OGs or OK Boomers? The baggage borne by MLS’s founding clubs at 25

As MLS opens its 25th season, the league’s nine surviving original clubs find themselves in a awkward place: trying to keep up in a league not interested in looking back.

Major League Soccer is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2020, and one of the most visible signs is the retro-inspired Adidas EQT jersey design that features on most of this year’s new MLS kits.

Those three stripes swooping over the right shoulders are intended as a tribute to the sportswear giant’s first “Equipment” line – which debuted in 1991 and was cycled out of most professional teams’ use by the time MLS debuted in 1996, meaning that while the USMNT once wore it, the iconic design never actually took the field in the North American league.

Given that awkward fact, the kits seem like an odd way to celebrate those heady early days a quarter-century ago.

Then again, it’s probably a reasonable metaphor for the still-growing league’s strange relationship with its past. The burdens of that conflicted identity seem to fall heaviest on the founding teams, who today find themselves navigating a league they would’ve scarcely recognized at their creation.

Like a snake shedding its skin, not much of MLS’s first version remains, even if its current form obviously owes so much to those charter members. The hard-won foundation laid by the first generation has been topped by a far larger and more mature entity so dramatically different that comparing them provokes a sort of cognitive dissonance.

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The visual identity epitomized by uniforms is just one example, though it’s a striking one.

Of the 10 franchises who launched in ‘96, nine have survived (RIP Tampa Bay Mutiny).

Of those nine, four have since rebranded completely and another four have changed or updated their crests (as has the league itself), leaving the New England Revolution as the only club to go the distance with effectively the same look.

FC Dallas (formerly Dallas Burn), the New York Red Bulls (formerly New York/New Jersey MetroStars), Sporting KC (formerly Kansas City Wiz) and the San Jose Earthquakes (San Jose Clash) bear almost no resemblance to their original selves.

The Revs, Columbus Crew SC and even D.C. United have all reportedly mulled rebrands recently, the Crew having already done one minor rebrand. And the Chicago Fire, the only other ‘90s club remaining, just executed one – to mixed reviews – as they return to Soldier Field under new ownership.

“At times it is easier to be new, and it is easier to be a new and improved, than it is to be a legacy business,” is how MLS commissioner Don Garber put it to the New York Times last year in a feature story on the particular under-performance of the Revolution, who were framed – with justification – as having missed out on “the soccer revolution in America.”

A quick rundown of where else the old school are perceived to lag:

• In terms of on-field competitiveness: Expansion clubs have won the past five MLS Cups, and the league marked a striking milestone in last year’s playoffs when, for the first time ever, no founding clubs were among the conference finalists, the season’s de facto final four.
• Financial heft: The LA Galaxy, a flagship club from the jump and the winner of more league titles than any other, are the only one of the nine originals in the top five of the 2019 edition of Forbes’ most valuable MLS teams (an admittedly imperfect ranking system). Only two others, D.C. at No. 9 and Kansas City at No. 10, make the top 12.
• At the gates: Attendance has generally been a chronic issue for the OGs. Chicago, Colorado, Dallas and Columbus (listed from worst upward) rounded out the bottom four in that category last year in the data recorded by Soccer Stadium Digest, with the Galaxy (sixth) the only original in the top 10.
• Attention and brand power: Newer teams like Atlanta and LAFC tend to command more national-television broadcast assignments and media coverage, higher merchandise sales, more social-media followers and the like.

Many of the original clubs are based in large metropolitan areas with fiercely competitive sports and media markets that complicate the quest for revenue, attention and relevance.

Now several of them have even come to be regarded as problem children, or at the very least underachievers compared to younger, richer, more dynamic expansion clubs

The early owner/investors, led by the enduring troika of Lamar Hunt, Bob Kraft and Phil Anschutz, underwrote stomach-churning losses of around $250 million over the league’s first six years of existence. Most subsequently spent heavily on infrastructure as the soccer-specific construction boom rippled across the continent and continues to this day.

Now several of them have even come to be regarded as problem children, or at the very least underachievers compared to younger, richer, more dynamic expansion clubs. Those arrivistes have had the advantage of standing on the originals’ shoulders, employing the lessons learned from their forbears and splashing their assets on ambitious steps forward rather than mere survival.

The nine originals and their yore retain some throwback charm for a certain breed of soccer hipster who can appreciate rather than merely grimace at memories of garish kits and names, mostly-empty NFL stadiums, scoreboard clocks counting down to zero and 35-yard shootouts.

For many others, however – including some of the league’s leaders, it appears – those are unloved, unsexy associations. In a sport where history is intrinsically revered, this league seems to have developed an almost crippling self-consciousness about its own past.

In 2017 the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote that the originals were “saddled with names and jerseys that appeared to have been stolen from a defunct roller hockey league.” The piece cited the now-common terminology of “MLS 1.0” and so on to denote them as equivalent to outdated software to today’s wave of “MLS 3.0” clubs.

In a sport where history is intrinsically revered, this league seems to have developed an almost crippling self-consciousness about its own past.

And this is not a particularly new concern for Garber & Co. A 2011 NYT piece titled “As M.L.S. Grows, Concern for Charter Clubs” warned of “the sober reality that attendance, while holding steady and showing modest improvement, is lagging in some important markets … the drag on attendance has come from some of the charter clubs.”

As then-Red Bulls director Erik Stover noted: “I think it’s harder for some of the older teams to overcome things than it is for a new franchise that has no history of bad feeling or missteps. Sometimes it’s harder for teams that have been around for a while. We’ve been through it.”

Different markets have prompted different approaches to the challenge.

Sporting KC banished their woeful Wizards days with a three-pronged solution at the start of the last decade: Committed local ownership, a gorgeous, intimate new stadium and a classy rebrand. (Winning games and trophies helps immeasurably, too.) That became something of a blueprint for the league, though other old-schoolers must beat a path under their own particular circumstances.

The Revs have upped their ambitions over the past year and maintain that their big breakthrough will arrive when they solve their endless search for a home closer to Boston’s urban core than the remote Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The Rapids sit in a comparable situation, albeit with less hope for their fans given the Stan Kroenke-led ownership group’s reputation for stinginess.

Suburban FC Dallas still sit far from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex’s urban cores out in Frisco, but the club have leaned into their vision of academy-driven player development and appear to be financially self-sustaining even with their small regional footprint. The Red Bulls are similar in that their system prioritizes youth and value, aided by the high-pressing philosophical guidance of their global parent organization. While they’ve been relatively successful on the field with that system, in the absence of big names their attendance has waned dramatically of late despite the impressive, theater-like setting of Red Bull Arena.

Elsewhere, things are looking up. After nearly being cast into oblivion by wantaway former owner Anthony Precourt, the saved Crew will move into a glittering new downtown venue next year, the biggest line item on a list of heavy spending by Precourt’s successors the Haslam and Edwards families.

The Earthquakes finally got a stadium of their own in 2015 and last year embarked on a Latin American-themed project led by charismatic Argentine coach Matias Almeyda that may better connect them to local Hispanic communities. D.C. United moved into downtown, waterfront Audi Field in mid-2018 and have been competitive on the field even as the capitol club labor to overcome the long-term consequences of self-inflicted cost-cutting during their final years at ancient RFK Stadium.

The Galaxy and their record five MLS Cups may be the outlier, but even they have felt the squeeze in recent years. The Since ‘96 side of LA can point to their rings and their rich history, but the newcomers across town will point to their shiny new Supporters’ Shield, crown jewel of a downtown stadium and use their rivals’ Carson location as a pejorative.

Expansion has been both transformative and dizzying in its swiftness. The league has added 12 clubs over the past decade, mushrooming in size from 15 members in 2009 to a planned 29 teams for the 2022 season, even as the fee for entry has skyrocketed from the $10 million paid by Toronto FC in 2007 to a whopping $325 million for Charlotte, who’ll begin play in 2021.

Perhaps this is the side effect of MLS’s sunny narrative of confident, and seemingly continuous, growth: The implicit acknowledgment that what was left behind was subpar. That the process of evolution inevitably had winners and losers.

Like a child actor, the league grew up before our eyes. And in the same vein, its originals must go above and beyond to prove that their very public growing pains have given way to maturity and strength.

That process will continue in 2020, and probably well after.