As Columbus Crew and LAFC prepare to meet in the 28th edition of the MLS Cup Saturday, US soccer’s crown-jewel showdown has come a long way since its inaugural final back in 1996, played between DC United and LA Galaxy on a rain-soaked pitch in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Yet despite the unquestionable uptick in quality of play, coaching and infrastructure the league has witnesses since, the first-ever MLS Cup might never be beaten for sheer entertainment.
Long before Lionel Messi’s seismic impact upon arriving Stateside and still more than a decade shy of David Beckham’s epoch-shifting time in the league, Major League Soccer was formed in the wake of the USA-hosted 1994 World Cup as the first professional American soccer league since the NASL’s disbandment in 1984.
“It was a bit of a start-up situation where everyone was trying to figure it out,” says Cobi Jones, the LA Galaxy winger who was one of the early stars of the new league. “You talk about the Premier League and football in England, it’s been around hundreds of years. Major league baseball had been around over 100 years. This was very new. The LA Galaxy expected 15,000 to 20,000 fans at the first game. They ended up having 67,000 show up. They were a little under-prepared – didn’t know the market, didn’t know what to expect.”
Alongside Jones, the Galaxy boasted one of the league’s early star signings in the flamboyant Mexican goalkeeper Jorge Campos and were coached by former national team boss Lothar Osiander. They raced to the summit of the Western Conference, winning 12 successive games to open the season.
It was a different story in DC. Bruce Arena’s side won just one of their first seven games, before a turnaround in the latter part of the campaign saw them secure the second seed in the East.
“The team had started slow,” remembers midfielder Tony Sanneh, a mid-season signing for DC. “Bruce was trying to get me earlier, but the league wouldn’t pay me any more. They had these really strict cap limits on what they would pay people based on where they were from. It just didn’t make sense for me to move to a big city and actually lose money. So they started to lose. The more they lost, I got more and more calls.
“[Arena] runs a very competitive environment. You could tell right away that he was building winners. By the end of the season, our biggest competition was in practice.”