Getting Reacquainted with DC United, MLS's Aging Rockstars

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

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Pretty much anyone who follows Major League Soccer knows that DC United was its first great dynasty. 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). His selection connected them to the Tahuichi Academy, Bolivia’s (then?) premier player development academy, which connected them to Jaime Moreno and those two signings, plus a semi-random striker who would hold the single-season recordfor goals scored for 23 years (Roy Lassiter) went a long way in the league’s early days. Thanks to defenses staffed mostly of recent amateurs and college grads, 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 DP Rule/the ability to buy talent seven to eight (or 12) years in the future, DC’s on-field successes gave them the reputation as the best team in MLS, which helped them bring in ambitious players, which one could argue (as I am) made their generally forgotten mid-2000s Renaissance possible. 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 a fifth MLS Cup in 2004; with solid replacements shuffled into the lineup – e.g., Bobby Boswell at the back and Luciano Emilio spearheading the attack – they added back-to-back Supporters’ Shields in 2006 and 2007. If you’re just counting trophies, all of that early success created the firewall thick enough to keep DC among the all-time most successful teams in MLS history (i.e., sixth on the all-time Joy Points Scale (methodology below*)). They’ve flirted with success here and there, particularly over the competent, yet trophy-free seasons of 2012-2019 aside, but DC has been flaming fucking awful more often than most since their glory years, as demonstrated by (now) five (5!) Wooden Spoons and some of the worst seasons in MLS history (looking at you, 2013). It’s not so much that they haven’t tried – e.g., a young Luciano Acosta, Wayne Rooney and Christian Benteke delivered! – but all that talent labored under lineups, systems, rosters, coaches, etc., that made every good player work twice as hard. Part of that followed from a hit-rate on signing top-rate talent from outside MLS that failed to hit – e.g., Edison Flores, Gabriel Pirani – but few teams have fallen for the next “wunderkind” with more ardor and frequency than most. They signed Freddy Adu 20 steps out of the womb and pissed away too many seasons waiting for him to become the player his agent promised; one hears echoes of that in the seasons wasted waiting for Santino Quaranta and Nick DeLeon to fill their forever-potential. They’ve been equally unsuccessful when it comes to rescuing once-useful-to-great cast-offs from other MLS teams – e.g., Julius James, Fabian Espindola, Chris Rolfe, Alvaro Saborio, and Pedro Santos – all of which has combined to cause then to fall ever further off not just their once-lofty standard, but the league as a whole.

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.]

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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.