(Though, honestly, I preferred this Kings of Cascadia display from last year – less self-reverential. And of course, the Space Needle tifo.)

With that very much in mind, Seattle fans in the Emerald City Supporters’ group set out to do something special of their own for the team’s first MLS meeting with Portland at QWest field this past Saturday night.

On their opening night, the Timbers Army stepped up their game. ECS finally has a rival supporter group to truly compete with. They raised their game, and everyone and their mothers are drooling over what they saw at Jen-Weld Field the rainy night of April 14th. Many have already forgotten that the bar for atmosphere and passion was set by the ECS and Sounders faithful. An atmosphere that put MLS Commissioner Garber in tears, it being a real life expression of his long term dream of what MLS and soccer in this country can be. May 14, 2011 will be the day we all remind the world who is king in Cascadia. It is the day we will all put forth the support that rightly puts us at the top of supporter groups in North America!

Forget the ahistorical silliness of “ECS finally has a rival supporter group to truly compete with”, Seattle fans did produce a display worthy of the occasion. It was the right way up, and everything:

It pains me as a Fire fan to say it, but that’s some world class tifo from ECS. Scale, execution and concept are all top-drawer. Steve Kelley was certainly impressed:

Moments before kickoff, the Emerald City Supporters dramatically unfurled massive banners that commemorated the rivalry.

Large drawings of former Sounders Marcus Hahnemann, Preston Burpo and Jimmy Gabriel floated down the south end zone along with pictures of assistant coach Brian Schmetzer (the Sounders’ USL coach) and forward Fredy Montero.

Then slowly another banner rolled down from the deck above, displaying a picture of a fist crushing a Timbers ball and proclaiming, “Decades of Dominance.”

Finally, from below, a banner with a drawing of Portland nemesis Roger Levesque unrolled with a jab at Timbers fans that read, “48 seconds.” In the 2009 U.S. Open Cup against Portland, Levesque scored in the first 48 seconds.

So maybe this wasn’t Arsenal and Tottenham or Manchester United and Manchester City, but it was a celebration of what the game slowly is becoming in this country.

The banners were spectacular.

Eh, I can’t say I’ve ever seen EPL fans unveil anything even remotely in the postcode/zip code of a major MLS tifo display. Certainly nothing they’ve created. It added to an outstanding atmosphere in the stadium. This is what Portland-Seattle should be about, not the hipster-rivalry nonsense this rather incomplete Wall Street Journal article got into last week.

Nitpickers might say of the display that ‘Decades of Dominance’ is a little overwrought, but if you’re going to say something a little over the top, may as well display it in an epic fashion. This was epic.

It should also certainly be noted that Portland fans brought an impressive away tifo to the table as well at the game, something we hopefully will see more of in MLS and difficult to do away from home:

Where does all this tifo fit in MLS history? I guess we’ll leave that for Shawn Francis to figure out. There has been impressive stuff done in many places now over the years, each spurring on rival groups to greater heights. And finally, MLS front offices and headquarters seem to realise the value of these displays to the culture and promotion of soccer in North America as something distinct from other sports here.

At the end of the day, the purpose of tifo is to inspire your team and your fans and in a rivalry stoke the embers: on Saturday night, both sets of fans did this in a manner that can only engender more DIY supporter culture in North America, a really healthy development for the sport here. The good part about this for Cascadia is that it helps make the rivalry between Portland and Seattle about devoting what you can to do support your team in a positive fashion, and not about fighting or other nonsense.

“Club World Champions?” isn’t exactly right around the corner, but Salt Lake’s run to the final of a tournament that does see the winners head to the FIFA Club World Cup has indeed been mightily impressive of course, and “The team is the star” is a fitting pull quote for this graphic. Ridge Mahoney is spot on with his take on RSL’s strategic success:

As a team, RSL’s advancement to the brink of a regional club title is a study in smart tactics and intelligent deployment of talented personnel. As an organization, its management of limited resources to succeed against richer clubs may be an even greater accomplishment, and a challenge to its league foes.

Indeed: their success with limited spending has been a fine example of simple resourcefulness, an underrated asset in MLS. One of the stats also pulled there tells the story of their remarkable fortitude: 25-0-9 at home, a 34 game unbeaten streak since May 2009.

Salt Lake have managed to create a buzz locally around the tournament unseen for quite some time in MLS, if ever, as Sporting News reports:

Unlike MLS teams in the past, Real Salt Lake has put significant promotion behind the tournament, and club president Bill Manning credits its Champions League success for securing two new sponsors—international home-security firm Vivint and Ford Motor Co.—to six-figure, three-year deals.

“We feel like we’re the first (MLS) team to make this our No. 1 priority,” Manning said.

The club also has drawn strong attendance numbers for Champions League games. An October match against Mexico’s Cruz Azul sold out Rio Tinto Stadium with 20,463 fans; a March 1 quarterfinals game against the Columbus Crew netted 15,400; and a March 15 semifinal against Costa Rica’s Saprissa drew 16,888. Manning expects Wednesday’s game in Salt Lake City to sell out.

In comparison, the club’s average attendance in 2010 for MLS games was 17,095.

“Our fans have a sense of ownership with this tournament,” he said.

Of course, there’s a fair bit of hyperbole here. For the first time in soccer history, one American MLS team should be on everyone’s mind as they take the soccer world for a spin, forever changing the global perception of US soccer.

Uh, sure. I can’t quite see the world paying more attention to RSL-Monterrey than Real Madrid-Barcelona tomorrow, but maybe that’s just me.

That said, regionally it is of considerable significance: MLS’ #MLS4RSL campaign may have become tiresome, but there is an obvious truth to the need for MLS to gain more regional respect, particularly amongst fans of the Mexican league. Salt Lake’s gutsy performance last week in Monterrey earned all the plaudits it garnered.

MLS sensibly euthanised SuperLiga this year, and has accommodated Salt Lake’s scheduling requests to aid its title tilt, rearranging last weekend’s game against Philadelphia for later in the season. The league has quite rightly put its weight behind Salt Lake and helped manufacture some needed buzz for the competition.

Of course, fans of DC United and the LA Galaxy will rightly point out they have already conquered the regional championship – then known as the CONCACAF Champions Cup – in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Neither featured a final on foreign soil, so the RSL advocates go in championing the unique nature of their possible victory, and the name and format-change the tournament underwent in 2008 means RSL can claim to be the “1st MLS Club Ever To Possibly Win The CCL”. Hell, if they do it, they deserve to claim whatever they want: and they’ll have done the CONCACAF Champions League some good, too.

We should begin with a pathetically brief description of what a ‘club’ is.

Clubs originated as a basic way for people to associate outside of family to support some kind of common interest. Some clubs have membership, some don’t.

What kind of clubs, then, are those that call themselves such things in Major League Soccer?

Writing at Match Fit USA, Robert Jonas argues — primarily from a Bay Area perspective, given the demise and rebirth of the San Jose Earthquakes in MLS — that clubs don’t exist in the league, in any sense he sees as valid.

For a league that reportedly lost nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in its first decade, 2010 is seeing some teams finally turning an annual profit — even as the country endures difficult economic times. Fans are embracing MLS in ever greater numbers, and new teams have been joining the league every year since 2005. At league headquarters in New York City, I can imagine the broad smiles and back-slapping that must be going on in the boardroom when looking back at how far the league has come.

However, back at the community level, the growth of MLS is having a divergent effect on the individual teams’ local fans and supporters. With each passing season, the idea that these people are actually “stakeholders” in the organizations’ success is fleeting. In fact, I will go so far as to say that identifying with these teams in the traditional sense as “football clubs” is fading fast. Your connection with your local “club” will soon be measured solely in terms of the dollars and time spent on their products and services. Oh sure, we’ll probably still have teams that feel the need to have the word “club” in their titles, but any semblance to the organizations of the past from which they borrow that term will cease to be.

I guess at this point I should clarify what I define as a “football club” in order to support my point of view. Using the traditional definition shared by many teams in a variety of sports, a club is an sporting organization where the community invests their efforts toward a common goal. In soccer, this means a team that is local owned and operated by the same people that participate and follow the progress of that team. Those that invest in the club are given the right to provide input to the club’s management team, and even elect those officials that run the club on a daily basis. The club then returns that investment through entertainment and value.

Jonas goes on to argue – referencing an interesting sounding speech by former Quakes GM Johnny Moore – that because MLS clubs do not have this local ownership by the fanbase, their relationship with their “clubs” is purely transactual, and thus they are not really clubs at all:

In two well publicized instances recently, supporters groups in Seattle and Toronto have raised their voices to express displeasure with their “football clubs.” Focusing mainly on the issues of season ticket packages and their costs, these organized protests have at least garnered official responses from the organizations. Both teams have announced new policies and price points moving forward in an effort to placate their supporters’ concerns. Maybe the Seattle Sounders FC and Toronto FC — two MLS franchises that invoke the notion of being a club by identifying themselves as such — were at least responding in a way that Moore might generally approve of

But really, in both these cases, the issues are not organizational but really that of straightforward customer complaining. The ticket buyers are consumers of a product, and they are voicing their displeasure at the perceived return on their investment. For me, this illustrates clearly the notion that TFC and Seattle Sounders FC are not true “clubs” — supporters do not garner any financial return on their purchases. Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.

Jonas is right in the most basic, vertical sense: Toronto Football Club are, for example, owned by a company whose aim is to make money, and not by fans. They sell a product, soccer games, for this purpose. That they do not consider themselves associated with fans for the common cause of TFC was demonstrated by the recent ticket price rise debacle. They consider fans consumers to be milked.

But the same is not true horizontally in Toronto Football Club as a cultural institution: that is, the very protests Jonas mentions show that fans have clubbed together for the sake of the sporting organisation in question (Toronto Football Club) in a way that meets Jonas’ definition of a “community [that] invests their efforts toward a common goal.” It is true that the fans do not own this club in a formal sense: but nor can they simply be divorced from it in terms of what Toronto FC is. Cultural capital is important, too.

It is notable that the TFC protests aren’t just about “me”, but are expressing the fears of fans about the damage that pricing out supporters’ groups could do to the club as a whole, built on the idea of “all for one” (I’m simplifying a very complex situation in Toronto, of course).

We could also look at this from the opposite pole. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch became a bestseller because it illustrated the personal and communal passion that surrounds supporting a football club (in Arsenal’s case at the time, not one any regular fans had any monetary stake in).

Can we not consider that football fans associating to support a common cause in ways uncommon to regular consumer transactions – singing, tifo, protests, fundraising, travelling thousands of miles in support of the team – creates clubs as community institutions in a cultural sense, regardless of formal ownership?

Let’s read Jonas’ words again: “Pure and simple, they may or may not be entertained during the matches they purchase tickets for, and that is as far as the relationship goes.”

If we were discussing purchasing tickets to a movie at our local multiplex – yes. You don’t form either a vertical (with the company from whom you give money to) or a horizontal (with your fellow movie goers) relationship at the cinema that lasts beyond the length of the movie. The same is obviously not true with sports clubs, and particularly peculiarly, with soccer clubs: we find friendships, we find shared spirit, we find lasting ties. Community spirit is intrinsic to a club as much as the opportunity to purchase membership financially, I would argue, even if it is a much more fluid and slippery relationship – yet it might be an even more important one.

In follow-up posts I’ll try to illustrate what I mean in a little more detail, and I’d more than accept that there’s a big difference between being a fan of the club called Manchester United and the club called FC United of Manchester due to the varied opportunities for fans to be a part of those clubs. One is clearly closer to pure consumerism than the other. But fandom and the sense of association around soccer clubs is also not as straightforward in England or in MLS as the swiping of a credit card.

Chicago Fire mural on 16th Street, Chicago, Pilsen neighbourhood. Recently restored and updated with new imagery, original produced in 1998, showing the Fire at Soldier Field:

See more pics here.

Photo credit: Frank Cardenas, WB05.

That is the plan of the owners of the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit, purchased by a Canadian investment group with Greek roots last November for $583,000, with the stadium in the spotlight this week as host to AC Milan vs. Panathanaikos this Friday.

It’s certainly, as the ownership group’s Senior Soccer Advisor puts it to Josh Hakala, thinking outside the box:

To achieve a reasonable stadium size, the Apostolopoulos family plans to remove the dome and divide the stadium into three sections. At the stadium’s ground level, will be a concert hall and a multi-purpose arena, capable of hosting hockey, basketball, and other indoor sports.

Resting on top of those two indoor facilities, will be a roughly 30,000-seat soccer stadium with natural grass. The current upper deck will essentially act as a lower bowl for the outdoor stadium.

It’s difficult to imagine, but maybe this will help.

If you have a ticket in the front row of the upper deck, with this proposed layout, you could lean over the railing and get an autograph, or catch a player doing a “Lambeau Leap.”

“It’s thinking outside the box,” said Roger Faulkner, Triple Sports and Entertainment’s Senior Soccer Advisor. “When the Apostolopoulos family bought the Silverdome, they bought it because they are soccer people, passionate soccer people. They want to make the Silverdome a major player on the world stage.”

This would be a first in MLS’ relatively short history (the league played its inaugural season in 1996), where the owner is retrofitting a stadium to attract an expansion team.

So, on the one hand, Triple Sports and Entertainment got the Silverdome for a ridiculous knock-down price, meaning they have their own stadium, checking off a key box for MLS ownership. On the other hand, retrofitting it for MLS and the other events mentioned will surely run into tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, in costs.

Roger Faulkner is an interesting character here, and a smart hire by the Apostolopoulos family as their key advisor — British-born, he has been promoting soccer in the United States and Detroit area since the 1960s, and was the general manager of the NASL’s Detroit Express from 1978 to 1980, the team playing at the 80,500 capacity Silverdome and featuring Trevor Francis and (on an overseas tour) George Best, though crowds never came close to filling the cavernous venue. Faulkner later was a key member of the Detroit World Cup Host Committee in 1994.

Faulkner most recently popped up here in 2008, as a part of the Michigan-based General Sports and Entertainment group who purchased Derby County in England, a club Faulkner had supported as a boy. Derby County are now partnered with a leading Michigan-based youth soccer club renamed the Derby County Wolves, who play in the elite US Soccer Development Academy. Derby County, meanwhile, seem to have been managed prudently by GSE, not achieving great success, but not flushing down the future for the present with the kind of fiscal indiscipline that has brought numerous English clubs to their knees in recent years.

In any case, it appears Faulkner’s main goal now will be to bring MLS to the Motor City: an ambitious plan, but one that will at least get some support from these guys.

Any rule or regulation that removes or tends to remove the power of money to make the difference in playing strength is a good rule.

So spoke Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman and a leading executive/owner in Major League Baseball at four clubs from the 1910s to the 1950s. He spoke the words above in May 1960 at a hearing in Congress as he looked to lead a loosening on Major League Baseball’s monopoly on talent, with the aim of launching a new entity, the Continental League. Rickey was concerned about the future of baseball, with the gap between rich and poor growing year-on-year: Trouble ahead, Trouble ahead, he warned. Rickey’s solution was to provide the poorer teams with more revenue, based on the premise that it takes two to tango: rich clubs needed to play poor clubs, and those clubs going out of existence or perennially feeding at the bottom of the tank did no-one any good in the long-run. As Rickey put it:

It has been reported that the American League club in New York City in 1959 realized a gross income of one million four hundred thousand dollars from radio and television. The Washington club in the same league took in approximately $125,000, yet the Washington club plays eleven games at Yankee Stadium. How can Washington ever expect to compete in the competitive market for player contracts where money is king?

Rickey’s solution was simple: the Continental League would pool two thirds of the television and radio revenue from every club and distribute it evenly amongst its clubs. Rickey aimed to set it up within the existing structure of Major League Baseball, at a time when each league had far more autonomy than today.

The Continental League never happened. Rickey’s ideas actually ended up having a huge influence on American sports, but not in baseball: his fundamental concern for the need for parity was adopted by the far-sighted leadership of first the American Football League under Lamar Hunt’s guidance, and then by the National Football League. In the coming decades, after the AFL had merged with it, the NFL eclipsed Major League Baseball as America’s game, whilst the latter continued to squabble over how to manage the gap between rich and poor.

The NFL was brought to this supremacy by Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who shortly after Branch Rickey’s congressional comments, led the league to a television deal that ensured a certain level of parity in income:  at the NFL’s annual owners’ meetings in 1961, Rozelle convinced the final holdout on his plan, the New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, to let the NFL sell the league’s television rights collectively and share the revenue. According to Michael MacCambridge’s outstanding history of the NFL America’s Game, Mara conceded that “We should all share, I guess. Or we’re going to lose some of the smaller teams down the line, and we’ve all stuck together.”

Rozelle later admired this acceptance by the bigger clubs’ owners of the need for a collective vision: “The big-city people — Halas, Reeves, the Maras — went along. If Green Bay lost its television money, they wouldn’t have a balanced league. It was an altruistic decision on their part.”

It was altruistic, but also pragmatic. In 1962, Rozelle negotiated the NFL’s first national television contract with CBS, $4,650,000 for two seasons. Rozelle and the NFL were accused of socialism: but this was smart business, and a smart way of viewing sport. “The whole thing was equalizing the competition on the field,” Rozelle said. “The sharing of income gave everyone the tools, the money, to compete equally. Now, some don’t. But management and coaching and so forth being the big difference — and players — they had the opportunity, at least, to compete equally.”

As MacCambridge puts it in America’s Game, this was a vision that would transform the future of American sports:

Much bluster would come later about owners as selfless or devoted to the good of the whole. But in this single case, the decision to share revenue equally — echoing the one that the AFL made at the behest of Hunt, and the one that the world of baseball ignored despite the entreaties of Veeck and Rickey — would become a model for American sports that would allow the game to rise from the Darwinian business model in which each club struggled for the last dollar, toward a system that made the primary competition the one on the field of play.

At heart, the NFL’s decision to approve a joint TV contract, whatever the intent, served to place a higher priority on an equality of opportunity for all competitors than on maximizing the revenue of any individual franchise.

Forty years later, soccer had learned this lesson from the NFL: the NASL collapsed amidst wild spending, the Cosmos’ fame not enough to keep the league alive, and Major League Soccer, guided by Lamar Hunt (with his experience in the AFL/NFL and NASL) had adopted the ultimate collective model by operating as a single-entity. All investors would be directly impacted by the financial success or failure of all other teams.

Still, in 1999, Major League Soccer was struggling. Attendance had declined for four straight years following the league’s 1996 inaugural season. Commissioner Doug Logan resigned before the playoffs. MLS’ key ownership groups, the Krafts and the Hunts, turned to a man who knew little about soccer to save the league, plucking from the NFL a 42 year-old executive called Don Garber. In the New York Times, Alan Rothenburg said upon his appointment that “I believe he has the potential to be the second coming of Pete Rozelle.”

Eleven years on, and Major League Soccer is convinced Garber is fulfilling that role, yesterday announcing his contract had been renewed for four more years at the princely sum of $3 million a year. Franchise values have soared, attendance is rising, television deals are improving, and different teams keep winning MLS Cup each year while a tight salary cap keeps a lid on spending.

Garber is a believer in Roselle’s focus on parity, and — in the lingo of his business — marketing the product of the league as a whole. Last week, in a Q&A with the Houston Chronicle, he reaffirmed this commitment:

Q: What kind of commissioner would you like your legacy to be? Would MLS commissioners like to be like former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who created a structure where everybody shares equally and there is more parity or like Major League Baseball with little parity.

A: I was fortunate enough in my early career in the NFL to work for Pete Rozelle and then to continue working for over a decade for Paul Tagliabue. And I believe the NFL is the most popular league in the world for a reason. And that’s that every fan knows at the beginning of the season that their team has a chance to go to the Super Bowl. And I believe that belief is an important quality for any league to be successful. Therefore I certainly subscribe more to the NFL’s approach to parity than I do perhaps to the structure of the English Premier League, where for the most part only a handful of clubs really have a chance of winning the league each year.

The question is, can MLS keep to that vision while revenues rise and the richer clubs itch to sign the world’s best players?

This Sunday at Toyota Park, we will see the latest star player to join MLS, Rafa Marquez. And we may well see, for the first time, five Designated Players (stars paid beyond the constraints of the salary cap) on the pitch at the same time: Nery Castillo and Freddie Llunjberg for the Fire, and Marquez, Thierry Henry and Juan Pablo Angel for the Red Bulls. As Steve Davis puts it: “the arms race is on. . .This could easily create a rich vs. not-so-rich divide – and I’m not sure that’s a great thing for the sport.”

Balancing MLS’ need for global stars to improve the quality of play and the league’s marketing efforts whilst maintaining the Rozelle mantra that every team’s fans must believe it has a chance to go to MLS Cup at the start of each season is Don Garber’s great challenge over the next four years. The introduction of the Designated Player rule, and its significant loosening this season (allowing the Red Bulls to acquire three multi-million dollar players, something only a handful of other teams could even conceive of doing), is not easy to square with Rickey’s maxim that guided Rozelle:

Any rule or regulation that removes or tends to remove the power of money to make the difference in playing strength is a good rule.

Everyone and their mother has an opinion on it: Bill Archer has a pretty harsh one, ridiculing the idea of the Cosmos fielding an “Independent All Star Team” that has apparently been mentioned, though it’s worth noting the NY Cosmos’ official site does not mention that at all. Instead, the focus is on making the Cosmos a key player in elite youth development and an announced effort to bring the Cosmos to MLS. Those two ambitions are where the real play is being made here.

It was actually on 28 August 2009 that we first noted the “The New York Cosmos are back!” and took a skeptical view of Paul Kemsley, the former Tottenham Hotspur director who procured the rights to the Cosmos brand and is now the Chairman of the club, using the same infamous photo of Kemsley with Pamela Anderson as Archer does. As we said at the time, Kemsley had earned a “reputation for overstretching himself” and has a troublesome history of lost investments in recent years.

But while Kemsley might appear to be a bit of a joke on the surface of it, what about the rest of the folks behind this venture?

The key figures are Carl Johnson, the CEO and Terry Byrne, the Director of Soccer (I really should make my job title “Director of Soccer for Pitch Invasion”, shouldn’t I?). The latter name you’ll recognise if you’ve been paying attention to David Beckham in recent years: in Grant Wahl’s excellent The Beckham Experiment, his backroom influence on the Galaxy earns him a few pages of infamy answering the question “Who was Terry Byrne?” and explains his rise “from cabdriver to David Beckham’s best friend.”

Byrne played a key role in the establishment of the David Beckham Academy in California a few years ago. Similarly, a crucial part of the Cosmos’ revival announcement was that the club will be fielding U-12 to U-18 teams, and will be a part of the high quality US Soccer Development Academy set-up, by virtue of their partnership with BW Gottschee, a long-time youth soccer club in Queens. Due to this partnership, Gottschee announced they were now making their Academy free (something most elite academies nationwide are currently having to consider doing to attract the top talent, in competition with MLS clubs’ numerous free academies). This year, Gottschee finished bottom of the “Liberty” division of the US Soccer Development Academy at U-16 level, and third out of six at U-18 level. Their status in the US Soccer Development Academy system and long track record of stability is extremely important here.

This is because Byrne and Beckham’s ambition to make it big in US youth development failed in LA: The David Beckham Academy in Calfornia closed its doors this year February. But despite its failure, this effort (along with everything else that went into The Beckham Experiment) tied Byrne to a very, very important figure in American soccer who will be one of the key players if the Cosmos are to join MLS: Tim Leiweke, President and CEO of AEG, owners of the Galaxy and at one point half of MLS’ teams. In The Beckham Experiment, Leiweke says “I started with Terry on this whole thing a long time ago. And Terry’s been my partner since day one, someone I loved.” Leiweke is, very importantly, currently the Chairman of MLS’ Board of Governors.

Still, Byrne’s connection to Leiweke has had its ups and downs due to his tight relationship with Beckham, a friendship with serious roots for both Englishmen. Byrne earned David Beckham’s undying affections by being there to cradle him at his most traumatic moment: following his red card against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, with the rest of the England bench ignoring him, Byrne (England’s masseur) was there for him in the locker room when no-one else was. Shortly after, Byrne got his first “Director of Soccer” gig with Watford, not long after leaving that to become Beckham’s full-time personal manager, and ending up as a paid consultant to the Galaxy following Beckham’s move to MLS in 2007, becoming the genius behind the disastrous hiring of Ruud Gullit as the foreign superstar coach Leiweke believed the Galaxy needed — and creating a curious situation, with Beckham’s best mate and business associate (through Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, Beckham’s agency) Byrne pulling the strings at the Galaxy.

The experiment proved to be a disaster, and in August 2008, Gullit was ousted and Byrne was booted from his role as a Galaxy consultant, with 19 Entertainment effectively put in their place by AEG. Bruce Arena was brought in as Galaxy General Manager, with Leiweke fuming at the fumbling that had taken place. As Grant Wahl put it, Leiweke’s message to 19 Entertainment and Byrne was: You had your chance, and you screwed it up. Now I’m taking my team back. Leiewke told Wahl: “I think what David and his people will tell you is they’re probably not a huge fan of mine based on Bruce. I didn’t ask them. . . are they happy with me? No. Now Simon Fuller and I have a very strong personal friendship. Terry Byrne and I had a friendship. I think we still do, but am I real popular with them as it relates to us owning this team and the decisions we have made [recently]? Absolutely not.”

Over the last year, since the publication of Wahl’s book, there’s been a lot of fence mending by everyone embarrassed by The Beckham Experiment. Leiweke and Byrne and Fuller and Beckham are probably best buds again. And the Cosmos are obviously the vehicle Byrne wants to control and prove he can make it in American soccer with, from youth development to MLS. Beckham’s name is not yet officially attached to the Cosmos, but many have already noted he has the option to purchase an MLS franchise once his playing career ends. The question, is how much faith does he have in Byrne given past failures: what does that hug in 1998 still buy Byrne?

If we dig into the various connections Byrne can call on through Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment, we find a very interesting one, if only for historical irony: Ed Bleier is the Chairman of CKX, Inc., one of the world’s top “entertainment content” companies and owner since 2005 of Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. 80 year-old Bleier previously spent 34 years working for Warner (rising to become its president in 1986), the company that founded and owned the original New York Cosmos under Warner president Steve Ross, an investment Bleier worked closely on for Warner.

It was Warner who, as Gavin Newsham puts it in his book about the original New York Cosmos rise and fall Once In A Lifetime, had a “relentless drive to publicise the team”, and it was Bleier who was chairman of the NASL’s Television Committee and warned against the NASL’s television deal with ABC signed in 1979 that saw nine league games telecast per year from 1979-1981, believing more imagination needed to be used in how the content of the sport was presented, wanting a highlights show that would have “standings, players, saves, goals, player of the week to build all the intrinsics of the sport and only put the Championship game on television. I got outvoted.” Within five years of the deal, the NASL was dead despite ratings on ABC that MLS would kill for. The Cosmos played their final game in 1985, a year after Warner had pulled the plug on the growing losses and handed the club to Giorgio Chinaglia and Peppe Pinton, who became the self-appointed “curator”of the Cosmos brand until Kemsley came along.

And that’s how we ended up with the latter standing next to Sunil Gulati (President of US Soccer), Kemsley and Pele yesterday. Which is kind of funny, as just three years ago, it was a frustrated Pinton saying that “I don’t think they [MLS] have good leadership to be honest with you. They don’t come from the world of soccer. They have no clue. It’s sad what they do in the league office … not just the league office, the headquarters of the [U.S. Soccer] federation too.”

But, hey, that old conflict is nothing a little slick Cosmos marketing can’t fix to get the club the buzz needed for investors to fund it for MLS (and to build the key missing element in all this, an MLS ready stadium). So take a look at the CEO of the new Cosmos, Carl Johnson:  the founder of a very successful marketing company Anomaly, named in 2008 as #24 in the “World’s Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company magazine, the only creative agency on the list:

Instead of claiming to reinvent advertising, Anomaly shirks the ad categorization altogether. In 2004, DeLand set out with four former colleagues from Chiat\Day and Wieden+Kennedy to build a new kind of company: part branding firm, part design shop, part innovation think tank, part VC firm. Anomaly has created a model that attacks the fundamental flaws of the agency machine. Most ad agencies still earn their paychecks from time sheets and media spend, which means they’re motivated to be inefficient and to produce ideas that are wedded to expensive media. Anomaly takes a different approach, negotiating upfront either a predetermined fee or, better yet, royalties or an equity stake in a product. So when a client comes in with an advertising problem, Anomoly addresses it more broadly as a business issue, analyzing everything from design to product development. “They have a talent that goes beyond your typical artist or creative,” says Brian Kelley, president of Coca-Cola’s Still Beverages, a client. “It’s an eclectic group of people who think about driving every piece of your business.”

In thinking about their own business, the partners recognized that as branding experts, they could just as well create original products too. “We would rather invent the next VitaminWater than do the ads for VitaminWater,” says partner Carl Johnson. So while half of Anomaly’s business is doing client work, the other half is building brands from scratch. “What we’re really doing is generating profit from clients, then reinvesting in a venture fund for our intellectual properties,” Johnson says.

Anomaly’s Sand Hill Road–meets–Madison Avenue approach isn’t yet ubiquitous — or dominant — but it is showing results. Profitable in its first year of business, the New York–based agency has doubled its revenue every year since. In 2007, Anomaly brought in nearly $20 million, with new clients including Converse and Bluetooth-headset maker Jawbone.

The thinking is obvious: Pele is the star power, Byrne does the soccer development and develops elite players that can be sold for bagloads of money down the line (and brings in Beckham), the same thinking that everyone has right now about tapping into the huge US youth soccer market for future profit. The Cosmos brand has the shit marketed out of it by Carl Johnson and his savvy associates: the Cosmos also hired Dan Cherry from Anomaly as their Executive Director of Marketing (how many youth soccer clubs do you know that have two of the leading creative executives in the world on their staff? Someone does have some money in the Cosmos here, if we consider that they’re also investing a fair bit in making the Gottschee Academy free to play in). Kemsley, who appears to have a talent at getting people to throw money at his ventures, gets the big investors lined up behind the Cosmos to get them back into MLS, presumably leveraging Byrne’s connections to the likes of Beckham, Fuller and (wishfully for the historical symmetry) Ed Bleier. The Academy breeds players for the MLS team and they’re then turned around and sold for a lot of money. Hey presto!

I’m not saying Kemsley and Byrne don’t have a questionable track record and there’s a huge question mark about the club’s MLS ambitions given the need for serious investment and a stadium. But at the same time, there’s a plan in here that makes some sense from a business perspective: the upside here may well make a big enough fish bite.

Those times have changed as the groups have grown and the atmosphere and publicity they bring to MLS clubs that help them differentiate those teams in crowded sports marketplaces have been recognised by MLS headquarters and most owners. Now, supporters’ groups are right there in the top reasons listed by Don Garber on why World Cup fans should buy into MLS:

Grant Wahl: Now that the World Cup is over, MLS is one of the few leagues in the world that is in-season right now. Do you feel like the league has put itself in a position to demand the attention of Americans who got into soccer during the World Cup?

Garber: We’re certainly putting ourselves in the position to ask for their attention. I don’t believe we’re positioned yet to demand anything from our fans. Our pitch to the World Cup viewer is give us 90 minutes and we’ll give you the game that you fell in love with at the World Cup. We’ll show you that our stadiums are world-class, our supporters groups are growing and the quality of play is pretty darn good, better than most people think. That’s not just me talking, that’s Sir Alex Ferguson and Thierry Henry talking.

More interestingly, the culture and influence of supporters’ groups is being noticed outside American soccer circles, too. Only last week, Portland’s unofficial supporters’ group, the Timbers Army, was picked at #5 in The Oregonian newspaper’s top 25 “Most influential People in Oregon Sports,” behind the likes of Paul Allen and Phil Knight, and ahead of the actual owner of the Timbers, Merrit Paulson, who comes in at #7:

5. Timbers Army (NR): Drumming, chanting, scarf-wearing soccer supporters transformed overnight from a band of PGE Park rowdies to an effective and influential political organization. Their political clout ends up greasing the wheels on the effort to bring Major League Soccer to Portland. Two favorite sayings: Rose City till we die.  If you want to be in the Timbers Army, you already are.

As the resolution to the recent Timbers logo controversy showed, the Timbers Army — now with its formal arm, the 107ist Supporters’ Trust — is savvy in protecting supporters’ culture while  helping the club move forward to MLS.

Philadephia’s Sons of Ben have never lacked for publicity even before their Union was born (for which they quite rightly pay homage to Steven Wells for), but their own DIY culture was recognised today too by Philadelphia Magazine in its Best of Philly 2010:

Supporters organisations have taken a lot of heat over the years in the United States (some of it deserved, most of it not), so at least from my admittedly partisan perspective on them, it’s very good to see recognition of their work in the wider local communities. That can only be good for broader recognition of the role supporters can play in the sport, for soccer’s long-term good in the United States.

1996 regular season average attendance: 17,416
1997: 14,619
1998: 14,312
1999: 14,282
2000: 13,756
2001: 14,961
2002: 15,822
2003: 14,898
2004: 15,559
2005: 15,108
2006: 15,504
2007: 16,770
2008: 16,459
2009: 16,120
2010: 16,627 (incomplete season)

At face-value, the league is still running to get back to the buzz it had in its inaugural season. But that’s not really true: last year, 3,608,359 total fans attended MLS’ 225 games in a 15 team league. In 1996, 2,786,673 fans attended the 160 games played by a 10 team league. For most of the decade, this aggregate number didn’t change much, dipping with contraction in 2002. Fast forward to 2004, and we have a 10 team league, and 2,489,440 fans in attendance at the 160 games played.

1996 regular season aggregate attendance: 2,786,673 (10 teams)
1997: 2,339,040 (10 teams)
1998: 2,747904 (12 teams: Chicago Fire and Miami Fusion join league)
1999: 2,742,144 (12 teams)
2000: 2,641,152 (12 teams)
2001: 2,872,512 (12 teams)
2002: 2,531,520 (10 teams, contraction of Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny)
2003: 2,383,680 (10 teams)
2004: 2,489,440 (10 teams)
2005: 2,900,736 (12 teams, addition of Real Salt Lake and Chivas USA)
2006: 2,976,768 (12 teams)
2007: 3,270,210 (13 teams, addition of Toronto FC)
2008: 3,456,390 (14 teams, addition of San Jose Earthquakes)
2009: 3,608,325 (15 teams, addition of Seattle Sounders)
2010: On pace for 3,990,480 at current average (16 teams, addition of Philadelphia Union)

So the story of MLS 2.0, or whatever crappy name we want to give it since the league started expanding again, is that aggregate attendance has improved by almost 50% since 2005: over one million more fans attend MLS games each season than in 2004, and if there’s a late summer surge of interest in the league a little above normal (with the addition of Thierry Henry likely to help), Major League Soccer will welcome over four million fans through its doors for the first time this year.

This rate of improvement will almost certainly not slow until 2012 at the earliest. With at least a 19 team league by then with the addition of the Portland Timbers, Vancouver Whitecaps and Montreal Impact, aggregate attendance will approach five million for the season in 2012 even if average attendance only holds steady at 16-17,000 (presuming teams still play 30 regular season games a year). This seems likely as Vancouver and Portland already have very strong season ticket sales for their opening season in 2011: 13,000 for the former and 7,000 for the latter with almost nine months still go to kick-off. Montreal will be the same story, as Philadelphia has been this year.

Indeed, that points to perhaps the most important story of expansion: since the arrival of Toronto FC in 2007, and with the exception of the curious backstory to San Jose’s existence, the new teams have been backed by season ticket numbers that make the original MLS teams blush in embarrassment.

The quick story on all these numbers is this: holding steady at this level of average attendance whilst also massively increasing aggregate attendance numbers and the league’s footprint with a big rise in the number of season ticket sales league-wide (albeit, an awful lot of them in two cities, Seattle and Toronto) is impressive — especially in the midst of a terrible recession.

Also: unless the landscape of soccer in America has changed drastically in the past four years, don’t expect a post-World Cup bounce simply because of the World Cup.

Also also: MLS attendance numbers aren’t entirely to be taken at face-value, but the trends above stand as a whole, and given the rise of season ticket sales in the expansion teams’ fanbases, the story of the rise in paid attendance is probably an even more dramatic success story over the past five years.

Also also also: The SportsBusiness Journal piece cited at the top has some interesting television viewership numbers as well that deserve their own analysis, but suffice to say, the number of viewers on the box is pretty flat this year so far. Numbers on ESPN2 are down 1.6% from the same period last year at 251,000 per game, while Fox Soccer Channel is attracting a dismal 53,000 per game. The latter’s contract with MLS expires this year, and rumours that MLS might be in discussions with Versus make some sense as FSC’s interest may well be waning, with MLS probably disappointed in their poor effort at promoting the league’s games.