The United States of Soccer by Phil West

Author:Phil West [WEST, PHIL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO000000 SPORTS & RECREATION / General
ISBN: 9781468314137
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

The team did have successes that were hard to ignore—namely, its 1976 Soccer Bowl triumph against the Minnesota Kicks in Seattle—but it was ultimately an iteration of the franchise that only lasted through the 1978 season. With the team’s sale to the Global Television Network, the Toronto Croatia entity returned from whence it came (to the National Soccer League), and to the relief of many, the team was rebranded the Toronto Blizzard, hanging on until the league’s demise after the 1984 season. In fact, the final NASL game was played in Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, with the Blizzard losing the second and final game of the experimental Soccer Bowl best-of-three series to the Chicago Sting.

There was skepticism that the MLS would work in Canada—specifically, in Toronto—prior to the 2007 launch. “Before we launched,” Mark Abbott recalls, “we were getting telephone calls saying, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to fail miserably there, the minor league team never drew more than a couple of thousand, you’re crashing the league by going up there.”

According to ESPN writer Doug McIntyre, the arrival of Toronto FC (and a fan base that understood what it was to be a proper soccer fan base) created an atmosphere that helped MLS move to a more cohesive, unified, and loud fan base—in other words, a fan base that seemed to effortlessly evolve from past to present generations in the major European leagues.

McIntyre remembers,

When I started noticing the fan culture of MLS changing was when Toronto FC came into the league in 2007. I knew there was a buzz around that team, and I had the opportunity to go to a few early games, and I said, “Wow, this is just a different opportunity than you see with other MLS teams.” The other professional sports teams in Toronto were not very good, and here they have this nice little stadium right on the water, a team that was well branded, that did things right at the start. They marketed themselves well and sold a lot of season tickets. And that was really an authentic sort of soccer atmosphere. Around the league, up until that point, I think the league had mostly marketed to families, as opposed to a sort of young urban core. And it showed. So that was the only place in MLS that had a sort of intimidating venue where fans were singing and chanting, and it was young men drinking beer and yelling things. You had that in pockets in other MLS stadiums. You had the Barra Brava in DC, and even the MetroStars had a fan section, it was just very small behind the goal—the majority of the stadium was still soccer moms and their kids, by and large.

That was really where it exploded, and then two years later, with Seattle, you saw it go to another level. And so you were starting to see a change where MLS started changing the way it marketed itself. It did start trying to appeal more to young urban professionals.

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