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):

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.