As one yacht trundled silently out of the Seattle Sounders’ bustling harbor, another raced into its maw. And a city stood silent, wondering what it would bring.
For 90 minutes a week – and sometimes marginally more – soccer squalls roll over stadiums in brief downpours before moving on. But the other 166 hours in the week, the game consumes the spaces inside pubs, dining rooms, classrooms, offices. The game is a round-the-clock occupation for its denizens. The moments on the field are merely the momentary beacon calling them all to community.
For the Sounders, that departing vessel was longtime coach Sigi Schmid, who parted ways with the Sounders after seven years following a dismal 6-12-2 start. And the arrival was Nicolas Lodeiro, the ballyhooed Uruguayan creator. The city was aglow with the possibilities. What would it all mean?
The game finds itself in these communities: it latches on and grows from the bedrock of the city itself, spreading to and then consuming outlying towns and states and countries whole. And the water that helps that particular team’s reputation flower?
Wins. Lots and lots of wins.
As the playoffs rev up this week, three MLS cities in particular could use an MLS Cup triumph to water the game’s growth in their particular sphere of influence for vastly different reasons. One to prove it can. Another for validity. And a third to provide a much-needed wakeup call for its market.
Since 2009, Seattle Sounders supporters have shown up in droves to support their club in MLS. Photo via USA Today Sports Images
Seattle Sounders: The Final Frontier
The Sounders’ trophy case is stocked as full as any team’s in the league without an MLS Cup. In fact, it was the reason Schmid stuck around as long as he did. The Sounders prioritized US Open Cup play during Schmid’s tenure, and as a result they captured four titles in his seven years in charge. They also did the double in 2014, snapping up both a USOC trophy and the Supporters' Shield.
But there is something else, a distant green light at the end of the dock pulling the Sounders ever deeper into a postseason neurosis they’ve been unable to wrangle. As the narrator wrote of his main character of fascination in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away.”
Gatsby’s light represented his shadowy love, Daisy. To the Sounders, Daisy is their MLS Cup.
If any club does not need a title to validate its existence, it’s the 42,000-fans-per-game Sounders, who saturate their own market like no other team in the league. But as Seattle plunges into a new era under general manager Garth Lagerwey, and it decides what to do with its interim coach Brian Schmetzer, and the pressure continues to build with each successive playoff appearance without a title (there have been seven before this year), the static will continue to crackle more loudly with each loss.
In many ways the Sounders have been MLS pioneers. But until they capture an MLS Cup, something they seem able to do this year, that itch will continue to burn through the city.
New York Red Bulls supporters commemorate the 7-0 defeat their team inflicted on rivals New York City FC on May 21, 2016. Photo via USA Today Sports Images
New York Red Bulls: This Land is Our Land
The last two years have been particularly strange ones for Red Bulls fans. Blooded in the earliest days of MLS, the club’s faithful have been bludgeoned with one failed trophy chase after another. That was until 2013, when former coach Mike Petke led the team to its first ever trophy – a Supporters' Shield – 17 years after its founding.
Less than two years later, the Red Bulls had local competition for MLS hearts and minds for the first time. Expansion side NYCFC presented a clear and present danger to the Red Bulls, who’d squandered their chance to throw down a marker as a trophy-winning club to sway the casual masses despite a 20-year head start. Suddenly there was a shiny new bauble in town. The Red Bulls were competing for MLS fans within their own market.
In the meantime, Red Bulls coach Jesse Marsch plunged deep into the heart of his own style, fanning the flames of the club’s youth furnace and pulling out one Homegrown talent after another. The USL title Red Bulls II won last weekend is as good an indication as any that the paving stones are thick between the club’s academy and its first team.
Yet for all the academy and USL titles and the Eastern Conference championships, the big one remains elusive. With pressure bearing down on the club from all angles, the Red Bulls have yet to win an MLS Cup.
In a sense, the Red Bulls could use an MLS Cup to wall themselves off from the demons that could multiply if the unthinkable happens. From the club’s perspective, NYCFC winning a cup title first would be an unmitigated disaster, considering everything. The fact that the club has only even been to a single MLS Cup final in 20 years would be fodder for NYCFC for all time. Red Bulls fans cringe collectively at the thought.
But more than that, the Red Bulls should want this for themselves. It'd be nice to have a canister of public relations nitrous oxide to jam into the trunk as a reward for the quality play it’s given its fans over the past few years. And at this point nothing else will provide the club validation that the city is its own without the league’s greatest prize.
FC Dallas head coach Oscar Pareja (front, second from left) celebrates with the rest of his squad as captain Mauro Diaz hoists the 2016 Lamar Hunt US Open Cup. Photo via USA Today Sports Images
FC Dallas: For the City
The confetti fell on FC Dallas last weekend in frantic clumps. For the first time, the North Texas outfit could claim a Supporters' Shield, its second major trophy in two months. Earlier this fall, FCD won its second US Open Cup and its first in 19 years. Given the fact that the club has as much of an inside track on an MLS Cup as anyone, FCD could well pull off an unprecedented treble in less than two months.
And yet perhaps the most impressive achievement of all occurred in the shielded solitude of the Development Academy (DA). Last summer, FCD’s U16 and U18 teams pulled off a national title sweep in the DA, something no other club had ever even come close to doing before. Getting that close in even one age group is a career-maker. Doing it twice? Unthinkable.
FCD is maybe the best top-to-bottom organization in MLS. It chases game-changing young talent in the transfer market, signs and plays its Homegrowns and promotes a technical brand in its academy. It is a jewel on the plains of North Texas. It should be feted as such.
And yet. It is not.
Texas being Texas, FCD is fighting an uphill battle against the unholy power wielded by the Dallas Cowboys and more established names like the Mavericks and the Stars, both of which play downtown. FC Dallas and their Frisco home are located 30 miles away and their average attendance was the lowest among MLS teams in 2016.
FCD has never won an MLS Cup, and even in its current heyday it’s only been able to captivate the city’s sports-mad denizens with title runs on a rare few occasions. It’s difficult to sell a population on academy titles, but it’s much easier to push out MLS titles and then trumpet the process that got you there. FCD would love to spear this MLS Cup, drop it on the plate and present it to its city as proof. We know what we’re doing. This is how.
For those versed in MLS, FCD’s organizational primacy isn’t in question. But one wonders whether Dallas as a whole knows that. A title will go a long way toward shifting that perception in Big D.
