(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.

The Democratic Republic of Congo was known as Zaire when it sent an ill-fated team to the 1974 World Cup as the first to represent sub-Saharan Africa.  Since that time both the country and the national team have had mostly hard times, occasionally interspersed with glimpses of the massive potential that makes Congo a complicated but fascinating place for outsiders like me to try to understand.  So in hopes of using soccer as a window to the Congo, and to further explore the way African soccer works in the global mash-up of the modern game, I recently sat down with Steve Zakuani to document one emigrant’s experiences.

Zakuani’s story is plenty complicated in its own right, a winding journey from Kinshasa to London to Akron to the Seattle Sounders, and while little of that story physically takes place in the Congo it does offer some thought-provoking perspectives on Africa, soccer, and fateful role of chance.  Further, the very fact of his success since leaving Congo raises the yet more complicated question about the place—best encapsulated for me by a famous story that can serve as a Rorschach test for thinking about African football.

As relayed by Mark Gleeson, journeyman coach Claude Le Roy was taking the DR Congo team through Johannesburg to a 2005 World Cup qualifier when, as he explained:

“I had a lot of problems with my squad. Some players did not get tickets sent to them in Europe, others did not have visas in time and I arrived with 13 players.  There was a big contingent of Congolese fans waiting to meet us at the airport and I was talking about my problem when they told me there were two good players in the crowd who had also come to say hello.  I told them both to join us and while we flew to Durban, they drove their cars down from Johannesburg (a five-hour journey). They both looked quite good in training and I chose them for the bench.”

One ended up playing as a reserve in the qualifier, both players went on to make the Congo’s roster for the 2006 African Cup of Nations in Egypt, and the story has been regularly employed as emblematic of the “chaos” of African football.

But what exactly does the story mean?

The usual interpretation is that it is a tale of failure and dysfunction.  Congolese football was such a mess that any random players with the necessary passport could have a chance if they were in the right place at the right time.  That interpretation often extends to the Congo itself—a country that is widely considered among the most broken places in the world.  A country that in the last 15 years has suffered through war, conflict, and inequality leading some to claim a death toll unequaled globally since World War II and others to describe it as “the worst place on earth to be a woman.”

But the other interpretation, one which seems to have actually been Le Roy’s intended moral, is that it is a tale of talent and potential.  Congolese football is so fertile that a coach could hardly avoid stumbling across talent with the necessary passport virtually any place and any time (the two players in the airport that day were there because they played with Orlando Pirates, one of the top professional clubs on the continent).  And while I suspect this is not the interpretation most of us outsiders might first think about when we hear the story, it too offers a metaphor for the Congo—a massive and diverse country nearly the size of all Western Europe that is among the most resource-rich in the world.  A country of 68 million people who live and cope despite the legacies of brutal colonial regimes, corrupt dictators, and the strategic indifference of an outside world that relies on the Congo for everything from the coltan that runs our cell phones to the talent that populates our soccer leagues.

In recent years American soccer fans have become the latest beneficiaries of the Congo’s potential—if Claude Le Roy had happened to make it to Seattle of MLS First Kick 2010 (and if he were still coaching Congo, rather than having moved on to Oman), he would have had some support for the latter interpretation in the persons of number 11 for the Seattle Sounders and number 10 for Philadelphia Union.

Of course, the reality is that both interpretations, both sad failures and bountiful potential, underlie some of the complicated story of the Congo.  And in a roundabout way some of those same themes are embodied in the experiences of Steve Zakuani.

From Congo to England

Though his birthplace is usually listed as Congo’s capital city of Kinshasa, Zakuani was actually born in his family’s remote rural village—exactly one week after his father had left for the capital with a prized opportunity to attend University.  I had noticed that his father’s name is Mao, and wondered if that was a tribute to the Congo’s dalliance with communism in the days of the Cold War (a dalliance that many think cost one of Congo’s most promising independence leaders, Patrice Lumumba, his life at the hands of the CIA in 1961).  But in fact, according to Steve, Mao Zakuani’s name derives from a term in local Congolese dialect that means “I’m afflicted for my beliefs”—a gesture symbolizing their family’s frustration with regional politics.

As Steve explains it, however, the Zakuani family left Congo more for opportunity than for politics.  After Mao had his degree in English and linguistics in Kinshasa, he earned a job with Air Zaire that in turn allowed him to make connections in England.  Those connections eventually lead to a job as a translator for asylum cases in the English court system—both Steve and his father speak English, French, Swahili, and Lingala—and the family moved to London in phases.  Steve arrived in London at age four, and now has only vague memories of the Congo; he remembers the joy of playing with friends and siblings, the strict discipline of his grandfather, the natural beauty of the landscape, and the occasional fear that accompanied soldiers patrolling the streets with impunity.

Yet, in Zakuani’s own words: “As much as I’m Congolese and I’m African, home—when I think of home—I think of London.  It’s natural for me.  14 years growing up there, family is still there, two of my younger siblings were born there, all my experiences—good or bad—were there, so London is always home.”  And it was in London where he fell in love with soccer, first playing in the park with his older brother and cousins, with Sunday league kids teams, and by 11-12 with the Arsenal youth set-up.  Determined to become a pro and have fun with friends along the way, school became an after-thought despite his parents’ efforts and his inquisitive disposition.  Then fateful chance intervened for the first time:

“People say, you grow up in London and think—wonderful.  But not the London I grew up in.  I grew up very inner-city.  We call them council estates, I think here you call them housing projects.  A bunch of kids together, you can only play soccer so much, so you get taken up by bad influences.  One day in 2003 I finished school and my friend said—hey I stole a moped this morning, come ride it with us.  There were about six of us and we’re just riding around the neighborhood…but I lost control of the bike, and hit into a car.  It wasn’t the worst crash, but when I got up to walk my leg buckled…It wasn’t until I got to the hospital that night that we realized how serious it was.  My Dad said to the doctor, you know he plays soccer so how long until he can play again.  And the doctor goes ‘Play?  We’re just trying to get him to walk again.’…I didn’t play for 18 months.”

Zakuani seems to think of that time, the crucial period in the English system around 16 years of age, as lost years—still determined to play professionally once his leg healed, he managed to finish his General Certificate of Secondary Education to leave school, but the accident meant no clubs were willing to offer him a contract.  He went on trials in Holland, Spain, joined an independent London academy team, and found himself torn between some of the bad influences in his neighborhood and a charismatic Jamaican teacher from his school who had started a mentoring program “for black kids that were failing their exams…I went there just to play devil’s advocate—he began teaching us on financial management, relationships, how to become men, all this after school hours.  I went there and when he’d say something, I’d say something against him.  But it got to the point where he’d embarrass me every time.  I’d just tuck in my head.  And when I left school we kept in touch.  Then on June 12^th 2005 he took me to a leadership seminar where I heard a Bahamanian speaker, and the speaker spoke about life, and leadership, and mentality, and…whoosh, everything opened up.”

Something clicked for Zakuani that day, and while he attributes much of it to the philosophy of that speaker (a part self-help guru / part evangelist named Myles Munroe) it was also another intervention of fateful chance.  Zakuani became devoted to reading and to self-improvement, diving into everything from Malcolm X to Nelson Mandela to Benjamin Franklin.  He was still determined to make it as a soccer player, but he also started to take his own education—both formal and informal—seriously.

From England to America

Fortuitously, around that same time an assistant coach from the University of Akron was in London: “They were scouting a good friend of mine, and after the training session I went to his house, just to watch videos.  And they said—what do you think of this?  And I said no, I’m ok.  But they gave me a DVD to think about it, and I took it to show my parents.  And it was over.  You can play soccer, and get a good education?  For free?  Take it.”  Though he had been an indifferent student, Zakuani’s raw intelligence came through in the form of relatively high SAT scores and he was off to Ohio (according to Zakuani, his friend missed the SAT cut-off for admission to Akron by 20 points and ended up staying in England).

When I asked him about going to school at Akron, Zakuani lit up: “Ah, I loved it.  Just loved it….obviously I took the Gen Ed classes but I also took classes on the black experience, Africans, Americans, government, and it opened up my mind.  As much as I loved training at Akron, I loved my classes just as much.  I loved it… the teachers make you think.  You don’t agree with everything, but you learn about everything.  That was awesome.”

Zakuani also thrived in the Akron soccer program, an environment that allowed him to reestablish his ability and reinforce his sense of purpose: “After my freshman year in July and August 2008 I went and trained with Preston in the Championship in England and I did well.  They wanted to sign me.  But before I left Caleb [Porter, the Akron head coach] made me promise I’d come back for my sophomore year.  And I didn’t want to break my word.  So I came back for my sophomore year, had a very good year, Major League Soccer got involved and Preston was still there.  The offers were almost identical, though there was more immediate growth in the Preston offer if I did well.  But then what swayed it was the MLS thing of going back to school, finishing….just the idea that in the professional contract you can have something that helps you go back to school, I said this is perfect.”

Though it may be perplexing to the many critics of the American college game to imagine that the system can work so well, for Zakuani college made all the difference—and offers an interesting counterpoint to the experiences of his own brother.  Gabriel Zakuani, a year Steve’s senior, is a hardy center-back for Peterborough United who had no moped accident, turned pro at 16, and has known nothing but soccer ever since.  He is a good player who has had a solid career, and Steve speaks of him with respect and affection.  But when I asked Steve if his brother shares his love of reading and curiosity about the world he just laughs: “No, he’s not like that.  I don’t know the last time he read something, no…he turned professional at 16, and that’s been his focus ever since.  Even today, I was in his place when I went back home and we can talk about anything except soccer—our childhoods, our community, whatever—but with him it always goes back to soccer.  Because that is all he knows since he was 16.  But at 16 I couldn’t walk properly.”  While he clearly admires his brother, Steve also appreciates his own fateful, and oddly American, chances to make soccer something more than just a profession.

From America to Congo?

Gabriel Zakuani with a Congo flag (from theposh.com)

Playing in England has, however, provided Gabriel Zakuani the opportunity to do something that Steve, for now, can only dream of: playing internationally for the Congo.  “Congo play a lot of their exhibition games in France or Belgium, so it was easy for Gabriel to go over.  But when they didn’t qualify for the African Nations Cup they kind of put it aside.  My Dad was there and he gets asked a lot of questions [about Steve], and my brother the same….but there are a lot of good players there.  I don’t take it for granted.  It’s not the kind of thing where I could just walk into the team.  I’d have to go there and really play.”

What’s more, there are many good players who don’t play for the Congo but could—including Zakuani’s soon-to-be Sounders teammate Blaise Nkufo, who was born in Congo but raised in Switzerland (which he will represent in this summer’s World Cup).  Other prominent examples of Congo-born pros mentioned by Zakuani include Claude Makélélé, who played 71 times for France, and Portugal outside back José Bosingwa—who Zakuani met when Chelsea played an exhibition in Seattle last summer.

For now, then, Zakuani’s connection to the Congo comes mostly through his family and his imagination.  In fact, he hasn’t been back to Africa since leaving at age four—having missed the last family trip when he was in the midst of his initial contract negotiations with MLS.  His family arrived in Kinshasa on the same day he signed his first professional contract.  But he tries to pay attention to the news, the politics, and the people, and he recently started a non-profit organization called Kingdom Hope as the first step in a long term plan to “build state-of-the-art facilities in London, Seattle, and the Congo where academic/soccer academies will be established.”

Zakuani knows that long term plan will take a while to realize—his goal is to have one facility started by the time he is 30, and a full program by the time he is 50—so for now he is starting with short day camps and a scholarship program named in honor of his mother.  But the idea of the organization gives him a clear sense of purpose: “I took sports management [in college] because I left London with Kingdom Hope in my mind—I knew that was what I was going to do.  I’ve had that dream since I was 17 years old because I knew people would need that in the years to come.”

The idea is to do concentrated work with a small group of 18 or so kids like him—talented players who, for whatever reason, don’t sign professional contracts at age 16 and don’t have the education nor the sense of purpose to realize their potential: “the main goal is to give them a passion in life, give them their own reasons to live.  Because Kingdom Hope is mine.  Find your own after the two year program.  And then you go and you change the world.”

But changing the world, as anyone familiar with the Congo knows well, can be an infinitely frustrating task and I’m still not sure I quite know how to think about it all.  I’m still not sure how to make sense of the Congo as both the dysfunctional state that too many people around the world assume to be iconic of Africa and the talent-laden font of qualities that the continent might yet represent during this ‘Year of African Football.’

I do know that I admire Zakuani’s sense of purpose, his proud identification with a homeland he mostly knows from a distance, and his determination to make soccer more than a game.  And so perhaps I should let him have the last word on the Congo: “First of all, the problems are real.  Very real.  Especially some of the stuff that happens with women being victimized.  And if you grow up in a country where some soldier can just come into your house and take your things that’s going to stick in your mind for a long time.  So I think people have to be made aware that is going on, it is reality.  And at the same time, I look at the Congo and I think it’s a very young nation—it just came in the 60’s from Belgian colonization.  And colonization, what it does it breeds dependency.  You depend on Belgium for everything.  And now they are gone, you have to do this for yourself.  And you don’t have people that are qualified to do this.  It’s very dangerous for them…But for me I’m proud.  I’m very proud to be from there just because to know that I came from there, and where I got to in life…I look back and a lot of the kids, if they could just get into the right environment I think they’d be ok.”

Andrew Guest writes weekly for Pitch Invasion. He is an academic social scientist and soccer addict living in Portland, Oregon.  Having worked (and played) in Malawi and Angola, he has a particular interest in Africa.  He can be contacted at drewguest (at) hotmail.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!”).

• 

  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.

The Emerald City Supporters group of the Seattle Sounders. . .posted in the interests of balance!

Photo credit: louis quatorze on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Much credit for that success gets attributed to the Sounders business model and a constellation of distinctive circumstances—such as a hulking NFL stadium that actually seems to work for soccer.  I was among the 46,000 fans in that stadium on Sunday for the MLS Cup final and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  The game itself was a bit dull, but the pre-game gathering at Occidental Park bubbled with enthusiasm and local character, the “Sound Wave” marching band seemed much less kitschy when rocking out during the march to the stadium than they do on TV, the full house crowd had good energy amidst its uncertainty of who to cheer, and the whole scene had the type of collective effervescence that keeps people coming back.

But the story of the Sounders’ business success this year has been well-told by others.  So I found myself thinking about the whole thing in relation to the broader scope of soccer in Seattle and soccer in the US.  I grew up in Seattle in the 70’s and 80’s, left to see the world, came home about a decade later realizing real estate in Seattle had become so insanely expensive I could never afford to live there, and eventually settled in Portland.  With that perspective it strikes me that the success of MLS in Seattle necessarily builds on a foundation that has gone underappreciated: the culturally odd, sometimes underwhelming, but largely functional soccer infrastructure that has evolved across many American towns.

In other words, the 2009 Sounders and MLS are only one landmark in the Seattle soccer story.  Coming back for the MLS Cup gave me a chance to reflect on some of the other landmarks.  And while there are distinctive things about Seattle’s success, there are also ways in which I suspect Seattle is merely a case study of soccer in anycity USA.

Landmarks of Seattle / American Soccer

The Eclectic Stadia: At the supporters summit on Saturday before MLS Cup the most interesting exchange of the Q & A between Seattle co-owner Drew Carey and MLS commissioner Don Garber riffed on the issue of flares.  Garber basically dismissed any possibility that MLS could ever allow supporters groups to use flares, to which Carey prodded “actually, I kind of like the flares.”  Garber said “Yeah, you like them until your stadium burns down and you have to play at Memorial Stadium.”  To my mind Carey took the points with his retort: “Right—name me one stadium that’s burned down because of fans lighting flares.”  But I was also impressed that Garber knew about Memorial—an old war-horse of a stadium directly underneath the Space Needle that has probably hosted thousands of soccer games in its decades of existence (including most of my Seattle public high school matches and many of the Sounders previous incarnations).  The stadium is a simple pair of concrete sides that could seat 17000 on the rare day that was necessary.  And it long had a terrible old-model Astroturf with an arced crown that made seeing from one touchline to the other problematic.  But it was a reasonably sized stadium right downtown that was soccer-friendly and gave several generations of Seattle players a starting point from which they might hope for more.

And that is to say nothing of the old Kingdome—host of the glory years of the NASL Sounders, full to the rafters with 50,000 soccer fans on big occasions.  The Kingdome was, quite frankly, a cement monstrosity and not a great place to watch any sport.  But it was dry, could be kind of cozy, and in its day made you feel like you were at a major sports venue.  As a kid I once got my picture in the local newspaper for going to an NCAA championship soccer game at the Kingdome with my Dad and some friends during a time when the NCAA had decided that ties should be decided in overtime only—they’d just keep playing them until someone scored.  In that particular game no one scored for 7 overtime periods (until that 1985 UCLA squad—coached by none other than current Sounders manager Sigi Schmid—won it in the 8^th), and my friends and I simply spread ourselves out in the Kingdome’s climate controlled comfort and went to sleep.  It made for a cute picture.  And while the Kingdome ultimately failed as a soccer venue (and was demolished in 2000 to make way for Qwest Field), it did introduce the city to the idea that soccer could be a major event.

The Suburban Mega-Field Complex: Most soccer in American cities happens on local fields rather than in major stadiums.  In cities such as Seattle, combining the immense popularity and growth of youth soccer in the US with the fact that soccer is not a “traditional” American sport, there were rarely enough of those local fields for soccer.  One solution has been the conversion of urban park space, but the main solution has been suburban mega-plexes carving huge swaths of what often used to be farmland into dozens of identical fields.  In Seattle the iteration from my youth is called 60 Acres, and it has likely hosted tens of thousands of youth games and training sessions over the years—socializing hundreds of thousands of us into the game, even if many are only in that temporary state known as “soccer mom.”  60 Acres is also representative in that its growth has proved controversial.  The seemingly insatiable need for fields among youth soccer clubs tends to generate civic opposition—from both the otherwise distinct anti-soccer and anti-sprawl forces.  But they are one small piece of keeping American soccer relevant.

The Public-Private Venture: Starfire Sports Complex, the place the modern Sounders call their “official training facility and administrative home,” is basically a failed public park.  Previously called “Fort Dent,” the park was run by the City of Tukwilla King County [corrected 11/24] until the starved local government could no longer afford the upkeep.  Into the gap stepped “Starfire Sports:” a private group organized as a charitable organization.  This transition only happened this decade, so I’m more familiar with Fort Dent than Starfire, but the entrepreneurial conception of the thing seems characteristically American.

The Indoor Centers: Indoor soccer is another example of an American bastardization of the game that kind of works and kind of matters.  Indoor soccer centers (growing up in Seattle mine was Woodinville Indoor Soccer because of location, but there were and are several others around the city) offered a place to keep playing in the wet and dark winters, taxing a different set of skills and fostering some imagination.  In fact, it is easy to forget that after the demise of the NASL , American professional indoor soccer had a brief run of significance.  I made the 45 minute commute down I-5 more than a few times to see the Tacoma Stars play a bizarre high-energy version of the beautiful game in the Tacoma Dome that was entertaining enough to keep me interested.  In fact, buried in the recent press release about Preki’s hiring as the new coach of Toronto FC is the trivia nugget that he first came to the US because of an offer from the Tacoma Stars (who had seen him playing for Red Star Belgrade).  The ability of Preki to parlay the Tacoma Stars into a career with Everton, the US National Team, and MLS is a tribute to the odd way that soccer success happens in the States.

The British/Irish Soccer Pub: For reasons of legal drinking age, this one wasn’t so important when I was growing up.  But it seems that every town American town has a couple pubs, most often owned and managed by either British or Irish immigrants, that have long offered soccer fans a refuge where you don’t have to feel bad about asking if one of the TV’s can be put on soccer.  In Seattle, a place like The George & Dragon pub looks from the outside like an obscure hole in the wall, but functions in the community as a place that makes soccer fans feel legitimate.  While that continues to be a valuable service, the growing popularity and changing demographics of soccer fandom mean that other establishments are finding their own niches—the Mexican restaurant with the Primera División or the hipster bar with US National Team jerseys on the wall.  It may be that for soccer to really succeed US cities need to get to the point where almost any bar or pub keeps up on the game, but for now we can at least rely on capitalism to ensure market niches get filled.

The Small Soccer Specialty Store: Before an American soccer player or fan could get anything their feet desired through the internet, we needed a local specialty store that fulfilled our consumer fantasies—be that the boots that we imagined would give us just the right touch, or the replica jersey that established a connoisseurs identity.  Like the pubs, the stores often seem to appear modest and mostly have immigrant origins.  In Seattle it was a family of German immigrants that founded what we always called “Sporthaus Schmetzer”—a family that also included some pretty good players and coaches.  Current Sounders Assistant Brian Schmetzer is probably the one a contemporary MLS fan would know.  (As a side note, I think one underemphasized key to the Sounders success has been their tapping local soccer families for key personnel—in addition to Schmetzer, Technical Director Chris Henderson hails from a suburban Seattle family of players and coaches that have had decades of influence on the game in Washington State).

The Adult Leagues: Seattle has long had extensive networks of adult soccer leagues at all levels serving thousands of locals at all ages.  My own love of soccer is due in no small part to the fact that my Dad, who grew up in Texas in the 50’s completely unaware of soccer, stumbled on over-30, over-40, and finally over-50 soccer as a way to exercise, socialize, and recreate.  He never was a great player, but he kept at it for decades, became a fan of the game, and made sure I was too.  In my own adult life during a nine month return to Seattle after the end of my competitive soccer days I had what remains my favorite adult soccer experience in Seattle Co-Rec leagues.  Unlike the corporate “sport and social clubs” models that feel contrived, Seattle Co-Rec was great at being about really finding the right level of soccer for any adult to enjoy—from the former pro to the total newbie.  I don’t know enough about adult recreational soccer in other parts of the world to say how distinctly American this all is—but I suspect that a significant number of the Sounders fan base keeps connected to the game at least partially because of such leagues.

The Colleges and Universities: As I’ve written before, while soccer aficionados inevitably write-off college soccer as a major problem with the American game, the reality is that colleges and universities offer the kinds of genuine community roots that a confusing corporate creation such as Real Salt Lake (in tribute to the Spanish monarchy!?!?)  can never have.  European teams usually started as real clubs, and have meaningful connections to their cities and towns.  For better or worse, college teams often serve that role in the US—particularly since there will always be college and university teams in American towns that will never have professional soccer.  In the Seattle of my youth this role was filled largely by Seattle Pacific University, a smallish regional school that was fairly obscure as a University but dominant in the local soccer world.  SPU’s soccer prominence seemed due largely to their coach Cliff McGrath, a local soccer icon who was the hub of a broad soccer nexus that included extensive summer camps socializing thousands of local kids into the joy of the game every year.  Times have changed: the University of Washington started devoting more resources to soccer and took over local prominence and Cliff McGrath seemed to have an unfortunate falling out with SPU (though it was fun to see him as an announcer on a few of the Sounders telecasts this year).  And MLS may well come to predominate in its 18-20 US cities.  But Americans love their college sports and local soccer icons from that world should get some due.

Locating MLS in this Geography

At the MLS supporters summit on Saturday prior to the MLS Cup, the MLS “Director of Player Programs” offered a brief overview of how the league is working to improve player development.  The theme of the presentation seemed to be tired soccer snobbery—Americans have it all wrong with their youth tournaments and college soccer, and need to turn everything over to European style professionalism.  At one point the MLS official actually made the astonishing statement that “the only group [in this country] that has a real interest in youth development is MLS.”  The implication that MLS is the only group that has a “real interest” in American soccer seems to me both delusional and counter-productive.

The way soccer works in the US has many idiosyncrasies, and much needs to change as the game evolves—just as the game evolves everywhere in the world.  But my point here is that there are many diverse groups that have a “real” and long-standing interest in soccer in America.  So while the 2009 MLS Cup was a nice tribute to the success of MLS in Seattle, much of that success may actually derive from an eclectic American geography that created the landmarks to make it all possible.  And may yet make it possible elsewhere.

Andrew Guest writes weekly for Pitch Invasion. He is an academic social scientist and soccer addict living in Portland, Oregon.  Having worked (and played) in Malawi and Angola, he has a particular interest in Africa.  He can be contacted at drewguest (at) hotmail.com.

Colorado Caribous 1978 NASL jersey. Can't wait to see this brought back!

“Party Like It’s 1979″, says the usually stone cold sober Kenn Tomasch. “The future of American soccer appears to be the past of American soccer.”

Kenn writes this because news broke today that the breakaway second-tier league made-up of nine former USL and new clubs may use the North American Soccer League name for itself, after Miami FC put in two trademark claims.

Kenn’s response, not quite as euphoric as I painted it above, is actually a well-balanced take on the name’s real importance (not as important as a lot of other stuff) tinged with a little welcome nostalgia for those of us too young to remember the league.

Kenn points to the growing trend of American soccer teams claiming a part of their city’s past with the sport, and resurrecting NASL team names has hardly done any harm to Seattle, Portland or Vancouver, for example. Indeed, a connection to the past is something that gives a little more depth to each club’s existence, even if it’s a mythical imagined past of fathers and sons following the Sounders various incarnations since the 1970s.

I think American soccer has grown up enough not to be afraid of the NASL boogyman any longer (lessons have been learned well enough already), though there’s something fitting if it is indeed used on this risky, ambitious breakaway. What really matters is the substance of the league’s business plan and the performance of each club’s front office, not the name.

Though some have immediately rubbished the name’s return in any case, a poll on Inside Minnesota Soccer (the best site for news on the breakaway league, incidentally) suggests reaction is mixed and broadly positive, with more in favour of the NASL name returning than against it.

Oh…and how about them Cosmos, then?

Big Story
The dramatic failure of Toronto FC this year, after a struggling season was concluded as the club blew its chance of making the playoffs by getting torn apart 5-0 by Red Bull New York, has thrown the entire direction of the team up for debate as well as the future of general manager Mo Johnston.

Paul James in the Globe and Mail says TFC have been ignoring the basic requirements in the recruitment of the team, concluding that “without a clear vision as to where you are going and then a plan as to how you are going to get there, you really have very little chance”. Meanwhile, TFC’s owners, MLSE, are forced to defend Mo and the two-year contract extension they oddly granted him in the middle of a mediocre season saying that “the direction is the right direction”. I barely dare ask if TFC fans agree: the club may be profitable, but failing to make the playoffs in its first three seasons is obviously unacceptable performance-wise.

Johnston is lucky that TFC do not have the same system as Seattle, where the supporters’ membership get to vote on their general manager every four years and can call a special election in between. Drew Carey, the Seattle Sounders celebrity part-owner, is interviewed by the Sports Business Journal, and says it was this system itself that prompted him to get involved in MLS, as he discusses the highs and lows of ownership.

Self-aggrandizing perhaps, Carey says he loves being involved with Seattle because “you can see which teams are run by people who love the game and which teams are run by accountants. There are a lot of teams out there strictly run by accountants,” pointing at the riches being made by the ever-struggling Detroit Lions in the NFL.  Carey continues, “Joe Roth, me, Adrian Hanauer, Vulcan Group, we’ve all got plenty of dough. We’re only in it to win and to put out a good product. Nobody buys an MLS franchise thinking, “Oh, I’m going to make so much money.””

Toronto fans may beg to differ as they consider the business plan MLSE has demonstrated so far. Perhaps it’s time MLSE demonstrated some commitment to the fanbase that’s making them a lot of money and gave them a say in who runs the club.

Worldwide News

• Sid Lowe in the Guardian asks if Athletico Madrid are Europe’s worst-run club, ahead of their clash with Chelsea today — that would be quite an achievement, but he makes a pretty good case.
• The financial mess at Hull City is broken down by Matt Lawton, who reveals the alarming fact the club spent £5.5million in agents’ fees in the two years Paul Duffen was the club’s chairman and chief executive”, with a £40 million wage-bill threatening the future of the club. New Hull City chairman Adam Pearson tried assuage fears by saying the club was in “no danger”, but it remains unclear how the £22m the club owes can possibly be repaid.
• A Member of Parliament on Tyneside has called for Newcastle owner Mike Ashley to reconsider selling the naming rights to St. James Park.
• UEFA boss Michel Platini again discusses his plans for reform and regulation of European football, believing it would ultimately benefit English football’s financial model. His more than reasonable explanations of his reasoning deserve more consideration than screaming tabloid headlines about the Frenchman’s plans to destroy English football.
• In what could have been an interesting article but ends up being a bit of direction-less ramble (as is common on goal.com), a strangely uncredited author looks at Kawasaki Frontale’s disappointing failure to live up to their promise once again after the defeat to FC Tokyo in the Nabisco Cup final. We need more articles like these in English on Asian football, but we do need them to be edited a little better.
• EPL Talk looks at the surging ratings for EPL games on Fox Soccer Channel, which have grown a remarkable 69% in the past year with highs of almost 300,000 viewers becoming a regular occurrence despite its continued niche status on cable networks, reaching only 34.7 million homes. With the channel going HD in January and the Premier League rights sewn up for a few years ahead, the future looks very bright for FSC. MLS ratings grew even faster, up 89% and averaging 51,000 per broadcast.
  
• One of the better blogs out there, Some People Are On The Pitch, celebrated its 1,000th post today. Keeping a blog going with good quality posting for three years is a tremendous achievement. Check it out as they move towards the next thousand.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story

Those who talk about the inevitability of a breakaway European Super League could see the following number either as proof (imagine how much more there’d be if Man Utd were playing Barcelona every week!) or as repudiation (look at how much money clubs would be walking away from!): this year’s UEFA Champions League is worth a  record $1.55 billion in marketing and television revenues, an impressive 33 percent rise on last year’s figure.

There are plenty of interesting financial tidbits: “Each club is guaranteed a $10.1 million participation fee before play begins in September and will get bonuses based on results. A group stage victory pays $1.14 million, while the final next May is worth an extra $12.8 million to the winner and $7.4 million to the runner-up.” Interestingly, last season the biggest market pool earner was Bayern Munich, who made $30.6 million because they were the only German team to reach the knockout stage.

It’s also reported that UEFA themselves keep $285 million of total revenues and that the newly formed European Club Association “will receive at least $3.6 million.”

Worldwide

• Fifa.com has its usual good weekend preview of action around the world.
• Dinamo Bucharest face sanctions after a pitch invasion led to the abandonment of last night’s Europa League game against Slovan Liberec.
• Carseon Yeung finally formalised his takeover bid for Birmingham City; the minority shareholder has lodged a $135m cash offer for control of the club.
• The Guardian considers six underrated footballers, with John Aldridge topping the list. My vote would have been for Vinny Samways, but I’m weird like that.
• It looks like Portsmouth’s takeover fiasco is finally approaching resolution as well.
• Supporters Direct has a piece on the new “fan card” in Italy, an issue we’ve discussed here before: “The fan card has not been welcomed by people attending Italian stadiums. Live football should be a joy, but in a police regime, it’s disregarded as a welcome opportunity to gain information, marketing opportunities, etc – it’s frustrating for all.”
• Barcelona have reported record revenues but lower profits for the past year.

North America

• There’s a tremendous interview with Oguchi Onyewu at the New York Times Goal blog. Frankly, I can’t remember the last time I read such an interesting Q & A with a player on a top European team. Onyewu covers everything from his gamble in not signing with a club before the Confederations Cup to his nationality and thoughts on racism in European football.
• Steven Cohen apparently announced today would be his last appearance on Sirius Radio’s World Soccer Daily, (hopefully) ending a long, bitter and ugly dispute with Liverpool fans. Cohen certainly brought much of this on himself, but if this is the last I hear of him and the campaign, I’ll be relieved.
• The Examiner reports that the Seattle Sounders have 2,000 people on their season ticket waiting list for 2010. There are MLS clubs who barely have more than 2,000 season ticketholders!
• Speaking of Seattle, an interesting note on the costly penalty miss by Freddy Montero — he wasn’t supposed to take the kick, according to coach Sigi Schmid. “He wasn’t supposed to hit the PK,” Schmid said. “There was a player designated to hit the PK — he needs to stand up and take responsibility for that.”  Oops.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Would you believe it: how about an expensive marketing campaign focused on the history of a club and the sport, promoting an actual competitive domestic match — in American soccer.

So much of this “summer of soccer” in the U.S. has been huff and puff about games that don’t matter (aside from the $$$), with the series of high-profile friendlies sweeping the nation featuring Real Madrid, Barcelona, Chelsea et al. These are all well and good, but the point of a competitive sport is, after all, to win trophies: and DC United’s marketing campaign for the upcoming U.S. Open Cup final to be hosted at their stadium hammers home that point with some verve.

We Win Trophies

The Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup — America’s oldest cup competition, founded in 1914 –  is sadly neglected by US Soccer and MLS in terms of promotional dollars and ideas; despite the drama it provides, the fairytale upsets for lower-league teams, and the attractively simple knockout format, it’s never received the marketing buzz it deserves — and hence, attendances are usually pitiful.

DC won the bid to host the final on September 2nd this year at RFK Stadium against the Seattle Sounders, whose own marketing machine this year has been quite the marvel — partly prompting DC President and CEO Kevin Payne to pump some serious cash (by MLS standards) into promoting the game to prove DC remain the standard-bearer for MLS as they look to add another trophy to their cabinet.

DC’s campaign has gone into overdrive for the final focusing on the club’s history of success. The first hints of it came with some simple but effective teaser marketing in the form of a sticker campaign across D.C., with an enigmatic rendering of the actual US Open Cup trophy (enigmatic given so few people actually know what it looks like!), the date of the match and “peel here” on the front — with the reverse side simply reading WeWinTrophies.com.

As you can see, Wewintrophies.com itself is masterfully simple, on-message, and easy to share virally — everything almost every MLS website hasn’t been for years (Seattle’s set a new standard recently, with DC’s main page also a vast improvement over many others). Tellingly, DC aren’t missing any of the tiny details either: even their Twitter icon has that same image of the cup and the date of the game on it. And popular urban news website DCist.com is completely blanketed by an advertising background with the same imagery promoting the game.

WeWinTrophies.com makes abundantly clear DC’s history as the most successful team on the field in MLS history. It includes an open letter from Kevin Payne addressed to “Washington, D.C.” playing this angle up. Payne writes “Since our first season in 1996, D.C. United has won 12 major domestic and international trophies and is firmly established as the most successful organization in the history of U.S. professional soccer.” (Some may quibble with this final statement: paging Kenn Tomasch!). It’s an old adage, maybe, but nothing sells like success, and seeing history (albeit only since 1996) touted in MLS is a welcome sight.

This isn’t a cheap campaign based only on stickers and a website, though. United also splashed out on a full-page ad in Sunday’s Washington Post printing Payne’s open letter to the city. The selling point Payne emphasises is success and city pride: “I know not all of you are D.C. United fans,” Payne ends the letter with. “Many of you aren’t even soccer fans, but a challenge has been issued and we expect all sports fans in D.C. to meet it. Join us at RFK. Hear the songs of passion. Feel the stadium bounce. Stand up and cheer. Stand up for another championship. Stand up for D.C.”

DC United vs. Seattle; or, Kevin Payne vs. Adrian Hanauer

Dig deeper into the letter, and it’s clear that the motivation for this angle of the campaign is fuelled by the feud between Seattle and DC over the decision of US Soccer to award the final to DC following their secret bidding process.  Tellingly, Payne writes:

Our opponent, Seattle Sounders FC, is new to MLS. They’re in the midst of a great inaugural season and have developed a large and passionate fan base. The Sounders, and its fans, have said that Washington, D.C. and its fans do not deserve to host the match at RFK. They insisted the match should be played in Seattle.

For 14 seasons, our fans have been the standard by which other fans in Major League Soccer are measured.

For 14 seasons, our fans have brought unmatched energy, enthusiasm and passion to RFK Stadium and Major League Soccer.

And now, after 14 trophy-filled seasons, it is time for our fans – for all D.C. area sports fans – to remind everyone who the best sports fans in the country are.

Payne’s motivation to prove this is pretty obvious, following his public spat with Seattle boss Adrian Hanauer, who criticised US Soccer for awarding the final to DC, and not to his expansion franchise with their legion of fans at Qwest.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was frustrated and somewhat skeptical of the process,” Hanauer said. “I don’t think D.C. has played a game in the Open Cup on the road in two years. They had a road through all lower-division teams to get to the Open Cup Final. I’m not in the know … enough to be able to raise any real issues, but I’m frustrated and I wish U.S. Soccer would explain why one bid wins over another.”

Hanauer then really stuck the knife in, suggesting if Seattle hosted the final they’d have packed their stadium with 30,000 fans and pointedly predicting DC would fail to attract a strong crowd.

“Our fans deserve some answers,” Hanauer said. “And, by the way, U.S. Soccer has been trying to raise the profile of the U.S. Open Cup. A game in front of 10,000 fans at RFK I don’t believe is going to raise the profile as much as a game in front of a sold-out Qwest Field.”

Hanauer was probably wrong when he said Seattle would have sold-out Qwest: as US Soccer obviously knew, scheduling issues in Seattle meant that had the game been there, it would have to have been played on a weekday afternoon. But it’s true that for last year’s final, only 8,212 showed up at RFK to watch DC win their last trophy.

The comments from Hanauer, in his first-year as an MLS GM, enraged Payne, who has been (on and off) leading DC since the first season of MLS in 1996. “I was surprised and disappointed and offended,” Payne told Soccer Insider. “Adrian uses the word ‘skepticism’ to describe the process, which seems to be implying that it wasn’t on the up-and-up. Which is really an outrageous implication. . .Adrian has no knowledge of what we bid or didn’t bid; my guess is that we bid more aggressively than they did. I appreciate that Seattle’s fans are great. Our fans have been great for 14 seasons. It’s really unseemly for Seattle to suddenly show up in MLS and everything should be handed to them.”

Payne went on to say that DC would “promote the game aggressively.” He has been proven true to those words: as we can see with this campaign, United are pulling out all the stops to ensure the crowd is significantly larger than the 10,000 Hanauer predicted would show-up at RFK.  DC  are spending “significantly more” than on the 2008 campaign, their marketing department told us.

If it takes a bit of a feud and a smart marketing campaign to raise the profile of the U.S. Open Cup and get a strong crowd out for a nationally televised final in D.C., then this is all to the good. A little juice and bitterness does wonders for fueling interest. And if DC can make money on the final thanks to their marketing (as Payne believes they will), then perhaps that might, just might convince US Soccer and MLS teams to invest some money to make some money by promoting the tournament as a whole with further similarly smart marketing campaigns next year.

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

A Historic Rivalry

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guerrilla Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do It Yourself

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

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

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

Seattle's Marching Band

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

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

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

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

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

Scarves Up in Seattle

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

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

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

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