Getting Reacquainted with Sporting Kansas City, aka, MLS's Barely Magical Wizards

When at his best, that's when you gotta watch out.

[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
Seeing Sporting Kansas City as the fourth-best team in MLS history makes sense and doesn’t at the same time – especially given all the ups and downs (more than I expected or remembered, certainly) and the fact that they had their last championship season 11 years ago. They alternated between success and failure more over their first 14 seasons, reaching MLS Cup here (e.g., in 2000 and 2004) and missing back-to-back post-seasons there (e.g., 1998 and 1999 and again in 2005 and 2006). SKC became more consistent over the back 14, missing the playoffs just three times, but, after their second MLS Cup, the trophies got smaller and then stopped coming. They’ve fielded some famous goalkeepers – e.g., Tony Meola, Jimmy “White Panther” Nielsen, and Tim Melia – and as many famous defenders (e.g., Ike Opara, Jimmy Conrad, Matt Besler), and I suspect most long-time fans of MLS associate them with seemingly eternal head coach Peter Vermes’ aggressive, grinding approach to the game. Kings of the 1-0 win, basically, or even claiming the game in penalties after they throttled the life of the other team’s attack and couldn’t shove in a goal of their own: that’s probably unfair, but that’s the reputation I hold in my head. We’ll see how that holds up below, but I’ll always quietly love them for coming into the league with beautiful rainbows on their kits and literally starting as the Kansas City Wiz. The fact they thought switching “Wiz” to “Wizards” made it better? Chef’s fucking kiss.

Best Season(s)
I might get some dissents on this call – particularly given the way it centers MLS Cup 2013, a game they won on penalties over Real Salt Lake in the coldest final in league history – but I’m going with 2012 to 2017. Despite some shaky finishes (e.g., 10th overall in 2014 and 2015), SKC added three U.S. Open Cups (in 2012, 2015, and 2017) to their second MLS Cup. The counterpoint is 2000, the season they did the double (winning Cup and Shield), but the league had such claustrophobic margins back then and I genuinely believe they built their best, most stable long-time roster in the 2010s.

Long-Term Tendencies
The loose impression holds up pretty well, honestly: a couple exceptional seasons aside (some recent, e.g., 2018, 2020, and especially 2021), SKC generally sticks at average or under it in terms of goals scored (18 of 28 seasons) and generally gets at average or under on goals allowed (17 of 28 seasons). Think a lot of stacked ‘n’ stubborn defenses, combative midfields and an occasionally-interrupted succession of attacking stars to turns Ds (or Ts) into Ws. For what it’s worth, I do think this is shifting, if slowly, and with Vermes’ blessing. He’s mellowed. Except when it comes to working the refs.

An MLS History Project: 1996, So Goddamn Thirsty

Desperation should never start here. Pro tip.

With no Major League Soccer to watch and/or write about, I’ve decided to take my...let’s call it chemically-strained memory for a test drive. The vehicle will be a year-by-year personal history of the first 24 MLS seasons; call it my own little commemoration of a 25th anniversary season that may or may not happen (for the record, my money’s against it, but my heart’s for it).

Because this is about what I actually remember, the overall intention is to use minimal prompts – e.g., a couple Wikipedia articles, maybe one specific event or concept I can mine to give anyone who finds this something better than, “and then DC United beat the New York/New Jersey MetroStars*, where they played the Tampa Bay Mutiny** in the Eastern Conference semifinals." (* The original New York team has always struggled with branding. ** Wow, I still type “Tampa Buy Mutiny” the first time ‘round even all these years later.)

The broad goal is to track themes, trends, great players, weird players, bad ideas, good ones, and to just try to get my mind back to what those moments felt like; the underlying goal is to treat the whole thing like a trivia night at the local bar: there will be no googling and no further research after checking…let’s go with three prompts (except to, say, dig up video for something I remember and would like to post).

Before diving in, I can tell you where this whole thing is very likely to fail: I put my chances at not being able to make particular distinctions between, say, 2003 and 2004, very, very high. But that’s not what this is. It’s a trip down Memory Lane. Because, when you’ve got nothing else to look at, why not look at what came before?

The whole thing starts when Major League Soccer started: 1996. Let’s set the scene…

First things first, the league was supposed to start a year earlier, in 1995 (apparently), but it failed to launch in the originally-scheduled Year One. Recalling that knocked loose the memory that having an officially FIFA-sanctioned top-flight domestic soccer league was a condition for the U.S. getting the World Cup in 1994 (how explicit a condition, I don’t recall). When friends asked about that during World Cup broadcasts, I have this loose memory of thinking it’d never happen…and, once the product rolled out, I figured the whole damn thing was doomed.