July of 1967, in Los Angeles. A crowd of just under 18,000 looks on as the first FIFA-sanctioned, nation-wide soccer championship in the United States is contested at the LA Memorial Coliseum. It’s a historic event, in the technical sense, but in the sweep of US sporting history, the match, and its participants, have been more or less forgotten. This is the birth of the professional game in the US and Canada. The league, the United Soccer Association, represents the first attempt at building a truly coast-to-coast, major soccer league. And they did it with borrowed teams.

On the day, the Los Angeles Wolves beat the Washington (DC) Whips 6-5, after extra time. The two teams had emerged as champions of their divisions, Western and Eastern respectively; outplaying teams in 10 other major US and Canadian cities. They truly were the best in America, and yet there was nothing American about them. The entire roster of the LA Wolves was identical to that of Wolverhampton Wanderers, Washington’s the same as that of Aberdeen FC of the Scottish First Division. To a man.

The 1967 Washington Whips. Courtesy of www.nasljerseys.com.

As a matter of fact, the entire league was composed of imported European and South American clubs. All twelve USA franchises were wholesale imports, picking up extra playing time and paychecks during the traditional summer off-season. In addition to Wolves and Aberdeen, the others were

Shamrock Rovers (Ireland): Boston Rovers
Cagliari Calcio (Italy): Chicago Mustangs
Stoke City (England): Cleveland Stokers
Dundee Utd (Scotland): Dallas Tornado
Glentoran FC (N. Ireland): Detroit Cougars
Bangu AC (Brazil): Houston Stars
C.A. Cerro (Uruguay): NY Skyliners
ADO Den Haag (Netherlands): San Francisco Golden Gate Gales
Hibernian FC (Scotland): Toronto City
Sunderland AFC (England): Vancouver Royal Canadians

The league only contested one season before merging with rival National Professional Soccer League to form the NASL in 1968. But it seems an oddly (perhaps cynically) appropriate beginning for the Great American Soccer Experiment, this importing of whole teams from European and South American leagues, considering what became of the NASL, and the Dark Ages induced by its collapse.

Most fans of soccer in the US are familiar with the roots of the collapse of the NASL, but if you’re not, this 1984 Sports Illustrated article by Clive Gammon saw the writing on the wall as the league began what would be its last season. And yet, he must have been a lover of the game, for he closed on an optimistic, and prescient, note: “Soccer is too great a sport to be lost because of the antics of sports-illiterate owners and fast-buck seekers. Even if the NASL goes gurgling down tubes of its own making, soccer will surely come back for another life.” It did, of course, in the form of the (hopefully) more stable MLS, but it was a long dark winter for the sport between 1984 and now.

Among the Ashes

The collapse of the NASL didn’t mean a sudden disappearance of fans or players, of course, or even many of the clubs. Most of the game moved indoors, though, and not a few clubs simply vanished in the implosion. Those dedicated to the outdoor game were reduced to semi-pro status at best, and dozens of leagues sprang up across the country, changed names, and collapsed over the twelve years between the end of the NASL and the birth of MLS.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, a handful of teams created what was originally called the Western Alliance Challenge Series in 1985, the year after the collapse of the NASL – a sort of mini-league composed of four independent regional teams: FC Portland, FC Seattle, Victoria (British Columbia) Riptides, and what remained of the post-NASL San Jose Earthquakes.

This was the state of outdoor soccer across the country immediately after the NASL: small regional groups of small-budget teams competing for nothing more than pride.  Chief among them seem to have been the Lone Star Soccer Alliance in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas (featuring the worst club name I came across during this research: San Antonio XLR8), the Southwest Independent Soccer League, and on the East Coast, the third league in the history of the country to call itself the American Soccer League.

These leagues were not particularly stable, however, fluctuating constantly in membership and name, and none of them as wildly as the Southwest Independent Soccer League. Between 1986 when it was established as an indoor league and 1997, it went through 8 different names. While it was composed of multiple divisions, over 40 of its listed member teams only existed for one season (including worst name runner-up, Ohio Xoggz). Most of those single-season teams played only in 1994, the year the United States hosted with World Cup, apparently hoping for a groundswell of interest in the club sport. Still, by the time its own dust had settled, the SISL had transformed from a small regional league into the United Systems of Independent Soccer Leagues, or USISL, and had constructed the divisional pyramid of semi-pro and developmental leagues that still operates today as the basis of lower-league soccer in the United States and Canada.

Meanwhile, the Western Soccer Challenge Series had become the Western Soccer League in 1989 and fielded teams from Arizona to Edmonton. It’s opposite, the ASL, managed the miraculous: two full seasons without losing a franchise. In 1990, the two merged, forming the first nation-wide outdoor league since the NASL: the American Professional Soccer League. Indeed, come 1994, the league would present itself to the USSF as a candidate for the Division 1 professional league the Federation had promised to FIFA in exchange for hosting the World Cup. Despite being the only functioning league put forward, the APSL lost out to what would become MLS.

The league rebranded itself again, this time as the A-League, but it was in steep decline and in 1996, when most of the league’s best had jumped ship to MLS, it was practically dead in the water. Enter here the ascendant USISL to absorb the A-League, which was merged with the USISL Select division. The new joint venture retained the name A-League and operated as the 2^nd Division in the US and Canada for many years after, eventually being rebranded again as USL I – still here today, if barely. But none of these leagues could ever really lay claim to being truly Professional in the way the NASL had been, or that MLS would become. That honor laid elsewhere, in hockey arenas.

Bringing the Torch Inside

“Indoor soccer will be the game of the Eighties. Bet your cherries on it.”

- Charley Eckman

There’s a certain ironic truth to that quote, taken from a 1983 Sports Illustrated article on the Major Indoor Soccer League by Frank Deford.  I say ironic because indoor soccer was, certainly, a sport of the Eighties, but not since. Charley Eckman was a former NCAA and NBA referee and had coached the Fort Wayne Pistons of the nascent NBA in the mid-1950s. By the mid-Eighties, though, he was the color radio commentator for the MISL’s Baltimore Blast, and had become a vocal proponent of the indoor game.

And well he should have been, for the game seemed well positioned to move in on its competition indoor winter sports hockey and basketball, neither of which had hit its peak. Consider this – searches of the Sports Illustrated electronic archive returned 10 articles dedicated to the MISL throughout the 1980s. Not a lot, to be sure, but a search for articles related to the predominate interim outdoor leagues discussed above returns only a suggestion to search for something else. It’s telling not only as an excuse for the sparse information presented here regarding outdoor soccer in the 1980s, but as a reading of public sentiment regarding the sport altogether.

After the collapse of the NASL, SI saw nothing worthy of coverage in the domestic outdoor game. When youth teams were taken on group trips to see a pro match, it was likely the MISL they saw (there may even be a St. Louis Steamers pennant lost among the collected memorabilia of my childhood somewhere). The outdoor game had failed – that was a fact. Nevermind that that was due more to poor oversight than cultural disinterest, indoor soccer was in its ascendency and no one was looking back.

In 1975, the NASL had undertaken its first-ever indoor tournament. Divided into regional groups, 16 of the 20 teams participated in the group-to-elimination competition. The San Jose Earthquakes defeated the Tampa Bay Rowdies 8 to 5.  The tournament was staged again the following year, but with only 12 teams competing (the flagship New York Cosmos notably one of the abstaining teams). Tampa Bay was vindicated in the final, but the tournament was put on hiatus.

There were tentative plans to launch a full-on indoor NASL league as a supplement to the regular season, but the NASL was beaten to the punch when, in December of 1978, the Major Indoor Soccer League opened its inaugural season. Pete Rose, baseball legend and part owner of the Cincinnati Kids franchise, kicked out the first ball, and the first professional indoor soccer league in the United States was underway – six-a-side, with hockey-style boards and all. Although there were only six teams that first year, the venture was a success, and the NASL quickly followed suit, fast tracking its own plans for an indoor league that began the following winter, though many of its stars – and some entire teams – declined to participate.

The NASL-Indoor may have featured incarnations of America’s topflight clubs, but it was really a doomed enterprise, formed as it was at the beginning of the end of the NASL. Teams began dropping out of the competition almost immediately, and as more and more teams folded completely, the NASL-Indoor dwindled to a paltry 7 teams in the winter of ’83-’84 – the last NASL competition, indoor or out, to be played. It didn’t help that, during its dying days, a few teams even jumped ship to MISL. Indeed, what had been the start-up rival league grew from it’s original 6 to 14 teams in the same time span, including former NASLers like Chicago Sting and Minnesota Kickers and even one season of the New York Cosmos in 84/85. Without the outdoor NASL, MISL was now the premier soccer league in the nation.

Over the next several years, attendances climbed to dizzy heights near 10,000 – more in places like St. Louis. ESPN broadcast as many as 18 games a season, and the league even had bonafide star players in Croat/Yugoslavian Steve Zungul and the Brazilian Tatu. And, in a pattern unsurprising in retrospect, soccer-ignorant businessmen clamored for the chance to throw their millions into the show.  Many a pundit (and hopeful investor) truly believed indoor soccer would be the version of the sport to capture the American market. Sports Illustrated writer JD Reed wrote 1980, “Magic or human pinball, the craze may be around for a while.” In many markets, the indoor teams were drawing far better crowds than their deceased and dying outdoor predecessors could.

Purists, of course, were mortified. This was not soccer, what with its hockey boards, multiple-point goal ranges, and penalty boxes. Ben Kerner, owner of the best-selling St. Louis Steamers told SI’s Drank DeFord, “All right, it’s not soccer. Call it something else. So what does it matter what you call it if the people enjoy it, heh? It’s better than being out on the street.” Former NASL goalkeeper Bob Rigby, playing in MISL in 1980 said, “Some crazy must have invented this sport. It’s a zoo, a circus. I can’t believe anybody takes it seriously, but they do.”

Many were stumped as to why, exactly, MISL seemed off to such a good start. If was, after all, a mere bastardization of a sport that was barely keeping its head above water. But it was, due in part perhaps to its own hype – which shouldn’t be under-estimated. Teams were introduced to a dazzling light show, emerging from clouds of theater fog to rousing disco tunes. Outrageous mascots (the Philadelphia Fever’s 8-foot-tall, electric-light-infused Socceroo, for example) threw trinkets and toys to the crowd. The players themselves were paraded and posterized in their leg-revealing short shorts. The spectacle was most certainly Of The Eighties, and it seemed to be working.

So much so, that in 1985 MISL got a rival start-up of its own, the American Indoor Soccer Association. The salary war that resulted saw the MISL shrink back to 7 (only after folding and re-establishing the Tacoma Stars franchise). By 1990, a certain equilibrium between the leagues seems to have emerged, as each competed with eight teams a piece.

In 1991 both teams rebranded, becoming the Major Soccer League and National Professional League, each having dropped the “indoor” qualifier from the name – perhaps an indicator of the primacy of the indoor version of the sport at the time. But, alas – and befitting the Sport of the Eighties – it was too late. MSL collapsed the following year as attendances drooped into the 6,000s. In 1993, however, the Continental Indoor Soccer League was born, which would stage its games in summer, and would come to include Mexican teams.

Since they played on opposite schedules, the CISL and NPSL were both able to grow in the run up to and immediately following USA ’94. The CISL folded two years on, though, unable to compete with the summer-schedule outdoor MLS. And while the NPSL carried on for several more years – and other leagues have since come and gone in an endless cycle – the birth of MLS was the writing on the wall for indoor soccer. All the predictions that indoor would be the version to sweep America proved hopelessly hopeful.

Sports writers, and the public in general, have displayed an amazing ability to forget the long and complex history of association football in the United States. And yet it seems they still sting from the lessons learned from the NASL and indoor soccer, hesitant to embrace the sport that has failed them so many times before. The future of soccer here is not guaranteed, of course, but as MLS nears its 15^th season, the current top-flight organization has learned its own valuable lessons, and continues cautiously apace. It leaves one hopeful that the future will prove more steady than the past, especially since I have never heard anyone call soccer the Game of Nineties, 2000s, or Teens.

However, with the good news there will now come inevitable comparisons with the Timbers’ primary rival, and MLS expansion case study, the nearby Seattle Sounders. And these comparisons make Timbers fans bristle. You see, while Seattle’s inaugural MLS season has been an undoubted success, Portlanders are suffering through what amounts to a sporting version of the overlooked younger sibling. They have been toiling away in the deep darkness of USL soccer for years, growing one of the largest supporters sections in any league in the US, and all through grassroot organization. But in a few months of Seattle Sounders MLS soccer, Portland has been overshadowed by what is, by all accounts, MLS’ most successful expansion to date.

A Historic Rivalry

Soccer in the two cities shares a similar history, dating back to the mid-seventies halcyon of the NASL. The Sounders and Timbers were admitted as expansion franchises in 1974 and 1975 and folded in 1982 and 1983 respectively, as the league disintegrated.

In the years after, as North American soccer died and was reborn and moved inside and back outside and died again, seemingly without end, teams from both cities competed in the alphabet soup of interim leagues, like the WSA, WSL, ASL, and ASPL. It was not until the USSF firmly established the United Soccer Leagues and a federation-run pyramid that the teams found stability. In the USL A-League (the nation’s top-flight until MLS was formed) the Seattle Sounders name and logo was rededicated in 1994, and the Timbers followed suit some seven years later in 2001.

In the A-League (later renamed USL First Division), Seattle proved to be a strong force, winning four League Championships and reaching US Open Cup semifinals three times. Portland, on the other hand, struggled mightily, never winning the league, or making it past the 4th round of the Open Cup. The Timbers’ greatest success was winning the 2004 A-League Western Division.

Off the field, however, the results were reversed. Seattle struggled to attract crowds over 3,000 for their entire existence, averaging closer to 2,000 around the turn of the millennium. Their highest average attendance came in their inaugural A-League season, 1994, with 6,347. Otherwise, the average for their entire existence in the A-League/USL-1 was 3,194.

Compare that with the Timbers, who’ve averaged nearly twice that in their seven years of USL soccer: 6,235. In fact, in ’07 and ’08, the Timbers have been the second highest drawing team in USL, behind only Montreal (who miraculously draw well over 10,000 regularly because French Canada is just inexplicable). The Timbers also became considerably well ingrained into the city’s sports consciousness, having only to compete with NBA’s Trailblazers and Triple-A baseball.

Crowning the large crowds (large by our modest standards, of course) is the Timbers Army, who occupy the North End of the stadium and have built a reputation for being among the most active supporters in any league in the United States — a recent “animated” tifo display, in which a 20-foot lumberjack clad in Timbers green chopped down a replica of the Seattle Space Needle, made waves in the deep recesses of the internet reserved for American soccer talk.

Guerrilla Marketing

All of that work, though, and the Timbers Army’s brick-by-brick construction of their club’s identity, has been eclipsed by the sudden appearance of a soccer marketing giant to the north, where before there had been little comparison between the two.

Seattle Sounders FC is going gangbusters since their “promotion” to MLS this season, both on the field in MLS and in the stands (and in the bank and in the city and in the news). In contrast to their meager USL days, the MLS Sounders have drawn average crowds near 30,000 in their 10 home matches this season. Yes. 30,000. You read that correctly (the semi-official number is 29,983.90, but all those zeroes look better in print). You may be doing some quick math in your head right now, so I’ll give you a moment to work it all out.

In the meantime, note that MLS’ previous best-team-ever-everybody-look-at-that, Toronto FC, are averaging 20,277 (probably as a function of stadium capacity – they’d draw more if they could). Have you done the math yet? The MLS Sounders are drawing almost ten-times as many fans than they did just last year, in the same stadium, with the same name. So what gives? Well, that’s what the Timbers Army wants to know when they chant “Where were you last year?!” at the seas of Sounders fans at Qwest Field.

A perfect storm settled over Seattle in 2008, at least as far as Seattle Sounders FC ownership group (faced by mascot Drew Carey but mainly backed by Hollywooder Joe Roth, along with Adrian Hanauer and Microsoft founder Paul Allen) were concerned. Seattle’s oldest sports team, gridiron’s Seattle Seahawks, were suffering a miserable season winning only four games and missing the playoffs by a mile and a half. Baseball’s Mariners had been nothing more than mediocre for some time. Most importantly, however, was the departure for Oklahoma City of the city’s most successful and nationally renowned sports team, the NBA’s SuperSonics. That left a huge gaping hole in Seattle’s sports consciousness.

The Sounders plugged that hole with scarves. In a “guerilla marketing” maneuver, engineered by Seattle-based Wexley School for Girls (a jocularly named “alt” ad and marketing agency), thousands of Seattle Sounders FC branded scarves were disseminated around the metropolitan area and fans were encouraged to display them publicly in a Scarf Seattle campaign.

The maneuver worked, and the city’s mailboxes, balconies, and shop windows were all a-flutter with the blue and green scarves. Through special offers to groups, Seahawks season ticket holders, and the like, the Sounders managed to sell 13,000 season tickets in a matter of weeks. While some of the announced tickets were actually Seahawks holders who had simply not-yet-passed-up their special offer, the number created buzz, and the momentum kept the sales sky-rocketing. By season’s start, there were nearly 20,000 legitimate Sounders season ticket holders. Throughout the city, posters, schedules and bar signs began popping up and a giant scarf was hung from a highway overpass. It was a perfect modern marketing gimmick: make the buzz, and the buzz makes sales, even if the product is totally unknown.

And therein lies the rub for the Timbers Army and their DIY culture down the road. Seattle’s initial success was the result of expensive marketing. John Keatley’s blog is an insider’s look that innocently enough details a stage of the campaign in which, since there were no available press photos of Sounders fans, a cartoon modeling company was hired to make the background for a billboard. Tellingly, Portlanders refer to Sounders fans as “customers,” characterizing them as simply having been the victims of good advertising. But the complaints go deeper than street-marketing.

Do It Yourself

In the strange marketplace and cultural space of American soccer, the idea of authenticity has become vital to supporters and fans. Many fan groups around the country have struggled hard to develop an identity, often at odds with the management groups of their supported clubs that, in the early days, insisted on clean family-friendly atmospheres, hoping to cash in on the soccer-mom and youth team market. This has made the DIY ethic a point of pride for many North American supporters groups, who view the trials and tribulations of the past as battles won. For example, many supporters groups in MLS have had to make their own team merchandise and even large flags and banners, paying out of association dues. The Timbers Army are perhaps the epitome of this sense of DIY pride, especially considering that they’ve labored in anonymity in the lower divisions. In many ways, to Timbers supporters, the sudden success of Seattle Sounders FC seems to represent the opposite of this mentality.

Meanwhile, within the stadium, Seattle’s games are conducted under much pomp and circumstance – a marching band, the Sound Wave, marches with fans into the stadium prior to kick off, green and blue confetti is shot from cannons overhead as the team is announced, and canned music blares out of the PA throughout the proceedings. The stadium announcer reads a dramatic script in a (presumably authentic) posh English accent, not unlike Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And amidst all this, fans hold aloft their uniform team-granted scarves. Overhead, large branded tarps cover unused seats in the top tier — a good use of dead space, except that one of them features goalkeeper Kevin Hartman, who plays for the Kansas City Wizards.

The whole ordeal feels as orchestrated as The Lion King On Ice. It is, without a doubt, a choreographed and controlled game experience – the antithesis to the anarchic, heady and wild experience so many supporters groups have struggled for years to engender in other stadia, not only in Portland, but also in Chicago, DC and other MLS markets. It’s no wonder the Sounders Experience has been derided as plastic, prefabricated, and shallow.

Seattle's Marching Band

That said, such derision is in some sense the product of envy. Seattle is what every American soccer team strives to be – appreciated by the city and treated as a sporting equal to other major sports, supported by regular sell out crowds, carried on local broadcast television, with a highly visible presence in the market. Seattle is strewn with Sounderphernalia, from team gear in the Space Needle gift shop to a branded Budweiser sign in every bar. Restaurants advertise televised games to draw customers. In most MLS cities, teams are lucky to have more than one “soccer bar” through which to market and build community, and it’s rare one can find merchandise available anywhere but at the stadium.

Teams in MLS sit across an uncomfortable dichotomy: one at play in the Northwest, but representing the entire soccer culture — that between supporters (being those fans who participate regularly in supporters’ sections, singing, displays of tifo and pyrotechnics and the like) and casual fans. The problem is that there simply are not enough supporters in any given American market to alone make a team profitable. Instead, much like the majority of attendees at an NBA or MLB game are not season ticket holding, chest painting, laid-off Ford plant workers, the casual fan has long been the holy grail for MLS. Drawing a group of 20,000 fans — diehard supporters or not — each and every match is what will make MLS teams profitable, more pervasive in the sports consciousness, and permanent.

On the other hand, however, as in all sports it is the wildly zealous and colorful die-hard fans that generate a team’s sense of identity and make the experience unique. You need only look to two-team baseball markets to find how the cultures of teams differ from club to club. Soccer’s single biggest asset, the thing that makes it a unique sport experience (and thus a unique return on your entertainment dollar) are the supporters. No other sport in North America produces a similar fan environment to the supporters sections in MLS from DC to Chicago to the newer expansion teams, not even close.

Thankfully, many soccer teams in the States are beginning to realize this, and are slowly undoing years of adversarial relations by trying to encourage the growth of supporters sections. After all, while the moms and dads will be the largest paying group, none of them will pay as often and as repeatedly as the supporters, and none will broadcast the brand as fervently. The Timbers’ highest attendance came in 2008, the year the team finished dead last in the table. These groups are the permanent kernel of the team’s identity, which is absolutely vital to the survival of an underdog sport like soccer in America.

Of course, Qwest Field in Seattle is not exactly populated solely by Mariners fans who wandered into the wrong stadium. The Emerald City Supporters group was founded in 2005, back when the Sounders were a USL franchise. Still active today, the ECS has grown into an umbrella organization representing various supporters’ clubs that occupy what has become known as the Brougham End, behind the southern goal. As do all other supporters groups, they organize tifo, stand, and sing, and just as Qwest Field is near capacity, the sections occupied by the ECS have been full for every MLS game — even if they get their tifo upside down upon occasion.

Scarves Up in Seattle

It is at the intersection of these two sectors where MLS pay-dirt lays. For while ECS and Seattle’s soccer-knowledgable hard core perhaps face an uphill battle to impart some personality on their squeaky clean new top-flight team, the Timbers Army will face a struggle to meld their raucous, foul mouthed energy with the family crowd the Timbers will need in MLS. In a recent interview in the Oregonian, Timbers owner Merrit Paulson saluted the Scarf Seattle campaign as a huge success, saying it will “go down in history as one of the all-time great marketing campaigns… that campaign, ultimately resulting in everybody bringing all the scarves to the games, was in my mind of the great examples of brilliant marketing. And we may take elements of that.”

It’s no secret that the success in Seattle has made every MLS executive sit up and begin taking furious notes, hoping to glean some bit of knowledge or luck that will draw that elusive beast, the average American sports fan, out of its armchair. Portland will want him just as much Seattle does, as will Vancouver and Philly, and as does the frustrated bulk of MLS teams from floundering franchises like New York and Dallas to clubs on the cusp like Chicago, Houston and DC.

So while the Timbers Army can bemoan having been overlooked, and MLS fans can have a go at Seattle’s preposterous game day fanfare and the newly minted fans with their team supplied scarves, Seattle is still out drawing all other MLS markets by a long shot. Here’s the rub, and the moral that risks going unnoticed. The true goal of all MLS teams, Seattle and Portland included, should be a melding of these two approaches. After all, marketing puts asses in seats, but the atmosphere created by dedicated, Do-It-Yourselfing supporters, the thing that makes soccer unique against an increasingly noisy sports market, gets them to come back. Shooting confetti from cannons does not.

For more trenchant cultural analysis of just about anything, catch Benny and friends at Running Downhill