Getting Reacquainted with DC United, MLS's Aging Rockstars

Give us a push back stage, love, and you can see it.

Thumbnail History: MLS’s Washed-Up Rock Stars
Pretty much anyone who follows MLS knows that DC United was its first great team. How that success came about may be less known. Bruce Arena built his reputation there, of course, but it also started with winning the lottery on one of their first Marquee Player picks (Marco Etcheverry; scroll down here to see the full list), that selection connecting them to the Tahuichi Academy, Bolivia’s (then?) premier player development academy (hence, Jaime Moreno), and the signing of a semi-random striker who would hold the single-season record for goals scored for 23 years (Roy Lassiter). With a nod to all the teams that made it possible (i.e., the poor fuckers who allowed them), MLS was a free-scoring league over its first five seasons, and DC generally led the way (with the 1998 LA Galaxy as the other big swinger). After the 2001 contraction, scoring fell off cliff (from 51 goals scored/allowed in 2000 to 42.1 in 2002), and with the ability to just buy talent seven to eight years in the future (or, honestly, more like 12), the margins separating the best teams from the worst shrunk. It’s possible that DC’s on-field successes (plus playing in a global capital) helped them pull off their generally forgotten Renaissance in the mid-2000s. With Moreno back from a stint in the EPL, shiny new playmaker, Christian Gomez, pulling the strings from midfield, Ben Olsen and Brian Carroll doing the dirty work and OG Kiwi Ryan Nelsen anchoring the backline, DC won its last MLS Cup in 2004. Several of those same players carried them to consecutive Supporters’ Shields in 2006 and 2007, if with replacements/upgrades like Bobby Boswell at the back and Luciano Emilio spearheading the attack. All of that success created a firewall thick enough for them to (still!) hold on at sixth place on the all-time Joy Points Scale (methodology below*) despite getting slapped with four (4!) Wooden Spoons and some of the literally worst seasons in MLS history. When DC sucks, in other words, they suck. As laid out below, they won their last trophy of any kind back in 2013 and its entirely fairly to say they haven’t been meaningfully competitive for going on a decade. That doesn’t mean they haven’t signed some real talent – e.g., a young Luciano Acosta, Wayne Rooney and, more recently, Christian Benteke – but, after their glory years, their hit-rate with signing top-rate talent from outside MLS has been patchy at best – e.g., Edison Flores - and too-often under-supported by the talent around it. Some of that might follow from betting too heavily and too long on the next future soccer star; Freddy Adu was just the most egregious (and now-outdated) example, but DC also pissed away years in the 2000s/2010s waiting for, say, Santino Quaranta and Nick DeLeon to fill their forever-potential. A strategy of rescuing once-great cast-offs from other MLS teams – e.g., Julius James, Fabian Espindola, Chris Rolfe, Alvaro Saborio, and Pedro Santos – provides another theory for how and why DC has fallen so far behind, not just their once-lofty standard, but the league as a whole. The choices they’re making aren’t uncommon by any means; it’s more that DC sucks at making the right choices and have for multiple seasons.

Total Joy Points: 38

Getting Reacquainted with DC United, A Metaphor on the Benefits of Inherited Wealth

Had some great damn songs, but...

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

Thumbnail History

Tempting as it is to see DC United as the team that squandered its legacy as the first best team in MLS, that narrative writes their first (and only) renaissance out of its history – i.e., the 2004-07 seasons, which saw them win another Cup and two more Shields. The echo might have been half as loud, but it did happen. Against that, those first straight-up fucking insane seasons – DC won three MLS Cups and two Supporters’ Shields, on top of having a crack at a fourth Cup in 1998 (the Chicago Fire won that one) – created a firewall thick enough for them to hold at sixth place on the all-time Joy Points Scale (methodology below*) despite getting slapped with four (4!) Wooden Spoons and some of the worst seasons in league history. Between them checking out of the post-season a half decade at a time and 10 seasons of Benny-ball (when Ben Olsen was in charge) thrown into the mix, it’s almost impossible to remember that DC United reigned as the undisputed Kings of MLS 1.0. Some of MLS’s first great players starred for DC, not all of them listed below (e.g., Jeff Agoos, Roy Lassiter, and Raul Diaz Arce, to name a few). In fewer words, yeah, the designated-player era passed them by. That doesn’t mean they didn’t try, and that they haven’t had a couple hyped hopes, but they have yet to catch up to a league that seems to get faster with each passing season.

Best Season(s)

I’ll always have a soft spot for MLS Cup I, when DC stepped into the downpour that fell on it as the underdog, but I’d call the 1997 and 1999 seasons the franchise’s high-water marks. I don’t remember 1999 so good, partially because I’d moved on to Boston and rooting for the New England Revolution, but I had a front row seat for 1997 and they ran away with everything that wasn’t nailed down. Special team, special players…also, this is where I picked up my aversion to success…

Long-Term Tendencies

DC built their trophy-winning seasons on reliable, live-wire attacks – sometimes to the point of covering for a shaky defense. The reverse held true as well: they suffered their worst seasons when a stumbling attack became the anchor that drowned them. Defense hurt a little as well, but the offense was always a little worse. And here’s a fun little detail: despite its reputation for playing it safe, the Benny-ball era (2010-2020) didn’t consistently translate into improved defensive performances: DC either hit over or above the average for goals allowed in eight of his 10 seasons coaching the team.

An MLS History Project: 1997, The First Great Roster Build

Drawing your attention to the two dumb, squat trophies in the foreground...

Dang. It’s already getting harder to keep shit straight. I’ve got a thin prompt for one – mostly a table of standings, a handful of names (specifically, top goal scorers, players of the week/month), and who finished where – and digging much more than that violates the spirit of the project (started with 1996). So, I won’t…

Fortunately, I have a ready-made theme for 1997 – one based on the simple, accidental reality that I moved from Portland, OR to Washington DC in early ’97 (by Amtrak; I can’t recommend the method enough, young people). As noted in the post on 1996 (link up there), the first MLS Cup churned my loins into a passionate froth, so I was already in the tank for DC United when the logic of moving there made enough sense to get me there. The season had started before I arrived, but I still bought season tickets and spent the year going to RFK. Alone, too. I had company for a couple games, and I was lucky to have some close friends in the area at the time, but I still went to and watched* the overwhelming majority of games all on my lonesome.

To share one memory from those games at RFK, one that really stuck with me, there was a concourse between the set of seats in the field and the one immediately behind it, and my tickets were in that second tier of seats. Just about every game there, some very young woman in summer dress (e.g., tube-top, tank-top and short shorts, it hardly mattered) would walk that concourse to a chorus of cat-calls, whistles, and other unmentionable sounds. Genuinely icky, obviously, and that’s just 25 years ago people and that chorus was loud.

To turn to a happier memory, I also saw DC host Chivas de Guadalajara that year in an early iteration of the CONCACAF Champions League. The game ended in a draw, and DC looked all right doing it too. To be clear, this was an American team, with a couple Bolivian ringers (Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno) playing mighty Chivas to a draw. Sure, it was in DC – probably helped it was August, and I remember the tournament rules somehow bending in MLS’s favor as well – but I was so used to watching DC win by then that it all made sense.