston Breakers, Carla Overbeck of the Carolina Courage, Tiffeny Milbrett of the New York Power. From the first day, as one official related to USA Today, affections ran high:
At our inaugural game, Julie Foudy was on the field at halftime ... and Hyundai had donated a car. So Julie announces who won and the woman is just crying and Julie is like, ' I know, it's so exciting.' And the woman says, 'I don't care about the car. Can I have a picture of you?' The fact that she was face to face with this heroine for her, that's what we're about.
This was not necessarily unique to the league, or to women's soccer. The president of the W NBA, Val Ackerman, claimed her fans had 'a very emotional connection to the league' and supported it 'for reasons that go beyond basketball'. Indeed, the essence of WUSA's appeal may have had little to do with the sport itself, as John Powers of the Boston Globe suggested:
The W USA understands that what will make the league thrive is not so much what the players do on the field as what they do off it. What made Kristine Lilly and her US teammates special was not so much their gold-medal soccer skills as their gold-medal people skills. They understood what their fans wanted - a smile, a handshake, an autograph, an arm-aroundthe-shoulders photo. Just a moment's intimacy that would be remembered for a lifetime.
More than 21,000 attended the inaugural championship game in Foxboro, won by the CyberRays on penalties over Atlanta after an engaging 3-3 draw. The winners took possession of a trophy which had been named the Founders' Cup in honour of the 20 marquee players the league had first signed - and who happened to be financial stakeholders themselves.
Having budgeted $40 million to see it through the first five years, the league claimed to have exhausted that amount after just one season, but the turnstile success and overwhelmingly favourable media coverage kept officials pointing towards prosperity. Yet many of the changes instigated for the second season proved disastrous - particularly new television arrangements with a less conspicuous cable network. Gates fell by 15 per cent and the championship match, won by the Carolina Courage, was attended by less than 16,000. Players were asked to take pay cuts of up to 25 per cent, rosters were trimmed from 18 to 16 and league officials searched for corporate sponsorship with increasing desperation.
As fans sobered up from their lingering 1999 hangover, a number of awkward truths came clearly into focus. It appeared that men were far more likely to be sports fans than women, and that the sports they preferred to follow were those in which males took part. Research compiled by a Los Angeles university classified 20 per cent of men as 'devoted' sports fans, compared with about 5 per cent of women, and found that broadcasts of big sporting events typically attracted twice as many males as females. Even for women's tennis or women's basketball, the majority of viewers were of the opposite sex. At least one television media buyer had asserted before the WUSA's first season that'the biggest thing that makes soccer an attraction is nationalism' and 'nobody in this country will care about city against city'. Some, undeniably, had cared; but not enough of them, and as the league limped into its third season the women found themselves facing the same sombre realities as the men - namely, that waving the flag for a team of winners was as much as mainstream America wanted to do with soccer. A heady concoction of patriotism, proficiency and pride had turned both male and female World Cup stars into heroes and heroines; its absence relegated them back to dreary soccer players.
Marketing analysts attacked the league's strategy. Young girls, whom the WUSA had regarded as its target audience, became 'somewhat embarrassed' to identify themselves as fans once confronted with adolescence, and in any event mothers were less likely to take their kids to a sporting event than fathers. 'I was intoxicated by what I witnessed in 1999,' Hendricks confessed, and mistakenly assumed it would flow over.' Though some of it had, what patently had not was an appetite from well-heeled sponsors. Over three years, the league claimed it had lost close to $100 million.
When the SARS epidemic forced China to withdraw from hosting the 2003 World Cup, FIFA, flushed with happy memories of 1999, hastily reassigned the tournament to the US. Optimists expected new corporate backers to come to the WUSA's rescue, but less than a week before the start ofthe tournament the league announced it was folding- for the time being, it insisted. In the build-up to what should have been the highlight of the year, players and fans were left reconciling mixed emotions.
With just four months to organise the Cup, American officials were under no illusions that they would replicate the startling accomplishments of 1999. Of course, the success of USA 03 hinged largely on the performance of the American team, for whom nothing less than another world title would do. They began by destroying their Group A opposition - Sweden, North Korea and Nigeria - by a combined score of 11-1 in front of healthy, if not spectacular, gates: more than 34,000 at RFK Stadium for the first victory, and a capacity 23,000 in Columbus for their third.
Under April Heinrichs, who had replaced Tony DiCicco as the team's manager shortly after the 1999 title, the team had adopted a rather less flowing and more physical style of play, exemplified by the intimidating presence of six-foot, 11%2 stone Abby Wambach up front. Wambach scored the winner in a relatively easy 1-0 quarter-final victory over Norway and fans began unfurling their flags in anticipation of another championship. But a strangely subdued performance against Germany, before a full house of nearly 28,000 in Portland, Oregon, denied them the opportunity. Though the 3-0 scoreline flattered the victors, with two goals coming in stoppage time, the Germans' confident, fluid play merited a place in the final. And this time the 40 million Americans had been watching the NFL.
The stars ofthe American team were ageing, and many announced they would end their careers with the 2004 Olympic tournament in Greece. Attention focused particularly on the hopes of five who had appeared in the first World Cup 13 years earlier - Hamm, Foudy, Lilly, Chastain and Joy Fawcett - who together were reckoned to have made more than 1,200 appearances for their country. The 2-1 extra-time victory over a largely superior Brazil for the gold medal - witnessed by fewer than 11,000 in Athens, but carried live and without commercial interruption on American TV - represented all the closure fans could have wished for. Jim Litke of Associated Press reflected:
It was not going to be about selling their game, the way the gold medal in Atlanta or the silver in Sydney was. Or about proving to TV, corporate sponsors and the other half of America that women athletes can draw an audience and keep it. It wasn't going to be about their coach or their sport or even their country. It was payback for all the sacrifices those five made for each other, for the long stretches away from home, for postponing marriages, careers and school.
Now there was no WUSA to t
ide over the devoted fans until World Cup 2007. But even after 100 years the men's game still struggled for acceptance and recognition. The women could hardly expect an easier ride.
ii. Take Me Out to the
Soccer-specific Facility
The 2002 World Cup and beyond
It's no coincidence that only two things happen in Italy on Sunday: church and soccer. Soccer there is not a show. It is not entertainment. And that's part of the problem for the game here. Soccer in America is never, ever going to be the same experience it is overseas. It will always be uniquely American - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Alexi Lalas
ust how much of a soccer nation has the United States become? It's a tricky question. Certainly the game has not managed to permeate popular culture - office conversations, school playgrounds, radio phoneins and so forth - the way the major sports do, and it seems a long way from doing so. It has not left much of a historical imprint, either. Though catalogues of the country's greatest sporting moments are certain to include all manner of World Series and Super Bowl victories, basketball triumphs, gold-medal-winning Olympic performances and highlights from golf and tennis, they are almost as certain to exclude soccer achievements of any description. In their 2001 book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman go so far as to assert that 'there is no soccer in the United States', on the basis that the vast majority of its citizens are not 'emotionally attached' to the game in the way other nations are, or as Americans are to pastimes of their own.
Others, with eyes fixed firmly on the millions of young people playing the game, are more generous. They point to how soccer has supplanted Little League baseball in many communities, and how at some high schools coaches have been forced to take rejects from the soccer team to bump up the numbers for gridiron. Young women are playing the sport in record numbers, to the extent that more female collegiates are engaged in soccer than any other competitive sport.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 41