An MLS History Project, 2001: MLS 2.0 & One Hell of a Missed Opportunity

The other, other path not taken, circa 2001.

“Things got so bad that the league actually decided to fold after the 2001 season and didn’t tell anyone.”

That quote comes from a 2016 Washington Post article and it feels like the government declassifying something. Turns out the Major League Soccer went so far as drawing up papers to fold the league. That wound up as the path not taken, but, back in this…timeline, MLS did contract immediately after the 2001 season, losing the two Florida teams, the Tampa Bay Mutiny and the Miami Fusion. For the record, I hold up both names as cautionary tales for anyone who argues that a team can't do anything worse than slap an “FC” or a “United” before or after a city’s name. I've seen shit…

The 2001 MLS season featured several firsts – e.g., the first time a former player (Frank Yallop) lead an MLS team to victory as head coach; the first MLS Cup final to be played in a soccer-specific stadium (more later; and I can’t believe I skipped it, and yet it’s somehow more appropriate); the first season cut short by a national tragedy (9/11; have you met COVID-19, btw?); the first MLS Cup played between two teams from both the same conference, but also from the same state. The San Jose Earthquakes (i.e., Yallop’s team) beat the Los Angeles Galaxy 2-1 on a “golden goal,” – i.e., a goal scored in the 10-minute extra period MLS tagged on the end of the full 90 starting with the 2000 regular season to give teams one last chance to break a draw. To get all technical, yes, I dispute the account in Wikipedia’s account of the 2001 MLS Cup, which calls DC’s winner over LA in the first MLS Cup a “golden goal,” because that predated the “golden goal” era, and was therefore just a regular, old sudden-death goal in extra time, but I digress. It was a year of firsts, then, but LA losing in final, on the other hand, was almost a norm at this point (three, count ‘em, three loses in 1996, 1999 and 2001 over six seasons).

San Jose’s shady past (detailed in my 1999 season recap) was/is of interest, of course – the rosters and general competence of all concerned continued to slowly spread around the league (albeit it taking longer here, and never entirely arriving in some places) – but, if there’s one detail I really want to flag, it’s the players who scored San Jose’s goals in the final: Landon Donovan and Dwayne DeRosario, and both scored bangers. 2001 was Donovan’s rookie year in MLS; DeRosario, meanwhile, had been called up from the Richmond Kickers by a savvy Frank Yallop: both players would go on to become the faces of a league starved for attacking stars – North American stars, in particular - for at least the decade ahead. They were far from alone, even if they shined (a lot) brighter, but the Galaxy’s Cobi Jones summed up the larger trend nicely in the highlights for MLS Cup 2001 (Note: you can see the goals mentioned above in there; total run-time, just under 8 minutes):

“I think the league had changed quite a bit, you’re having a lot of next generation players come into the league. It was that first transition phase for the sport, to see some of those new faces come in and start to develop new characters and new ideas within the league.”

In fact, the way Yallop built his 2001 goes some distance to underscoring how much the league developed in just six years. To start, he pillaged “proven MLS players” from teams around the league – e.g., Jeff Agoos from DC, Manny Lagos from Tampa, and Zak Ibsen from the Galaxy. In central defense, he paired Agoos with Troy Dayak (who broke his neck, or close to, at some point; or maybe a very young Jimmy Conrad) - and, by the time crunch-time came around, Yallop had midfielders Richard Mulrooney and Ronnie Ekelund in front of them, giving San Jose a pretty sturdy, two-way midfield. When he brought in Donovan via the allocation system from Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, and scouted DeRosario from the juniors, those players and others at long last gave Ronald Cerritos the support he needed to have an attack worth of a qualifier besides “limited” or “disappointing.” Now that I’ve peaked at them, it’s worth noting where the service to those forwards came from; Mulrooney provided a good chunk of it (nine assists), but the overlapping fullbacks chipped in another 15 between them (nine by a guy named Ian Russell, another six by Wade Barrett, three from each sideburn).

To reiterate/carry forward a talking point from my post on the 2000 season, the general cycle described above was MLS 2.0. What started as a league of the highest profile foreign players that the league could buy paired with a bunch of random Americans, evolved into something different, certainly, but also something better and worse at the same time. On the positive side, it became clear that the U.S., and even North America as a whole, had a domestic player pool that was both self-regenerating and, in general, respectable; better still, there was actual quality at the top end – i.e., players who were fun to watch and, when called on, able to step onto the world stage, not only without embarrassing themselves, but to cause a little trouble to boot.

The negative side showed up in labor relations. Because too few American players made it to Europe to establish any sort of base-line value for that particular species, the question of what any given player was “worth” turned on one main consideration: how to split a $1.7 million player budget among 18 players (yep, just 18 per roster back then, with some wiggle room assumed). Fears about the long-term viability of the league – clearly justified (see above) – made investing hard enough, even before the steady annual losses (estimated/reported at $250 million over the first five seasons). That and the absence of a functioning transfer market left players with virtually nothing for leverage. I can’t (easily) find the league minimum for 2001, but a review of 2004 salaries give a rough guide for how little a player could expect at the low end. In general, it looks like about…one third of all players earned less than $35,000 per year, guaranteed. It’s hard to do a precise count because the source (an old Soccer America article) is incomplete, but, I thought dropping same famous names and their salary figures should clarify things nicely – again, these are all salaries from 2004, when some of these players just got started:

Justin Mapp - $35,575
Nat Borchers - $24,000
Kyle Beckerman - $31,811
Davy Arnaud - $25,200
Alejandro Moreno - $26,460
Mike Magee - $26,480
Shalrie Joseph - $25,200
Brian Ching - $32,550

To anyone asking whether all those players paid their dues, the answer is a resounding yes. Most of them would win an MLS Cup, with more than one playing a central role in the win. Mapp never made it, but he was one of the league’s best wingers for a couple seasons and New England’s Joseph was the dominant defensive/two-way midfielder of the mid-2000s. All of them no doubt looked promising, but, with the labor market for American soccer players in 2004 the way it is, paying them for their value was out of the question, obviously – which should stir your imagination for what players’ leverage looked like in the season before the league contracted. I have memories of a minimum under $20K. So again, Americans finally had a league, a chance to become better players, and an audience to play in front of, but a lot of them barely had a paying job. It wasn’t a different world.

As for the LA Galaxy team that San Jose beat, their time would come – soon too, and I’ll get to that (and do a lot of compare/contrasting when I do). For this current roster, it was fun seeing current Toronto FC head coach, Greg Vanney, drop a 40-yard assist on Luis Hernandez’s right foot in MLS Cup. Long-time stars – there, I’m thinking Mauricio Cienfuegos – were edging toward the exit, and you had more of the “old guard” of players coming into and/or falling out of the roster – e.g., Alexi Lalas (from the New England Revolution) and Paul Caligiuri, respectively (for what it’s worth, I actually remember him getting that yellow card then getting subbed out in MLS Cup 2000; that would be the last time this guy played in MLS, maybe even at all). Knowing the future that LA had in front of them at this point makes it harder to put too much stock in them as a “failed team” of any sort. If nothing else, they'd already played in three MLS Cups. Yeah, yeah, they didn't win, but what’s the word for a team that’s almost great? What’s the word for that space in between ultimate victory and getting that close to it over and over and over? I mean, besides the Buffalo Bills.

For what it’s worth, I think I’ll put a little more into research, maybe even picking through rosters for the next several posts – which has everything to do with missing some big things in earlier posts. One of those omissions was, frankly, huge because it deals with what wound up being the first signal I accepted as first clear evidence that MLS wouldn’t fold (then again, the COVID). A stray line in that (very short) article about the league folding flagged it:

“More and more teams began to build right-sized soccer-only stadiums, moving out of the American football stadiums that they struggled to fill.”

MLS Cup 2001 was played at Columbus Crew Stadium, later MAPFRE Stadium (with some branding detours I assume), the first soccer-specific stadium in MLS. I’m sure I’m last one to mention this, but it’s in the process of getting replaced and, due to all the truly massive events that happened there (e.g., the first Dos-a-Cero, this MLS Cup, the 2015 MLS Cup), the necessary progress tastes bittersweet. Crew Stadium opened May 15, 1999, and that sucker was modest. It cost a pittance, it never looked like much (no offense!), but, it never looked like anything more or less than the biggest, ballsiest bet laid down to that point that domestic top flight soccer had a future in this country. As noted in Wikipedia’s write-up on MLS Cup 2001, both LA (the Home Depot Center) and Chicago (Toyota Stadium) started construction of their own soccer-specific stadia in 2001, but it felt like anything could happen after contraction happened. It didn't matter that they broke ground on those stadiums, because, why wouldn't they stop if the whole damn league folded? As such, Crew Stadium felt very much alone in the American sporting landscape – e.g., not unlike the Vikings’ first attempts to populate North America. Bold, sure, maybe even nice, but certainly not sufficient.

That broad idea of insufficiency grew razor-sharp and menacing when the league dissolved the Florida and Miami franchises. It was doubly disconcerting due to one, very specific detail: the Miami Fusion had become the darlings of MLS on their way to winning the 2001 Supporters’ Shield. Had they won MLS Cup…damn, just damn.

Now, by way of broad outline, I remember both Florida teams as “entertaining,” which, here, means scoring a lot of goals and allowing just as many. It was all very swashbuckling, as you’d expect from a team called the mutiny. It’s more accurate to say that one team never got past erratic only to utterly collapse in its final season (Tampa Bay), while the other behaved pretty much like an expansion team, only with a truly remarkable story to tell (Miami).

I’m going to start with the Mutiny because, 1) they arguably only had one good season (1996), and 2) no one really talks about them anymore. As such, there’s just one question to ask about them: how did they go from a solid second place in the then-Central Conference in 2000 to one of the worst teams in league history in 2001? To be clear, the drop was harrowing: a 16-12-4, 52 points season with a +12 goal differential in 2000 to a 4-21-2 record, 14 points and a -36 goal differential in 2001. With most of my memories of the team now reduced to, “was that a bat? if so, why?” I’m relying on old, bare texts and filling in the blanks, but personnel changes look plausible. The Mutiny dropped, traded or otherwise lost, Daniel Hernandez (of the ’98 Galaxy line-up; gushed about briefly here), Raul Diaz Arce, Dominic Kinnear, and, noted above Manny Lagos (and maybe his brother(?), Gerard Lagos). Diaz Arce, who’s probably still a name in DC soccer circles of a certain age, was a journeyman by 2000 (that said, he posted low, but efficient numbers), but it’s very likely that losing Hernandez and Kinnear in midfield exposed Carlos Valderrama, a very impressive attacking player who couldn’t defend a toddler. Losing Lagos, meanwhile, very likely would cost Tampa Bay both goals and options…both of which went to San Jose.

In the Tampa Bay front office’s defense, that 2000 roster looked old: Valderrama never relied on movement, so he had a couple years left, but Kinnear’s sure as hell did. He actually retired after 2000, while Trittschuh would just one season later. The team had shoes to fill for 2001, only they didn’t. That stranded the talent that it did have – e.g., Steve Ralston (winger, MLS record holder), Scott Garlick (‘keeper, and a very steady one; think he got capped), as well as Mamadou Diallo, a league-leading forward who returned less every season, and…Richie Kotschau (mostly of interest because editions of FIFA from around this time pronounced his name “Cat Chow.”) In fewer words, Tampa went cheap in 2001 and paid for it…

…and maybe more than you realize. See, there’s this episode of MLS Insider (which ran…can’t remember) mini-doc that tried to capture the essence of the 2001 Miami Fusion. At some point, the coach of that team, Ray Hudson, hinted fairly directly that the existence of both Miami and San Jose hung in the balance in their 2001 semifinal series. As in, winner stays open, loser closes down. And Tampa Bay didn’t missed all of the playoffs that year…

Hudson’s a good place to both start and end with the legendary Fusion team. He’s a great story in his own right, sort of an average twit’s dream come true. He was the color analyst for Miami broadcasts in before 2001; he basically auditioned for, and earned, the head coaching job (think all the folks talking themselves into the Trump administration via Fox News, only he seems delightful). His legend builds from there, if for no better reason than Hudson had a lot of the same players as his predecessor, Ivo Wortmann – mainstays like Leo Cullen, Jay Heaps, Tyrone Marshall, Ivan McKinley, Nick Rimando, oh, and get this, both Kyle Beckerman and Pablo Mastroeni (Mastroeni was the veteran back then, and had totally earned it) – all of them future stars, or anchors. A couple well-known names lurked around the fringes of the 2000 roster – e.g., Roy Lassiter, Eric Wynalda, Andy Williams (who had a future ahead) – but they were on before (Williams) or after (Lassiter and Wynalda) their time. Two more players deserve place in the legend of the legend: midfield engine and captain, Jim Rooney, and their visibly-talented, long-suffering Colombian forward, Diego Serna.

The upshot of all that name-dropping: the 2000 team was damn close to a competitive starting eleven; it’s possible they under-achieved, and that’s often a coaching problem, so cue Hudson. The Fusion did add some pieces, big ones too (though, for the record, the sites conflict a little, and I’m not digging that hard). In a theory that brings all this together in a way that just feels so good to say “yes” to, their rebuild wasn’t all that different from San Jose’s – i.e., they started with the “proven-MLS-player” model. First, they called in Preki from the 2000 champion Kansas City Wizards – again, one of MLS’s first great players – plus, Carlos Llamosa from DC United, Chris Henderson from the Colorado Rapids, (I think) upcoming centerback, Brian Dunseth. All that would have bought them another season on making the playoffs, but Miami either got lucky or they exploited a surprisingly robust scouting network in Honduras land Alex Pineda Chacon; he proved the difference between playoff-competitive and winning the Supporters’ Shield.

All this fit together very well – seriously, the balance was phenomenal – but watching Serna and Chacon really was something. While both could hurt you multiple ways, Serna specialized in breaking defenses one defender at a time on the dribble, and he could shoot from range; Chacon, meanwhile, seemed like the marble that drops into the Rube Goldberg Machine and sets it off. They had Preki freelancing around and with them, and the whole thing worked because everything behind that was the right combination of sturdy and athletic; they had the right pieces all over the field…

…and it did feel unfair seeing them downsized, even at the time. I understand how much Florida sucks for sports markets (and generally), but the reality stands that Miami pushed through the expansion growing pains and, in just three years’ time, they built one of the better, most-balanced rosters in MLS history. The silver lining I can see in all this is the fact that the San Jose team that beat them was very goddamn good in its own right…and wait till you see/recall what happened to them.

Anyway, it’s hard to reconnect with the chaos of MLS's adolescence. It didn’t fail chaotic at the time, so much as it felt expected. Americans didn’t watch a lot of soccer; you could see it in the stands. If you watched games at a bar, you’d have someone pitching you shit at least every other time (the classic counter-move: patiently explaining soccer to people by answering said shit-pitching with examples from the game - e.g., "you see what he's doing there? that's not really that different from..."). The U.S. was a hostile market, not in a dangerous way, by any means, but, Jesus, was it exhausting.

People missed the 2001 Fusion as a result. If you start watching at 7:40 in that MLS Insider mini-doc, you’ll see Ray Hudson explain the loss, even the sense of shock, of building something truly impressive only to see it get yanked out from under. You’ll also get a sense of how much Hudson helped build the myth. It wouldn’t have worked if the team didn’t, but that’s what makes the Fusion the ghost that haunts MLS. The market might have sucked (though, for what it’s worth, Lockhart Stadium looked all right on TV), but it was a shame to see that team get pulled apart before we could see what it could really do. It probably had a five-year window…one hell of a missed opportunity top to bottom.

Whoa. Waxed on a little, but that’s 2001. See you in 2002.