Major League Soccer 1996

[Zee-Row]

I wonder why they didn't just call the Tampa Bay Mutiny the Rowdies? That name has so much history in Tampa since they were the very first pro team there. Maybe the Rowdies will get into MLS one day.

[SJAnfield]

I wonder why they didn't just call the Tampa Bay Mutiny the Rowdies? That name has so much history in Tampa since they were the very first pro team there. Maybe the Rowdies will get into MLS one day.

MLS originally wanted to distance itself from the original NASL

[Gothamite]

Yeah - when MLS was formed we were only ten years away from the NASL's collapse, which had left the U.S. without a D1 soccer league. They were very skittish about being seen as a continuation of that league.

It wasn't until much later that they realized they could borrow on the legacy of idividual teams (like the Earthquakes) without being stained by the NASL's eventual failure.

[raysox]

Yeah exactly. A league with shoot outs, and a counting down clocks probably weren't too worried about history and legacy. Everyone probably would've loved to see the New York/New Jersey Cosmos, but the league & nike wanted to be something new. The Clash became the Quakes in 1999, and the rest remained their original names.

[seattlesonicsofsacramento]

I finally got around to reading this second oral history of the formation of the MLS, and I was really intrigued by this idea, related by Kevin Payne (President and General Manager of D.C. United at the time), re: Nike, Adidas, and Reebok's aesthetic vision for the MLS:

They wanted looks that were reflective of skateboard culture. They were very taken with the idea that this was a counterculture sport, whereas my feeling was exactly the opposite—this was the most traditional of sports. People in the United States liked what they saw overseas.

[gbasalmon]

My only problem with initials like FC are that it's Major League Soccer, so all the teams are Soccer Clubs (SC). Not to mention we call them teams, not clubs--which is much more fitting, since they were all created as league-owned franchises, not organically grown as local clubs of friends/coworkers/neighbors--so even SC is misleading. That's why I think Nike had the right idea with [city name] [nickname] in creating the original MLS team identities. That's the American sports team naming convention. The only downside is that the team names (and uniforms) were entirely 90s.

Arsenal (Gunners), Manchester United (Red Devils), Tottenham (Hotspurs), Chelsea (Blues). It's not unprecedented. The nicknames just have to be timeless.

I love oral histories though and I'm def going to read this entire article.

Club is the traditional way of referring to professional soccer teams. In soccer, team is more general than club--e.g., if you were to ask a player which team he/she plays for, the answer could be a professional team or a national team. On the other hand, if you were ask a player which club he/she plays for, the answer will always be a professional team.

Soccer is short for association football, so I don't care if Major League Soccer teams prefer to call themselves football clubs instead of soccer clubs. Soccer is an international sport, so it makes sense to adhere to the conventions like FC and club.

Yeah, I didn't fully explain what I meant there. Basically, I believe that since most teams around the world have 3 names (the full name, like Arsenal FC; the shorthand name, like Arsenal; and the nickname, like the Gunners) then it's nothing new or unusual to have American teams with a city name and nickname, for those who feel an aversion to MLS teams having nicknames.

Seattle Sounders FC (should be SC or ST though), Seattle, the Sounders.

The difference being that many (maybe even most) soccer teams around the world don't have official nicknames, their nicknames have been given them by media, fans, and opponents. Several teams have multiple nicknames, for example--

City, the Citizens, the Sky Blue for Mancester City

Villa, the Villans, the Lions, the Claret and Blue for Aston Villa

los Blancos, los Merengues, or los Galicticos for Real Madrid

los Groguets or el Submarino Amarilla for Villareal

And these unofficial nicknames are never used in combination with the team name--Mancester United Red Devils or Real Madrid Merengues, which is why it's feels weird for many soccer fans to use team name plus nickname combination when referring to MLS team.

Sorry for the huge quote, but I'm responding to both "halves" of it.

You're exactly right, "soccer is an international sport". And part of that in my opinion/aesthetic preference should be that we embrace each country's language and naming conventions. I just made a logopack on Football Manager 2015 for the top 5 leagues of Hungary's soccer pyramid. Here's a list of abbreviations just the clubs in the first division use:

• SC: Sport Clubot
• TC: Torna ("Gymnastics") Club
• ETO: Egyetértés Torna Osztály ("Concordance Gymnastics Department")
• FC (x5): Futball Clubot
• TE: Testedző Egyesület ("Gymnastics Club")
• SE: Sport Egyesület ("Sport Club")
• MTK: Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre (Hungarian ? ?)

So many names, all accurately capturing each club's origins, whether they started out as a general sports/gymnastics club or purely football. Abbreviations should (1) be localized to each nation's language and (2) authentically capture what that club (or team) is about.

In the MLS's case, each team was formed exactly as that: to be a typical American team in a typical American pro sports league. And it doesn't matter that soccer is short for association football, because we don't call it football (F[C]) or association football (AF[C]) for that matter. Soccer Team (ST) is the most precise way to describe what each of those original 1996 MLS teams were. My biggest problem with giving an MLS team FC or SC is it's inauthentic. It's trying to capture something the MLS isn't about. There's a very specific reason why international football clubs were originally called clubs: because that's exactly what they were. The MLS was born long after that ceased to be the case.

As for your point that "many (maybe even most) soccer teams around the world don't have official nicknames, their nicknames have been given them by media, fans, and opponents", you're onto a point that I completely agree with. A major problem (or at least difference) with the MLS is that it did NOT form organically. It was pre-planned (as raysox's article shows, even the teams were planned years in advance) and controlled by the league in a very deliberate manner, to try and show that the U.S. was worthy of having hosted a World Cup and to try and re-develop our game so that we could qualify for more. So yeah, all the MLS teams starting out with nicknames seems very inauthentic, corporate, lame, etc.

But 2001mark brings up a good point, that it's still possible for MLS teams (even one of the most recent MLS teams) to organically develop a nickname. So there is hope.

In my ideal 1996 inaugural season of the MLS, each team would have been given the full name of [city/state/region name] [sT/other authentic American identifier] and allowed to organically develop its own nickname over time (a la Toronto FC). Of course that's way too idealistic for an American pro sports league.

Regretfully I can't quite figure out how to only quote one small part of it, but interestingly, a quick Google Translate trip revealed that the MTK stands for Hungarian Physical Exercise Circle. Hmm... American Physical Exercise Circle Miami for Beckham's new team has a nice ring to it - APEC Miami.