Level Set 11, the San Jose Earthquakes, aka, the Strivin' Orphans

Think many kids have played Orphan Annie. Is that dog real?

What follows is a brief history of the San Jose Earthquakes, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Extremes characterize the early history of the San Jose Earthquakes, and most of the rest is tragedy. They also have a real shout as MLS’s most tortured franchise, but to start at the beginning…

They started as the San Jose Clash and started poorly. After making the playoffs in the league’s inaugural season (1996), the team missed them over the next four, three as the San Jose Clash (1997-1999), then one more as the San Jose Earthquakes (2000); as if to prove that rebranding doesn’t equal rebirth, they picked up a Wooden Spoon under both names (1997 and 2000). San Jose flipped the script one thin season later - and how. It started with the hiring of MLS Frank Yallop as head coach and only got better when U.S.-wunderkind, Landon Donovan, returned to the States after a frustrated stint with Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen. With a reliable spine of Joe Cannon in goal, Jimmy Conrad in central defense and Richard Mulrooney rage-tackling in front of them, Yallop filled out the roster with young players who would dominate mid-2000s MLS – e.g., Canadian great Dwayne DeRosario and hard-nosed center back Eddie Robinson, wily veterans like former DC United fullback Jeff Agoos and nifty Danish import Ronnie Ekelund. With that fresh start, San Jose threw down 2000’s Wooden Spoon and grabbed MLS Cup 2001. Another strong recruitment class – e.g., future MLS stalwarts like Ryan Cochrane (defender), Brian Mullan (midfielder), and Brian Ching (forward, for both club and country) – plus some crafty poaching - e.g., long-time midfield anchor Ricardo Clark – not only carried them to their second, and last, MLS Cup in 2003, but carried them to the 2005 Supporters’ Shield. They did that despite Donovan’s (controversial) departure to the LA Galaxy and losing key players like Ekelund and Agoos. Then, and pretty much out of the blue, the team fucked off to Houston, Texas.

An MLS History Project, 2003: The Ballad of Chris Roner (& The End of Puberty)

This is like that Big Foot photo. Defining.

Some part of my subconscious anticipated that these history posts would eventually reach a point where the talking points start and end with who won what trophy and which players made it possible. I didn’t think it’d happen so soon, but…

Fortunately, that also signals that Major League Soccer had survived its growing pains – the acne (teal uniforms), hair in places that it wasn’t before (going with the Tampa Bay Mutiny), breaking voices (no ties and the shootout) and random boners (I don’t know…the Colorado Rapids?). MLS has been a (probably) viable league (old habits die hard) since then and the panting of The Grim Reaper grew fainter and fainter with every season after 2001 (well, until the COVID). In general terms, the league keeps adding teams and raising the salary cap; fans see only tweaks to the rules of competition, maybe a poorly-scheduled post-season now and again, but they’re not seeing, say, rearranged conferences or the local team evaporating. Starting at a certain point, one very close to 2003, Major League Soccer looked like the same league it was the season before, only with more faces.

2003 didn’t see more faces – expansion hadn’t happened yet (and neither had relocation) – but the competitive rules did evolve a bit. First, they ended the one year experiment of letting teams qualify regardless of conference (see 2002 post); the top four teams in each five-team conference would make the 2003 MLS Cup Playoffs. They also managed the playoffs differently – i.e., for reasons that still don’t make sense, but…sure, only the conference semifinals featured a three-game home-and-away series, while both the conference finals and MLS Cup would be one-and-done. I can’t recall or state with confidence that those choices made anyone happy, but, the 2003 playoffs did include one hell of a powerful argument for the greatest all-time comeback in MLS history. The team that won it was the San Jose Earthquakes, and they’d go on to win 2003 MLS Cup as well, beating a restructured Chicago Fire team 4-2 in what remains one of the highest scoring finals in league history.

The venue is noteworthy too: the Home Depot Center, MLS’s second soccer-specific stadium, opened that season (June 7, 2003) and hosted MLS Cup. It gave the Los Angeles Galaxy a home and, in some ways, a home field for U.S. Soccer as a whole (they only used Crew Stadium when they wanted the closest possible version of a home-field or make Latin American players cold/uncomfortable; related, this is fun, and check out the venue that landed No. 1). I’ve heard a lot of things about this stadium down the years, some good, some bad, but it’s also unquestionably one of the original “cathedrals to the game” for MLS. Anyway, back to the game…

An MLS History Project, 1999: Late Bloomers & Shrinking Margins

The theme of tonight's TED Talk...

“This was the last season which used the 35 yard line shootout rule to resolve tied games, and that of the countdown timer, with MLS Cup 1999 adopting the IFAB-standard running clock thereafter.”

Major League Soccer’s unsavory gimmicks lasted somwhere around four years. I can't name a decisive date because the league’s commissioner only decided ditch the a game-clock that counted down instead of up when MLS Cup 1999 rolled around, thereby returning to the normal…profoundly well-established tradition of the referee keeping time on the field…and having people explain to that same referee at volume, and in extraordinarily personal terms, that he is an asshole who does not know how to keep fucking time. See? Tradition.

Then and future commissioner Don Garber made that call. For what it’s worth, I think that small, obvious decision bought “The Soccer Don” a well of sympathy that he has yet to burn through, if with the older generation. I don’t like him a lot, but he seems to get the big things…look, a lifetime of voting for Democrats prepares you for certain things.

As for the season, tell me if you’ve heard this one before: DC United reached and won an MLS Cup final. Guess who they played? Yep, the Los Angeles Galaxy. Guess where they played? You’re not gonna believe this, but…Foxborough, MA, yes, the same venue where DC snuffed out the Galaxy (whoa.) in the inaugural MLS Cup just four years earlier. I’d forgotten this, but Christina Aguilera performed for the MLS Cup 1999 halftime. I dug around a bit to see if I could find the video (nope!), but I did find a NY Times blog post from 2007 that included this little snippet:

“Christina Aguilera, who at that time was still more Mickey Mouse Club than ‘dirrty’ pop-diva, performed a song from her debut album that went platinum 10 times over and won her the Best New Artist Grammy in 2000. Meanwhile, M.L.S. average attendance dropped slightly the next season.”

The headline to that piece – which was about Jimmy Eat World playing the 2007 MLS Cup halftime - was “Pop Stars Riding M.L.S. Coat-Tails.” Yeah, no. Moving on…