By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Jan 13, 2015) US Soccer Players – It wasn't that long ago when picking a club in MLS required no real sense of geography. There were plenty of places where no MLS club really counted as local. A 10-hour drive to see soccer might as well be a five-hour flight, all things considered. The reality was a video-only fan base, picking a favorite without relying on proximity.

That shut out the standard 'support your local club' response to what team to follow that you'll see in other parts of the soccer world. Rooting for the home team might be the ideal, but most pro sports teams in North America don’t take that for granted.

MLS had a different problem. It wasn't the old hunt for glory we see in other leagues where hats and jerseys with the logo of champions and contenders start showing up in places nowhere near those teams. Instead, it was that old national footprint issue with ten or a dozen topflight soccer teams unable to cover the massive amount of territory that is the United States.

Expansion changed things, creating opportunities for seeing MLS in person. Fans of clubs that weren't playing in MLS a decade ago are part of a different conversation. It's not a single-entity league with investor/operators owning 49% of a local franchise. It's a league of clubs with that local identity greater than the league itself.

Whether or not that was ever in the plans of MLS as a business is an open question. So is whether or not it's beneficial for the league. The attendance numbers on the Pacific Northwest almost makes that a moot point, but that runs hand-in-hand with those fan bases seeing their clubs as existing with or without the league they currently happen to play in.

History and MLS is an interesting thing. The San Jose Earthquakes might talk about 40 years as a professional soccer club, but the original version stopped playing anything resembling professional soccer in the mid-80s. The team MLS assigned to San Jose in 1996 wasn't the Earthquakes. Seattle also misaligns their pro club soccer history, conveniently forgetting no fully professional team played as the Sounders following the end of the 1983 NASL season until the 1994 APSL season.

In the bigger sense, fair play to both of them for creating a history that links back to the original NASL versions of topflight soccer in their cities. By doing that, they're trying to tell a story that's bigger than MLS right now. That's a hallmark of the club setting itself up as more important than the league.

Again, this might not be MLS's preferred narrative. It's not as if the local clubs lacked a sense of place in 1996. Expansion and club names didn't subvert a league without a local focus. That focus was always there, with the local fan bases reinventing what supporting professional soccer clubs meant in the USA.

Depending on where your allegiances happen to lie, what we've had over the recent MLS seasons is the next step in supporting local clubs or a convenient misremembering of what came before. That's the lack of respect complaint normally directed at the Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers who entered the league as fully formed clubs. They didn't have the same issues as the original ten MLS teams, saddled with names and narratives that might not have helped them make local connections.

Single-entity and MLS as a business once loomed larger than the clubs themselves. It didn't help sell soccer locally, compounding the basic interest in professional soccer problem in the USA with an interest in a peculiar business model applied to professional soccer.

Over time, MLS learned that it wasn't enough to encourage people to focus on the games rather than the business practices. As the last couple of weeks have shown, MLS still can't stay out of its own way. The Frank Lampard non-signing wasn't how MLS intended to start a new era of transparency.

It's still too easy to think of MLS first and the individual clubs later. Signing players to the league and then dispersing them. No free agency. Teams forbidden from competing for players outside of MLS. The rules seeming arbitrary. The multiple allocation processes. All of these return the focus to where it's always been. League over club.

The early supporters faced that same issue back in 1996 when they chose to look at the league differently. Those early supporters groups borrowed and invented a way to follow soccer that saw the new league for what it was. They chose to interpret their role differently in an era of questionable team names and uniform colors. That created the space for what we saw with the first expansion, and every expansion since.

Club over league isn't a new thing in MLS. It's a stubborn insistence on an identity that's now showing up in the league's own corporate branding. Changing MLS into a league of soccer clubs is the next step.

J Hutcherson started covering soccer in 1999 and has worked as the general manager of the US National Soccer Team Players Association since 2002. Contact him at jhutcherson@usnstpa.com.

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