At some MLS games, an away goal is met with nothing but deafening silence. Joe Callaghan reports on why the local fans usually have the place to themselves

When you’re on alert for any shade of outsider, the fashion protests of Montreal’s police don’t help. Locked in a long-term pension dispute, the city’s officers forego part of their uniform and opt for wildly coloured camouflaged pants as a very Quebec bargaining tool. They stand out.

Last Saturday afternoon at the Stade Olympique, as deep blue and black-clad crowds begin to pour out of the subway and into the arena, they’re the only ones who stand out. Easier then to just approach and ask them if anyone else is likely to stand out from the home crowd as the Impact host Columbus Crew.

“Are you guys expecting many away fans, or do they use a different entrance?” Utter bemusement gives way to a withering: “No, not today. It’s … quiet”. So it stayed.

Spring may have sprung elsewhere across North America’s soccer cities, but it was still coiled, still bitterly cold as fans streamed down Avenue Pierre-de Coubertin on Saturday.

The father of the modern Olympics could be held responsible for the hulking white elephant that dominates this corner of the city. But right now the natives just want to get off his road and inside to the warmth of his stadium.

The locals have the place to themselves. The 2015 MLS Cup runners-up are in town, but away from the pitch, you’d never know it. A group of three yellow shirts spotted in the distance turn out to be of the Colombian rather than Columbus variety. A ticket hawker claims to have spotted a single Crew fan, but they’re not certain.

If so, that fan is likely to have suffered in solitary as the Crew, dreadfully deficient in defence, lost 2-0 on a day when 22,053 Impact fans filled seats but 38,951 remained empty. The crowd may have been bigger and the scoreline more than likely much wider had the city’s star turn, Didier Drogba, not been precluded from playing due to the plastic pitch.

Nonetheless, with Major League Soccer having celebrated its 20th birthday in the week before, this contest, in an ill-fitting arena, on an off-colour surface, with a one-way soundtrack from the stands was almost a hark back to a different footballing time in North America.

So much has changed in the sport here since the swinging days of 1970s boom and bust, or even the fledgling days of the 1990s, that it can be folly to look for comparisons.

Next time Montreal play a home game, they will be outdoors for the season, and the Stade Saputo will fizz and crackle for a derby against Toronto FC. Yet in spite of the myriad slow but steady and always significant strides that have been made in two decades of MLS, away days remain a somewhat one-step-forward, one-step-back, no-step-anywhere part of the culture.

The numbers are on the rise. Yet not in all sectors. And unlike overall average attendances that in recent years have outstripped the NHL, the NBA, and the top tiers of professional soccer in France and Holland, away numbers are rising from the very basement.

On the first weekend of April, only the Portland Timbers’ away following was reported to have surpassed three figures, around 200 travelling to Orlando. New York Red Bulls, visiting New England Revolution, were second-best represented with roughly 80. A snapshot on what was, admittedly, a particularly paltry weekend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Portland Timbers fans have acquired a reputation as the league’s best. Photograph: Don Ryan/AP

Earlier, on matchday three, with more regional showdowns, was better: the Whitecaps took 750 to Seattle, the Crew over 100 to Chicago and San Jose also hit three figures against LA. Yet by some European standards, those numbers remain fractions. (The average away following in England’s third tier of professional soccer was almost 700 last season.)

Earlier in April, Sporting Kansas City travelled in numbers to New York, but the Timbers again led the way, taking over 300 to LA. The reigning champions on the park, Portland is undisputedly leading the way off it too. On its night, Providence Park remains the most raucous house in the league. The Timbers Army supporters group, in consistently impressive numbers, take that show on the road. But, on this note, they don’t take particular joy in standing out from the rest.

“My attitude going into these grounds isn’t, ‘Look at us, we’re here to show you what real fans are like’,” Timbers Army member Keith Palau told the Guardian. “We’re all the same, we’re soccer fans. We all want the sport to thrive and to grow. I’d be thrilled if over time there would be multiple teams and cities who are there saying, ‘We’re a better group than Timbers Army, we take more people and create more of an atmosphere’.

“I wish we were average and had to step up our game to keep up. The numbers are respectable, sure. But there’s no glorying in what we’re doing.”

The Cascadia three of the Timbers, Sounders and Whitecaps appear to be the most frequent flying fans, followed by Sporting KC. For all supporters groups though the mitigating factors are many – geographic and economic primarily. When it costs so much to travel so far, they like to rotate away trips. The league’s format might not help either - saving funds for play-off runs rather than regular-season contests is also a consideration.

“We were [in Montreal] last season and in 2014, so we’re giving that trip a break for right now,” Morgan Hughes, of the Crew’s NorOnTour away fan group, told us. “[You’ve] gotta keep the destinations fresh, or the people will grow bored of the same [place] every time.”

Columbus’s trip to Montreal, one of their closer away games, is roughly the equivalent of Paris to Vienna. The Revolution heading for San Jose to face the Earthquakes would be somewhere close to Tottenham taking off to Tehran. And there’s no Ryanair to give you a kick-start.

MLS distances were particularly stark the previous Saturday. The Football Factory in west downtown Toronto was warm and welcoming. It was busy too. Toronto FC, starting the season with eight-straight road games due to renovations at BMO Field, we’re hosting a fans viewing party for their trip to Colorado to face the Rapids.

As Sebastian Giovinco darted in and out of the sun and shade on the TV screen, outside, streetcars trundled through flurries of snow. Only two of the dozen or so fans we spoke with had ever seen TFC on the road, both having made a jaunt to Montreal.

“Everywhere is so far,” was one particularly philosophical offering. It can feel far for the players too. At some MLS games, an away goal is met with nothing but deafening silence. At others, the back and forth between home and away fans that can help keep some spark in the most drab draw in European football would be all too welcome.

“In MLS, away from home, is really different, really difficult,” Steven Caldwell, former Toronto captain and now director of corporate development with the club’s owners, tells the Guardian. “You feel the distance, you feel the geography. The landscape of the countries even. From Newcastle to London is pretty far but you still feel like you’re in the same country.

“But from Toronto to LA in April is like a totally different continent. You’ve had the travel, you’re up against it, altitude maybe, and then you’re dealing with just a swell of support from the home team and nothing coming back.”

The Timbers Army are intent on ensuring there’s something ‘coming back’ however. They benefit primarily from being the standalone Portland supporters group, a cohesive, logistical hub, compared to other clubs with various fractured fan groups. They also boast a vast web of regional supporters’ clubs, brought together by social media who team up on away days.

It’s unsurprising, then, that TA members are prominent on the Independent Supporters Council, an umbrella group founded in 2009. Among many successes, it has helped harness and promote away support in the league, trying to standardise practices and guidelines with MLS and club security officials.

The reception that greets travelling supporters at away grounds is generally improved and continually improving, but many-statism can prevail.

“At times, MLS could do a better job as an organisation to value and harness supporters’ groups,” says Palau.

“Encourage them. The Timbers Army and the Timbers have a great relationship that has been forged with a lot of hard work on both sides. But then you see things like the flare incident in DC last weekend [when a United fan was banned for a year for setting off a flare in a car park outside the RFK] and you wonder what the MLS is doing here.

“At times they end up looking like they don’t want to engage at all with supporter groups. That they’ve got the soccer mom to the front of their mind but there should always be room for all aspects of the support.”

Cultural barriers can seem just as significant as those financial, physical or bureaucratic. The Guardian caught up with Caldwell just outside the Air Canada Centre. The NHL’s Maple Leafs had played the Blue Jackets the night before and there’d been no invasion from Columbus then either. The Raptors would face the Pacers in the NBA the following night but no ‘Indiana Brigade’ would take over a corner of the arena.

From his own European playing days, Caldwell recalled a second-tier English Championship encounter when Sunderland brought 7,500 away fans to Wigan, a Champions League tie against Inter Milan when Newcastle’s hordes made themselves heard in the San Siro.

While college sports can see significant numbers of fans hit the road, in terms of major pro sports in North America, there’s just no precedence for the kind of away-day fandom European soccer knows, loves and loathes.

“That’s kind of the way they build their sporting occasions here,” says the former Scotland international defender, who works across TFC, the Leafs and the Raptors in his role with MLSE. “You’re going into a stadium to support the home team. There might be a few scattered about but there’s no away ‘support’ as we know it.

“I remember going to the NBA finals, ‘09 I think it was, Lakers-Magic. There was a considerable amount of away fans, Laker fans, in the arena. They were dotted around. That’s the thing about North American sport, you can have a few mingle away. Whereas Birmingham-Leeds, can you imagine them mingling?

“In sports here there just isn’t that culture … or that hatred. This is what we need to realise and accept in MLS. Different doesn’t mean bad. MLS can try and build that rivalry with the two New Yorks, another LA, ourselves [TFC] and Montreal but for now that’s very manufactured. It’s difficult to know in the next 20 years if they will become proper rivals as would be known in Europe – that will attract bigger away crowds then. It will come a little bit for sure. But it can’t be forced.”

On that Saturday in Montreal, after the sweet mercy of the full-time whistle, Columbus players trudged towards a far corner of the Stade Olympique, not to salute any away support but because that’s where the exit was. The supposedly solitary Crew fan, if indeed he was there, suffered on in silence.