6 avril 1996
Spartan Stadium San Jose
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Clash United 96.rar
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As the inaugural match of Major League Soccer ticked into its final 10 minutes, Eric Wynalda was concerned. Minutes earlier he had missed a chance to put his side, the San Jose Clash, 1-0 up. Now, with the game in its its final embers, Wynalda, the Clash, the league and the sellout crowd of 31,683 who had packed Spartan Stadium that day were faced with the one outcome no-one wanted to see: a nil-nil. After all, this was Major League Soccer: the new dawn of professional soccer in America, a league that the country had been without since the North American Soccer League folded, in 1984.
With the sun setting, fans still singing, and the game entering the 88th minute, the ball ping-ponged around in the Clash’s half before arriving at the feet of Nigerian midfielder Ben Iroha on the left. Iroha cut inside and ghosted into the opposition’s half. (In the game footage, a faint, hastily-covered MLS logo can still be seen in the center circle. It was painted by the new league, only for Fifa to declare that such markings were against the rules of the game.) Iroha played the ball to Wynalda, whose first touch took him towards the edge of the box as defender Jeff Agoos backpedalled. The decibel level rose slightly. “The atmosphere was fantastic,” Wynalda, who won 106 caps for the United States, told the Guardian. “I had experience of playing in a World Cup and had already seen it an environment like that. But it had a big effect on some of my teammates, who were perhaps experiencing an atmosphere like that for the first time.”
Two-and-a-half years earlier, this scene was nothing more than a vision on paper. One of the stipulations for the United States being granted the 1994 World Cup was that the US Soccer Federation had to start a new Division One league. When Major League Soccer gave its presentation, in early December 1993, it proposed a single-entity structure that would oversee all teams and focus on domestic player development. The MLS proposals which had the support of the USSF president at the time, Alan Rothenberg – faced competition from the American Professional Soccer League, the de facto top-tier league at the time, and League 1 America, a bid headed by businessman Jim Paglia, which proposed changing the game to feature a chevroned pitch and four goals, along with a number of other innovative new rules. Major League Soccer would go on to win, picking up 18 votes to the APSL’s five and League 1 America’s zero.
In the months leading up to the World Cup, those brought into the league’s managerial positions were soon met with humble realities of the task they faced. Ivan Gazidis, who would go on to become the league’s deputy commissioner, later described the scene. Gazidis said that he arrived at the World Cup offices in Century City, Los Angeles, only to find that “there was no banner that said Major League Soccer; nobody knew what that was. I had a desk in a corridor of the main thoroughfare MLS played a side part during the World Cup preparations, but the tournament did bring with it the expected fanfare, shattering attendance records and seeing youth participation levels rise. American sports fans, though, had seen the soccer boom before. The North American Soccer League, for example, blew up in the mid-70s to early-80s, only to see a rapid decline when factors such as all-too-rapid expansion and overpaying for aging foreign stars made an impact. The challenge facing Major League Soccer, then, was one of convincing fans that the new league was here to stay.
One of the ways the organizers hoped to do so was to persuade American viewers, perhaps of the NASL generation, that soccer matches were not to be seen as a one-off spectacle (as was the case when the New York Cosmos’ roadshow used to roll into town). The league would also pitch itself to recent immigrants, and reached an agreement with Spanish language TV network Univision, hoping to appeal to Hispanic fans. As well as managing the demographics of soccer fans and preconceived notions of how a professional soccer in the United States might turn out, sustainability to MLS also meant cost containment. To avoid the boom-and-bust cycles of the past, the league proposed a salary cap, which was reported at between $1.1m and $1.3m. Though this figure was just a drop in the ocean compared to the wages paid by other American sports, MLS hoped that the model would allow them to spread investment evenly throughout its teams and increase competition. George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the New York Yankees at the time, was reported to have described the model as communism one minute and brilliant the next. As well as gaining Steinbrenner’s attention, the league would also attracted interest from 22 different cities. But by November 1994, it was decided that the league would need to postpone its 1995 start date in order to find suitable investment.
Despite claims that the delay would not allow MLS to capitalise on the fervor of the World Cup, the decision eventually proved to be the right one. By June 1995, owners had been found for seven of MLS’s 10 franchises; Dallas, Tampa and San Jose would initially be run by the league. With MLS having a single-entity structure, it was essentially all systems go in every department from the World Cup onwards. Team names needed to be selected, logos picked. There were also members of staff to hire (for teams and the league offices), sponsors to find, and season tickets to sell. And then there was the small matter of signing players. Because of the speed at which the league needed to be assembled, many players’ contracts were put together on the fly – some were even signed up by the league before teams had coaches or general managers in place. Each team was allowed four marquee signings, which saw players like Carlos Valderrama, Jorge Campos, Roberto Donadoni and Hugo Sanchez join from abroad. In keeping with its proposals to the USSF, MLS also placed an emphasis on making sure that the best American talent returned to its shores, as for a number of years, a key group of USA players had been stating that they would return home were the country to develop a new Division 1 league.
“The move to Major League Soccer was so important to so many people,” Eric Wynalda, who was playing for VfL Bochum in Germany at the time, said. “It would have been wrong if I didn’t come home.” Wynalda was joined by American internationals such as Alexi Lalas, Jeff Agoos and Brian McBride. Domestically, those scouts who were positions to identify players had to select talent from the APSL, United States Indoor Soccer League, and other amateur and indoor soccer leagues (some of which were out of season). But despite the haste at which everyone had been working, by early February 1996, most allocated players were in place. A two-week, 16-round combine at the University of California-Irvine followed, with 250 players present. Then came the supplemental draft and a college draft.
This gave teams around two months more months to prepare for the start of the season, which was to be met with much anticipation. Major League Soccer also introduced a series of changes that it hoped would make the game more entertaining: a clock that went down not up; shootouts to decide matches that ended in a draw; and teams would be allowed to make four subs instead of three, as long as one was a goalkeeper (this was mainly to allow Jorge Campos to go outfield). There would also be a playoff system, like in other American sports, and because shootout wins counted for one point, a team finishing 12-10 could technically finish ahead of a team finishing 15-7. What Major League Soccer had created, then, was an exciting league that it hoped would appeal to the traditional soccer fan and a new audience, keep people coming back, and not leave itself open to a financial collapse. There would be star players – American star players – and an approach geared towards sustainability would allow the league to grow over time, it hoped. This modesty meant that MLS set itself the reasonable target of having average attendances of around 12,000 across its inaugural season.
But on April 6, 1996, there were more than 31,000 spectators present inside Spartan Stadium in San Jose, all staring at the one result that, in American sports terminology, is compared to “kissing your sister”: A tie. And a 0-0 tie at that. As Wynalda entered DC United the box, he dragged the ball from his right foot onto his left, shaping to pull a shot across the face of the goal. Dummying, he then moved the ball back onto his right, opening his body on the edge of the six-yard-box. The scene was familiar to Wynalda: in a pre-season friendly against DC United a few weeks earlier, he had faced United goalkeeper Jeff Causey in a similar position before missing the chance at the near post. “All of that went through my head when I took the shot,” Wynalda said. “I remembered the play, I remembered the way he read it, and I remembered the way he addressed the position.” In the crowd, Clash general manager Peter Bridgewater was making his way down to the field in the anticipation of a penalty shoot; Ivan Gazidis, also expecting a shootout to end what he described as a “total disaster” of a game, was on his way down from the bathroom; and Sunil Gulati, who had overseen the league’s development from the start, was sitting with J-League chairman Saburo Kawabuchi.
“The truth is, I just tried to hit it hard with the inside of my foot and inside the far post,” Wynalda said. “I missed it to a certain extent. I caught it a little underneath because the grass was a bit longer than most fields we played on – but it ended up looking great.” Wynalda’s shot flew into the top corner of the net, causing the crowd to erupt. Ivan Gazidis, who had heard the roar on his return from the bathroom, was reportedly soaked with beer as he moved back to his seat. Wynalda rushed to the sideline, flipped down his shirt and slid to his knees a defining moment for a league that was under the microscope. “My comment at the time was: ‘Thank God for Eric Wynalda,’” Gulati, today the USSF president, told the Guardian. “We were nervous about the first game in the league’s history ending scoreless when we had been promising attacking soccer.” “If Wynalda hadn’t scored, I don’t think it would have been a catastrophe, but it would have taken a bit of momentum away from the league,” Beau Dure, author of Long Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer, said. “Maybe some of the big crowds in the first weeks would’ve been slightly smaller.” The game finished 1-0 minutes later, and MLS’ average attendance over its inaugural season would be a healthy 17, 406. Last month, the league entered its 21st season. “Over the years, so many people have come up to me and had their say about where they were when it happened; I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was a game-changer in my career,” Wynalda said. “So many people were positively affected by that goal, and it’s a moment in time that you just always associate with Major League Soccer, so I’m extremely proud of that. It’s a great little piece of history.”
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