Getting Reacquainted with Inter Miami CF, the Very Bestest, Special Boys of MLS

Fuck Lays on so, so many levels.

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I came this close to lumping the Miami Fusion in with Inter Miami CF, and this was to the point of doing the math, but decided the gap separating the two teams was too vast. The Fusion joined in the same pre-contraction expansion season as the Chicago Fire, only, when contraction did come, the league opted to keep Chicago and cut Florida loose…of which, maybe it’s time for an early 2000s revival. I opted against, even if OG Miami was a good, fun team and even that’s before getting to the fact that MLS legends like Kyle Beckerman, Pablo Mastroeni and Nick Rimando started their careers in sunny Florida, which alone marks them as a worthy footnote for posterity…

…but today’s Miami lives in a totally different ZIP code than the old team and about 20 floors higher. It was born a glamour team and, as befits a team with ambition to match the buckets full of cash they had lying around, 2020 Miami went so rules-breaking big on its first roster-build that it forced the league to sanction it for playing a shell-game with their roster compliance. They played through the sanctions (which, factually, didn’t bite till the following season) and squeaked into the 2020 playoffs, if only due to the fact the playoff pool was out-of-control-house-party big that season (because COVID) and even then it took a wild card slot an MLS HQ acting as a village. In fact, Miami never made the playoffs as anything better than a wild card until 2024 – which, 1) doesn’t count in these parts* and 2) took riding Gonzalo Higuain’s last gasp to come off. I briefly became obsessed with Miami’s chances at the beginning of 2023 when they started strong on the back of sterling midfield performances from Gregore and Jean Mota, but Gregore went down for most (if not all) of the season by the third game and Mota succumbed to an injury of his own just a couple games later. Miami’s cruel summer to arrived ahead of schedule - they went winless and generally stepped on rakes from the middle of May to the middle July – and then came the ringers. Lionel Messi arrived first, of course, but then came Sergio Busquets, Jordi Alba, and…Robert Taylor. With all that star power and a new director (they bumped now-Portland Timbers head coach, Phil Neville, for Tata Martino), Miami won its first trophy, the 2023 Leagues Cup. They could not, however, climb out of the hole the pre-ringer team dug over those two months of dining on shit once a week…and we all know where things go from here, not least because the league never allows us to forget that Messi Is Here.

Total Joy Points: 10

How They Earned Them (& *How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
Supporters’ Shield: 2024
Leagues Cup: 2023
CCL Quarterfinals: 2024
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 2023

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):