Then the New York MetroStars, later rebranded to Red Bull New York, started playing there almost two decades later in Major League Soccer.

As the Red Bulls laid the final piece of sod today at their new, impressive Red Bull Arena in New Jersey, some current players took the chance to express their feelings about Giants Stadium and the support they (did not) receive there. The massive stadium seemed to serve mainly as a mausoleum for a team that could never win over the soccer fans (or perhaps their children) in the region who once packed out the place for the Cosmos.

And it certainly never won over the home team’s players who consistently struggled on turf in front of pitiful crowds.

Giants Stadium

I’ll present the comments from the players on Giants Stadium without commentary, but I do wonder if a new stadium is really the magical solution they all seem to think it is — even if it will certainly be a significant step-up, deeper issues to do with winning on the pitch and attracting soccer fans to a soft drink branded team still exist.

From the MLS site at today’s ceremony at Red Bull Arena:

Mike Petke, New York Red Bulls veteran defender:

I’m brainwashed, I’m still seeing turf right now. Until I actually go down there and feel it, I’m not going to believe it. While Giants Stadium was good to us and was our home for so long, just to have not only the stadium and the grass, knowing that we won’t be running on rock-hard concrete anymore in front of sparse crowds, is just an overwhelmingly great feeling.

Juan Pablo Angel, New York Red Bulls captain:

I was probably the biggest critic of Giants Stadium since my first day here. I never liked it, I never liked the surface, I never liked the atmosphere, apart from the L.A. game in 2007. That was the only decent atmosphere we ever had at Giants Stadium. Apart from that it was a stadium that looked empty. For me personally, I never felt at home. That’s why I’m so excited about this. This is home, it’s like you’re walking into your second house.

I plan to be in New Jersey next spring for the Red Bulls inaugural game at Red Bull Arena, and a few Fire fans should be with me to make things a little less like home for Juan and his friends. Hopefully it will be the start of something more like soccer for the area’s MLS outpost, but we’ll have to wait and see how that stadium’s atmosphere pans out in reality.

The 1998 Chicago Fire MLS Cup and US Open Cup championship team included many talented hard working players with good character including Piotr Nowak, Frank Klopas, Lubos Kubik, Chris Armas, Diego Gutierrez, CJ Brown and Jesse Marsch.

Last week we discussed the keys to assembling and retaining good personnel for a successful front office.  This week, we will take a similar look at building and retaining a successful team in Major League Soccer on the field.

MLS’ strict salary budgets, weighted lotteries, drafts and allocations have made it a very difficult league to stay near the top or the bottom of the standings for long stretches.  Incompetent, lazy or ignorant decision making can certainly make the latter an exception to the rule, but staying on top requires the right combination of several factors including a little bit of luck.

This column will focus on retaining a strong core, but I do want to mention a few keys to assembling a strong team in the first place.  As in the construction of a front office, the key to assembling a good soccer team is to surround yourself with talented, hard working people with good character.  Include players you have worked with personally or are recommended by people you know and trust.

Experience Mix – While the senior living 2009 Los Angeles Galaxy is doing its best to prove me wrong, I believe that a successful MLS team needs to have a balance of young and veteran players.

Once assembled, retaining a good roster is just as important as putting the roster together in the first place. The following are ways to retain a good roster:

Fair Compensation – It is very important to reward young players who outperform their initial contracts with offers for a new contract at a higher salary in exchange for an extended commitment to the team.  It sounds simple, but too many teams take advantage of young players who outperform their low end contracts, refuse to renegotiate and then lose them on a free transfer once the options run out in four years.

Rewarding these players not only retains the services of your most talented young players, it also sends the right message to their teammates and players throughout the League that yours is a team that treats players well.

After the Fire  won MLS Cup and the US Open Cup as an expansion team in 1998, we were faced with the decision to either exercise all the options and bring most of the same players back at 3% increases. . .or we could extend the contracts while rewarding many of the young players who outperformed their meager contracts like Chris Armas, CJ Brown, Diego Gutierrez, Zach Thornton and Jesse Marsch.  By taking care of this young core of the team, we kept them together, allowed them to grow together and compete for and win championships for the next eight seasons.  It meant that under the strict salary budget, we couldn’t afford to keep some of the older players like Francis Okaroh, Lubos Kubik, Frank Klopas, Roman Kosecki or Jerzy Podbrozny more than one or two more seasons, but the future was in the young core.

When running a team, it’s not always easy to even know what it is the club is doing that’s working to retain players.  So I thought I’d ask one of the veterans of those Fire years.  Here is a first person account from Diego Gutierrez, one of the players who experienced the process first hand as an expansion pick by the Fire from Kansas City in 1998:

I remember the early Fire years as some of the best in my career.  It is important for the coaching staff as well as the management team to create an atmosphere where players not only feel part of things, but also feel like they are part of something special.  That was the case with our Fire teams of ’98, ’99, 2000, and 2001.  Those teams had a number of guys who had come together and had morphed into a band of brothers, a group that would win together and lose together.  We knew about each other’s business, as much as it is healthy of course.  We knew about each other’s families, our aches, our pains and our joys.  If there was a birthday, a wedding, a loss of a loved one… our locker-room was special…We shared much more than just a place to play.  We brought our families together, and we all became identified by the crest.

Retired Chicago Fire veteran Diego Gutierrez says "It is important for the coaching staff as well as the management team to create an atmosphere where players not only feel part of things, but also feel like they are part of something special."

All of this was tremendously important when it came time to do new deals.  If somebody had a great contract, we got happy for them.  We just knew that by helping the team succeed and succeed collectively, in the end our individual turns would come.  I had the opportunity to make a couple of jumps and explore Europe in the prime of my career… but I have to tell you… I was happy that my young family was content and thriving under the circumstances at that time.  Money was important, but not as important as my wife’s happiness and the tranquility of playing in the place that I loved.  There are many reasons for players to want to test the market (mainly financial), but in reality if you are happy, if you are developing and growing as a player and you have no issues with what you take home, well, it’s tough to argue with that.

In time my turn came, I got my bigger contracts, but I feel like I had the best of everything.  I remained with a group of guys that I loved, we won constantly, and I absolutely loved going to work.  That is the way it is supposed to be.  Peter and Bob created a working environment where honesty and sincerity were paramount, they were the foundation of everything we did.  It kept the place sacred, it kept doubt from ever penetrating anything we did.  If a guy was frustrated with playing time, we talked it over, put it on the table and dealt with it.  As a player, you can’t ask for more.  If your coach and your President/GM are bringing in the right people, they are honest with you and you know where you stand, there are no obstacles for you to go out and do your best.  I think it is safe to say that you play your best when you have peace of mind.  By our results, I think you can judge we were all pretty much at peace.  But if you let those frustrations and doubts into the dressing room that’s when issues start appearing and the whole thing starts to crack.

US National Team Coach Bob Bradley's communication skills are an important part of the success he's enjoyed throughout his coaching career.

Diego’s comments are very generous to me as the training environment was certainly much more Bob Bradley’s doing than mine.  Here are some of the things Bob did well that helped us keep our core together:

Regular Communication – Bob Bradley is a great example of the importance of effective communication with both a team and with individual players.  He is very clear in his messaging and makes certain every person involved with the team knows their role within the team including trainers, doctors, administrators and equipment managers. Bob speaks with individual players regularly to give them a chance to understand what they need to do to contribute to the team and to improve. He does the same to the group as a whole, so everyone is on the same page.  He keeps any team issues in house and creates an all for one mentality.

Reward Players For Success – Players who work hard in training during the week and are successful in training need to be rewarded with increased roles on game day.  Besides being a good indicator of helping out the team when it matters, rewarding good training efforts sends the right message to the rest of the team that they must prove themselves every day.

Respect All Players – Favoritism to certain players or using certain players as whipping boys does nothing to build team chemistry and can easily fracture the delicate balance of a team.

Transparency, Trust and Responsibility – Those same concepts that are critical to building a team culture in a front office are critical to building a good environment for the on field team as well.

The Importance of Keeping the Core

The most successful teams are those that keep the core of the team around for long stretches.  A consistent roster maintains the culture and of course creates connections on the field.  Several teams come to mind: DC United, New England, Houston/San Jose, Columbus and Chicago.  Not coincidentally, these same five teams are the top five teams in MLS regular season points both the last five years and the last seven years.

Here’s a chart of the top five team’s point totals the last five seasons:

Here’s a list of the coaches (in bold) and players they’ve been able to retain for the last five seasons (and four of last five years in italics):

Each of the five most successful teams has retained at least one member of its coaching staff and a core of at least six players over the last four years.  On the other hand, none of the five worst performing non-expansion MLS teams has retained a single coach or more than five players for each of the last five seasons.  Here is the current list of the four and five year coaches and players with the five worst performing non-expansion teams:

The theory that teams that are able to retain their coaches and core players are the ones that succeed can, of course, be explained away by saying that it is the success itself that causes the teams to retain their coaches and players, and teams that aren’t successful to fire their coaches and get rid of their players.  There is certainly much truth to that, but the above charts also make one think that even the worst teams would benefit by being more patient with their better players and coaches.

An example is the 2005 MetroStars who elected to give up on Bob Bradley in his third year as MetroStars Head Coach.  More patience might have given them the following as a base to build on in 2006 and beyond:

Instead, a couple years later, the likes of Bob Bradley, Eddie Gaven, Ante Razov, Michael Bradley, Amado Guevara and Tim Ward became names like Mo Johnston, Dane Richards, Dema Kovalenko, Danny O’Rourke,  Edson Buddle and Chris Henderson.  And then a couple years later, all of those players except Richards were replaced by other names.  Marvelle Wynne and Jozy Altidore were added as draft picks, but of course later Jozy and Michael were sold to European clubs and Marvelle was traded to Toronto.  A case can be made that the new players individually were or were not better than those they replaced, but I believe the turnover itself prevents the team from building cohesion as a unit.

Would New York have added to their trophy case in 2006 through 2008 if they had held on to Bob Bradley, Eddie Gaven, Tim Ward, Ante Razov and Amado Guevara and added Wynne, Altidore, Juan Pablo Angel and others?  In theory they would also have included Seth Stammler, Carlos Mendes, Mike Magee and Jeff Parke.  Ante and Amado are obviously past their prime now, but in 2006 and 2007 they could still be impact players.  I’m certainly biased, because of my friendship with Bob, but it really seems that a little patience would’ve been rewarded in that case and I suspect in others as well.

I think the main lesson is the importance of retaining the core of your team and many of the points above can help a team achieve that.

Peter Wilt writes weekly for Pitch Invasion

Youth development is often considered at the level of the US Soccer federation, but what progress has there been this year from MLS and its clubs?

It flew under the radar, but MLS’ Board of Governors’ decision in July to allow clubs to sign two “homegrown” players from their academies who would not count against the 24-man roster limit this year (though nor can they play in league matches) is starting to bear fruit (last year, a few clubs faced dilemmas over whether to sign an Academy player who might not be able to contribute to the first team, risking losing them abroad).

Last month, DC United signed their first player from their youth academy, goalkeeper Abdul Hamid. Last week, the Red Bulls followed suit as they signed youth academy product Giorgi Chirgadze and just this week, FC Dallas announced the signing of Bryan Leyva, a Mexico U-17 international from their academy. This is definite progress, with MLS’ participation in US Soccer’s Youth Development Academy structure obviously now paying off. All three had been linked with clubs abroad.

On the other side of the coin, U.S. U-20 coach Thomas Rongen this week criticised MLS for abolishing the reserve league in the last offseason, which he says has restricted playing time for young players, partially explaining why he has less than he’d hoped in his U-20 World Cup squad. “You rely on their development with their respective clubs and situations and not too many of them are getting first team playing time, and since there’s no reserve league some guys aren’t getting enough games, or games at all, and that concerns me.”

With the academies strengthening and finally producing MLS-quality players, a return of the reserve league (or other integration of a true developmental league) is critical to increasing the flow of players into senior rosters, allowing them playing time and more opportunity for first team coaches to assess their readiness for MLS play and keep them match fit. MLS clubs have made progress with their academies, and the league now needs to cement a structure to integrate them into the professional system.

Worldwide News

• The New York Times has perhaps the most convoluted explanation of why diving isn’t good for football ever written. I’m all for a little academic insight into sport and some intellectual peroration — the author of the piece is grandly titled as the president of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport — but I’m not sure one needs a PhD to conclude that “Soccer does not flourish when diving occurs. . .Perhaps, the more diving is condemned, the less players will be inclined to use it.” Well, yes. You don’t say. The bigger question is how we get to that cultural point in the sport, aside from NYT opinion pieces.
• David Conn reminds us why he’s the best journalist in English football, with a fantastic three-part feature on the engimatic ownership behind Manchester City’s fortune. And there’s an excellent pictorial review of Manchester City’s transformation on the Guardian as well. Meanwhile, City claim their focus is now on their youth academy.
• When is scoring a boatload of goals (81 goals in 93 league starts) not enough for a first-choice striker? When you’re Rangers’ forward Kris Boyd, left-out of Champions League play by Walter Smith for his lack of all-round contribution and fear that he’s a flat-track bully.
• What would happen to American soccer if influential anti-immigration lobbying organisation FAIR had had their way in the past thirty years of their campaigning? As the debate on immigration reform heats up again in DC with FAIR lobbying Congress this week on their near-zero immigration platform, Imagine 2050 considers the potential impact on diversity in soccer.
• There could be more upheaval in USL, with reports coming out that the Cleveland City Stars may be moving to Elkhart, Indiana. The Stars’ sudden promotion to USL-1 was a bridge too far for the club.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter. Many thanks to Richard Whittall of A More Splendid Life for holding down the fort in my absence earlier this week; he’ll be back sweeping up at the weekend.

After all, only the day before the game, I politely requested the Fire beat the New York Red Bulls and also deliver me Juan Carlos Osorio’s head on a stick.

How to Find Yourself Driving 1600 Miles to Support an MLS Team

Rewind: it’s a year ago, and I’m just getting stuck into my first season as a full-on headcase Chicago Fire supporter, part of the Section 8 supporters who commit themselves to the Fire until someone realises they’ve gone completely insane and has them sent to a mental institution.

I’d initially found it difficult to get properly into MLS in my first few years in the United States after moving across the Atlantic from England at the age of 21. Back when I arrived, too many teams still played in giant, empty American football stadiums and the family atmosphere seemed alien to the terrace culture I’d grown up in (albeit, the latter has been largely muted back in England now anyway).

But last year — and this is partly how this blog got going in the first place — I decided to immerse myself in MLS and Fire supporter culture as far as I could. It’s fair to say that I reached its epicentre pretty fast. Something about Section 8 helps you keep coming back, even when the football’s terrible.

How to Hate in MLS

The problem was, for the first few months of 2007, the Fire were perhaps even worse than terrible. I went on a thousand mile roundtrip to Toronto for my first away game to watch them hand the Canadian expansion team their first goal and win in MLS. I saw the Fire play soporific football and suffer depressing defeats at our home, Toyota Park. I saw dwindling crowds and growing disenchantment with manager Dave Sarachan and President John Guppy.

Then two things happened: the Fire replaced Dave Sarachan with Colombian Juan Carlos Osorio and veteran Mexican superstar Cuauhtémoc Blanco arrived. Everything turned upside down: the Fire powered into the playoffs, eventually losing in the Conference final in a tough one to New England.

Then Osorio decided to turn everything inside out: in the offseason, he suddenly discovered his family needed to be in New York, and handily the New York Red Bulls had a coaching vacancy and a lot of cash to toss his way and try to resurrect their struggling team.

Off he went, a bitter war of words breaking out between Fire ownership and New York, leaving most in the Fire organisation and fanbase feeling very bitter towards the Colombian. Further enmity developed when Osorio and the Red Bulls tried to poach one of the Fire’s key defensive acquisitions of 2007, Wilman Conde, who had decided he wanted to be reunited in New Jersey with Osorio.

Fire ownership stayed firm and refused to trade Conde east, frustrating the defender who did not start a game before Sunday. A further battle with Osorio broke out over a discovery claim on Paraguayan Lider Marmol, who also eventually ended up at Toyota Park. It’s fair to say the bitterness between the two teams found no bounds.

You can presume everyone had Sunday’s match, the Chicago Fire versus the New York Red Bulls in New Jersey, circled on their calendars.

The Bowels of New Jersey

So around 70 Fire fans made the 800 mile journey to New York by whatever means we could. It soon became apparent that the Red Bulls efforts to derail us from attending the game knew no limits as we drove in from New York City (that’d be a good place to put a soccer team, wouldn’t it?), cleverly playing the game in the pits of decaying post-industrial New Jersey, with a spaghetti junction and barely existent signposting sending us on a detour to Newark International Airport before the match.

We made it in time to tailgate a little in the parking lot, before being led by stadium security on the aforementioned Death March to the upper deck mezzanine, from where we were able to survey the entire near-empty caverbous stadium and the unappealing artificial turf. This was the set-up of MLS that had initially repelled me: but now, I could not care less, at least for the next ninety minutes.

All that mattered was a Fire victory that would stick in the craw of Juan Carlos Osorio forever and ensure we’d make it back to Chicago alive. Osorio’s replacement as Fire head coach, Denis Hamlett, had even stirred the pot a little further by handing Conde only his second start of the season, anchoring the backline alongside the immense Bakary Soumare.

And this is what happened:

Or:

Chicago Fire (6-2-1) vs. New York Red Bulls (3-2-3)
May 25, 2008 — Giants Stadium

Scoring Summary:
CHI — Chad Barrett 3 (Cuauhtemoc Blanco 3) 8
CHI — Chris Rolfe 2 (Cuauhtemoc Blanco 4, Bakary Soumare 1) 48
CHI — Cuauhtemoc Blanco 4 (penalty kick) 55
CHI — Chad Barrett 4 (Justin Mapp 3, Cuauhtemoc Blanco 5) 60
CHI — Gonzalo Segares 1 (unassisted) 62
NY — Jozy Altidore 3 (Hunter Freeman 1) 74

Blanco has never said much about Osorio’s departure, but his demolition of the Red Bulls on Sunday perhaps gave us a clue about his feelings. It also reminded us that for all the Fire’s pragmatic progress under Osorio at the tailend of 2007, it’s under rookie head coach and Fire original Denis Hamlett that Blanco and the rest of the team have really been freed to reach their potential in the attacking third.

The Fire were as good as the Red Bulls were bad. Osorio was not on the bench due to a sideline ban, but one can only sweetly imagine the apoplexy his team’s disintegration drove him to.

After the match, we were asked out to the team’s hotel nearby for a celebratory drink or two. Several members of the Fire’s team and staff were very friendly to our slightly inebriated selves, the vastly underrated forward Chad Barrett in particular.

Juan Carlos Osorio was not invited to join us.

In soccer, that’s too late to start competing against professionals and expect to develop into world class talent. As we all know, talent in the rest of the world is now being snapped up and developed by clubs before young boys have even reached an age in double figures.

That’s why it is heartening to report that Major League Soccer has recently taken significant steps to improve player development and directly funnel it to the clubs, rather than mandating all talent be drafted centrally. Unfortunately, there are still significant problems in the MLS rulebook blocking the full realisation of the clubs youth academies.

The Promise

MLS has long relied on what was initially Nike’s Project-40 and is now Generation Adidas to ensure elite American talent signs with MLS. This allows clubs to obtain via the SuperDraft (for far more than the minimum developmental salary, and not counting against the Senior Roster limit of 18 players) a Mapp or an Altidore, rather than seeing them go abroad in search of more money.

But these players did not come through the clubs youth systems, and frankly, with expansion in MLS we need far more Altidores and Adus to maintain and improve the quality of MLS soccer. Thankfully, a major rule change in MLS now gives clubs a greater incentive to spot and develop talent at an even earlier age that ought to lead to this improvement: the Home Grown talent rule instituted in late 2006 mandates that every club sets-up an amateur youth program, and allows teams to sign up to two players from that pool (as long as they’ve been in it for 24 months) each year, bypassing the central draft.

Each club has a “home territory” from which it can draw players, somewhere in the region of 75-100 miles from their stadium. Teams can reap the benefits both in the short term by these players enhancing their first teams, players connected to their home regions who fans ought to be particularly fond of, but also in the long-term as many will be transferred abroad eventually, bringing in valuable allocations and transfer revenues to the clubs.

I’ve been following closely the Chicago Fire’s program this season. They were the second club after DC United to make their youth Academy fully free, an important step towards — if you’ll pardon the word — democratising youth soccer development in this country. Before a recent Fire Academy game, I spoke to a father of one of the Fire’s U-16 players, a very talented Mexican-American boy. He told me that he could not have afforded the fees to send his child to one of the elite youth clubs in the Chicago area, and even considered returning to Mexico to give his kid an opportunity before the Fire solved his problem.

The Fire’s U-16 team is stocked with talent from the Hispanic community, a demographic that, as Paul Gardner never tires of telling us, American soccer needs to draw on more. The Fire’s U-16 team recently more than held its own against a U.S. National U-17 team at Toyota Park, and Academy Director Louis Mateus expects to sign one or two players directly to the Fire’s Senior team by next season. US youth international Victor Pineda is perhaps the hottest prospect, a composed and gifted attacker.

The Problems

That’s the good news. As you might expect in MLS, there are still glaring issues that need to be resolved before these programs can reach the world class level they need to be to compete with Europe. After all, almost two years in, no MLS club has yet signed a player from their academy directly to their first team.

The first problem is that only a few MLS teams have committed sufficient resources to their youth academies. One senior MLS executive told me that only DC, Chicago, New York and Chivas USA have significant programs and the rest of MLS was “piggybacking” of their work, as most players still end up going through the central draft anyway.

Therefore, whilst the Home Grown talent rule gives teams some incentive to develop their own talent, this needs to be expanded further.

The reason for this can be seen in the troubling case of the New York Red Bulls Matt Kassel. A U-18 American international who has been with the Red Bulls youth program for some time, Kassel was expected in many quarters to be signed to the Red Bulls Senior Roster this season. Whilst perhaps not ready to play immediately, such a move would have him committed to the Red Bulls for the future, and allow him to develop alongside the likes of Angel, Altidore and Reyna. Instead, after New York decided not to offer him a Generation adidas contract or a Senior Roster spot, feeling he was not yet ready to contribute significantly on the field (Kassel had no interest in a low-paid developmental contract), he is headed to the University of Maryland.

There are contrasting perspectives on the meaning of this. Metrofanatic believes this is a serious blow to Academy development, revealing it as essentially a “road to nowhere”:

The bottom line is that the club doesn’t get it. Not surprising if you have followed Metro for all these years. What was heralded as perhaps the greatest faction of the franchise, the youth academy, has now been reduced to a joke. Come witness the best youth program in MLS and their quest to get all their graduates into the NCAA where the only way you are going to break into the first team is if you are an uber-star at 18 and can contribute immediately. But to Red Bull this is an acceptable path to follow, they are quick to point out how wonderful playing for Maryland will be; effectively saying that they think the NCAA is a more effective training environment than their own; that is quite a damning self admission. To make matters worse, a quote from Jeff Agoos about Kassel yesterday revealed his ignorance, “My hope at some point is that we can sign him,” Agoos said, “whether it’s next year or a few years down the road. That’s up to Matt.” Earth to Agoos, you could have signed him yesterday, paid for by MLS and cap exempt.

It’s possible that Kassel could be lost to the Red Bulls, though it is equally possible he’ll sign with the Red Bulls next season in any case. Either way, this is something MLS needs to fix so that clubs don’t face such difficult decisions about whether to sign very talented young players. One way would be to expand the Senior Roster, so that clubs can feel more comfortable signing young players at the age of 18 even before they’re ready to start in MLS: the rosters are too tight as they stand.

Another route would be to get rid of the frankly ridiculous rule that MLS teams can only use one Generation adidas deal in a three-year period on an Academy product. This particular rule is the epitomy of MLS bureaucratic heads-in-the-sand insanity. (Edit: and just to confuse things further, I’ve now discovered that teams could graduate a player from Generation adidas earlier than three years — by adding them to their Senior or Developmental Roster — and then sign another GA player from the Academy. Confused yet?)

A further positive move would be to raise the Developmental Roster salary so that good prospects will have a financial incentive to sign on with MLS rather than head to college, even if they’re not worth a Generation adidas deal.

The new MLS rules and the programs instituted by several MLS clubs (as well as US Soccer’s own development academy) bode well for the pipeline of American soccer talent. But there must be further changes that facilitate that pipeline actually directing talent early enough to MLS teams for the good of the players and the clubs that have invested money, and to encourage the rest of MLS to follow suit. The future of American soccer depends upon it.

Overall, I’d say there’s more variety than in past years, and Adidas have thankfully toned down the wavy stripe obsession from 2007 (see the 2007 versions here). What do you think, and which ones are the best and worst?

Kansas City Wizards, Real Salt Lake, San Jose Earthquakes

DC United, New England Revolution, Chivas USA

New York Red Bulls, Columbus Crew, Chicago Fire

FC Dallas and Houston Dynamo