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| Bro. Don't. It doesn't end well. |
First, and full disclosure, you can skip this post and just watch a young Rob Stone tell you the story of the 2000 MLS season. That’s about an hour of your life (and why'd they stop making those?!), so this’ll be shorter. Probably. I do go on…starting now…
If I gave the impression that I can place some, or even all MLS Cups in time, this is inaccurate. The 2000 MLS Cup Final, on the other hand, sticks in my memory like a rock in a shoe. It was the first final in league history that I dreaded and prayed to all the gods I can name (it’s a lot) to keep it from coming to pass. It did, obviously, and the 2000 Kansas City Wizards team that won it was that rock in my shoe. It took their more recent face-lift and a general improvement in their approach to the game to make me stop hating them. So, that was what? 15 years?
The Wizards won MLS Cup that season by beating a far more interesting Chicago Fire 1-0 on an 11th minute goal by Danish import, Miklos Molnar. To look back through brighter lenses, that awful ending casts a shadow over a season that sparkled with all kinds of massive debuts. The 2000 season saw the great incoming and upcoming of some of the most important players in MLS history, but it was the latter group (e.g., the upcomers) that teams would rely on and build around for the entire decade to come. As you’ll see when I get to them, these aren’t all household names; better still, at least one actual legend made a lot of noise when he joined the league, only to leave it with a bitchy little Teutonic whimper. I’ll get to all that, but, first, I’ve got to talk about MLS’s updated mechanics.
If I gave the impression that I can place some, or even all MLS Cups in time, this is inaccurate. The 2000 MLS Cup Final, on the other hand, sticks in my memory like a rock in a shoe. It was the first final in league history that I dreaded and prayed to all the gods I can name (it’s a lot) to keep it from coming to pass. It did, obviously, and the 2000 Kansas City Wizards team that won it was that rock in my shoe. It took their more recent face-lift and a general improvement in their approach to the game to make me stop hating them. So, that was what? 15 years?
The Wizards won MLS Cup that season by beating a far more interesting Chicago Fire 1-0 on an 11th minute goal by Danish import, Miklos Molnar. To look back through brighter lenses, that awful ending casts a shadow over a season that sparkled with all kinds of massive debuts. The 2000 season saw the great incoming and upcoming of some of the most important players in MLS history, but it was the latter group (e.g., the upcomers) that teams would rely on and build around for the entire decade to come. As you’ll see when I get to them, these aren’t all household names; better still, at least one actual legend made a lot of noise when he joined the league, only to leave it with a bitchy little Teutonic whimper. I’ll get to all that, but, first, I’ve got to talk about MLS’s updated mechanics.
A lot of league’s most infamous gimmicks – no ties, the 35-yard shootout that prevented them, the ridiculous scoring system that followed from, keeping time on a scoreboard clock that counted down to 0:00 with no input from the referee, and so on; just all the comical misjudging of what American soccer fans wanted, not to mention the idea that that stupid shit would lure fans of America’s Big 4-5 to soccer (deep breath) – those all died with First Kick 2000. Don’t take that to mean the fever had totally broken:
“Following a ten-minute sudden death extra time, rather than going to a penalty shoot-out, if two teams were tied, the tie would stand.”
Yes, this was the “golden goal” era…that’s what they called it…look, just imagine saying that phrase to anyone who wasn’t straight-up desperate to see MLS succeed. To give that Rob Stone video credit (don’t know why I call it that; it’s probably ESPN or something), it reminded me that the Miami Fusion (I know, who?) and the New England Revolution played to the first regular season draw in MLS history; the Columbus Crew’s Robert Warzycha scored MLS’s first golden goal, and it’s a beauty (can't find video, dammit; you'll have to watch that 2000 review video...).
An even bigger change happened, even if it didn’t last as long. MLS decided to split the league into three conferences in 2000, and they broke down like so (and I listed the teams in the order they finished):
Eastern: New York/New Jersey MetroStars, New England, Miami, DC United
Central: Chicago, Tampa Bay Munity (who?), Dallas Burn, and Columbus Crew
Western: Kansas City, Los Angeles Galaxy, Colorado Rapids, San Jose Earthquakes
Obviously, this impacted how teams qualified for the post-season. Too many teams still qualified, of course - eight teams of twelve lowers the bar to mediocre – and that three conference, eight team set-up made for a janky playoff draw. For instance, winning, say, the Eastern Conference didn’t really give the MetroStars anything that the Galaxy got for finishing 2nd in the Western Conference., the same way it didn’t give the Fire anything for topping the Central Conference, or the (fucking killjoy) Kansas City Wizards for beating LA in the Western Conference. On the one hand, no harm, on the other, where’s my goddamn trophy? (Related: did they give a trophy to the conference winners that year, and how cool would it be for any team to have an MLS Central Conference champion trophy?)
Before talking about the road to MLS Cup, I want to talk about the team who had never not played in a final to this point in league history, and who missed said final very badly in 2000: DC United. Part of that followed from the edicts of parity dismantling the team year-by-year: John Harkes and Tony Sanneh left after ’98, but Roy Lassiter leaving after 1999 kicked out the step-stool; everyone but Jaime Moreno’s stats dried up between 1999 and 2000, a shift best exemplified by Marco Etcheverry’s 1999 stats (4 g, 17a) versus his 2000 stats (4g, 8a). DC’s legend didn’t die with their awful 2000, but, when they did come back, it tracked a narrative arc not unlike the time between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his end at Waterloo. Whether by fate or by a, frankly redistributionist fiat from the MLS front office, DC United handed the torch to MLS’s next generation…and maybe I spoke too soon about how easy it was to delineate the league’s various reboots, but I’d call 2000 the real starting point for the real MLS 2.0…and I’ll get to that, but first, I want to bitch a while about the 2000 KC Wizards.
It starts with a question: if someone told you that the best thing about a team was its defense and goalkeeper, how excited would you be to watch said team? As noted in the prior entry in this series, the Wizards got killed by their defense two seasons in the 1998-1999 seasons. They definitely adjusted to that, and in the most soul-sucking way possible: they dropped a five-player brickwall built around Brandon Prideaux, Peter Vermes and rookie/future anchor, Nick Garcia in the backline, with Matt McKeon and Kerry Zavagnin in front of then-former (right?) UMSNT ‘keeper, Tony Meola. That set-up killed every attempt on goal and all the joy in the league all the way to the MLS Cup. This quote from Wikipedia’s MLS Cup 2000 entry sums up the game perfectly:
“The Fire responded by using its attacking forces to find an equalizer, but failed to break the Wizards defense and goalkeeper Tony Meola, who made ten saves in the final. Meola earned his 5th shutout of the playoffs in addition to 16 clean sheets to his name from the regular season.”
To translate that for newer MLS fans: think the Seattle Sounders sucking all of the fun out of the (was it?) 2016 MLS Cup. A crappy defense wasn’t the Wizards’ only issue: they struggled to find the whole goddamn goal, never mind the back of it, in 1999, a situation they repaired by signing Miklos Molnar. For what it’s worth, I’d love to take a poll of all the people who followed MLS back from, say, 1998 (at least) to 2000, and ask them how many goals they remembered Molnar scoring in 2000. I’m pretty confident the number would be higher than the 12 regular season goals he actually scored, and that probably has something to do with all the game-winning goals he scored in the 2000 playoffs – e.g., the goal that kept KC alive in the semifinal, the golden goal that sent the Wizards through to the final and, of course, the game-winner in MLS Cup 2000…so very, fucking early. 78 minutes, plus stoppage time, of crushing boredom.
My final thought on all the above, and my closing argument for the same, KC won with the Defender of the Year (Vermes), the Goalkeeper of the Year (Meola), and the Coach of the Year ("Bone Dry" Bob Gansler (not his real nickname)), and that tells you everything. KC’s goals for and against numbers for the underline it: 47 goals for, 29 goals against. The very few teams who scored fewer goals than KC finished third in the West (Colorado), last in the West (San Jose), and last in the East (DC). More significantly, the team that even came close to matching the Wizards’ defensive record (eight goals shy) scored the exact same number of goals: that’d be the LA Galaxy (who, for context, was only replaying the same formula that almost carried them to glory and/or MLS Cup from the year before). The next closest team for goals against in 2000, New England, allowed 20 more goals.
To sum up the thought, I was positively vibrating with “anyone-but-Kansas-City” hostility from the beginning of the 2000 MLS Playoffs all the way to the final, but their formula turned out to be as irresistible as it was awful to watch. For what it’s worth, this is the first time I’ve had occasion to think about trends on this scale in MLS history and, frankly, I can’t wait to dredge up the memories of what MLS Cup finals looked like from, oh, 2001 to 2012, or so; I mean, did the league going defense-first? I’ll be curious to find out.
I’m going to close out this post by talking about all the players who joined the league in 2000, and how much they did and did not matter to the league’s larger history.
That Rob Stone/[Sports Outlet] recap video makes the strong early assertion that the 2000 season saw “the best crop of foreign talent of all-time” join MLS. It hangs its hat for that claim on two players: Bulgarian Hristo Stoichov and German legend Lothar Matthaus (if you caught the word “Teutonic” way up above, you probably see where this is going; also, I’m not about to fuck around with formatting umlauts for this shit). Stoichov, who hit an almost one-goal-per-two-games in the early 90s for (fucking) Barcelona didn’t exactly light up the league during his three semi-hobbled seasons in MLS, but he had his share of glorious, even decisive moments – his name appears plenty in the 2000 playoffs – but he’s also tied a Ukrainian-born, second-year player named Dema Kovalenko on total “points” for the Fire in 2000 (goals count for two, assists for one, right?); on the…plus side, I think each player has broken as many legs as the other during regulation play…and friendlies…whoof, I think I’m going to be sick…
As for Matthaus, raise your hand if you remember he even played in MLS. Anyone? The man has a (fucking) storied career in club soccer, and he has 150 caps for Germany, but he was petulant for the one year he spent States-side. Moreover, he could very well have been the first, true cautionary tale against signing older-yet-splashy foreign players, or the first example of pedigree so utterly failing to match production. To pose the kind of question that could never get answered over one season: did he help the MetroStars more than he hurt them in 2000? To put that another way, how much of that team’s conference-winning success flowed through Matthaus…and how much of it flowed through someone else entirely?
To name a far, far better candidate, Clint Mathis could be the brightest, hottest meteor to ever shoot across the MLS firmament. If America ever produced its own George Best, it was Mathis. At his best, he was fun as a barrel of monkeys, riding nitrous-boosted ejector seats through the zombie apocalypse level fun (yeah, I know, that should all be connected by hyphens). Watching Clint play from 2000-2003 was my first experience at believing an American could play soccer, or make anything happen from something besides lung-busting effort. He just…did things, so fast and so instinctually that no one besides his teammates saw it coming. There are the highlights, of course – one of the best (if over-hyped) goals in MLS history, plus scoring the goal that kept the U.S. Men’s 2002 World Cup team alive for the round of 16 (plus hitting the pass on the first goal in the first Dos-a-Cero game (first goal in this fuller collection) – but those highlights glosses over watching Mathis play day-to-day; it was a permanent world of possibility. In the end, and I say this with respect, Mathis took the Elvis route; he toured too much, he got heavy (that said, I don’t think he ever got really into pills, or met Dick Nixon, but who knows?), and he never hit the heights that he did while playing for the MetroStars. I hope that did Mathis justice, because he is, and has always been, my avatar for what the best American player can look like.
Mathis wasn’t the only flash in the pan to pass through the league in MLS. Senegalese striker, Mamadou Diallo, who played for the Tampa Bay Mutiny (and got service from Carlos Valderrama), was the next player after Stern John to hunt for Roy Lassiter’s single-season goal-scoring record; he was also involved in one of the most infamous incidents in MLS’s early (on-field) history when he knocked the MetroStars, Mike Amman, out for most of the season (the more I look at that video, the more damning it is). Because I’m typing this cold (or is it hot?), and I don’t want to look it up, I want to say that Diallo might have been the last player to come close to Lassiter’s record, maybe even to the point when Atlanta United FC’s Josef Martinez at long last broke it in (was it?) 2018? Wait, no, Chris Wondolowski got close at least once…shit, what a story that guy is. More to the point, I can’t think of a better possible player/segue to the close…
As I read the few websites I did to research this post and watched Rob Stone preach, I noted the names that jarred loose a happy and/or impressed memory. Some of them didn’t last long – a category that, with a few, key exceptions (see: Vermes, Peter), includes most of the players named above. Denmark’s Anders Limpar falls into that group, but he’s another happy memory – even if I didn’t remember him setting up the best, and least likely moment of Marcelo Balboa’s life till I saw it last night. But I want to close with (again) some name-dropping of legit MLS legends whose names I saw for the first time in this long stroll down Memory Lane.
Picking through various sources, five names stood out: Joe Cannon, Steve Ralston, Carlos Bocanegra, Danny Califf, and, to finally get to a name that recent arrivals might recognize, DaMarcus Beasley. I think this gets lost in the permanent inferiority complex too many people feel about the domestic game, but those five players were often the best players on their respective teams and, when given the chance, the U.S. Men’s National Team. To single out a player I watched closely (and happily), Steve Ralston was still playing for Tampa in 2000, which meant his best years were ahead of him, but he ended his career as the second all-time player for assists – just one behind Landon Donovan, in fact. As for the rest, Cannon won Goalkeeper of the Year at least two times as many as Nick Rimando should have (who never won it), and he deserved both, because he was really fucking good; it’s harder to give stats to the other three – e.g., Bocanegra, Califf, and Beasley – but they’ve all been regular starters everywhere they go, and that’s the best, if loose indicator for a good defensive player.
Another name I spotted in while staring at this stuff arguably offers a better example than any of the guys named above: Sacha Victorine. Even though his career basically spanned the 2000s, he never put up huge numbers, and numbers are what gets a player remembered. What Victorine did, just like scores of players like him, was bring balance to a team’s attack; he was good enough that opposing defenses had to watch, and even game-plan around what he did for, first, the Galaxy and, starting the mid-2000s, the Wizards. MLS was built on players like Victorine and the more of them showed up, the better every team became top-to-bottom.
To make an argument from that that I’m confident not everyone will buy: the same process of osmosis made the U.S. Men’s National Team better in roughly the same way. It is hard to the point of being impossible how limited the options felt, even by the late 1990s. The arrival of MLS amounted to annual multi-month, longitudinal auditions for the U.S. player pool, not only U.S. Soccer, but U.S. soccer fans as well. If, say, your central defender wasn’t working out, there were players all over the league suggesting themselves as replacements. That reality doesn’t erase…just all of the opportunities that U.S. Soccer has missed over the past two and a half decades (mostly through the pay-to-play crap and ignoring certain communities), but it was unquestionably an improvement.
To close out the argument with something even more controversial, I’ve never been entirely convinced by the “they MUST play in Europe” argument. What I can accept is the idea that any individual player will become better playing against stronger, smarter, faster opposition; it’s the matter of how that translates to the team as a whole that I question. To hit the same point from the other side, if the U.S. National Team has more players in Europe than it ever has, and those guys are playing for ever-bigger teams, doesn’t that at least beg the question of whether or not the “go to Europe, young man” is sufficient unto itself.
I can’t argue that the U.S. National Teams from the 2000s are better than the current one; I can state that they got better results. And maybe the fact that so many of them knew one another from MLS helped make perhaps less-talented individuals into a better team.
All right, that’s it for 2000. See all y’all in 2001!
“The Fire responded by using its attacking forces to find an equalizer, but failed to break the Wizards defense and goalkeeper Tony Meola, who made ten saves in the final. Meola earned his 5th shutout of the playoffs in addition to 16 clean sheets to his name from the regular season.”
To translate that for newer MLS fans: think the Seattle Sounders sucking all of the fun out of the (was it?) 2016 MLS Cup. A crappy defense wasn’t the Wizards’ only issue: they struggled to find the whole goddamn goal, never mind the back of it, in 1999, a situation they repaired by signing Miklos Molnar. For what it’s worth, I’d love to take a poll of all the people who followed MLS back from, say, 1998 (at least) to 2000, and ask them how many goals they remembered Molnar scoring in 2000. I’m pretty confident the number would be higher than the 12 regular season goals he actually scored, and that probably has something to do with all the game-winning goals he scored in the 2000 playoffs – e.g., the goal that kept KC alive in the semifinal, the golden goal that sent the Wizards through to the final and, of course, the game-winner in MLS Cup 2000…so very, fucking early. 78 minutes, plus stoppage time, of crushing boredom.
My final thought on all the above, and my closing argument for the same, KC won with the Defender of the Year (Vermes), the Goalkeeper of the Year (Meola), and the Coach of the Year ("Bone Dry" Bob Gansler (not his real nickname)), and that tells you everything. KC’s goals for and against numbers for the underline it: 47 goals for, 29 goals against. The very few teams who scored fewer goals than KC finished third in the West (Colorado), last in the West (San Jose), and last in the East (DC). More significantly, the team that even came close to matching the Wizards’ defensive record (eight goals shy) scored the exact same number of goals: that’d be the LA Galaxy (who, for context, was only replaying the same formula that almost carried them to glory and/or MLS Cup from the year before). The next closest team for goals against in 2000, New England, allowed 20 more goals.
To sum up the thought, I was positively vibrating with “anyone-but-Kansas-City” hostility from the beginning of the 2000 MLS Playoffs all the way to the final, but their formula turned out to be as irresistible as it was awful to watch. For what it’s worth, this is the first time I’ve had occasion to think about trends on this scale in MLS history and, frankly, I can’t wait to dredge up the memories of what MLS Cup finals looked like from, oh, 2001 to 2012, or so; I mean, did the league going defense-first? I’ll be curious to find out.
I’m going to close out this post by talking about all the players who joined the league in 2000, and how much they did and did not matter to the league’s larger history.
That Rob Stone/[Sports Outlet] recap video makes the strong early assertion that the 2000 season saw “the best crop of foreign talent of all-time” join MLS. It hangs its hat for that claim on two players: Bulgarian Hristo Stoichov and German legend Lothar Matthaus (if you caught the word “Teutonic” way up above, you probably see where this is going; also, I’m not about to fuck around with formatting umlauts for this shit). Stoichov, who hit an almost one-goal-per-two-games in the early 90s for (fucking) Barcelona didn’t exactly light up the league during his three semi-hobbled seasons in MLS, but he had his share of glorious, even decisive moments – his name appears plenty in the 2000 playoffs – but he’s also tied a Ukrainian-born, second-year player named Dema Kovalenko on total “points” for the Fire in 2000 (goals count for two, assists for one, right?); on the…plus side, I think each player has broken as many legs as the other during regulation play…and friendlies…whoof, I think I’m going to be sick…
As for Matthaus, raise your hand if you remember he even played in MLS. Anyone? The man has a (fucking) storied career in club soccer, and he has 150 caps for Germany, but he was petulant for the one year he spent States-side. Moreover, he could very well have been the first, true cautionary tale against signing older-yet-splashy foreign players, or the first example of pedigree so utterly failing to match production. To pose the kind of question that could never get answered over one season: did he help the MetroStars more than he hurt them in 2000? To put that another way, how much of that team’s conference-winning success flowed through Matthaus…and how much of it flowed through someone else entirely?
To name a far, far better candidate, Clint Mathis could be the brightest, hottest meteor to ever shoot across the MLS firmament. If America ever produced its own George Best, it was Mathis. At his best, he was fun as a barrel of monkeys, riding nitrous-boosted ejector seats through the zombie apocalypse level fun (yeah, I know, that should all be connected by hyphens). Watching Clint play from 2000-2003 was my first experience at believing an American could play soccer, or make anything happen from something besides lung-busting effort. He just…did things, so fast and so instinctually that no one besides his teammates saw it coming. There are the highlights, of course – one of the best (if over-hyped) goals in MLS history, plus scoring the goal that kept the U.S. Men’s 2002 World Cup team alive for the round of 16 (plus hitting the pass on the first goal in the first Dos-a-Cero game (first goal in this fuller collection) – but those highlights glosses over watching Mathis play day-to-day; it was a permanent world of possibility. In the end, and I say this with respect, Mathis took the Elvis route; he toured too much, he got heavy (that said, I don’t think he ever got really into pills, or met Dick Nixon, but who knows?), and he never hit the heights that he did while playing for the MetroStars. I hope that did Mathis justice, because he is, and has always been, my avatar for what the best American player can look like.
Mathis wasn’t the only flash in the pan to pass through the league in MLS. Senegalese striker, Mamadou Diallo, who played for the Tampa Bay Mutiny (and got service from Carlos Valderrama), was the next player after Stern John to hunt for Roy Lassiter’s single-season goal-scoring record; he was also involved in one of the most infamous incidents in MLS’s early (on-field) history when he knocked the MetroStars, Mike Amman, out for most of the season (the more I look at that video, the more damning it is). Because I’m typing this cold (or is it hot?), and I don’t want to look it up, I want to say that Diallo might have been the last player to come close to Lassiter’s record, maybe even to the point when Atlanta United FC’s Josef Martinez at long last broke it in (was it?) 2018? Wait, no, Chris Wondolowski got close at least once…shit, what a story that guy is. More to the point, I can’t think of a better possible player/segue to the close…
As I read the few websites I did to research this post and watched Rob Stone preach, I noted the names that jarred loose a happy and/or impressed memory. Some of them didn’t last long – a category that, with a few, key exceptions (see: Vermes, Peter), includes most of the players named above. Denmark’s Anders Limpar falls into that group, but he’s another happy memory – even if I didn’t remember him setting up the best, and least likely moment of Marcelo Balboa’s life till I saw it last night. But I want to close with (again) some name-dropping of legit MLS legends whose names I saw for the first time in this long stroll down Memory Lane.
Picking through various sources, five names stood out: Joe Cannon, Steve Ralston, Carlos Bocanegra, Danny Califf, and, to finally get to a name that recent arrivals might recognize, DaMarcus Beasley. I think this gets lost in the permanent inferiority complex too many people feel about the domestic game, but those five players were often the best players on their respective teams and, when given the chance, the U.S. Men’s National Team. To single out a player I watched closely (and happily), Steve Ralston was still playing for Tampa in 2000, which meant his best years were ahead of him, but he ended his career as the second all-time player for assists – just one behind Landon Donovan, in fact. As for the rest, Cannon won Goalkeeper of the Year at least two times as many as Nick Rimando should have (who never won it), and he deserved both, because he was really fucking good; it’s harder to give stats to the other three – e.g., Bocanegra, Califf, and Beasley – but they’ve all been regular starters everywhere they go, and that’s the best, if loose indicator for a good defensive player.
Another name I spotted in while staring at this stuff arguably offers a better example than any of the guys named above: Sacha Victorine. Even though his career basically spanned the 2000s, he never put up huge numbers, and numbers are what gets a player remembered. What Victorine did, just like scores of players like him, was bring balance to a team’s attack; he was good enough that opposing defenses had to watch, and even game-plan around what he did for, first, the Galaxy and, starting the mid-2000s, the Wizards. MLS was built on players like Victorine and the more of them showed up, the better every team became top-to-bottom.
To make an argument from that that I’m confident not everyone will buy: the same process of osmosis made the U.S. Men’s National Team better in roughly the same way. It is hard to the point of being impossible how limited the options felt, even by the late 1990s. The arrival of MLS amounted to annual multi-month, longitudinal auditions for the U.S. player pool, not only U.S. Soccer, but U.S. soccer fans as well. If, say, your central defender wasn’t working out, there were players all over the league suggesting themselves as replacements. That reality doesn’t erase…just all of the opportunities that U.S. Soccer has missed over the past two and a half decades (mostly through the pay-to-play crap and ignoring certain communities), but it was unquestionably an improvement.
To close out the argument with something even more controversial, I’ve never been entirely convinced by the “they MUST play in Europe” argument. What I can accept is the idea that any individual player will become better playing against stronger, smarter, faster opposition; it’s the matter of how that translates to the team as a whole that I question. To hit the same point from the other side, if the U.S. National Team has more players in Europe than it ever has, and those guys are playing for ever-bigger teams, doesn’t that at least beg the question of whether or not the “go to Europe, young man” is sufficient unto itself.
I can’t argue that the U.S. National Teams from the 2000s are better than the current one; I can state that they got better results. And maybe the fact that so many of them knew one another from MLS helped make perhaps less-talented individuals into a better team.
All right, that’s it for 2000. See all y’all in 2001!
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