Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)

by David Wangerin

  What seemed clear enough was that, at last, the nation had come to terms with the game itself. Little was made of the fact that the final had ended goalless or that, for all its suspense, it had produced few thrills over the 120 minutes of normal play. One account claimed that the 'biggest reaction of regulation time was when the crowd booed as Clinton was shown on the scoreboard'. Even fidgety children seemed to have been riveted. 'It was never boring,' one nine-year-old told a reporter. 'We didn't score for a while, but the end was very, very exciting.'

  While television had worked wonders for the women, it seemed to be conspiring against Major League Soccer. The Premiership and Champions League were encroaching into American homes through cable TV, captivating many fans for whom the empty stadiums and inferior talent of MLS, its matches plagued with artifices like the Shootout, represented strictly Minor League Soccer. Curiously, in Britain, the N FL was struggling with a similar phenomenon in reverse, even after relaunching its foundering World League of American Football in 1995 as NFL Europe. Trudging off to see the London Monarchs remained a poor substitute for an armchair viewing of the latest big game from America. The Monarchs, and others, soon disappeared.

  For the fourth straight year average MLS attendances fell, though almost imperceptibly (only about 30 fans a game) and neither ABC nor ESPN claimed any upsurge of interest as a result of the women's World Cup. The league had attracted a modest share of fans, but signs of growth were limited. 'We had this infant baby sitting in a cradle,' Doug Logan reflected. 'Everyone had taken great delight in the birth. As with newborn babies, nothing goes wrong. Everything is terrific. Everyone overlooks even the soiled diapers.'

  By 1999 the mood had turned less charitable. Salary cap restrictions, league expansion and management decisions combined to ensure that many of the most recognisable names didn't stay in one place for long. John Harkes, Alexi Lalas, Tony Meola, Carlos Valderrama, Eric Wynalda, Leonel Alvarez and Roy Lassiter had all changed clubs. Raul Diaz Arce moved three times. 'Competitive balance' further clouded the issue. MLS still assigned arriving 'marquee' players to their 'markets', a practice that produced countless allegations of favouritism and rulebending. Yet for all its even-handed intentions, the league was still left with weak teams: in particular, San Jose, New England and its problem child, the MetroStars, who had never progressed past the first round of the play-offs and were anything but the big-city flagship franchise the league craved.

  The RotMasters, as Soccer America's Paul Gardner termed them, appointed their fifth manager, the ever-available Bora Milutinovic, only to plummet to a new low, winning just seven of 32 matches. With gates dropping below 15,000 and the club having run through 76 players during its brief existence, Giants Stadium was now playing host to a club about as far removed from the Cosmos as it was possible to be. The acquisition of Lalas in 1998, expected to shore up both the club's defence and its fan appeal, did neither. Dismissed by one writer as 'one of the worst defenders ever to play in MLS', Lalas's celebrity value was all but exhausted. He stayed at the Meadowlands only a year and a season later announced his retirement ('I'm going to drive across the country'), though he would resurface with a vengeance in 2001.

  Lalas spent the 1999 season with the Kansas City Wizards, arriving with another MetroStars cast-off, Tony Meola. But neither of the two World Cup heroes made much of an impact at the gate. The club's pitiful average of around 8,000 was for the third straight year the worst in the league, looking all the more tiny in 79,000-seat Arrowhead Stadium. An early-season losing streak brought Ron Newman's 31-year career as manager of various indoor, outdoor, professional and semi-professional teams to an unceremonious end.

  His dismissal left only one manager where he had started in 1996, David Dir of the Dallas Burn, a team whose regular-season proficiency was habitually betrayed by the poor play-off form that eventually cost him his job. The Burn, like the Tampa Bay Mutiny, remained without an investor-operator and continued to be run by the league, with the anticipated ethnic support largely failing to materialise. Dallas's most impressive player was not some prized Latin import, but a Nebraska-born college product named Jason Kreis, the league's leading scorer in 1999. In Los Angeles crowds were down by nearly 25 per cent even though the Galaxy won their division for the second year in a row, while in Miami support for the expansion Fusion plummeted almost as badly.

  In Columbus, though, gates were up by more than 5,000 a game, and with good reason. The Crew had made American soccer history with what MLS insisted was the country's first big-time stadium designed for the sport (the league has repeatedly dismissed the claims of the stadium Sam Mark built for Fall River in the 1920s on the grounds that neither the ASL nor the capacity of Mark's Stadium amounted to 'major league'). Unable to convince the city's taxpayers to assist, Lamar Hunt funded most of it himself. It went up in just nine months, at the modest cost of $28.5 million (the Cleveland Browns' new gridiron home would come in at ten times that amount) and with an intimate capacity of 22,500. For the self-styled `hardest-working team in America', the stripped-down design of laudably unsponsored Columbus Crew Stadium - no roof, no enclosed concourses and only 30 glass-fronted 'club loges' - seemed appropriate. More importantly, front-row fans were now just eight feet from the touchline, no longer separated from it by the athletics track of Ohio Stadium. An overflow crowd of 24,741 saw the Crew's first match in its new home, a 2-0 win over New England. Hunt, who gave passes to 850 construction workers who had put in extra hours to ensure it would be ready in time, reflected: 'One stadium in one city and one sold-out game don't make a success, but this stadium will be here for 50 years, even if I won't be.'

  The 1999 MLS Cup turned out to be a repeat of the first, with DC defeating Los Angeles in Foxboro. Two crass mistakes from a normally frugal Galaxy defence settled the outcome, but for some the selection of Foxboro Stadium, its pitch narrowed for the gridiron season, was a bigger blunder than any committed during the match. The league had declined to reconfigure the stadium to accommodate a wider pitch (saving itself $30,000) and the unyielding, furrowed surface - chewed up by an NFL battle less than a week earlier - featured a wide swathe of bare earth almost the length of the pitch. The ball was bouncing around like bunnies,' observed Marco Etcheverry, who once again emerged as United's play-off saviour. Harsher critics looked beyond the sorry turf. The incongruous image of teenage diva Christina Aguilera prancing about a stage at half-time, lip-synching her selections, personifies what MLS has been passing off as marketing,' lamented Soccer America, and many fans believe its product on the field is just as ersatz as Aguilera.'

  The architect of the league's leading club begged to differ. 'I've seen a lot of teams in Europe that DC United could beat, teams that are playing in the Bundesliga and the Premiership,' Bruce Arena maintained. 'I'm not ready to tell people to get on the boat and go to Europe if you want to learn something about soccer. We know what we're doing here.'

  Now Arena had the chance to prove his assertion on the biggest stage, filling the national team vacancy left by Steve Sampson. His domestic record may have been outstanding, but his international experience was confined to a mediocre showing at the 1996 Olympics, when the US went out at the group stage. With the luxury of a four-year, $2 million contract - the likes of which had never been offered to his predecessor - Arena also found himself with nearly two years to prepare his team for its first qualifying match of the 2002 World Cup.

  Arena made no drastic changes in personnel, though MLS proved capable of drawing new talent to his attention. Where MLS was getting its talent from, though, became a source of grave concern. The college season remained derisively brief and continued to blunt the most promising careers, as the former college boss Arena realised: 'No one is questioning the ability of college coaches, but is the college system the right environment to develop international players? The answer is no.' While basketball and football seemed to bend over backwards for the pro leagues, college soccer disowned all obligations to MLS and professionalism,
insisting its only responsibilities were to itself and the education of its 'student-athletes'.

  So began what came to be termed Project-40, a joint effort between MLS and the USSF to identify the nation's top 17- to 22-year-olds and in effect pay them not to play college soccer, offering instead a 'developmental' MLS contract which engaged them year-round while providing funds for further education. The bold scheme caught the universities off guard, leaving many to complain they hadn't been properly consulted. But their insular stance had scarcely merited much co-operation.

  One the earliest aims of Project-40 was to produce an Under-23 team capable of success at the 2000 Olympics, yet the US unexpectedly crashed in qualifying (beaten at the final hurdle by Guatemala) and never reached Australia. A few years would pass before players such as josh Wolff, who lasted three years at the University of South Carolina, and DaMarcus Beasley, an Indiana high school student who signed his first MLS contract two months shy of his 17th birthday, established themselves as national team mainstays. But by November 2000 the 46 players acquired by Project-40 included just 13 who had never played at a university level, suggesting the college game had little to fear. Some prodigies did slip through the programme's fingers, most notably the captain of the US Under-17 team, Landon Donovan, who ended up with Bayer Leverkusen. Though he eventually returned to MLS without playing a minute in the Bundesliga, one could hardly blame the Californian midfielder for looking overseas, since the salaries offered to Project-40 recruits were as frugal as the league's pay-scale on the whole.

  Yet Europe sometimes proved as frustrating as four years of university. In 1992, Manchester United signed another Californian high schooler, Jovan Kirovski, and gave him an extensive run in their reserve team. Difficulties in securing a work permit resulted in his transfer to Borussia Dortmund, where he played only sporadically. Kirovski then wandered from club to club (Fortuna Cologne, Sporting Lisbon, Crystal Palace, Birmingham City) before somewhat unceremoniously joining MLS at the age of 28.

  One source of talent remained largely untouched by Project-40 or the college system: America's enormous base of Latinos, many of whom played outside the sanctioned boundaries of 'organised' US soccer. Though about 13 per cent of the US population was Latin American, the proportion playing in MLS had never come close to that level. The USSF admitted it lacked an appropriate system for identifying and targeting Latino talent, while colleges focused their recruitment efforts on suburban high schools. More strenuous efforts had been made to attract Latino supporters, but the results were almost as disappointing. Those with backgrounds in the smaller Central American countries had a relatively sympathetic view of the league, but the more numerous Mexican-Americans saw little reason to be swayed from the Primera Division Nacional, broadcasts of which were readily available on Spanishlanguage television. An MLS team largely stocked with gringos and playing in an unsympathetic style was hardly enticing. When the Los Angeles Galaxy sent Jorge Campos to the Chicago Fire in 1998, league officials hoped his transfer would galvanise support from MexicanAmericans there, but Campos fell out of favour with manager Bob Bradley and played just eight times before leaving the league.

  While MLS struggled to pull together the disparate strands of its fan base, its clubs proved more successful at integrating with the international fraternity. DC United nearly won a second Concacaf championship in 1999, losing in the semi-finals along with the Fire in a double-header curiously staged in Las Vegas. The following season the Galaxy defeated CD Olimpia of Honduras to become only the second American club to claim the zonal crown. Though organisers continued to tinker with the format of the competition - and never finished the 2001 tournament - MLS steadfastly offered its support in spite of generally meagre rewards. The Galaxy's victory took place in front of just 8,500 in the LA Coliseum.

  A similar lack of interest plagued the Open Cup, which celebrated its 85th anniversary in 1999 to typically scant attention. Its largest crowd, for any tie, was still the 21,583 who had seen the 1929 final between the Hakoah All-stars and Madison Kennel Club of St Louis. Though most MLS clubs patronised the competition - and dominated it - their fans were much less enthusiastic. As few as 1,200 saw the 1997 semi-final between the MetroStars and Burn, inexpensively staged on the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan.

  Only fans of the Rochester Raging Rhinos took to the cup in a big way. But the A-League side's elimination of four MLS clubs in 1999 helped to illustrate the difficulties the USSF faced in soliciting interest in its showcase competition. Victories over Chicago and Dallas, both in front of more than 10,000 at home, put the Rhinos into the semi-finals, which the federation had consented to stage far from the grounds of any of the four participants - Colorado, Columbus, Rochester and an A-League entry from South Carolina called the Charleston Battery - at a modest new soccer-specific facility in Virginia. A tropical storm held the attendance down to less than 2,500, by which time the decision to play the final in the Crew's new stadium had already been taken. When Columbus twice failed to hold on to a lead against the Rhinos and dramatically conceded a long-range match-winning goal in injury time, hopes of a large gate for the final evaporated.

  Though Rochester stood on the brink of a small piece of soccer history, the premature decision to play in what was now a neutral and largely uninterested city meant a potentially rousing final - shown live on national television for the first time - became a pitiful anticlimax. A scant 4,500 saw the Rhinos beat the Rapids 2-0 despite the absence of three regulars. 'If you can't join them, beat them' read the T-shirts of their band of rapturous fans, most of them convinced that Rochester's cup exploits (in four seasons, they had won six of nine ties against MLS opposition), together with appearances in the two most recent A-League championship games, merited 'promotion' to the higher league. What held the Rhinos back may not have been pedigree so much as facilities - their home had been built three years earlier for a minor league baseball team and held only 13,000. The club's owners promised to build a new arena, realising that for MLS soccer-specific stadiums were now de rigueur.

  With certain exceptions. There was, for example, little chance that the Kansas City Wizards would ever leave Arrowhead Stadium, not with Lamar Hunt's family owning both. The single-entity structure in effect subsidised the rent charged to the club by the stadium corporation while allowing the Hunts to keep the car parking and concessions revenue. For similar reasons, one could see why the Kraft family did not wish to move the New England Revolution out of their NFL home in Foxboro. But where investor-operators were merely tenants, the craving for `ancillary revenue' had grown acute. As Columbus's new facility took in money from gridiron exhibitions, pop concerts and even a lacrosse championship, the owners of the MetroStars found themselves parting with about $1 million each season for the use of Giants Stadium, while DC United insisted that the proprietors of their ground pocketed more from an MLS match there than they did. The MetroStars, Fire, Burn and Galaxy all vowed to follow Columbus in leaving their gridiron quarters, but in the search for homes of their own suffered from the vagaries of local politicians and property owners.

  Having pronounced 1999 the `year of no excuses', MLS's disappointing progress left Doug Logan in a precarious position, and he resigned before the play-offs. The man who had boldly targeted 20,000 fans a game in the happy aftermath of a promising debut season had instead presided over four straight years of gradually declining crowds and flat television ratings, a hand further weakened by his hasty pre-season dismissal of Sunil Gulati. The Krafts promptly hired Gulati to preside over their MLS interests and soon their preferred choice as Logan's successor, Don Garber, was handed the commissioner's reins.

  The 42-year-old Garber was popular with the Hunts as well as the Krafts, largely because he had spent the past 15 years working for the NFL, most recently as the successful managing director of its international division. Like Logan, he had no background in soccer (he numbered among his five immediate priorities 'developing a working knowledge of the game') but
after mingling in the stands with his new customers wasted little time in endearing himself to the most traditional of them.

  Within three months of his arrival, and to the cheers of purists, Garber abolished the Shootout ('We want to align our game with the rest of the world ... We do not want a contrived device to end our games'). In its place came two five-minute golden-goal periods, meaning that although America's vaunted thirst for winners would not be completely ignored, for the first time in a quarter of a century a big-league American professional soccer match could end in a draw - even a goalless one. We have to go back and shore up our existence with the core soccer fan,' Garber insisted. 'We do know in our research that there are approximately 60 million people in this country that consider themselves soccer fans. We don't have 60 million people going to our games.'

  The league also eliminated the Americanised practice of counting down the official time on a scoreboard clock, and even toned down its garish playing strips. Garber spoke enthusiastically of expansion, including the possibility of placing a second team in the New York area to compete with the flaccid MetroStars. Not since the Cosmos rocked New York with one blockbuster signing after another in the mid-1970s has so much change shaken American soccer so quickly,' claimed an excited Soccer America.

  Soon M LS revealed a blockbuster signing even the Cosmos would have been proud of, and one which the MetroStars hoped would transform their fortunes in 2000: Lothar Matthaus, Germany's veteran midfielder, who at 38 had been released by Bayern Munich yet continued to turn out for the national team as he closed in on a record 144 caps. Matthaus would earn around $1 million in salary and endorsement deals, yet the league expected to make money from his acquisition, largely through a deal with German television. To veteran reporters such as Alex Yannis of the New York Times, the arrival of an international superstar at Giants Stadium offered a throwback to the glamour days of the NASL: