An MLS History Project, 2012: A Real Change Up of a Season

Just saying, "peaking at the right time" is rare...

Major League Soccer served up a fairly compelling 2012 regular season. For one, it saw some of the older powers reclaim the stage after a couple years of chaos (as described in my post on the 2010 season), but the several teams involved wandered separate paths from the start of the season to its end. At one end of the season, five teams, a mix of old/former powers and rising new ones announced their intentions by starting strong – over the first 12 games (~1/3 of the season), the Seattle Sounders and Real Salt Lake went 7-3-2, while eventual Supporters’ Shield winners, the San Jose Earthquakes, edged both at 7-2-3; Sporting Kansas City won their first seven games, then lost three, then evened out for a 8-3-1 start, and, finally…occasional, sorta (also, future) power the New York Red Bulls matched SKC (if this project has reminded me of anything, it’s that New York has produced some fun teams).

All five would fall by the wayside, and all of them in the playoffs, when a pair of real playoff powerhouses nudged past them into MLS Cup. Both eventual finalists – the Los Angeles Galaxy and the Houston Dynamo – struggled out of the gate. The Galaxy missed Omar Gonzalez for the first half of its season and started 3-8-2 as a result; the Dynamo, meanwhile, couldn’t keep their asses from bouncing on the playoff line until they end. They finished 8th and 9th overall, respectively, and both had to pass through the play-in to make the playoffs. In doing so, they carried forward the infamous, semi-apocryphal tradition of “peaking at the right time.”

I’d counter with a theory that combines form and “good bones.” LA and Houston weren’t uniquely good teams in 2012. Observers had credible reasons to believe that the five “hot start” teams listed above had an equal or better shot than Houston or LA of winning MLS Cup – highly credible in some cases, e.g., San Jose’s (more later). Of the 10 teams who made the playoffs, only the Vancouver Whitecaps looked like make-weights; both the Chicago Fire and DC United looked less likely – offense hurt the former, defense the latter – but they still performed well enough (and DC got screwed in their series against Houston (more later)) to look like they belonged. And I’ll get to that. First, let’s take a detour…

The way I consumed MLS changed after the Portland Timbers joined the league. Expansion played a role in that it overwhelmed my capacity for keeping up with the details on every team in MLS, but I didn’t need those details to tell me why Portland missed the playoffs in 2012 – badly, too. The Timbers signed their second-ever DP that season, a Scottish striker named Kris Boyd. While the Scottish Premier League’s reputation had dimmed quite a bit over the course of MLS’s existence, Boyd came to Portland as the SPL’s all-time leading scorer (as he remains, apparently). My memories of how Boyd failed to pan out don’t match the record: in my memory, he scored a lot early, and largely with the same kind of goal (headed goal, near-post run), but the stuff I’m scratching up out of the record doesn’t support that – i.e., he didn’t score much or often (just seven goals and one assist all season; no one did, really) and his minutes dried up completely after the Timbers parted ways with the head coach who hired him, John Spencer. And, point of interest, Boyd picked up where he left off upon returning to Scotland.

An MLS History Project, 2011: A Coronation and Other Beautiful Things

Why LA won MLS Cup 2011, in a photo.

The Los Angeles defeated the Houston Dynamo 1-0 in the 2011 MLS Cup, and the whole thing looked like a coronation. Given that they won their second consecutive Supporters’ Shield that season, it’s possible that was the best Galaxy team of all-time – and, with Landon Donovan, David Beckham, Omar Gonzalez and, later Robbie Keane in the line-up, it was certainly their most (recent) famous team. With no disrespect intended to Calen Carr, the image at right speaks Encyclopedia Britannica-level volumes about the match-up. As such, I’m going to bury the final and talk about the biggest, bestest news about the 2011 Major League Soccer season.

The Portland Timbers joined MLS that season and, lo, the sun shined a little brighter, the grey skies cleared up, and the bar got raised a little higher for supporters’ groups across the nation. Before anyone’s undies get in a bunch, yes, other supporters’ groups existed before then – for instance Barra Brava and…the other one was up, running and pretty impressive, even at Year 2, when I lived in Washington, D.C. - and, honestly, those groups deserve a ton of credit for building their supporters’ culture from (literally) nothing. The fact still remains that the Timbers do a better-than-average job of making the Timbers feel like the best-loved team in MLS.

Oh, and the Vancouver Whitecaps joined the same season. Back to the Timbers…

By the time 2011 rolled around, MLS had expanded from the baseline 10 teams from 2001 to 18 teams – if with detours that saw one expansion team (the Chicago Fire) live and another (the Miami Fusion) die, the latter with one of the MLS original franchises (the Tampa Bay Mutiny; see my short history of a rough season). Because both team salary budgets and salary adjustment mechanisms proliferated as the league grew, MLS doesn’t really have a one-cut template for what expansion looks like. First things first, yank the Houston Dynamo all the way out of the sample, because they just relocated a dynamite fucking team and never had to go through the loss/pimple-filled adolescence common among expansion teams in most professional sports. Outside that odd duck, the experience of expansion teams coming into MLS has varied. To give examples, the teams that came up from a USL team used to have a generally more reliable experience – e.g., the Seattle Sounders, who hit the ground running and never stopped – than the teams that (if memory serves) sprang to existence through the magic of a (usually) billionaires’ money – e.g., Toronto FC, who took over a half decade to find its feet. MLS’s “big money era” (aka, now) changed that equation – see your Atlanta United FCs and your Los Angeles FCs – though it’s entirely fair to ask for how long (I’ve seen enough once-good/great teams get swallowed and never emerge from either end – e.g., Houston and the New England Revolution).

An MLS History Project, 2010: The Final Fabulous Freak Season

Call 'em the MLS 2010 Mascots.

It passed without notice at the time, but Major League Soccer experienced a brief interregnum over the 2008-2010 seasons.

2008 appears normal at first glance – as noted in my write-up on that season, the Crew had a lien-free claim to the best team in MLS that season – but, unlike past champions (or even reliable runners-up like the mid-00s New England Revolution), they didn’t have the legs to return to an MLS Cup until years later. Before that, you had DC United running the 1990s (stalked for seasons by the Los Angeles Galaxy), the early 2000s boom-let for the Kansas City Wizards and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago Fire, followed by a half decade’s worth of dominance centered around the San Jose Earthquake/Houston Dynamo franchises (again, shadowed by New England). They didn’t tear up that script or anything – Columbus won a second Supporters’ Shield in 2009, after all – but there was a pan, and there was a flash in it.

In terms of season-upon-season quality, RSL did much the same thing, and for much the same reason: they built a good, durable team of players with an excellent understanding of roles. On the other hand, RSL really had more ways to lose the 2009 MLS Cup than to win it, starting with qualifying dead last for the playoffs and, it bears noting, having to go through the same Columbus team in the first round (all of that covered in my write-up on the 2009 season). Again, it wasn’t so much that they had a bad team – they didn’t, as subsequent years showed – than they found a gap in the MLS space/time continuum where no teams succeeded in dominating the rest of the teams.

If those two years upended assumptions, 2010 simply paid them no mind. I mean, the Colorado Rapids won MLS Cup, fer crissakes. Wait, it gets weirder: they beat FC Dallas to do it.

Before getting into that, let’s take a quick tour of new developments. First, and arguably most important, the league and the players’ union argued over a collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) right up to first kick. I don’t recall which CBA negotiation was the most bitter, but I’d imagine MLS still felt more fragile around this time. Seeing as that’s been superseded at least once by now (I think twice), I’ll leave it to real die-hards to read about what they agreed upon. (Top-line notes: it established the Re-Entry Draft (still no free agency), raised each team’s salary budget to $2.55 million (which feels like a comically impossible ceiling at this point), set the minimum salary at $40,000 (don’t give up those side-gigs, y’all!), and, I think this came later, allowed teams to sign as many as three designated players (which, I’m just gonna say it now, they should have called “The Ringer Rule”). More detailed notes on the latter:

An MLS History Project, 2009: A Lot of Treading Water and Playing Hurt

Google "Mukbang."

This little tour of Major League Soccer’s past has put a couple personal mythologies to the sword. The relevant one here: I always thought MLS hit a low-water mark for total goals scored during a season in the early 2000s and then, over time, gradually raised to some unknown, higher, happier, equilibrium. And when the goals average for MLS plunged from 51.0 goals/season in 2000 to 43.25 in 2001, and then continued down to 42.1 (2002) and 39.2 (2004), I nodded sagely at the trend line and cursed the parity and mediocre teams that brought it about.

Then the 2007 season delivered just 39.8 goals/season. As for 2009? 38.1, the lowest recorded so far. I’m still a little paranoid about my methodology (which, here, means basic math), but it matches the eye-test: Dallas topped the league with 51 goals over the all season, but most teams stalled in the low 40s. There’s a reason I mention this, because I’ve seen it a couple times now (and maybe this is blazingly obvious to everyone else): low-scoring seasons tend to end in dog fights. And in every sense of the word.

As current fans know, MLS has hyped “Decision Day” into formal, annual “event,” an appetizer for the playoffs, if you will (man, I should use "if you will" more often), only losing means you have to sit and watch someone else eat the entrée. I don’t know what inspired that branding, but 2009 could very well have planted the seed. The competition on the final day of that season was close and bloody…

At the top of the table, the Columbus Crew won its second consecutive Supporters’ Shield (for the record, the Shield is, and will always be the Official Conifers & Citrus Benchmark for Excellence), but, because they went 2-3-0 over their last five games while their closest competition went 2-1-2 (Houston Dynamo) and 3-1-1 (Los Angeles Galaxy), they held on by finger nails (aka, four more in goal differential) [Note: I just discovered some bad numbers in the "official" 2009 standings - e.g., they show some teams playing 31 games in 2009, even 32- and, while I'll continue to use their data, file that reality away for future reference.] The story looked very much the same at the lower end of the playoff race. When the 30th day of the 30-game season rolled around, players on a minimum of six teams jumped at the referee’s starting whistle, knowing it could be the last time they’d hear the famous call to action until the 2010 season. To piece things together from the potshards..:

An MLS History Project, 2008: A Coach, His Guys, a DP & a Clean Sweep

The 2008 Western Conference bracket, a visual

We have now, without question, moved past the point where Major League Soccer’s gawky growing pains gave way to a league that wraps up one season and moves to the next where the names are the only thing that changes. I mean, sure, new teams join the league annually, sometimes two at a time, but isn’t that just more teams and people doing the same thing? It’s great when it comes to your hometown, obviously…wait for it…

That said, the 2008 MLS season saw: the San Jose Earthquakes return to the league and balance restored between the Eastern and Western Conferences (seven teams per); Real Salt Lake opened Rio Tinto Stadium and that felt like a louder signal to new owners that a soccer-specific stadium amounted to an ante for getting into the game (then New York City FC showed up and added a sub-clause); uh, a couple more sponsors joined (and did Amway come in this wave?), and that’s about it, though MLS fans will always have this to savor:

“Bruce Arena replaced Ruud Gullit, who resigned from his role as head coach, and Alexi Lalas, who was fired from his role as president, as both head coach and general manager of the Los Angeles Galaxy.”

That’s 2008 confirming that Alexi Lalas doesn’t know what he’s talking about, not really.

The season itself was pretty damn compelling – not least for ending with hints at what MLS’s future would look like. On a “just the facts, ma’am” level, the Columbus Crew beat a, frankly, fortunate New York Red Bulls team in MLS Cup that season; they won the Supporters’ Shield too, and they did it in style (DC United won the U.S. Open Cup…eh, so what?). For those wondering at home, yes, that was an all-Eastern Conference final. MLS organized the playoffs by having the top 3 teams from each conference qualify directly, while the final two spots went to the two teams with the most points, regardless of conference. The Red Bulls, who squeaked past the Colorado Rapids in a way the top-line numbers simply can’t explain, wound up in the Western Conference bracket. They drew the 2007 MLS Cup holders, the Houston Dynamo, in the first round and looked paper-doomed going in. With most of its championship team intact, the Dynamo continued to roll, losing just five out of 30 games all season – just one of them in the second half of the season…and, no, I can’t explain why Houston and DC United have a 31st game in the 2008 Form Guide. (The fuck…?)

An MLS History Project, 2007: A Grand Re-Re-Re-Opening

All was right in New England the next season...

“The 2007 season was often cited as the first season in the modern-era of Major League Soccer.”

This claim is currently under investigation…but the phrasing begs a question: did another season replace this one as the season “often cited as the first season of the modern-era of Major League Soccer”? Also, is that hyphen necessary?

Grammatical/verb tense cheap shots aside (to think, what someone else could do with any of my posts), Major League Soccer saw a handful of changes going into the 2007 season that stake the claim. For one, MLS allowed jersey sponsors for the first time that season (one of the sponsors hints at what might have nudged them over the line: “The international recognized brand, Red Bull became the shirt sponsor of New York Red Bulls, whom they owned.”). The long, uneven path toward standing up an international club competition in the CONCACAF region got a boost as well; while they wouldn’t switch to the CONCACAF Champions League until the 2008 season, MLS and Liga MX ran the Superliga up the flagpole – and, holy shit, the New England Revolution won the 2008 edition, beating the Houston Dynamo on penalty kicks. Turns out pigs can fly, man…

…but if I had to name the one thing that finally made these regional tilts worth playing, I’d go with the magnificent duels Houston played against La Liga’s Pachuca CF. They played the first during the 2007 season, back when it remained the CONCACAF Champions Cup. Houston, those beautiful bastards made it possible to believe a North American team might one day one it all.

Two new soccer-specific stadiums opened – one of them hosting a new expansion team (welcome aboard, Toronto FC!); the other was the Colorado Rapids’ Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, aka, The Dick (tell me they still call it that) – and MLS made some tweaks to the rules of competition (again; more below), but it was the arrival of the designated-player (DP) rule that really puts a spine into that “first season in the modern-era of MLS” claim. I think just about everyone likely to find this lonely post knows how the DP rule works (short version: “permitting one big-ticket foreign player to play for each team without going against the team's salary cap”), but it’s fun to look at who showed up in that inaugural class:

An MLS History Project, 2006: My First Heartbreak (& New England's Third)

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The “firsts” start to dry up as Major League Soccer’s history moves closer to the present – does adding a new team really count in a league that adds two a season? - but 2006 saw a few. The Chicago Fire opened the league’s third soccer-specific stadium up in Bridgeview, Illinois (per franchise tradition, it was a mixed bag) and the ridiculously-named New York/New Jersey MetroStars became the no less ridiculously-named New York Red Bulls (or Red Bull New York, I can never truly remember). Parenthetical specifics aside, both moves amounted to what the domestic top-flight needed more than anything else: long-term investment and stability.

The biggest on-field change saw the San Jose Earthquakes move to Houston, Texas for the 2006 season. It didn’t look great, but it looked nothing like the contraction that culled the Florida teams after the 2001 regular season (my notes here). In fact, a general failure to invest in the San Jose market prompted the move, not league-wide financial struggles. I’ll get to all that and more, but, to paraphrase a line from the Jaws 3 trailer, the 2006 season was unusually personal.

Soccer fans talk about “bleeding” for their teams all the time, and of “living and dying on every goal.” I don’t do that. In fact, I can count on the number of games that transported me to real rapture on two hands at most. To name two that should give you some idea of where I set the bar, the United States Men’s 3-2 win over Portugal in their 2002 World Cup opener and the Portland Timbers’ famous double-post victory over Sporting Kansas City make the cut. (Another is highly personal, a random league game that saw Liverpool put four goals past Newcastle in a back-and-forth barn-burner they ultimately won; I took a shot of gin for every goal Liverpool scored that season, and it took some work to talk the bartender into honoring the tradition). I’ve got moments where joy and rage boiled over by the hundreds, but it takes a lot to get me to transcendence.

MLS Cup 2006 was another one.