(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.

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.

Banner displayed by the Timbers Army. Portland Timbers vs. Vancouver Whitecaps, USSF D-II. 3 July 2010.

Photo credit: Chris Endersby on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

And quite rightly. The new look was cartoonish, with unnecessary bonus wings. It supposedly paid homage to the club’s on-and-off history stretching back to 1974, but in reality did it a disservice with such poor treatment. The failure of the front office to get enough fan input before the unveiling was a real disappointment when they have consistently used the club’s history in their marketing of the club. Here’s a reminder of the new logo’s look:

The Timbers Army, or rather the 107ist, took a sensible approach to dealing with what threatened to turn very ugly (after an initial awkward public encounter between owner Merritt Paulson and hardcore Timbers Army fans following the public unveiling). They met with the front office, and came up with modified designs that better matched the traditional look. As another reminder, here is Portland’s current crest:

To their credit, Portland’s front office and ownership listened. Here’s the club’s release on the changes:

“The MLS stable of marks holds true to our root elements while evolving to communicate our historic elevation to MLS,” said Merritt Paulson, president of the Timbers. “We welcomed fan input in the process and feel the final result appropriately honors our traditions and represents the magnitude of the organization’s step to the highest level of soccer in North America.”

Elements of the identity system included both direct fan design and input. The ligature was selected from several submissions from talented local designers who are members of the team’s supporters group – the Timbers Army. The secondary crest is a direct take-down of the primary crest, which has been altered slightly to reduce shading in the axe.

And here are the new logos and the “ligature” (yeah, I had to Google that one).

The changes don’t look radical at first glance. But it is notable that the primary and secondary logos have also been adjusted, with the shading from the axe removed to make it less cartoonish. Let’s compare:

I still think some of the elements of the new primary crest are overdone, but while subtle, the Timbers organisation has clearly seriously listened to fan input: it would be easy to make fun of merely removing the shading on the axe, but it matters they have in terms of it better representing the club’s past identity. And the secondary logo is close to being a classic. I’m not really sure what the “ligature” is all about — but it’s nice they took a fan submission and made it part of their look.

Credit to the Timbers and the 107ist for getting together sensibly and getting this done. It’s an important demonstration of how fans and front offices can work together, compromise and come up with something better for the club as a whole.

Comparison images courtesy of Calimero JackAcid on the TA messageboard.

The new:

The reaction:

The Portland Timbers’ supporters are not happy with that new logo the Timbers organisation has developed for the Major League Soccer expansion Timbers team, to start play in MLS next season. The MLS version of the club has based its entire marketing campaign and, indeed, owes its existence to the current Portland Timbers team’s identity, the lower division side that has been playing since 2001.

“You can’t fake this,” screams the Timbers’ MLS site, a not-so-subtle nod to the Timbers’ fans well-known antipathy to the Seattle Sounders marketing machine a little further north. Many supporters in the Timbers Army supporters’ group seem to view the new logo as a plastic imposition on Portland’s soccer tradition that the MLS team was supposed to be building on.

The 74 page thread that has grown in the couple of days since the announcement on the Timbers Army messageboard is full of vitriol about the logo’s cartoonish look and fighter plane styling. As is de rigueur these days, a Facebook group has been set-up to protest. The Timbers Army are not going to let this go easily.

The current logo has its roots in the crest of the first version of the Portland Timbers, the NASL side that existed from 1975 to 1982. The new one was developed by a marketing company called Rare Design, whose portfolio is remarkably extensive in its number of mediocre American sports team logo designs. Yes, the Timbers’ MLS logo incorporates a number of elements of the club’s traditional crest, but only in a manner that suggests mere lip service is being paid to that beloved identity.

Portland’s supporters, “organised” in the Timbers Army with the simple credo that you are Timbers Army if you want to be Timbers Army, have built their remarkable culture around that identity and the history of the club in Portland. It’s been a messy history, but it’s one that has been tied to that logo off and on since the 1970s, an age in American soccer.

If some of the reaction from the Timbers Army seems overwrought, it should have been obvious how sensitive the waters that the MLS team’s logo designers were wading into: it seems supporters were little involved in the project to update the crest over the past year. Incorporating supporters in such a process is just as important to winning their approval for it as the final design itself; minor flaws look much less glaring when one has been part of creating it as a whole. The MLS expansion project has used the Timbers Army extensively from its bid to become part of the league to its latest marketing materials. Paying scant attention to their input when updating an element a supporter always holds dear about the club’s visual identity seems arrogant at best.

Writing on these pages a little over a year ago following the announcement the Timbers would be entering MLS in 2011, Zach Dundas provided a superb essay on the development of Portland’s uniquely vibrant supporters’ culture in lower league American soccer that explains the strength of their rejection of the new logo:

While the club itself clung to viability under absentee ownership—enjoying, for a time, the dubious distinction of being the only football club in world history owned by a pro baseball league—the Army thrived. The fans shared a character-building history. Those of us who witnessed Chugger Adair, a forward with the monolithic stature (and mobility) of an Easter Island totem, will never forget him. On the field, the Timbers have won—to borrow an apt British-ism—sweet fuck all. In the stands, the club is arguably the most dynamic phenomenon in North American football culture. The evolution and internal nuance of Timbers Army culture could fuel many masters-degree theses. Let it suffice to say that the spectacle of today’s Army, which often numbers more than 1,000 fans packed into a surreal, maniacal, Technicolor-green north end, amazes me. The Army embodies Portland’s eccentricity, creativity and DIY spirit, as well as an urban patriotism worthy of a medieval city-state. Major League Soccer has only a faint notion of the monster it is about to absorb.

And there’s the rub, as Dundas hinted at the end of his piece: “The only question is whether the MLS-certified Timbers can maintain the fizzy underground brio of today’s lo-fi club. That is a question that will largely be answered on the terraces rather than on the field.”

That underground brio is now proving a little too “fizzy” for the Timbers’ ownership, led by Meritt Paulson. The challenge is how he will now respond and handle the Timbers Army’s concerns about the logo before this gets ugly; this was not a very good way to start.

The Timbers Army, supporters of the Portland Timbers in the USSF Division II, welcome the team at their 2010 home opener in front of 15,418 fans at PGE Park.

Photo credit: Steven D. Lenhart on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

The current (2009-2010) Portland stadium

The future home of the Portland Timbers, which opened a final USL season Saturday in the midst of a remodel to ready it for MLS in 2011, has been hosting soccer games with various degrees of success for over 100 years.  But while we Portlanders can be proud of our soccer history, we also must be honest: the stadium itself has never really been a good place to watch a game.

Please don’t misunderstand.  There have been many glorious crowds, magnificent atmospheres, and bravura games in Portland.  On Saturday alone the place was packed with over 15,000 fans to watch a minor league match against the Rochester Rhinos in a stadium configured for baseball—a hearty Portland crowd significantly bigger than those that watched half of the MLS games that same night, and several thousand more than bothered to show up at New York’s sparkling new “soccer palace.”

Yet Portland’s building itself has always been more like Javier Zanetti than Lionel Messi, more Kasey Keller than Clint Dempsey – always there, always valuable, often intriguing, but never likely to steal the show.  I’ve heard several local fans of both soccer and baseball describe the stadium as feeling ‘soulless’ – which is reasonable as a description for the feeling of the structure itself.  The gently sloping seating areas, currently off-set in a way that makes a soccer crowd disturbingly asymmetrical, are cramped and crumbling.  The moldy grey cement walls that border much of the field look melancholy and cheap.  The surface has been slippery, ugly versions of artificial turf for over 40 years.  But saying that the structure feels ‘soulless’ is very different from saying it has no soul.

In fact, more than any other current MLS stadium (with the possible exception of RFK in Washington DC—which the league is desperate to vacate anyway) Portland’s future home will offer the league true American soccer history.  From a ‘Pacific Coast Championship’ contested by teams of immigrants at a 1905 World’s Fair, to the late 1970’s glory days of the NASL, to the rise of American support for US National Teams, to the vanguard of modern supporters’ culture, the Portland stadium has seen it all.  And now, if they can get the latest remodel right (a topic I may return to in future weeks), if they can actually make it a good place to watch the game, the Timbers MLS home has a chance to be a truly unique place for American soccer fans: a new stadium with meaningful history.

The Pre-Timbers Years

The Portland stadium set up for American football in 1959 (photo via Pete Wright at flickr)

The name of the stadium is as good a place to start as any: though currently known as PGE Park, Portland General Electric only bought ten years worth of naming rights in 2000.  Immediately prior to that it was known as “Civic Stadium,” though upon its founding in 1893 place was called “Multnomah Field” after the blue-blood Athletic Club (and, in turn, the county) that still borders the playing surface.  It also had a period after its first major upgrade in 1926 as “Multnomah Stadium” until being sold to the city in 1966 by the Multnomah Athletic Club (known colloquially as “The MAC”).  And now PGE’s naming rights are set to expire just in time for MLS to arrive—with little word as to what name might come next.

So for reasons of both historical flux and personal bitterness (due to having my jacked up PGE rates fund the types of exorbitant CEO buy-outs and Enron business practices that represent all that is wrong with the American economy), I’m going to just call it Portland’s stadium.  It has, after all, been the city’s primary site for sport and spectacle of all types for almost 120 years—and its coming incarnation will likely be a prominent face of the city for many years to come.

A flooded Multnomah Field in 1904 (photo via Pete Wright on flickr)

One of the main explanations for the stadium’s local prominence is its location in an old heart of town: just west of the downtown business district, just east of the moneyed West Hills, just south of a yuppified shopping/dining/drinking district, and just off a mass transit line, the original Multnomah Field was built on a site that the history of the Multnomah Athletic Club describes as having been a ‘natural amphitheater perfect for athletic use.’  That ‘natural amphitheater’ was created partially by Tanner Creek Gulch, a water source that also made possible a 1840’s tannery central to early Portland’s commerce, along with a series of ‘Chinese vegetable gardens and shanties.’  With the coming of the athletic field, however, Tanner Creek was gradually diverted underground—an old landscape feature that has created some modern challenges to construction work on the current re-model, along with local calls for the new stadium to tribute the ‘historic course of the creek.’ I’ve also heard some vague (and so far unsubstantiated) claims that the gulch is one reason the space would be hard to maintain as a grass playing surface—the natural drainage patterns are apparently more conducive to a bog garden than a football pitch.

Football was, nevertheless, among the original tenants of the field—though in the 1890’s the specific type of football to be played was still somewhat uncertain.  The “intercollegiate” rules for what would become ‘American football’ were still being negotiated on the East Coast, and amateur athletic clubs such as The MAC were prime sites for experimentation.  As such, according to The MAC’s history, when the first interested ‘football’ players gathered at Multnomah Field in the 1890’s the specific code they’d use was uncertain: one of their organizers had introduced ‘rugby and association football’ at a local academy, but others “insisted they play the new version.”  American football, including many college games played by the various state universities in Oregon, eventually did become a feature of the early decades of the Portland stadium—but it is interesting for a soccer fan to note that with a few twists of fate it could have been otherwise.

From The Oregonian, September 29th 1905

Soccer did not, however, disappear entirely.  In fact, thanks to a tip from eminent soccer historian Colin Jose, I learned that in 1905 Multnomah Field hosted what I’ll claim to be a precursor to the Cascadia Cup—a “Pacific Coast Championship” held in conjunction with the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (Portland’s version of a World’s Fair).  Invitations went out to teams from California, Washington, and British Columbia, and the Portland team prepared by playing teams of sailors from British ships cruising the Pacific coast; one report from the August 27^th 1905 Oregonian has the locals “defeating a team of sailors from the British ships Tottenham and Comeric by 6 to1.”  If it is true that history repeats itself, I like the sound of Portland defeats Tottenham 6 to 1.

Unfortunately, like too many Cascadia Cups, the actual Exposition tournament didn’t go well for Portland.  Only one of the invited teams actually showed up, from Ladysmith BC, and they soundly beat Portland to take the 1905 title.  As the September 29^th Oregonian reported “The Portlands were outplayed and outweighed, man for man, although they played a plucky game.”  The paper went on to describe the great ancestors of the Timbers Army: “The attendance?  At the busiest part of the game a careful computation of the occupants of the grandstand revealed 18 young men and one ‘yaller’ dog.  Whether this combination formed a hoodoo against the Portlands is not known.”  Damn that yaller dog.

The Portland stadium would host more soccer in coming decades, but prior to the arrival of the NASL Timbers in 1975 it was more known for its eclecticism: it hosted undistinguished US Presidents such as William H. Taft and Warren Harding, an artificial ski jump competition that delighted “40,000 cheering spectators” in 1953, an Elvis Presley concert that prompted a 1957 Oregonian headline of “Stadium Site of Bedlam,” and 22 years of greyhound racing that made for the stadium’s primary income from 1933-1955.  Even now, the stadium is a stop on the “Fasten Your Seat Belts—It’s Been a Bumpy Ride” bus tour of “Portland’s discriminatory past:” according to the Willamette Week, “In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku Klux Klan contingent west of the Rocky Mountains, with about 70,000 members and over 50 ‘klaverns’ (KKK chapters) statewide.  The KKK held rallies at Civic Stadium, now PGE Park, when voicing its opposition to ‘Koons, Kikes and Katholics.’” (According to some other sources, the focus for the Oregon KKK was mostly on being anti-Catholic—though I’m sure Oregon’s small African-American population wasn’t too popular either).

Plaques outside the current stadium's luxury boxes, with tributes to greyhound racing, Elvis, and the NASL

Greyhound racing was displaced as the stadium’s primary tenant in 1956 when Portland’s minor league baseball team moved from a demolished Vaughn Street Park, leading to a decision all soccer fans must rue: in 1969 the stadium achieved the dubious distinction of becoming “the first outdoor baseball facility to install artificial turf.”  And because I agree with most American soccer fans that artificial turf is a detriment to the game, I have a sad confession to make: in looking at many pictures of the stadium field through its early history I’ve yet to see one where the grass looked to have been playable.  In its grass days Multnomah Field was always a muddy, wood-chipped, patchy mess.  It was, and I fear always will be, a pitch conspired against by long rainy days, a busy schedule, a subterranean playing surface, and a previous identity as Tanner Creek Gulch.

The Post-Timbers Years

Despite its bastard turf, however, recent incarnations of Portland’s stadium have hosted some pretty good soccer.  In the NASL Timbers’ very first year, for example, they beat the Seattle Sounders in front of a 31,000 person home crowd—leading to a good old American style pitch invasion and a run to ‘Soccer Bowl 1975.’   With teams of primarily British imports including Clyde Best and Clive Charles, the first iteration of the Portland Timbers then averaged 20,000 in 1976 (its second year of existence), only falling below 10,000 during their final season in 1982 when the NASL was well into its fatal decline.  Their attendance figures were not the best in the league, but considering Portland’s relatively small population they are impressive enough to make a current MLS team like FC Dallas blush.

Portland was also chosen as the host for the 1977 Soccer Bowl – and though the Timbers failed to make the playoffs that season, the stadium turned out over 35,000 fans to watch the New York Cosmos defeat the Seattle Sounders 2-1 in what would be Pele’s last competitive game.  As Clive Gammon described it in Sports Illustrated: “It was a huge fiesta in the rain. The lucky ones sat in the stands and the rest on open benches, drying out a little when the sun fitfully appeared, and roaring their hearts out as if this were Munich on World Cup day, not a soaking Sabbath in Portland. All 35,548 of them were crammed into creaky old Civic Stadium that was built in the ’20s with greyhound racing in mind but which in the future may be recognized as the place where soccer in North America had its coming-of-age party.”

Sadly, however, claims of a ‘coming-of-age’ party for North American soccer were premature.  The NASL Timbers, along with much of the league, were gone by 1982—reincarnated briefly in 1989, and then in its current form in 2001.  So the stadium experienced another relative big-event soccer lull, albeit one interspersed with some significant appearances by US National Teams.

Of the US National Team appearances, perhaps the most significant men’s game came in 1997.  The US was in the midst of a sloppy qualifying campaign for the 1998 World Cup in France, and needed a pro-American venue for a crucial qualifier against Costa Rica.  With the help of Nike (headquartered in nearby Beaverton), the US Federation created an atmosphere that many have cited as an early crest of soccer enthusiasm for our own national team.  As Tim Crothers reported “The capacity crowd of 27,396 at Civic Stadium did muster plenty of enthusiasm, albeit somewhat orchestrated by a certain local sneaker company of national repute that, in its role as a sponsor of U.S. Soccer, passed out noisemakers and urged fans to wear white clothing as a sign of unity. This request was largely honored, resulting in a scene that could have passed for a convention of some bizarre tennis cult.”

Yet, however bizarre the scene, when Tab Ramos scored a late goal for a 1-0 victory that “virtually clinched” a World Cup spot Portland felt like the capital of the American game.  Even Big Soccer’s Dan Loney, with his entertaining tone of informed mockery, has cited the game in Portland as something close to a genuine highlight of American soccer fandom: “For a long time, Portland in September 1997 held that prize [of greatest moment in US fans’ soccer-watching lives].  There was a fan section!  We won!  It was a sellout!  Soccer was here to stay, and Portland was destined to get an MLS team!”

At the 2003 Women's World Cup (photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images, via sportsbusinessdaily.com)

While the MLS team obviously took a while longer to arrive, within a few years the Portland stadium did earn the inadvertent distinction of being one of the few places in the world to host games for consecutive FIFA World Cups—the 1999 and 2003 Women’s World Cup (with the US serving as an emergency fill-in for China in 2003 after a SARS outbreak).  In 1999 Portland only hosted group games, drawing decent crowds including over 20,000 for games such as the decidedly non-glamorous North Korea – Denmark clash (neither team advanced).  In 2003, with the stadium having been remodeled two years prior partially in a failed effort to make it more baseball friendly, Portland hosted a semifinal doubleheader with temporary stands and an imported grass surface.  In one of those games the US lost to Germany 3-0, a contest that symbolized both the waning on-field dominance of our women’s team and its nascent off-field potential: it drew huge local interest along with a sold out crowd—including a colleague of mine who gladly paid $500 dollars to a scalper for two tickets just to be able to say he was there.

The Present and the Future

A Willamette Week illustration of Timbers owner Merritt Paulson contemplating the stadium

In more recent years Portland has been enjoying its new version of the Timbers, and wrangling its way through a sometimes contentious debate about what having an MLS team will be worth.  Whether or not you like the team, the minor league version of the Timbers has offered an impressive example of how an American city can foster a large and passionate fan base for soccer—despite the team being in a minor league and playing in what is in current form is basically a bad baseball stadium.

And this, ultimately, is the rub.  All the meaningful soccer history embodied in the Portland stadium exists at odds with the fact that it has never really been a very good place to watch the game.  So yes soccer purists, the MLS version of the Timbers will have to share the stadium with some Portland State University football games, and yes it probably doesn’t make sense right now to put down a real grass playing surface.  But for the first time in its 100+ year history Portland is going to have a stadium designed primarily to cater to soccer.  And, hopefully, to make more history.

In that vein, it may be appropriate to return one last time to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, where Portland’s team captain explained his team’s failure to win the championship to an Oregonian journalist by noting: “I wish to say that I am not in the least discouraged at the showing made by our team.  On the contrary, I am proud of their work…I am confident that in a year or so, with the support of all admirers in Portland of association football, we shall be able to turn out a team that will be a credit to this city and carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.  We can do nothing without enthusiasm….”

And if by including the qualifier ‘a year or so’ the captain was allowing for the possibility it could take 106, then he might be right—with a new stadium and old history Portland may just yet “carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.”

The latest MLS stadium plans (from portlandonline.com)

Photo by _ambrown from flickr.com

Why, with intense and organic feelings of affiliation to our teams, does it so rarely seem to matter that the teams themselves are obviously artificial constructions?   Why, in the midst of a fan revolt against an ownership group that is foreign and detached, do Manchester United fans not seem too bothered that most of their players are also ‘foreign’ (beyond Mancunians Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, United’s 18 on Saturday included 15 non-English players)?  Why, amidst the admirable growth of genuine American supporters groups, do MLS teams not seem to put much emphasis on employing local players with roots in their communities?  I’d like to suggest that the emotional intensity of fan affiliation, and the fact that it persists and even grows amidst the globalization and commercialization of the game, is less about our teams and more about our minds.

I’ve been intrigued by the noble irrationality of fan allegiance for years, with recent events in my small corner of the soccer world further piquing my curiosity—as a current Portlander who grew up in Seattle, the MLS-fed intensification of a lingering fan rivalry has been most curious to watch.  The recent tenuous claim of ‘hooliganism’ when a Portland fan was apparently choked with his Timbers scarf by Seattle fans after a pre-season ‘friendly’ was only one marker in an ongoing Pacific Northwest rivalry.

Any American reader of soccer blogs that mention the Sounders or the Timbers is certainly familiar with the phenomenon—comment threads will inevitably end up with angry references to ‘S**ttle’ and ‘Portscum,’ often including exaggerated claims as to the differences between the cities.  Likewise, at games themselves chants, songs, and signs regularly transition into personal attacks that are often demonstrably irrational.  I was particularly struck at a US Open Cup match in Portland last year where a large double posted sign on parade in front of the sold-out crowd had a stark black and white illustration of a large rifle captioned with “KELLER—DO THE COBAIN.”

Really?  Suggesting Kasey Keller should commit suicide because he had at that point played 12 games for the Sounders (about one tenth as many games as he has played for the United States—of which, despite occasional efforts to declare its own people’s republic, Portland is still a part)?  What’s more, Kasey Keller has more connections to the city of Portland than any single player on the field for the Timbers that day.  Keller was an all-American at the University of Portland, and is widely credited as the key player that allowed Clive Charles to make UP a legitimate soccer power—something the city’s soccer fans often note with pride.  Keller even played 10 games for a previous incarnation of the Timbers in 1989.  In contrast, the Timbers starting eleven that day had exactly zero players with any childhood or college roots in Portland—and at least one player on the roster who had not even heard of Portland Oregon until signing a contract.

Of course the vast majority fans, even in Portland and Seattle, don’t choke people with scarves or promote suicide—there are crazy people everywhere.  And the edginess and intensity of passionate fan allegiance is often a crucial element of what makes a great match so much fun for everyone involved.  But that doesn’t make our emotional allegiance to professional teams, which are mostly artificial ‘clubs’ oriented to making money for rich people, any more rational.

What does explain the engaging irrationality of the sports fan?

A few weeks ago I wrote about sports psychology, and the fact that in my experience it has proven less useful for enhancing performance than explaining how the game works.  So this week I’m returning to that theme and suggesting that while many factors contribute to our emotional connections to sports teams, one of the best explanations comes from social psychology.  (For an excellent alternative take in a more English football-centric direction see this recent essay by Fredorrarci.)

The basic idea, drawing off social identity theory, is that for various evolutionary reasons one of our most fundamental psychological instincts is to identify and divide the world into two groups: us and them.  Us is good; them is bad.  In our ancestral past this instinct may have been oriented by clans, but now it is up for grabs—we are constantly, unconsciously, affiliating with cities, countries, schools, political parties, genders, ethnicities, musicians, companies, teams, and whatever else becomes salient in our daily lives.  What’s fascinating about this basic ‘us versus them’ instinct is how quickly, and irrationally, it activates.  For a Portlander at a Timbers-Sounders game Kasey Keller should rationally be one of us.  But instinctively he is one of them.

There are a couple fun examples of the automaticity of ‘us versus them’ thinking that might be familiar to anyone who has ever taken Psychology 101.  The classic is Muzafer Sherif’s 1954 “Robbers Cave Experiment.”  Sherif was a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who was interested in group behavior, and devised a classic experiment elegant for its simplicity.  He basically just took a group of normal boys to summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park.  The trick was that the boys were randomly assigned to two separate groups and isolated from each other—adopting group names “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles” (no relation, I presume, to the Screaming Eagles “standing up for DC” United).  After an initial period of bonding, the boys learned of the other group, and the researchers began arranging for competitions on a ball field.  There was almost immediate animosity; name calling, efforts to self-segregate, raids of group camps, and, in fine supporters group tradition, the exchange of derogatory songs.  The researchers added a final phase where they created situations in which the groups had to work together, and suddenly everyone started to get along again.  It was a simple study making a profound point: there was no difference between the two groups of boys until they became groups.  Any of the “Rattlers” could just as easily have been “Eagles” in exactly the same way as, I suspect, many Manchester United supporters could just as easily have been for Arsenal or Liverpool with a few small twists of fate.

Another favorite example comes from several decades ago when an Iowa school teacher named Jane Elliot created a brilliant demonstration of the power of us versus them as a way to address racial discrimination with her elementary school students in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.  One morning she simply told the students that they were going to do a little demonstration where they would be divided up for a few days by the color of their eyes.  First the blue eyed kids got the privileges, while the brown eyed kids put on colored scarves marking their out-group status (and the next day it was reversed).  By recess time that same morning the kids were brawling on the playground because us started mocking them for having brown eyes.  In Jane Elliot’s words: “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”  Substitute “sports fans” for “children,” along with “ninety” for “fifty,” and the quote still works quite well.

Further, in the classroom situation, not only did simple and substantively meaningless group distinctions based on eye color create anger, the kids let their group membership shape their performance on school work—on a flash card task the same kids either excelled or flailed depending on whether their group was assigned superiority for the day.  Our ‘us versus them’ instinct can make kids seem stupid, and I suspect it can also allow ostensibly intelligent and educated soccer fans to end up choking people with scarves.

A laboratory for groupness

It turns out that soccer and supporters groups are nearly perfect laboratories for stimulating ‘us versus them’ instincts.  According to Judith Harris’s accessible, if controversial, summary of the scholarly research, some of the key ingredients for making group membership psychologically significant include:

• Socially defined membership that necessitates more of an internal than external commitment, along with shared experiences and an emphasis on commonalities within the group (according to the Timbers Army web-site, to be a member “If you like your sports passionate instead of passive – if you’re proud of the Rose City — if you appreciate the Beautiful Game – YOU are Timbers Army. No membership, no initiation, no rules, no fuss. Just wander into the North End of PGE Park and join the fun!”)
• Competition and an emphasis on points of contrast from other groups (when the European Football Weekends site waded into explaining the Sounders-Timbers rivalry across the pond, the comments were inundated with defensive comparisons from both sides: a relatively tame example from an anonymous Sounders fan, “you may wonder why Timbers fans are commenting on an article about the Sounders. They are a funny lot whose entire supporter culture revolves around jealousy of and irrevocable obsession with the Sounders. They rarely know the names of their own players, but they will mark their calendars months in advance for a match against us. If you spend time in person with a Timbers fan, you will hear more talk about the Sounders than their own team.”).
• Proximity (it is no coincidence that many supporters groups mark themselves explicitly by the section of the stadium where they sit—the “The 107 Independent Supporters’ Trust is the machinery behind the Timbers Army” and is named after the stadium section where they sit during games, while the Sounders group Emerald City Supporters have their numerical sections (121-123) and their street (“Brougham Faithful”) featured on their logo.)
• Group goals and/or a common enemy (at the Sounders-Timbers match at least one Vancouver Whitecaps correction: San Jose Earthquakes supporter came to Portland bearing a sign with the message “The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”).

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  Photo by Bjørn Giesenbauer from flickr.com

  Explicit markers of group identity (scarves are virtually ubiquitous across the soccer world because they are such an efficient marker of group identity—one of the Sounders’ marketing coups was to provide ‘free’ scarves to season ticket holders, automatically cementing a social identity while also bearing an eerie resemblance to the scarves Jane Elliot used to mark the “inferior” group in her classroom).

• Implicit norms and expectations (some Sounders supporters groups, such as Gorilla FC, distinguish themselves by trying to explicitly avoid the stereotypes of “ultra” groups: “One more belief of Gorilla FC, besides the love of the party, is that this group will share the same spirit as the fans of FC ST. PAULI!! WE ARE ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FACIST, ANTI-SEXIST, AND ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, BUT PRO-PARTY!! It seems bizarre to have to post that, however we want to establish that our friends are dedicated to building a love of the Sounders free from ignorance. A thinking ethic! We also will be active in supporting various community organizations. Gorilla FC is more than just a supporters club!!”)

As that last example makes clear, creating a sense of ‘groupness’ is not necessarily a bad thing—however artificial, the social identities of sports fans have just as much potential to influence pro-social as anti-social norms.  In fact, the Timbers’ 107ist Supporters Trust includes not just tifo and game travel but also charitable works among its ‘basic purposes.’  Likewise, when social marketing campaigns such as ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ work it is likely due largely to re-framing social identities—remaking the group identity to include ‘soccer fans fight [rather than endorse] racism.’

But what team rivalries and fan allegiances all over the world illustrate most of all is that the ‘us versus them’ instinct plays fast and easy on our minds.  As much as FIFA folks like to spin platitudes about the game bringing people together, it can just as easily tear people apart.  As much as the World Cup presents opportunities to display national identities, our local allegiances and teams (so often composed entirely of outsiders) display how contrived all our social identities can be.  And, at the same time, how meaningful.

Portland's Timbers Army on tour at their "friendly" in Seattle against the Sounders this week.

Photo credit: Steven D. Lenhart on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.