Many, then, busily plotted their lines from Korea towards the ultimate 'goal', which seemed to be M LS muscling up to the level of the 'big three' professional leagues, or at least reaching the less dizzy heights of the NHL. World Cup success didn't send the MLS turnstiles spinning, but Don Garber's preoccupation with the 'core fan', together with a decision to reduce the number of midweek fixtures, had already reaped modest rewards. In 2001 the league managed to celebrate its first increase in average attendance, and gates went up again the following year. Yet there were some puzzling anomalies. The 2001 champions were San Jose - no longer the Clash but the more nostalgic Earthquakes - whose gates dropped by nearly a quarter that season to become the lowest of any club: 9,600. And the league still carried more than a whiff of gimmickry. The highlight of the season, some claimed, was a farcical All-Star game that ended 6-6 and saw Donovan and Miami's Jim Rooney remove their shirts after scoring to reveal Brandi Chastain-style sports bras.
Those in MLS who still regarded the march toward sporting prominence as mostly a matter of marketing bluster were made to think twice that year. The latest pro gridiron venture, the XFL, launched by wrestling tycoon Vince McMahon, lasted all of one season before collapsing. With McMahon's name, a prime-time network TV contract and a surfeit of soft-porn cheerleaders, many expected the likes of the Los Angeles Xtreme and Memphis Maniax to titillate the same American public that had responded so fanatically to the spectacle of McMahon's wrestling events. But the XFL's combination of showmanship and skin proved a surprising failure. In much the same way MLS was looked down upon by those enamoured of the big European soccer leagues, the XFL drew unfavourable comparisons with its more established rival.
Garber insisted his league was not only staying put, but going places. Yet after the 2001 season it opted to contract, removing itself from an area of the country once considered crucial. Despite enjoying its best season on the pitch and at the gate, the Miami Fusion had lost too much money - $50 million - for its investor-operator, telecommunications magnate Ken Horowitz. Across the peninsula, the Tampa franchise was also disbanded, the league-run Mutiny having set a new M LS low by winning just four matches that season. Combined with the departure of Carlos Valderrama to Colorado and a scandal involving the embezzlement of $100,000, it made for a wretched year. Overtures failed towards Malcolm Glazer, whose NFL team played in the same new $169 million Raymond James Stadium as the Mutiny. Glazer had cast a predatory eye across the Atlantic towards the altogether more tempting proposition of Manchester United, and by May 2005 he would controversially acquire a controlling interest in the club.
Down to its original size of ten teams, MLS seemed to be back where it started. 'I know many out there think this is the end of Major League Soccer, and that couldn't be further from the truth,' Garber insisted. ' It's something we feel is a new, strong beginning.' After the Los Angeles Galaxy had clinched the 2002 MLS Cup in front of a record crowd for the fixture, 61,316, it was tempting to sympathise with that view. For the first time, all the clubs in an American soccer league had averaged more than 10,000 fans, and most had exceeded 15,000. Part of this could be attributed to a remarkable level of parity (just 19 points separated the best and worst teams). Beneath the veneer, though, lay a familiar bedrock of transience. The size of the MLS Cup crowd, for instance, was due almost entirely to the presence of the home-town New England Revolution, and the Boston Globe for one noted that 'two months ago most of the people in Gillette Stadium couldn't have named three players on the [team], but yesterday they were claiming them as their own, and feeling their pain.'
Two of the Galaxy's most visible players helped to keep the trophy in California: Guatemalan international Carlos Ruiz, whose 24 goals made him the league's leading scorer, and a rejuvenated Alexi Lalas, sans goatee. It was an overdue achievement for a club finally claiming the title after losing in three previous finals, and which now replaced the slumping DC United as the league's most formidable side.
Further east, the multi-billionaire Philip Anschutz, a staunch conservative with close ties to Vice-President Dick Cheney, increased his holding to five clubs, buying the MetroStars and DC United to leave him in charge of half the league. Quite how a man once described by Fortune magazine as 'the nation's greediest executive' had come to place his faith in a sport few had made money from was difficult to fathom. Some pointed to a track record of extracting profit from opportunities rivals failed to identify - 'he has made his career out of proving others wrong,' Garber boasted - but as the cost of propping up teams playing in oversized stadiums with hefty rental fees began to bite, Anschutz soon reduced his portfolio.
With progress on soccer-specific grounds largely confined to drawing boards, other clubs felt the same sort of pinch. The MetroStars combed Harrison, New Jersey, in search of a refuge from pricey Giants Stadium, while the Dallas Burn thought they would be moving into a new home in nearby McKinney, Texas, only for local officials to change their mind about helping them build it. The Burn spent a disastrous 2003 season playing in a 13,000-seat high school facility, which curbed their attendance by nearly 40 per cent. The Chicago Fire looked as though they might have no home at all after Soldier Field was earmarked for a refurbishment to pacify the NFL Bears. Sent away for nearly two seasons, the Fire had to make do with a small college facility in suburban Naperville and a tiny artificial pitch.
The lone breakthrough was one Anschutz helped to broker on the west coast. In the industrial suburb of Carson, 30 miles south of the enormous Rose Bowl - a stadium so large even its famous college gridiron tenant rarely filled it - the Los Angeles Galaxy took possession of a new purposebuilt stadium in 2003. Part of a $150 million complex that also included a velodrome, an athletics track and a tennis arena, the inevitable 'naming rights' were sold to a DIY chain with no obvious link to sport. Yet the appeal of the Home Depot Center was hard for most fans to resist: a cosy 27,000-seat rectangular stadium decidedly upmarket from the facility in Columbus, boasting 42 luxury suites, a further 1,500 'club seats' and a restaurant overlooking the pitch. Its appeal was such that the organisers of the 2003 Women's World Cup had forsaken larger grounds to stage the final there. 'If the Los Angeles Galaxy don't make money this season, then maybe there's just none to be made in professional soccer in the United States,' concluded one writer. They did, just, but manager Sigi Schmid was among those who appreciated a longer-term significance. ' It means we are putting down roots, that we're not a temporary situation,' he declared. 'You don't build a stadium like this and in two years hang it up.' The new surroundings failed to stop Schmid's team from slumping to the worst record of their eight-year existence, yet average regularseason gates of nearly 22,000 - the highest figure anyone had managed since the league's first season - kept their new home pleasantly full.
Such enthusiasm remained elusive in San Jose, whose own stadium had been built in 1933. Even though the Earthquakes claimed a second MLS Cup in 2003, their gates continued to hover around 10,000. Local fans were strangely ambivalent towards a team far more successful than its NASL namesake, their frame of mind all the more puzzling since in Landon Donovan they possessed one of the most marketable players in the league. Having become only the second manager to win the championship more than once, San Jose's Frank Yallop emulated Bruce Arena by becoming manager of a national team, though in trying to get Canada to the 2006 World Cup the one-time Ipswich Town defender could not duplicate Arena's international success. The Canadians were eliminated after finishing bottom of their second-round qualifying group.
For most of America, soccer in 2003 didn't mean MLS so as much as it meant Freddy Adu, the precocious Ghanaian teenager who had moved to the US after his family won an immigration lottery and who burst on to the US sports scene in a blaze of publicity. After signing him for $500,000 (half the amount Nike had already paid for his services), DC United issued 315 press passes for their first match of the season, in which the centre of attention, two months short of his 15th birthday, obligingly came on as a subs
titute to give the league a welcome publicity coup. Not since 1887 had someone so young played for an American professional team.
Apparently more significant for MLS's credibility was Tim Howard's move from the MetroStars to Manchester United. While Keller, Friedel and Reyna had all become established Premiership material, none had struck gold with the country's most prominent club. Still looking for an heir to Peter Schmeichel, United had been impressed by Howard on a close-season tour, and for $3.6 million in the summer of 2003 they helped to break down one of the last frontiers of American soccer: a home-grown, MLS-bred product with no links to the mother country and no previous European experience had been hunted down by one of the biggest teams in the world. But after a spectacular first season in which he displaced Fabien Barthez and became the first American to secure an FA Cup winner's medal, the New Jerseyan's form slumped and he soon found himself in the reserves.
Howard was far from the league's first sizeable export - Friedel had left after its first season and the Trinidadian striker Stern John moved from Columbus to Nottingham Forest in 1999 - but his departure came at a time when MLS was redoubling its efforts to nurture and retain younger talent. There were exceptions, the most infamous being DC United's flirtation with Paul Gascoigne in 2002. `It's the promise of magic ... you may be reaching into the fire, but it may be worth it,' a club official admitted. (It wasn't.) And there was still a liberal helping of veterans such as the evergreen Preki Radosavljevic of Kansas City, who defied his 40 years to claim the league's Most Valuable Player award in 2003. But by and large MLS had grown younger as it grew older. At the end of the 2003 season, more than two dozen players with at least 100 appearances left the league, dropping the average age below 26 for the first time.
Worryingly, some on their way out were established internationals. Hanover 96 signed Clint Mathis, DaMarcus Beasley headed for PSV Eindhoven and Landon Donovan returned to Bayer Leverkusen, a move again fated to end in disappointment. These players should have represented the future of the league, but investor-operators were loath to compete in the global market. Shep Messing, the nonconformistgoalkeeper-turned-agent, was all too familiar with the wage disparity. 'I have a lot of clients in Europe who would love to play in MLS,' he claimed. 'But after I explain what MLS pays, they say, "OK, I'll visit there on vacation."'
DC United claimed their fourth MLS Cup in 2004 with the league's youngest championship team. Two goals from 22-year-old striker Alecko Eskandarian, son of the famous Cosmos defender, led them to victory over Bob Gansler's Kansas City Wizards. Another former US coach, Steve Sampson, had joined Los Angeles after two years in charge of Costa Rica. Chastened by his experiences in France ('I was not as seasoned as I needed to be ... at the time, I felt I had all the tools'), Sampson took the Galaxy to within 90 minutes of the championship game.
In other seasons, he might have been more fortunate. The league made the curious decision to reduce the 2004 semi-finals to the same one-off, winner-take-all match as the final, while keeping the quarter-final round two-legged. The aggregate system (though not quite the one practised elsewhere; away goals didn't count double) had produced a memorable semi-final the year before - a 5-4 aggregate win by San Jose over the Galaxy after trailing 4-0 from the first leg, one of the most memorable contests in league history - but for some this had represented just another reason to loathe soccer. 'Imagine a world in which you could lose the final game of your postseason series - and advance,' bellowed one soccerphobic columnist. 'That's the world of MLS. In any postseason in any sport anywhere, all that matters is that you win; in MLS, all that matters is how much you win by. This isn't just un-American, it's downright inhuman.'
Of course, the league had embraced other more American practices which seemed even less rational - most notably, deciding its champions through a play-off system, a concept so deeply embedded in American sport few could contemplate anything different. And in allowing eight of the ten teams to participate, it continued to render six months of regularseason matches almost meaningless, with 30 games resolving the fate of only two teams. Persisting with play-offs seemed to run counter to the league's policy of targeting the hard-core soccer fans who, among other things, preferred 0-0 draws to Shootouts (in 2004, MLS boldly eliminated extra time from regular season play altogether).
The play-off system alone may not have been enough to turn away prospective fans, yet soccer snobs remained aloof and even hostile to a league they regarded as second-rate. Looking down one's nose at MLS, caustically referring to it as Minor League Stupidity or even Mostly Like Shit, had become a popular pastime for those enamoured of the televised glamour of the European leagues. To elitists swathed in imported replica jerseys, the performance of Manchester United, Juventus or Barcelona, religiously tracked via the internet and cable TV, was of far greater consequence than anything they could buy a ticket for.
Millions of Americans with only a passing interest in soccer were now familiar with David Beckham, who had never so much as kicked a ball in the US, and the red jersey of his principal employers. United were, as American reports unfailingly termed them, `the New York Yankees of soccer', a connection cemented in 2001 when the two clubs reached a marketing and merchandising agreement. In 2003 Manchester United arrived in the US for a series of midsummer friendlies, christened ChampionsWorld, between some of the most recognisable club `brands'. The football significance of these contests was virtually nil, but their turnstile appeal was almost without precedent.
Despite charging as much as $125 a ticket for essentially meaningless games, the four US fixtures the Premiership champions appeared in that summer attracted more fans than nine of the ten MLS clubs could manage across their entire season. Though Beckham had been sold to Real Madrid and missed the trip, nearly 67,000 flocked to Seattle's new $300 million stadium for United's first match, a 4-0 win over Celtic. 'Fans savored the spectacle', noted one report, observing how they `turned the stadium into a giant bowl of twinkling flashbulbs every time a player fired a free kick'. Plenty more twinkling followed. More than 57,000 turned up at the LA Coliseum for United's exhibition with Mexico's Club America; a duel with Juventus drew 79,000 to Giants Stadium; and 68,396 saw them baptise Philadelphia's new $512 million stadium with a victory against Barcelona.
Was this a boost for US soccer, or a kick in the teeth? In some ways, things had changed little since the original ASL had sputtered to a halt during the Great Depression. The American fan was still attracted to foreign clubs playing under summer skies, not the season-long grind of workaday teams with largely unknown players. The intensity of the promotion may have changed, but watching an exhibition between Barcelona and AC Milan - as 45,864 did in Washington that summer - still sold tickets in a way bona fide competition did not.
In the 1980s, the NASL had staged a Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup between two of its top clubs and two from overseas, and crowds of 30,000 or more showed up in Giants Stadium to watch the likes of Roma and Fluminense play the Cosmos, at a time when the league's gates were falling. MLS failed to devise an equivalent - one which, aside from the obvious financial considerations, might have helped to establish its credibility in the eyes of the more disparaging fan. But the ChampionsWorld clubs and impresarios, which included Giorgio Chinaglia, saw little to be gained from playing American teams, and they returned in 2004 to continue their spectacular plunder.
In deciding where and how to expand its humble footprint, MLS pinned its hopes not on star-studded exhibitions or high-profile acquisitions but on finding permanent homes for its members. 'I would much rather invest in brick and mortar that will be around for 50 years,' maintained Don Garber, than have what people perceive as the fix in terms of players.' But the expansion of the league by two clubs for 2005 involved building only one new facility. The other entrant would share a stadium, and take the league in a new and contentious direction.
In August 2004 Jorge Vergara, the owner of Mexican League club Deportivo Guadalajara (known as Chivas), was granted an MLS franchi
se aimed overtly at enticing the elusive Mexican-American fan. Funding a team for MLS, which borrowed the Chivas nickname, sent a comforting message to league officials about the viability of their operation. Yet what was initially expected to be a victory for the city of Houston (teeming with Latinos and with a disproportionately high audience for MLS telecasts) or San Diego (close to the Mexican border), evolved into a novel proposition for Carson, California. Not since the ill-fated year of 1967 had two professional soccer teams used the same ballpark, but the Galaxy would now share their home with Chivas USA, sparing the league the expense of hiring one elsewhere.
That decision, combined with Chivas's Latino-conscious marketing strategy (slogan: 'Goodbye soccer, hello futbol'), appeared to push the Galaxy down a more Anglocentric path. But it soon emerged that loyalties did not necessarily follow ethnic lines. Many Latinos, especially those who weren't Mexican-Americans, saw no need to shift loyalties. Criticised in some quarters for fielding what appeared to be a reserve Mexican League team, Chivas finished bottom of their division and well out of the play-off race. Though their average gate of 17,000 was reasonably healthy, it was distorted by a crowd of 88,816 in the Coliseum for a 'Night of the Super Clasicos', a double-header that included a friendly between Vergara's Guadalajara and the immensely popular Club America of Mexico City.
The other newcomer, operating out of a market no larger than Columbus, was just as much of a surprise: Salt Lake City, Utah. For a $1 million deposit and the promise to build a soccer-specific facility, a consortium of investors headed by Dave Checketts, a former pro basketball executive, trumped several more likely candidates (among them Cleveland, which dropped out after its likely owner died during the preparation of a bid). Oddly, the franchise was christened Real Salt Lake, apparently an appeal to the international grounding of the core fan, and one which could scarcely have been more different to the Rowdies, Roughnecks and Rogues of the NASL.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 43