Minnesota’s pro soccer team was on the verge of folding in 2009.

That’s when Djorn Buchholz, the club’s general manager, took out his personal credit card and paid for the Minnesota Thunder to travel to their final road game of the season.

“There was no way I wasn’t going to send the team,” Buchholz told the Pioneer Press last week. “Do I regret it? Probably not. It took me a while to pay it off, but at the time, I thought it was the right thing to do.”

So did the Thunder’s director of soccer operations, Manny Lagos, who chipped in his own money, as well. Angie Blaker, one of the few other members of the bare-boned front office, said she went about five months without a paycheck after then-owner Dean Johnson abandoned the club with an empty bank account and a trash can full of empty promises.

“We were putting our office furniture on Craigslist to keep the money coming in to try and pay off other debts to keep the team alive,” she said. “You didn’t want it to end like that.”

After 40 years of starts and stops, and teams with names such as the Kicks, Stars and Thunder, pro soccer in Minnesota will officially hit the big time Friday, when the latest iteration, Minnesota United FC, is expected to announce it will join Major League Soccer for the 2017 season.

Principal owner Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group, and team president Nick Rogers are embracing the state’s 40-year pro soccer history; Lagos and Blaker still have leadership roles with the team. But all vow the new team — expected to play as Minnesota FC — will not share the tenuous, and sometimes tawdry, history of its progenitors.

That will start, they believe, with a $150 million soccer-specific stadium in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood and a team ready to compete in MLS for the long haul. With the future bright, we revisit the often lean years with key movers in the history of Minnesota pro soccer.

1976-81 >

Relocated from Denver, the Minnesota Kicks averaged more than 23,000 fans in their inaugural season and built a following from there, packing 49,572 into Bloomington’s Metropolitan Stadium for a North American Soccer League playoff game in 1976.

But the Kicks folded in 1981 because of poor management, said former player Alan Merrick.

“It was absentee ownership and not taking care of the franchise,” said Merrick, an Englishman who settled in Lakeville. “So it had nothing to do with the game.”

1984 >

The Strikers’ one year in Minnesota was best known for an announced crowd of 56,621, drawn to the Metrodome in part for a Beach Boys concert nightcap. At season’s end, NASL shuttered its doors, and the Strikers were done. From 1985-88, the Strikers moved indoors to play in the less-regarded Major Indoor Soccer League.

“That 10-year gap, it’s like the dinosaurs,” said diehard soccer fan Bruce McGuire.

1995 >

St. Paul Academy math teacher Buzz Lagos, along with Tom Engstrom, formed the Thunder as an amateur club in 1990 and stepped up to compete in the United States Interregional Soccer League in 1995.

“We’re running camps to make more money,” Lagos said. “The average salary (was) $1,500 to 2,000 a month for three or four or five months, and (players) would make $500 a week doing camps. It was not an easy life to do overall and then play soccer. They really loved what they were doing.”

The Thunder advanced to a USISL championship game with a roster that featured Lagos’ sons Manny and Gerard as well as Tony Sanneh and Amos Magee. Their foe, the Long Island Rough Riders, featured Tony Meola, Chris Armas and Giovanni Savarese.

With the experimental use of a countdown clock, Savarese broke the Thunder’s hearts when he scored a goal with 6 seconds left to win the game 2-1.

“It brought a lot of character,” Manny Lagos said of the loss.

After the season, Manny Lagos and Sanneh left to play in the inaugural season of MLS in 1996.

“It was a remarkable story of how they started and how they succeeded,” said Peter Wilt, the Thunder’s first general manager, who went on to form the MLS franchise Chicago Fire for the 1998 season. “It was always their vision, particularly Buzz’s vision, to play in the first-division level. … To me, 20 years later, having that vision being completed brings tears to my eyes.”

1997 >

With MLS stealing some of the thunder of the Thunder’s lower-level league, the club spent more on advertising and player acquisition, but without revenue to offset the added investment.

“We didn’t make money until (my) very last year (2005),” Buzz Lagos said. “It was sometimes close, but some years, we lost half a million dollars.”

Lagos took a pay cut, but principal owner and former Medtronic CEO Bill George and his partners weren’t happy.

“Until the owners decided to come back, I thought we would go under. … They were never quite told that it was getting that disastrous,” Lagos said.

1999 >

With tighter budget constraints, the Thunder won their only A-League championship in their fifth season as a pro club. They scored 57 goals and allowed 17 en route to a 26-10 record.

Lagos estimated 10,000 fans came to Blaine to see the Thunder win the title game against the Rochester (N.Y.) Raging Rhinos. That year, Rochester won the U.S. Open Cup, a storied nationwide tournament that included bigger MLS clubs.

It was Lagos’ only championship in six title-game appearances. “There were five losses, but all on the road,” Lagos said. “We just couldn’t quite win that final game. … We were very unlucky. …1995, we should have won it, for sure.”

2004 >

The Dark Clouds supporters group began informally in an online message board during the winter, according to Bruce McGuire, one of its originators. A small group of passionate fans then set up behind the opposing benches during the team’s home games at Central High School.

“We are going to do things that are fun and interesting and a little baffling, a little odd,” McGuire, who is not related to owner Bill McGuire, said.

Membership in the Dark Clouds was in the dozens and now tops about 1,000. The group chants, waves flags and engages in other revelry at United matches. The name, a play off Thunder, doesn’t have a known creator.

“It’s one of those weird, little mythological things,” Bruce McGuire said.

2005 >

After beating MLS’s L.A. Galaxy and falling to the San Jose Earthquakes in an epic match during the 2004 U.S. Open Cup, the Thunder got hot for a run deep into the tournament the following year. They beat three MLS sides: Real Salt Lake 6-4 after extra time, Colorado Rapids 4-1; and the then-Kansas City Wizards 3-1.

In the semifinals, they lost to the Galaxy 5-2, with an opening goal from U.S. star Landon Donovan at the now-StubHub Center in Carson, Calif. Lagos, who was coaching his final season, called that tournament run one of his career highlights. Bruce McGuire of the Dark Clouds said there was “magic in it.”

With a $10,000 bonus for the team’s performance in the U.S. Open Cup, the Thunder turned a profit for new owner Saeed Kadkhodian. “In my mind, that was the only year we made a decent profit,” Lagos said.

2006 >

After playing at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., Brian Kallman joined his hometown club. There was no red carpet unfurled for the Woodbury native.

“The trainer used the back of her SUV to tape all the guys and take care of all the guys” during practices and games, he said.

Players received less than $3,000 a month during the season and were required to work youth camps.

2007 >

Johnson’s first year of ownership, with partner Henk Habers, came with a lot of promises.

“They took over and appeared as though they were going to pump money (into the team), and they had stadium designs in St. Paul,” player Kevin Friedland said.

One of the first promises was fulfilled, but fell flat. They scheduled a exhibition match against icon David Beckham and his new team, the L.A. Galaxy, at the Metrodome.

A few days prior, Beckham and the Galaxy played the Vancouver Whitecaps in British Columbia, before 48,172 fans. But attendance in Minneapolis was 20,123 after the date of the friendly match was pushed back. Still, it was a large crowd — not quite the 64,101 who were on hand for an international friendly between Chelsea and AC Milan at U.S. Bank Stadium two weeks ago.

“Outside of what just happened recently,” Friedland said, “there hadn’t been crowds that big since the Kicks.”

From there, Friedland said, “It unraveled pretty ugly.”

2008 >

“The owner would show up every couple of months to a couple of games, even though he was living in Europe,” Bruce McGuire recalled. “He always had a nice suit and all that, but he had the same old pair of Hush Puppy shoes. Some people have lucky shoes, so we started calling him ‘Ol’ One Pair.’ Everything that’s wrong starts with a little crack. That was the crack, the one pair of shoes.”

2009-11 >

The Thunder briefly turned out the lights following the 2009 season only to find yet another savior, this time the National Sports Center in Blaine, which sponsored the team for a season before NASL took ownership in 2011 with a new coach, Manny Lagos. “It galvanized me from seeing what my father did to make things work no matter what, with whatever resources,” he said.

The team, which changed its name to the Stars, finished sixth in the eight-team league and got the final playoff spot. The Stars went on a playoff run and won the two-match championship series over the Fort Lauderdale Strikers.

During the stretch drive, the Dark Clouds sang a little ditty:

“The team that nobody wanted

The team that nobody wanted

The team that nobody WANTED … is going to win the cup.”

“We felt like a little team of destiny,” said Stars defender Justin Davis, now an everyday stalwart for United.

2012 >

Still under league ownership and maintaining an austere player budget, the Stars made another playoff run amid rumors they would fold at season’s end.

“As a team, we were, like, ‘Hey, we’re going to go in and win this thing again,’ ” said Brian Kallman, older brother of current United center back defender Brent Kallman. “They’re not going to let the championship team in back-to-back years fold.”

The Stars fell short in penalty kicks to the Tampa Bay Rowdies, and then-NASL commissioner David Downs visited the locker room. Carl Craig was a Stars assistant coach under Manny Lagos at the time.

“We just lost the game,” Craig said. “He comes in, and we still didn’t know if we had a job.”

Now United’s head coach, Craig sat in his office desk chair at the National Sports Center last week and unfurled a boisterous laugh at one of the odd things he remembers from that stressful time. Then-goalie Matt Van Oekel, he said, “Six-foot-four, naked, just stood there … while David is trying to make this important speech.”

Downs’ message included an important nugget: “We’re really working to maintain this franchise.”

Earlier that season, Downs and Bill McGuire were spotted at a match in Blaine. The wheels for McGuire’s purchase of the team were in motion.

2013 >

At the Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, McGuire announced the re-branded team, Minnesota United FC, and unveiled the Loons logo, which includes representations of the North Star and Mississippi River.

“A bunch of us players were there. … This is kind of when we started thinking this is going to be way better, and obviously they started signing some bigger names,” said Kallman, who stopped playing before this season.

2014 >

The level of professionalism jumped across the board. Instead of early morning red-eye flights with long connections — including return flights lubricated with a few drinks — the Loons’ road trips featured direct flights at reasonable hours.

United finished first in the NASL combined-season standings with a 16-4-7 record but lost in the playoffs on penalty kicks to the Fort Lauderdale Strikers. But the team beat out the Minnesota Vikings and other suitors to become an MLS expansion franchise.

2015 >



During the March announcement that United would join MLS as an expansion franchise, a Dark Clouds song echoed through the suite level of Target Field:

“The team that nobody wanted

The team that nobody wanted

The team that nobody WANTED … is going to MLS.”