Write On Sports LLC - "Major League Soccer: A Primer to a Culture" by Jeff Bull

Major League Soccer: A Primer to a Culture

2006-09-22 19:48:58 | By: Jeff Bull

Eleven years isn’t much time for a league, never mind one that has already shed two franchises, to develop a personality or identities for its constituent clubs. As such, it’s not too surprising that Major League Soccer (MLS) suffers from the perception that it is comprised of anonymous, even basically inter-changeable, teams. But MLS looks very different to long-time fans. Through supporters’ clubs and online communities, American soccer fans have unconsciously, yet quite naturally, built a culture around the young league.

An attempt to explore the state of that collective culture served as the inspiration behind the fifth “Carnival of Soccer.” The Carnival of Soccer, the brain-child of a blogger who posts as “D” on a DC United fan-site called DCenters, has one blogger establish a soccer-related topic and invite contributions from other bloggers. The blogger who chose the topic then organizes the Carnival by linking to and briefly introducing all the contributions. Past topics have included familiar ideas, such as how to move the U.S. national team program forward after the relative disappointment of the 2006 World Cup, to more arcane subjects like raising the profile of the U.S. Open Cup. When it became my turn to host Carnival of Soccer 5, I took that opportunity to see how my take on Major League Soccer’s teams synced with other bloggers’ views. The goal was to determine the extent to which MLS’s fan culture is, in fact, shared.

The results, though drawn from a small sample, revealed a compelling level of unanimity how the fans believe the league’s teams stack up. Offering those generally shared perspectives here serves as a means to introduce general sports fans, or even soccer fans wary of the league, to MLS in a way that no advertising campaign ever could. Knowledge of MLS’s culture, especially from outside the league’s “we’re all winners” frame, introduces some context to what a casual fan would likely see as a random game - and, because this is MLS, odds favor a game of, um, less-obvious quality. Coming to an MLS game without a frame wouldn’t be unlike a casual baseball fan sitting down to watch the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees without knowing they hate each other; it may or may not be a good game, but knowing why everyone looks so pissed off can only help.

So, who are these teams that comprise MLS? Carnival of Soccer 5 offered some colorful answers and useful analogies to make sense of all that.

Because their status is least ambiguous, let’s start with the best and worst of MLS’s teams. With four of ten MLS Cups in their trophy case, DC United stands as the best team in league history. DC’s top-dog status drew comparisons to a pair of NFL teams, a popular way among contributors to the Carnival to explain the league. One, Mr. Fish of The Kin of Fish blog, took that status as confirmed and compared DC United to the famously successful Pittsburgh Steelers, while Kinney, author of the DCenters blog, took a longer view by comparing DC’s early dominance of the league to the Green Bay Packers’ similar dominance of the NFL. Regardless of whether those analogies hold (they do, though, well enough), DC United sets the pace in MLS - as Mike H of My Soccer Blog puts it, “just by showing up, they intimidate.”

The unfinished basement to DC United’s master suite is, without question, the Columbus Crew. Whether they’re compared to “the guy who is every girl’s friend” (Mike H), or simply dubbed “hapless” (my take), everyone agrees that Columbus won’t be winning anything any time soon. This is the team no one hates, but that everyone simultaneously pities and looks forward to playing.

A lot of teams remain between the best and the worst and these aren’t so easy to organize - especially the league’s two newest franchises. Chivas USA and Real Salt Lake haven’t yet reached two years of age, but they’re being quickly subsumed into the league’s big picture nonetheless. After a cocky entrance last season, in which they fielded Mexican players before and after their prime playing years, Chivas USA, which has deep ties to Chivas de Guadalajara in Mexico, has impressed by adapting quickly. Real Salt Lake, on the other hand, was twice compared in the Carnival to the NFL’s Houston Texans - ouch. Even so, based on this season, they’ve already over-taken Columbus.

Summarizing the remaining eight teams, each of whom are either in their eleventh or ninth year of existence, doesn’t come so easily in spite of the generally shared impressions. As such, what follows is one man’s version of a “best of” from Carnival of Soccer 5. From the top, or thereabouts, down:

The Los Angeles Galaxy are generally viewed as the league’s “second team”; with the league’s (alleged) best player, Landon Donovan, on their roster, LA invited comparisons to the Chicago Bulls on DCenters. Fans view the Chicago Fire, the team that hails from America’s actual “Second City,” as among the league’s better team; My Soccer Blog’s Mike H dubs them “the last-born child of a four-kid household,” but one who “keeps finding ways to 'out shine' their older siblings.” Throw in a penchant for cynically smart play and you’ve got Chicago. The Houston Dynamo, who was, till last season, the San Jose Earthquakes, round out the league’s upper-tier. In my post, I argued that “Houston is never bad” and credit this to finding a good supporting cast for one (or two) great players.

After these teams, comes a pair of generally respected teams infamous for coming up short: the New England Revolution and FC Dallas. Blessed with a slew of offensive stars, the Revolution owns the reputation as the great under-achievers of recent years; DCenter’s Kinney says plenty by equating them to Jim Kelly’s Buffalo Bills. FC Dallas, on the other hand, almost indisputably stands as the league’s all-time under-achievers. Whether or not all Carnival contributors would agree with that phrasing, none would dispute that the Dallas team, under any name (they used to be the Dallas Burn), has an unfortunate tradition of starting strong only to “gear down” before the playoffs.

Disrespectful as it may seem to phrase it so, the rest of the league’s teams exist only as after-thoughts - and that’s in spite of one of them, the Kansas City Wizards, having one championship to their credit. Perhaps if they weren’t universally regarded as “boring” - in italics no less - the Wizards would get more love. After that, picking the “most dissed” team in MLS depends largely on the judging criteria. Is it worse to be both loathed for where you live and ridiculed for endemic dysfunction and futility like Red Bull New York - or the “Pink Cows” as DCenters’ Kinney calls them? Or does Colorado - who was not only dubbed a “true vanilla team” by The Kin of Fish’s Mr. Fish, but also either explicitly or implicitly forgotten by three other contributors - get the shortest stick? That’s a tough call. Of the three, at least Kansas City can deflect some barbs with a trophy; the other two simply have it bad until things improve.

That, in a hopelessly brief nutshell, is what MLS looks like to long-time fans and it doesn’t even address some of league’s heated rivalries that either grew spontaneously - for instance, the Fire versus DC United - or those that were formally established by competing supporters’ clubs, as with the Rocky Mountain Cup that pits Real Salt Lake against the Colorado Rapids. (Another contributor, Bonji, of College to the Pros, wrote a fine piece on this young, but very intense rivalry). It isn’t so much that the league has no history or tradition than it’s that those traditions are being shaped from the ground up and on the fly. The league’s small media footprint confines the reach to interested parties, which renders it something of an unintented secret. Based on what came out of Carnival of Soccer 5, though, future fans the league will have a rich, shared culture waiting for them if and when they arrive.

Editor's Note: for the complete listing of the Carnival of Soccer 5, see the entirety of Jeff Bull's post on his blog "It's a Simple Game" (http://itsasimplegame.blogspot.com/2006/09/come-one-come-all-carnival-of-soccer-5.html). Its great to see the blogging community in this arena getting together to discuss ideas and furthering a community. Keep it going!!

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